Chocolate Cakes in Bracknell

Finished in ganache rather than buttercream — the rest of the gallery.

Which chocolate cake is which?

Four of them, and they are not variations on one recipe. Two are layered cakes built from thin sheets rather than sponge, one is a cherry cake with chocolate around it, and one is chocolate the whole way through. The table below is read from the kitchen's own menu, so the prices here are the prices on the cake's own page.

Each one has a page of its own under the signature menu, and the layered cakes explains why two of them are built from sheets rather than sponge.

Why is a chocolate sponge made with cocoa rather than chocolate?

Because melted chocolate is mostly fat, and fat is the enemy of a risen crumb. Cocoa powder is what is left after most of the cocoa butter has been pressed out, so it carries the flavour and the colour without weighing the batter down — which is why nearly every chocolate sponge worth eating is a cocoa sponge. The chocolate itself goes where its fat is useful: into the ganache, the filling and the coating.

That division explains something people notice and misread. A chocolate cake that tastes intensely of chocolate is almost always doing it on the outside and in the middle rather than in the sponge, and a cake advertised as made with real chocolate throughout is usually denser than you wanted. The sponge's job is to be light and carry the rest.

What are the chocolate finishes, and what do they cost?

Ganache is chocolate melted into warm cream and left to set — glossy, firm at room temperature, and the only finish on the extras list priced at nothing. A velvet coating is chocolate thinned with cocoa butter and sprayed on, which dries to a matte suede surface rather than a shine, at £15–£30 depending on size. A drip is a loose ganache poured over a chilled cake so it runs and stops, at £25. A moulded chocolate figurine is £15 each.

Ganache appears on 9 of the 97 cakes photographed in this kitchen, which makes it the commonest finish here after buttercream and fondant. Its real advantage is mechanical rather than aesthetic: it sets hard enough to survive a box and a car boot, where buttercream takes a mark from anything it touches. The drip page covers that finish on its own, and the designs page prices the rest.

What if you want chocolate but not a chocolate cake?

Then the answer is usually chocolate & salted caramel, which is the custom flavour most often ordered here: a chocolate sponge with salted caramel through it and chocolate buttercream outside, at the ordinary size price rather than a premium. It is sweeter than the menu's double chocolate and less serious than the Black Forest, and it is the one most children choose when asked.

For two people, the 4" bento comes in a chocolate sponge with chocolate cream at £70 — the bento page has the combinations. The salted caramel page covers the custom flavour, and all ten flavours are listed together. Allergens: Our kitchen handles all major allergens (celery, gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, tree nuts). While we take every care, products may contain traces of allergens.