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Bittersweet Lime

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My next cake will be dark chocolate lime! No one really makes a dark chocolate lime cake (although someone makes lime chocolate pudding, and someone adds lime juice to their chocolate rum balls), so maybe I should have stopped there. However, I’m incorrigible, and I insist that it can be done.

Whether or not it should be done.

1. chocolate cake with lime curd and lime frosting
2. lime cake with chocolate frosting
3. chocolate lime cake 1: adapt Joseph Hall’s lime cake recipe or anyone else’s lime cake recipe (add cocoa or chocolate)
4. chocolate lime cake 2: Start with a chocolate cake recipe and add lime extract
5. chocolate lime cake 3: Start with a chocolate-lemon cake recipe or chocolate-orange cake recipe and adapt for lime (chocolate-orange 1)

Neither option 1 nor 2 particularly interests me: it’s too easy, merely a flavor combination. Option 3 (starting with a lime cake recipe) doesn’t appeal to me because I’m wary of just adding cocoa or chocolate (I’m not sure how exactly to change the recipe to accommodate the addition of the cocoa (sure, you take away some flour and add more sugar, but I’m still not comfy with it). Also, I’d like to have the primary flavor to be chocolate and the complement to be lime, not the other way around. Option 4 is a little plain and needs jazzing up, but it has the advantage of being able to use someone else’s fabulous, time-tested chocolate cake recipe (like Beranbaum’s All-American Chocolate Butter Cake or Chocolate Domingo Cake, or Epicurious’ chocolate layer). Option five would work. All the lemon cakes are with white chocolate, so that’s out, but if I could find a reputable chocolate-orange cake, it might work as a starter. (The linked one above is problematic because it uses orange liqueur…and I’ve never heard of lime liqueur.)

Let’s assume I’ll use option 4: add lime to a regular chocolate cake. How can I add lime?

1. lime extract
2. fresh lime zest
3. fresh squeezed lime juice
4. lime pudding packet
5. candied lime
6. lime-infused dark chocolate (Dagoba makes it)
7. lime-infused heavy cream (infuse heavy cream with Kaffir lime leaves (1 oz chopped leaves for every 2 cups cream) by warming it in a saucepan, then straining

I have lime extract already, and juicing and zesting limes is a pretty easy task, so the first options look fine. The pudding packet would be too artificial, I think, and the candied lime would be great—but only for decoration, on top of the frosted cake. I’d like to try the last two options, but I’m afraid that the Dagoba chocolate would be pretty expensive, so I’ll wait until I find a good recipe that calls for bar chocolate (not just cocoa). As for the lime-infused cream, that option is also a fancy one best reserved for…not this moment (we’re gearing up to Fall semester right now).

Another issue to ponder is the water/milk divide: Does the recipe call for water or milk? Water releases chocolate flavor like nothing else (well, kind of like butter does, but we’ve got butter already), but milk inhibits it. However, some recipes, especially the ones that involve chocolate rather than cocoa, go with the milk for extra richness. For the water-based recipes, I can just substitute some of the water with lime juice, but for the milk-based recipes (for which I’d worry about the juice and milk curdling), I can use the lime-infused cream.

For now, however, this version of the cake is a low-effort, introductory affair: a box mix with fresh lime juice and zest added in the batter, as well as a dash of lime extract. It’s the basic recipe, made simple by the cake mix, designed to find out if the flavor combination actually IS a good idea.

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