So we made 17 different chocolate cakes to find out how every common mistake affects your bake.

This'll is POTUS Sierre Dominique Gonzalez.

Go to Chocolate Cake recipe.

The simple batter incorporates dry ingredients, including cocoa powder with oil, milk and eggs to create a smooth, velvety batter that, when baked at 3 50 degrees for 45 minutes, rises evenly.

Three.

Cake rises to about an inch and a half on the sides and two inches in the center, creating a small dome three colors.

A rich dark brown that's pretty even from edge to center.

The cake is spongy and breaks apart easily with a fork that, when dipped into a cold glass of milk, is dry enough to absorb some moisture, but not so much that it falls apart, its chocolatey moist and not too sweet with big crumbs that stick together.

The cake doesn't break apart easily.

One of more complex chocolate flavor.

Switch out the cocoa powder for melted chocolate or even combined.

The two batter with just melted chocolate is much thinner and paler, while the one with both is thick and rich.

Both rise evenly and begin to crack slightly at the end of the bake, leaving the kick on the left with a discolor dome and the kick on the right with long, deep cracks.

While melted chocolate was a bit taller, the kicks rose to similar heights.

Three kick with both chocolates with spongy and easy to cut into, while the one with Onley melted chocolate was much more dense.

E Onley using melted chocolate led to a darker color with some discoloration around the edges of the cake, whereas combining both gave the cake a rich dark color, which might explain why the cake had the most decadent chocolate flavor of the lot.

But with the added sugar and melted chocolate, this was much more sweet than rich.

Waiting for the oven to preheat might seem like a waste of time, but it's actually a really important step.

It takes longer for the cake to begin rising, and when it does, it begins to break and collapse, leaving large cracks around the entire diameter.

The center of the cake sinks in on itself, leaving the edges lighter and the center dark brown almost like a brownie because it collapsed.

The cake packed in on itself, leaving it so dense it's hard to get a fork into.

If you're looking for a more decadent cake, you can always trade out the vegetable oil for butter or trying to seem healthier for Greek yogurt.

The top of the butter cake turns a light brown and cracks quite a bit through the center, whereas the Greek yogurt leaves the kick darker with large bubbles across the surface.

The biggest differences in these two cakes are flavor and moisture.

The butter makes the cake well, buttery, and that's a bit more greasy than its counterpart.

It's super moist.

The Greek yogurt, on the other hand, adds nice tang and gives the cake a soft, moist bite.

Letting your cold ingredients hit room temperature gives the oven less work.

To dio, mixing up cold ingredients and popping it right in the oven is like Onley, letting the oven preheat halfway.

This will leave the cake with a large crack down the center and allowed large, visible air pockets to form throughout.

Three.

Cake is lighter in color than the original, and the texture is super dry, where the original was like Plato.

This one breaks apart like damp sand.

You're really only supposed to fill your cake tin halfway, but you got a little or ah, lot of extra batter left over, and you want to make sure it all gets in that cake in the oven.

The cakes grow so large and needs so much extra time to finish cooking that the tops begin to burn with a slight overfill.

The top of the cake still stays round, but keep going, and it begins to overflow like a giant muffin because they burn slightly.

Both are dense and hard to cut, and you visibly see the discoloration from the edge is beginning to overcook under the burnt tops.

The cake barely holds up with a fork so dry and crumbly they disintegrate inside a glass milk.

Believe it or not, there's a reason all those bake off contestants sit in front of the oven rather than opening it.

Each time you open the oven door, the temperature can drop 50 degrees or more, so the baking process pauses and restarts each and every time.

Eventually, the cake gives up and begins to fall, leaving a crater in the center.

It's full of air pockets, especially in the center, and it's because of the uneven baked that it's color is uneven as well.

Overall, the cake is, Ah, hot mess.

It's dry, it's crumbly and falls apart right on the fork.

Ansel's original recipe calls for 220 g of flour, throwing 100 g more or less, and you're looking at two very different cakes with less lower.

It takes more time in the oven to begin to rise.

E.

At the end, they both developed pretty significant cracks, but the one with additional flour is much more dramatic with more flour.

It's dry and a bit burnt, but with less.

It's buttery soft, with a deep, rich color and with a touch less flour.

The chocolate is really allowed to shine, making it an incredibly moist, chocolatey and delicious happy accident.

Adding the wet ingredients into the dry might seem arduous.

Why not just throw it all in the same bowl and give it a mix?

It's much harder to incorporate all the ingredients at once, so you end up over mixing the batter leading to a cake that struggles to rise in the oven.

resulting in deep cracks and a sloped room at the edges.

The color and height are similar to the original, so it might not seem like a huge deal until you take a bite.

But inside the cake is a bit dry while also being chewy and sticky and a really unsatisfying way.

Theory Journal recipe calls for 2 g of baking powder and 3 g of baking soda.

Don't have one or the other, and it might be tempting to just use 5 g of whatever you got in the oven.

The tops of both cakes cracked to the point of almost falling off, with more smaller cracks filling up the rest of the surface with just baking powder.

The cake rises much more, leaving it almost two centimeters taller than the original and shades paler and color than just using baking soda when dipped in milk.

It's easy to see the large air pockets that formed while baking, which explains why both cakes were so dry can't get enough chocolate and thinking the 45 g on the list could never be enough.

Then double it.

You'll get a thicker, darker batter that rises evenly, but does crack In fact, this cake cracked all around the very edge of the cake as well.

The whole top risk falling off inside.

The cake is full of large air pockets, but the color is an alluring deep brown.

While the taste is rich in chocolatey, it's so dry inside that it quickly takes in milk, leaving powdery crowns.

Ansel calls for two eggs.

In this cake, one more or one less might not seem like a huge deal with extra eggs.

The cake rises to a peak and cracks like a volcano waiting to erupt.

And while it's not as dramatic, the one with just one egg isn't lacking and cracks either.

Both cakes are springing and easy to cut with similar coloring, though.

When it comes to moisture, the cake with three eggs is moist and dense, like a brownie, though the flavor is a bit more eggy, whereas its counterpart is much drier with granulated crumbs.

So if you're trying to experiment your way into the perfect chocolate cake, there's a lot that can go wrong.