That history was admittedly not much on my mind when we fled the heat of Madrid for a two-week vacation in Cantabria and Asturias—leaving the steaming streets and my cake obsession behind. So a month passed before, organizing an inaugural dinner for new friends, I remembered the best chocolate cake. I hurried several blocks to the store, which was now, quite miraculously, full of life, and ordered one. I chose blindly between predetermined cacao concentrations—53 or 70 percent—when the woman at the counter refused to answer my questions about which was “the best.”
On the evening of the dinner, I served flageolet beans I’d brought from Asturias, preserved peppers, fresh cheese from Burgos, and pork sausages. At dessert time, I opened the pretty brown box and sliced. I felt a surprising texture with my knife and then heard a crackle. Inspecting a cross section, I saw that the crunch came from layers of meringue. Sandwiched between was a darker chocolate cream, all of it topped with more glossy chocolate.
In my haste, I hadn’t asked what the cake was actually made of. It appeared to contain no flour. I passed out slices and was soon surrounded by unanimous murmurs of pleasure. I gazed around at forks being licked clean. It was too vulgar, in the moment, to ask if the cake deserved its title. What a ridiculous question, anyway. There were other things to talk about, like whether anyone had managed to download the school’s mobile app. As I washed the dishes, though, I found myself consumed. If it was the best chocolate cake in the world, I needed to know how to make it. Elbows deep in suds, I resolved to figure it out.
A good first step seemed to be to re-create what I’d served. La Mejor Tarta’s website lists the cake’s ingredients: Valrhona chocolate, butter, margarine, sugar, cocoa powder, and eggs. A Portuguese chef named Carlos Braz Lopes invented the confection in Lisbon in 1987 after he’d been inspired by a dessert at Fauchon in Paris. He opened eight branches of The Best Chocolate Cake in the World in the intervening years, in locales as diverse as Brazil and Switzerland. I wrote to Lopes, requesting the exact recipe, and headed out to my local Corte Inglés to buy the ingredients. Arms full of Valrhona chocolate, butter, sugar, and so on, I returned home to my computer, anticipating a reply. There was none.
