Rick Bayless Chocoflan: The Impossible Cake

Recipe 👉 www.rickbayless.com/recipe/ch...
The first time I tasted this was a couple of decades ago in a market stall in Merida. It blew me away: chocolate cake on the bottom fused with a rich, creamy flan on the top. I quickly went on the hunt for a recipe, which was pretty easy to find, given that most recipes are based on prepared ingredients (chocolate cake mix, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk) and easy for non-bakers to execute. Recipes abound, but history does not. Given the prepared ingredients, I guessed it was first concocted in the test kitchen of a prepared foods company. But to date, I have not found one claiming it. Nor anyone else, which seems odd for such a crazy-good, crazy-fun-to-make cake.
Here’s what you do: you smear caramely cajeta over a deep pan, spread in chocolate cake batter, then carefully top it with a liquidy custard. In the oven, the cake’s leavening is activated, filling the batter with bubbles causing it to rise through the flan (it does this in clumps) and reform into a chocolate cake layer. The cake batter that started out below the flan finishes on top as a beautifully cooked cake layer. You turn the whole thing out onto a platter and there it sits: chocolate cake topped with flan, the cajeta standing in for the flans typical caramelized sugar crown.
Though the boxed-cake-mix recipes abound, I wanted to make chocoflan from scratch, so I contacted a professional baker friend in Puebla and asked if she had one. Hers is the recipe I’ve used for years, though it calls for a 10-inch cake pan that’s 3 inches deep, not a pan the average cook owns. Here I’ve scaled her recipe to fit in a Bundt pan (the internet tells me this is the most common way to bake chocoflan), which actually makes the baking quicker and more uniform.
I’ve fiddled with the cake, too, nudging it closer to a devil’s food cake and more streamlined than my original. Some recipes call for cream cheese in the flan (making it what’s know as a flan-or queso-napolitano). My version is a little lighter, which I love.
Though this recipe may appear daunting, I will relay that my mother, in her eighties, decided this was her dessert and made it for many special occasions. And she never considered herself much of a baker.