Valerie Bertinelli’s Cocoa Ripple Cake Is the Perfect Dessert To Eat With a Cup of Coffee

If you’re the type of person who likes a little something sweet after dinner but can go without the boatloads of sugary icings, frostings, and other add-ons that make your teeth ache just thinking about them, then Valerie Bertinelli has the perfect dessert for you. It’s a bundt-style chocolate ripple cake and it’s about as simple as it gets. No frosting, a hint of cocoa flavoring, and it’s just sweet enough to fill that post-dinner craving or even to slice into in the morning with a hot cup of coffee.

Like most cake recipes, Bertinelli’s Cocoa Ripple Cake recipe first has you combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, and salt) in one bowl and the wet ingredients (butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, and whole milk) in another. But in a third bowl, you have to mix together the ripple, which consists of cocoa powder, walnuts, sugar, and a pinch of salt.

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After mixing together the wet and dry ingredients, it’s time to assemble the cake in a standard, greased bundt pan. First, spoon a layer of the batter into the bottom of the pan. Then, sprinkle a bit of your cocoa mixture onto the wet batter. Then add another layer of batter, then another layer of cocoa. The layering is what creates that ripple effect in the center of the cake.

“It’s not super sweet, which I love,” Bertinelli said in the above segment. “I think my mom didn’t like super sweet desserts, as well.”

When the cake is fully baked and cooled, you can invert the bundt pan and (hopefully!) the cake will slide right out. “It smells chocolatey, and you can smell the nuts that cooked perfectly in there,” Bertinelli said. She likes to top her slice with a sprinkling of powdered sugar, but you can eat it as is if you don’t want to overdo it.

“I might need a cup of coffee to go with this,” she said. “I just know it!”