Chocolate cake mix and Diet Coke are the only items you need for dessert tonight

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While boxed cake mixes take the effort out of dessert, they usually require eggs, oil, water, or milk to bind the dry ingredients. However, you can swap all of these wet ingredients for Diet Coke to produce a deliciously airy and moist chocolate cake. Diet coke is a carbonated beverage with artificial sweeteners and no calories, so it won't add any extra calories to the cake mix like eggs, oil, or milk do.

The carbonation found in Diet Coke — or any other soda for that matter — is a well-known leavening agent, replacing the work of the eggs that most boxed cake mixes call for. Diet Coke also provides the moisture and volume that a blend of oil and water or milk and eggs would typically bring. Pairing Diet Coke with chocolate, a robust flavor that's also dark, will work well to mask the taste of the cola without affecting the taste of the chocolate.

Simply add a 12-ounce can of Diet Coke to the dry cake mix in a bowl, stirring to combine according to the box directions. You will need to adjust the baking time for your cake, reducing it by five minutes less than the box directions. Since you'll be swapping eggs or oil with a fat-free soda, the crumb will dry out more quickly. Still, the bubbles and moisture of Diet Coke combined with the adjusted baking time will result in a perfectly light and moist chocolate cake.

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Ideas for a cola chocolate cake

Diet Coke and chocolate cake mix is really all you need for dessert tonight, but there are other ways to dress up cake mix that you can apply to this two-ingredient dessert. For example, you can add a couple of teaspoons of instant coffee mix for a rich, bitter note to complement the chocolate flavor, mask the cola, and temper the additional sweetness from Diet Coke's artificial sweetener. A dash of cinnamon or chili powder would also bring a complementary spicy kick to chocolate cake. You can swap Diet Coke into this recipe for cherry cola dump cake that adds chocolate chips to the chocolate cola cake and pours the cake mix over a bed of cherry pie filling. If you want to keep it a 2-ingredient cake, you could swap Diet Coke for Cherry Coke Zero to bring a complementary fruity flavor to the chocolate cake. For that matter, you could also add a Vanilla Coke to double as vanilla extract.

If you're looking for the best chocolate cake mix brand at the grocery store, we voted Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge Cake Mix as our favorite. The bitterness of the dark chocolate will work especially well to mask the cola. If you're looking for a low-calorie icing for the Diet Coke chocolate cake, you can buy a reduced calorie Cool Whip Lite to spread over the cake, which you can infuse with instant coffee or baking spices.

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Read the original article on Tasting Table.