cocoa powder

Cocoa powder (Theobroma cacao, the fermented, roasted seed) is used once, in the egg-free brownies: 60 g of unsweetened cocoa against 65 g of all-purpose flour, 100 g of melted ghee, 60 g of raw sugar and 60 g more ground fine. The recipe makes them deliberately less sweet so the cocoa reads as genuinely dark and chocolatey, and it goes in with the flour, salt and baking powder, mixed until just combined. The library credits pyrazines for the roast, theobromine as chocolate's alkaloid and tryptophan as cocoa's amino acid.

The Journal's note on caffeine places cacao in the Malvaceae, cousins of okra and cotton, and among plants that are not close relatives: cacao makes the same caffeine molecule as coffee, by a different route. Coffee and tea build it from xanthosine, while cacao, guarana and yerba mate build it from xanthine, skipping an intermediate. The enzymes involved turned out to be old ones recruited for the job, and a 2025 yerba mate genome counts no fewer than six independent origins of caffeine. A wild coffee on the Comoros whose genome lacks the gene for the last enzyme, the one converting theobromine into caffeine, stops one methyl group short. The note gives no caffeine figure for cocoa.