I tried a bunch of chocolate cake flavors and they left me convinced that if you want a good plain chocolate cake (not a German Chocolate Cake with coconut) your best bet is probably to build it yourself out of separate chocolate flavors and cake flavors and forget about chocolate cake flavors.

TFA Red Velvet Cake There’s a DX version I don’t have that has the diketones taken out, but they both have butyric acid and it makes it taste a little barfy at 6 days. Not like full-on barf but like it got just a little stomach acid yucked up on it. It’s also got a ton of cheesy buttery flavor that goes way beyond cream cheese frosting, and it’s not very sweet. And it doesn’t really have more than the slightest touch of chocolate to it. Or cake. It tastes more than anything like you ate a hunk of pungent cheese, the kind that smells a little like feet, regurgitated a little of it into your mixer while it was mixing up some cream cheese icing, and then kept mixing it and ate some anyway. Thick, and very rich, deeply saturated flavor, but kind of makes it even grosser. I didn’t get nauseated after just a few hits but trying to clear my RDA of it was a bit sickening. This is the first time I’ve ever vaped it standalone, though in the past I’ve vaped a two-flavor recipe with it at 2% and FLV Cupcake Batter at, I think 4%, that was pretty good, but I had to wait two to three weeks for the barfiness to steep out.

HC Chocolate Cake - Dark chocolate with a weirdly sour tangy, fruity sweetness. Slightly dry in texture or at least not creamy, which is more in line with cake, but otherwise I’m not really getting any cake flavor at all. The tangy sourness here is undoubtedly butyric acid, it it’s not enough to taste like vomit any more than a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar tastes like vomit. In fact it tastes like it would do a pretty accurate milk chocolate flavor if you just added more milk to it, except for that the fruitiness tied to that sweetness.

WF Smores’ Cupcake - It tastes like WF dropped the ball a bit on the chocolate here, it tastes kind of rubbery, like chocolates can do, and I’m not getting much of the graham coming through in the vape either, just chocolate and sweet toasted marshmallow. It does have a nice cakey body, but that chocolate is just a little too weird.

FLV Red Velvet It’s unusual to get peanut butter as an off-note but if you tried this before and didn’t taste peanut butter at all I dare you to try it again and while thinking about PB. It tastes like it’s got just a touch of peanut butter in there along with some fluffy, semi-sweet chocolate cake. Not getting any of the cream cheese frosting you’d expect with something called red velvet, at all. Really not getting anything rich at all, that slight peanut butter off note might the richest thing about it. The cocoa taste is not very pronounced - it’s like a touch of cocoa in a cake versus a real chocolately chocolate cake - and the whole thing vapes a little light in flavor, which adds to the fluffy impression, like an under-chocolated chocolate sponge cake, but without as much texture as that.

OSDIY Choco Yum Cake - This one is similar to HC Chocolate Cake in that it’s a chocolate with a prominent odd fruity sweetness, but it doesn’t have that weird sour tang attached to it. Instead it has a slightly medicinal quality, like a cherry off-note. I don’t know how you’d cover up all of the fruit, as it’s pretty forward right in the middle of this vape, but maybe you could hide the medicine behind another fruit that doesn’t have any of that, possibly a raspberry or strawberry, and create a fruit-filled chocolate cake? The chocolate cake part does actually taste like chocolate cake, at least, without the common chocolate pitfalls or cake mistakes and it has a deep and rich flavor saturation like a not too dry, box mix chocolate cake. It’s such a shame about that weird medicine-y fruit thing right in the middle. Finish has a subtle waxiness in a chocolate frosting kind of way and sweeter than the rest of the vape.

SCE Chocolate Cake More fruit. This one is tangy but unlike the yuckier sour fruit thing in the Health Cabin Chocolate cake it’s brighter and more natural, like a raspberry or fresh strawberry, right on top of an otherwise fairly solid chocolate cake flavor that’s thick, rich, and has a nice cakey feel to it with just the slightest bit of tootsie roll-ishness to the chocolate. I guess it’s fine if you want a chocolate cake topped with fruit, just add some more fruit to give it a clearer identity and be on your way. Maybe a sweet cherry if you’ve got one that’s not awful want to go the Black Forest Cake route with it. But I don’t think you can just ignore the fruitiness, it’s pretty prominent.

LB Lava Cake (New) and LB Lava Cake (Old) - https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY_eJuice/comments/dqmwzx/flavor_reviewcomparison_lb_lava_cake/

FW Creamy Chocolate Cake - Thin and somewhat dry chocolate cake that’s a bit light on the chocolate, to the extent that it tastes more like thin amount of slightly waxy chocolate frosting leaching into a regular cake a bit. I guess it’s supposed to have a cream filling but I’m not really getting a cream feeling here, it seems to just be a dry cream taste like freeze-dried ice cream or something that’s washing out a lot of the cake, so that it’s dry but not really grainy and cakey. It is sweet, but just not rich in any way. Like several of the other chocolate cake flavors, it seems like it needs a lot of help in every way to be what it’s supposed to be, which is like a Ding Dong, I think. More bakery, more richness within the bakery, more chocolate, some actual cream.

MB Creamy Cake - I can barely tell the difference between MB Creamy Cake and FW Creamy Chocolate Cake, I’m only putting this at Number 1 because all of the differences are slight improvements. Most of the same adjectives apply. It’s thin and dry and a bit light on the cocoa, but one of the subtle differences is that the chocolate is slightly more prominent and integrated rather than more sitting on top, and it’s less waxy. There’s a bunch of cream that’s a little dry, but it does have a bit more of a vanilla taste than FW and a bit more of a cream filling feel. Partially rehydrated freeze dried cream filling, maybe? It’s making the cake part washed out and lacking texture just like in the FW Creamy Chocolate Cake, but it least it has a more prominent cream taste and somewhat thicker, creamier, less dry impression to it. Seems like it would need all the same help that FW does, but not as much help with the chocolate or the cream.

FLV Chocolate Deutsche It’s a German Chocolate Cake. I get that is not actually traditional German thing, but German Chocolate Cake is what we call chocolate cake covered in coconut-pecan caramelly goopy custardy frosting in the US and I think in Canada. Anyway, it tastes like rich, dense, saturated dark chocolate cake with a fairly prominent sweet coconut undertone throughout, a touch of gooey caramel, and a lighter nutty flavor. Not at all dry, but not so wet as to be lacking in texture, just rich. I don’t get any off notes at all for German Chocolate Cake, though I can understand the dismay of people who just want a chocolate cake without the coconut. Really nice cakey texture. It tastes pretty much perfect for what it's supposed to be.

Been vaping 5% INW Grapefruit the last couple of days. I haven’t done much single flavor testing yet as I’ve only been mixing about 3 weeks, but this stuff is pretty great. It tastes a lot like grapefruit juice. Like fresh squeezed grapefruit. Not the sweet juice you’d buy in a can. I’m experimenting with adding different notes of lime to it