  The characteristics of the Galactic Center Excess (GCE) emission observed in
gamma-ray energies -- especially the morphology of the GCE -- remain a hotly
debated subject. The manner in which the dominant diffuse gamma-ray background
is modeled has been claimed to have a determining effect on the preferred
morphology. In this work, we compare two distinct approaches to the galactic
diffuse gamma-ray emission background: the first approach models this emission
through templates calculated from a sequence of well-defined astrophysical
assumptions, while the second approach divides surrogates for the background
gamma-ray emission into cylindrical galactocentric rings with free independent
normalizations. At the latitudes that we focus on, we find that the former
approach works better, and that the overall best fit is obtained for an
astrophysically motivated fit when the GCE follows the morphology expected of
dark matter annihilation. Quantitatively, the improvement compared to the best
ring-based fits is roughly 6500 in the chi^2 and roughly 4000 in the log of the
Bayesian evidence.
