Deepwire's Blog

This weekend we have guests coming to visit, one of which loves chocolate, so naturally, I decided to make a chocolate cake.  This is a recipe I have tried once before, and it turned out great, so this time I have varied things a bit in a quest to improve it!

The original recipe comes courtesy of the BBC Good Food Website, and is for a simple chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream filling (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4689/chocolate-cake).  I chose this recipe because I wanted one with actual chocolate going in to the cake itself, rather than just Cocoa powder or hot chocolate powder, as I have always found these a bit dry.

As I like to experiment, this time I varied the recipe, changing a few ingredients, so instead of using only plain chocolate, I used a mix of 180g plain chocolate with 70g milk chocolate.  I also swapped out the unrefined soft brown sugar for light muscavado sugar, which has a better flavour, with a small amount of plain caster sugar.  This has made the cake itself a bit sweeter, with a slightly richer flavour from the muscavado sugar.  As this recipe makes a large amount of cake mix, I decided split the final mix to make 2 cakes, based on previous experience where it would not fit in just one cake tin.

The smaller one I left as is, while the second I experimented further.  To add yet more chocolate to this recipe, and give the cake some texture, I broke up some chocolate into small chunks, and mixed these in (50g Dark, 50g Milk and 50g White Chocolate).  (I also added a teaspoon of baking powder to this to help the heavier mix rise).  Then it was time to bake both cakes for an hour at 140°c as indicated.

While this time I cheated on the icing (using ready made Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge icing), I think both cakes turned out great!  They rose perfectly, and coupled with the icing the recipe gave two very moist, very chocolatey cakes.  The one thing I would change next time, now I’ve tried this recipe twice, is to make only 1 cake instead of two.  The first time I tried, I only had smaller cake tins, where it needed to be split to fit.  This time, I had a larger tin I was using, along side a smaller one.  If I had wanted to, I think it would have fitted into this, without the need for the smaller second tin.

But hey, I got 2 cakes out of it, both tasting great, so I’m not complaining!