Monday, 9 January 2012

Baking for Beginners: Easy Peasy Chocolate Cake

I love cake. I particularly love this chocolate cake because it is so incredibly simple - here's one I made in about five minutes flat (plus cooking time) last week. I iced it as a salute to my service provider who was irritating me.

In an ideal world, nothing I cooked would involve more than five ingredients, and any techniques more complicated than "throw everything in, stir."

This is one of those recipes - hurrah!

Easy Peasy Chocolate Cake (serves 10-12)
You will need: 

  • 225g sugar
  • 170g self-raising flour
  • 55g cocoa
  • 115g margarine/butter
  • 4 eggs
  • greaseproof paper
  • two 20cm round cake tins

    For the icing
  • margarine/butter
  • icing sugar 
  • cocoa
  • boiling water
Make it!
  1. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees. Bung everything into a large bowl and whizz liberally until it's bound together, spend two minutes casually licking whizzers clean.
  2. Cut out two circles of greaseproof paper to line two round cake tins with. Smear the paper with marge, and dollop in your mixture, spreading it out so it's even and leaving a little downwards dent in the middle of each.
  3. Pop in the oven for 25 minutes and test with a cocktail stick. It should come away clean. Remove from tins, turn out onto cooling racks and remove the paper. Leave to cool for an hour or so.
  4. If you'd like a moist cake to have on its own, just undercook it for a couple of minutes. My mum used to pack me off to school with a good slab of really melty cake and it's brilliant.
  5. Top with your preferred icing. I like coffee or chocolate, but make this in very much a suck it and see fashion. ie: put "some" marge in a bowl, sieve "quite a bit" of icing sugar and cocoa on top, add a "smidge" of boiling water and then whizz."

4 comments:

  1. Kat, my love, I have a suggestion to make it EVEN FASTER: cake release or tarrant. Former's available from Lakeland etc. I'm not sure where you get the latter as a professional baker friend gave me some.

    Basically you either squeeze (cake release) or spray (tarrant, not to be confused with Chris) this stuff on the pan, spread it out with a pastry brush or spatula (in the case of cake release only) and then you need NEVER faff with greaseproof paper cutting again.

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  2. The other option is cake liners
    http://www.lakeland.co.uk/5551/20cm-Cake-Tin-Liners

    they make life a lot easier

    I would be intrigued to know what different the reduction in marg makes as this is nearly but not quite an all in one sponge which is equal mass eggs, butter, sugar and flour plus baking poweder and flavourings and that is the best cake ever imho

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  3. Oh you guys! TBH I don't really mind the greaseproof paper bit as I don't make cake all that often. Amazing tips though, I didn't even know that sort of stuff existed!

    Bagpuss, give this one a try and see what you think! Undercook it a bit for extra noms x

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