Devil’s Food Cake

Chocolate cake. There are endless recipes, and endless varieties, all taste brilliant… After all, its chocolate, what’s not to love!

This recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawson, I made very minor changes depending on what I had or didn’t have. The result is still brilliant, quite spongy, quite moist. One of the changes I made in the frosting was that I didn’t use dark chocolate as I didn’t want it to be too bitter.

Another point to note is that the frosting will seem to be too runny to be used as a frosting. It will be runny for a long long time if you leave it at room temperature to firm up. So I put it in the freezer 🙂 15 minutes, and it was where I wanted it. Not runny at all, but not brick hard as well. Smooth to touch, but I was able to frost the cake quite smoothly with it as you can see.

 

Makes an 8″ cake.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

Cocoa powder – 50 grams
Dark brown sugar – 100 grams 
Boiling water – 250 ml 
Soft butter – 125 grams
Caster sugar – 150 grams 
Plain flour – 225 grams
Baking powder – ½ teaspoon 
Baking soda – ½ teaspoon
Vanilla extract – 2 teaspoons 
3 medium eggs

For the frosting:

Water – 125 ml
Dark brown sugar – 30 grams
Butter – 175 grams
Dark chocolate or Milk Chocolate (I used milk chocolate), broken into equal pieces – 300 grams

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Prepare an 8″ pan or two 8″ sandwich pans.
2. Mix together the dark brown sugar, cocoa powder and boiling water. Briskly stir to mix and set aside.
3. Sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda and set aside.
4. Cream the caster sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla essence, and the eggs, one at a time. Keep whisking. Then add the sifted flour. The finally fold in the dark brown sugar mixture.
5. The batter will be extremely runny. Pour in well greased pan and bake at 180 degrees for 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
6. While the cake is baking, make the frosting. Put the water, sugar and butter in a pan and bring to boil. Remove from heat and add the broken chocolate. Swirl the pan so that the chocolate is fully covered by the liquid. Leave for a while to allow the chocolate to melt.
7. Then whisk with a spoon, mixing properly. You can either leave at room temperature to thicken if you have time or put in fridge/freezer to set quickly.

I sliced my cooled cake horizontally and put frosting in the centre and on the sides. I decorated with chocolate shards and piped some roses with ganache. You can just frost it and serve it as such, it tastes amazing just like that!