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!

 

Chocolate Shards

There are so many ways chocolate can be used for decoration, and I am only starting to learn few of them. I have done chocolate collars a few times now and am fairly confident in making them. This time when I was asked to do a chocolate cake, I started trolling through various images online to find out what could be done. And my oh my, there are so many things which I wouldn’t even dare attempt at the moment, but these shards looked good. Apparently there are (at least) two ways of making these shards, and I will be writing about the method I used.

I used the shards to decorate this Devil’s Food cake.

 

Ingredients:

Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate and White Chocolate – Cubed

Method:

Melt all three chocolates in separate bowls, either in microwave or a double boiler. If melting in a microwave, heat for only 30 sec bursts and stir constantly. Stop when most of the chocolate is melted, stir briskly to melt all the remaining chocolate.

Take a large square piece of baking paper and put on a movable surface, like a tray. Drizzle dark chocolate, then milk, then white all over it. Then hold the tray and paper up carefully, trying to sort of let the chocolates merge a little bit into each other.

Now put the tray in the fridge to set for an hour.

Take another square piece of baking paper and put on your work surface. Take the chilled and set chocolate from the fridge and invert it on top of the second piece of baking paper, then carefully peel off the baking paper from the chilled chocolate. The chocolate would now be inverted, and look like this

 

Now taking a sharp knife, trim the sides to get a square/rectangular shape. You need not be very precise on this, just get some neat edges. Now, using the same knife, cut it into shards. The trick is to touch the chocolate as less as possible, or not at all, because it WILL melt because of the heat of your hands.

 

 

The beautiful shards are ready!!