Worship Me, For I Am Mighty

Right. So I made the best chocolate cake in the world. Ever. Probably. Sal said it was the best she'd ever had and she is a doctor so we must respect her rulings. I'll include some pics of it as I was cooking it, so you can see what it should look like. It's from a Good Food recipe. In order for this cake to work, follow the recipe and the ingredient measures exactly. Fo' serious.

I mean, come on, look at that! That's a thing of beauty, if I do say so myself.

Ingredients (cake):

200g quality dark choc (70% cocoa solids)
200g butter (not marge) diced
1 tbsp instant coffee granules
85g self-raising flour
85g plain flour
1/4 tsp of bicarbonate of soda
200g dark muscavado sugar (light will do, but dark makes a richer cake)
200g caster sugar
25g cocoa powder
3 eggs
75ml butter milk

Ingredients (topping):

Bar of white chocolate
200g quality dark choc
284ml double cream
2 tblsp caster sugar

Firstly: If you don't have any butter milk then a cup full of milk with the juice of a whole lemon mixed in, then left for 5 minutes, will do the same job.

As usual, pre-heat the oven to 140 deg or 160 if no fan. Line a cake tin, around 20cm if you have it, or if possible use one with a removable base. If you don't have lining then butter it extremely thoroughly.

Smash up the chocolate and melt it in a pan with the butter. Dissolve the coffee granules in 125ml cold water and pour that in with the melting choc and butter. Melt, warm and mix. Yeehah. Do not over heat this, you don't want anything sticking to the pan at all. While that's doing its thing, mix the flours, sugars, bicarb and cocoa in a bowl (sift if you can). Get your hands in the bowl to do this as you'll need to rub the lumps that muscavado makes out. No lumps at all if you can manage it. Next beat the eggs and put them in the flour mix bowl with the buttermilk. Stir stir stir.

Pour the chocolate buttery yummyness into the floury sugaryness and mix until you have a smoothe cake batter. Oh Lord. I can almost taste it typing this. Pour evenly into your cake tin and stick it in the oven. Mine took exactly 1 hour 23 minutes to be ready. After about 1 hr 10 a skewer came out clean but the top felt a bit jelly like so make sure that it is fairly firm to the touch on top. Do NOT leave in any longer than strictly necessary, it shouldn't need more than 1 hour 30 minutes, or you won't get the fudgy effect.

Whilst the cake is doing its thang, make the ganache topping (if you've read my other posts you'll be able to do this with your eyes closed by now!). Smash the dark chocolate up and put it in a bowl. Warm the cream over a low heat, stirring in the caster sugar too. Heat until almost boiled then pour into the bowl and stir until completely melted. It will look weird and milky at first but will soon thicken up. Put in the fridge to thicken but be sure to keep a soft spreadable texture (if you over cool it, just microwave for a few seconds).

Get the cake out, turn it onto a cooling rack and be sure to wait until it's completely cool, however hard this task is! It should look a bit like this:

If it doesn't, don't worry! I'm sure it'll be delcious. When it's cool, get a bread knife and cut the cake into three, horizontally, so you have three thin layers. Don't try and carve straight through the middle, stick the knife in the gently cut round, turning the cake as you go. When it's in three, get your ganache out and spread a fairly thin layer onto the bottom and middle layers of the cake so that you have two layers of filling. If you catch my drift...

Once you've assembled it back into one cake with your dual-filling, smother the entire thing, including the outside edges, in ganache. Get it all over so no cake is visible. This is super fun! You can do patterns if you want or use a pallette knife to make little waves. Next get your white choc and melt it for a very few seconds in the oven or microwave so that it is just starting to become soft at the edges. Get a peeler and, applying pressure downwards, peel along it like you would a carrot. If you have a cheese slicer, use that instead. This is actually pretty tricky so try to stick with it. It will make the white choc curls you can see on the first pic. I arranged these in a flour type thing but you can do what you like with it really! Finish by grating the rest of the white chocolate over the whole cake.

If this isn't the best chocolate cake you've ever tasted, I want to know why. It's relatively simple but makes a truly impressive cake, perfect for a present or party. Let me know if you try this one.

Enjoy, children.

A x