The Book Lover’s Kitchen: Chocolate Fudge Cake

After a somewhat disastrous attempt with one chocolate fudge cake recipe, I found the old one I used to rely on. Which has turned out so much better! And made a massive cake which fed three adults and a six year old at home for a week, and a Department meeting at school!

Ingredients

For the Cake

• 400g Plain Flour
• 250 g Caster Sugar
• 100g Demerara Sugar – although I used 50g Demerara and 50g Soft Brown Sugar because it was all I had and the cake seemed to work!
• 50g Cocoa Powder
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

• 3 Eggs
• 150 ml Soured Cream
• 1 tbsp vanilla essence

• 175g Butter, melted
• 125 ml Corn or Rapeseed Oil – or any other non-flavoured oil
• 300 ml water

For the Icing

• 285g Butter
• 315g Icing Sugar
• 200g Melted Dark Chocolate

Method

Firstly, put all the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl and whisk them together until fully incorporated.

In a second bowl, whisk up the wet ingredients.

Meanwhile, melt the butter over a low heat, add the oil and the water. Whisk thoroughly.

Beat the dry ingredients into the fats, beating hard to ensure they are all incorporated; then add the wet ingredients (the eggs and soured cream mixture). Keep beating until it all combines and then pour into tins – either two small tins or one big one. It is quite a wet and loose mixture so I wouldn’t use loose bottomed tins. This was the tin I used, which is 21 x 21 square and greased and floured before the mixture was added.

Bake at about 160 for 1 hour and 15 minutes. At that point the cake was well risen, coming away from the sides of the tin and looking good. The usual skewer test came out clean. If I had two tins, I would probably say 180 for 55 minutes…?

Once cool, I sliced it in half and iced it inside and on top. I don’t like icing on the sides of a square cake: who gets the heavily iced corners, the medium iced edges, the minimally iced centre… it’s a question fraught with dangers!

The resulting cake looked like this