Choc Mint-topped Chocolate Cake

My middle son asked for a chocolate birthday cake topped with cream and mint chocolate. I thought a simple cream topping needed a cake that was a bit more rich and moist than my other chocolate birthday cake.

I used a recipe from 'Apples for Jam' that I hadn't tried before called simply 'Chocolate cake with icing' but skipped the icing part.

Melt the butter in a pan, then add chopped up dark chocolate and cocoa powder and stir until all melted together. Remove from heat.

In a medium bowl beat the egg whites until creamy and stiff.

In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks until creamy, then beat in the sugar. Add the melted chocolate mixture a little at a time, mixing until smooth.

Carefully fold in beaten egg whites, mixing until completely incorporated.

Scrape out into buttered and floured 24 cm springform pan (I buttered and base-lined my tin, and mine was 22 cm) and cook at 180 C for 30 - 35 min.

Cool the cake completely in the pan before turning out. I'm not sure if mine puffed up as much as it should have - I'm never very good at folding in whipped egg whites - but it was nice anyway!

I topped it with beaten cream and roughly chopped mint Aero. Yum!

Ingredients:
180 g unsalted butter
50 g dark chocolate
30 g cocoa powder
3 eggs, separated
180 g caster sugar
125 g flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp milk

24 cm springform tin

Chocolate Cake with Strawberries and Cream

A variation on the chocolate birthday cake - this is my little son's birthday cake for his actual birthday (rather than his party cake). It is the same recipe as the Chocolate Cake with Hundreds and Thousands but this time I cut it in half horizontally and put cream and strawberries in the middle. Then I topped it with chocolate icing and some halved strawberries.

It was very nice, but in future I would use a different recipe for slicing in halves, at this was difficult to cut without it falling apart. Because of the generous cracks in the top. Thank goodness for gooey chocolate icing that glued it all back together!

Chocolate Cake with Hundreds and Thousands

It's birthday cake-making time here, this was the birthday party cake for the smallest boy in the house. A chocolate cake with chocolate icing and hundreds and thousands (a bit like a huge chocolate freckle).

This is the recipe I usually use if I'm asked to make a chocolate birthday cake. It uses cocoa powder, is quick and easy and not expensive. You just put all the ingredients in a food processor or mixer, then whizz it all up.

If you don't have a mixer or food processor, put everything in a big bowl and beat everything together by hand - that's how I always used to do it. Just make sure the butter is very soft or you'll be there for weeks.

All combined...

...ready for the cake tin (buttered and base lined). My tin is 22 cm. Cook at 170 or 180 C depending on how fierce your oven is.

After about 55 minutes (stick a skewer or sharp knife in the middle part to check it's cooked right through) take it out of the oven and leave to cool.

This cake always gets cracks in the top especially if you use a food processor, I've found. I choose to see this as a good thing, because it means that the icing gets right down into the cake. It's best to use a thickish icing so the cracks don't show.

I spread on some chocolate icing, then decided to get fancy and try a baking paper cut-out number. This was all done while eleven 6- and 7-year-olds rampaged around the house, so I was a bit crazy.
It took me about an hour to decorate the cake as I kept having to go and supervise children and tell them to stop running etc. Luckily it was ready just in time!

Putting hundreds and thousands on a dome-topped cake is a very tricky thing to do. They all roll and bounce around the place. I'm going to be finding them all over the house for months to come.

The cake was a big success...

Where did it all go?

Ingredients:
185 g butter, very soft
330 g (1 1/2 cups) caster sugar
3 eggs
225 g (1 1/2 cups) self-raising flour
110 g (3/4 cups) plain flour
50 g (1/2 cup) cocoa powder
250 ml (1 cup) warm/hot water

Chocolate icing
65 g butter (ie the rest of the 250 g block)
3 tbsp milk
25 g cocoa powder, sifted
22g g icing sugar, sifted (or use icing mixture and skip the sifting)

Place butter and milk in a small pan and heat gently until butter is melted. Pour into a large bowl and blend in cocoa powder. Stir in icing sugar and beat until smooth. Either use immediately to give a smooth, glossy finish or allow to thicken for a buttercream-type finish. If it gets too thick, add a little more milk. (For a cake with cracks, like this one, make sure the icing is thick enough to fill in the cracks before spreading over.)

Chocolate and Coconut Slice

I recently found Brittany's blog Les rêves d'une boulangère because she kindly left a comment on one of my posts. There are lots of recipes on her blog I would love to try, and this is the one that I could easily make straight away because I had all the ingredients.

Combine butter, brown sugar, egg and vanilla extract in a bowl. Sift in flour and cocoa.

Stir it all together with the desiccated coconut.

Spread the mixture into a lined 19 x 29 cm pan - mine was a little smaller. Put in a 180 C oven (Brittany uses 160 C fan forced) for around 30 minutes - I took mine out at 25 minutes.

Leave to cool then make some icing by sifting cocoa and sugar into a bowl, adding melted butter and a little hot water and stirring it all together.

Spread icing over the the slice and sprinkle on some extra coconut.

Cut into slices and share around! Not overly sweet or chocolatey, just perfect as a little treat with a cup of tea. I have to admit I ate more than my fair share of these!

Ingredients:
125 g butter, melted
1 cup brown sugar (packed, although I didn't pack mine in to reduce sweetness)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract (I missed this out)
1/2 cup plain flour
1/4 cup self-raising flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1/2 cup desiccated coconut
Icing:
1 cup icing sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
10 g butter, melted
1 1/2 tbsp hot water

Here is Brittany's original post for this recipe

There's another chocolatey slice recipe here on my blog that's also pretty good.

Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cake

Birthday cake time again, and this time it's Nigella's Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cake. I hadn't ever made this one before, and wanted to try it out.

Put the cake ingredients in a food processor (flour, sugar, baking powder, bicarb, cocoa, soft butter, eggs, vanilla and sour cream) and whizz them all up.

Before I had a food processor I used to hate it when recipes said things like that ('Thanks - I don't have a food processor!') but you can make it without one - see the recipe on Nigella's website.

Mine became a very thick mixture - so I added a couple of tablespoons of milk and blitzed it again.

Still very thick but a bit more smooth-looking. I'm not sure why it was originally so thick - maybe something to do with sour cream in Australia being very solid?

Divide mixture between two greased and base-lined cake pans and spread out as evenly as you can. Cook at 180 C for 20 minutes or so. The recipe says 25 to 35 minutes. Mine took just over 20 minutes.

When cooled down, remove from pans. One of my cakes was a bit bigger than the other, but never mind!

For the icing, melt chocolate and butter in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. When it's cooled down a bit, add the golden syrup, sour cream and vanilla, then mix together.

Put the chocolatey mixture into the food processor with the icing sugar and whizz it up.

(For non-food-processor-owners, sift the icing sugar into the choc/butter/cream mixture and beat it all together.)

Icing ready to spread on the cake.

Spread about a third of the icing on the first sponge, then put the other sponge on top.

Use the rest of the icing to cover the top and sides of the cake. The 'lines' on the top was my middle son's idea - he also decorated the cake with Smarties.

(Smarties are 'old-fashioned' enough for this cake I think - although I always forget how dull the colours are now that they've stopped using artificial colours. I think they should sell both types so people like me can use them for colourful birthday cake decorating!)

Ready for the birthday celebration...

Wow the icing is full-on! I know many bloggers have made this cake before, and I'll be checking to what others thought of the recipe.

Everyone in my family enjoyed this cake (it's chocolate cake after all) but I'm not sure I'd use this recipe again. I feel I could have made a similar cake using a more basic recipe using cocoa powder and no sour cream, but maybe this is down to a combination of my cooking abilities and personal taste!

I much preferred the Honey Bee Cake and Malteser Cake and would definitely make either of those again.

I suggested to everyone that if I made this cake again I would use half the amount of the icing - my husband agreed (and he is a real sweet-tooth!) but my children were horrified by the thought!

The recipe for the cake is here on Nigella's website.

Caramel Crown Cake

This weekend I took up the Claytons Bloggers' challenge to 'Pimp that Biscuit' - and I decided to make a big Caramel Crown.

The Caramel Crown is one of my favourite bought biscuits. It has a crunchy base topped with a layer of caramel, and the whole thing is coated in milk chocolate. Mmmmm......

After much close inspection of the Caramel Crown - slicing, dissecting, tasting etc - it was decided that the base was a quite plain and not particularly sweet biscuit - so I decided to use packaged biscuits and crush them up.

I chose a reasonably plain type of biscuit - kind of like an oaty digestive - and crushed two packs of them finely. Then I melted 200 g butter and stirred it in.

I lined a 22 cm springform pan with baking paper, and then formed the cake base by pressing in the crumb and butter mixture, and moulding it into a shallow bowl shape.

The original biscuit has tiny bumps around the biscuit edge, but after a few unsuccessful attempts at copying this effect, I decided that particular feature wasn't very important (except that it's probably the reason the word 'crown' is in the biscuit's name. Never mind).

I cooked it for 15 minutes on 180 C and let it cool completely before removing it from the tin and putting it on the serving plate.

The Caramel Crown has a layer of caramel (as you would expect) and as I have very little experience at making that type of thing, I decided to cheat and use caramel topping from a tin.

To be more authentic, it would need a smooth, home-made caramel, like the caramel you find in Twix and Mars bars.

Annoyingly, for some reason I stopped taking step-by-step photos at this point, but after I filled the biscuit case with the caramel, I then melted a 200 g bar of cooking chocolate, let it cool for a while, and poured it over the caramel part of the cake. Then I melted another bar of chocolate, and when that had cooled and thickened a bit, I used it to pour and spread over the edges and sides.

Quite a lot of chocolate pooled around the biscuit base, but that was fine because I had put strips of baking paper under the sides that I could remove afterwards.

I put the cake in the fridge to set the chocolate, and when it was starting to firm up, I drew a few lines in the top in an attempt to copy the ridges on the top of the original Caramel Crowns.

Then when the chocolate was completely set, I trimmed around the pooled chocolate at the base with a sharp knife, in order to remove the baking paper strips.

I had timed my Caramel Crown Cake-making so that it could be my Number One Son's (15th) birthday cake but didn't want to stick candles in my creation. So I stuck them in two obliging Caramel Crowns instead.

After the singing and blowing out of the candles, the cake was whipped back into the kitchen and cut with a sharp knife to reveal the interior, which looked pretty much like the original. It tasted similar but not identical, was very sweet and very popular.

Ingredients:
400 g plain oatmeal biscuits
200 g unsalted butter
1 tin of top and fill caramel
400 g (approx) milk cooking chocolate (good quality)

Chocolate Cola Cake

This is a recipe I found by chance while I was looking for something else, and I had to make it straight away, even though it's hot here at the moment, and not really a good time to have the oven on!

I halved the original recipe to one I can fit in my 20 x 20 cm Pyrex dish, because it isn't anyone's birthday and I didn't think we needed to eat a whole cake between us. (OK so it's Australia Day, but that's not really enough of an excuse for us, as we don't really commemorate it in our house!)

Put flour, bicarb, sugar and cocoa in a bowl and combine. Beat an egg lightly, and add vanilla extract.

In a small pan, melt the butter gently, then add cola and milk. Turn off heat. Add egg and the butter mixture to the dry ingredients and mix in quickly and lightly.

Pour mixture into a cake pan - mine was a 20 x 20 cm Pyrex dish lined with a strip of baking paper. Cook at 180 C for 30 minutes or so until a skewer comes out clean.

Cool in pan for 10 mins before removing to a cooling rack. My cake was quite delicate so needed to be handled carefully.

The icing was made by melting butter then stirring in cocoa and cola. Pour the mixture into some icing sugar and beat together until smooth.

Pour onto cake and spread over the top. There was enough to cover the top of the cake and for some to dribble down the sides a little.

Cut into slices and watch it be demolished extremely quickly.

This was a very light, moist cake, with an interesting taste - the cola gave it a subtle flavour that was different to other chocolate cakes - it's hard to describe, so maybe you should make it yourself and see!

Ingredients:
Cake:
125 g self-raising flour
pinch of bicarb
2 tbsp cocoa powder
150 ml caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
125 g butter
100 ml cola
2 tbsp milk
Icing:
100 g icing sugar
50 g butter
1 tbsp cola
1 tbsp cocoa powder