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.

Banana Breakfast Ring

This is the recipe I cook most from 'Feast' - it's so quick and easy to make, and is great for using up over-ripe bananas. It's also light and fluffy and has a slight lemony tang. I have to say I've never eaten it for breakfast though!

In a large bowl mash up bananas well, then add oil, eggs, lemon juice and zest, vanilla and caster sugar. Whisk them all together with a fork.

Add flour and raising agents (or self-raising flour which is what I've started using) and fold to combine.

You end up with a lumpy mixture - very muffin-like, which is probably exactly what it is. A big muffin.

Pour it into an oiled bundt tin, or normal round cake tin. Cook for 30-40 minutes at 180 C.

When it's all golden on the top, remove from oven and leave to cool in the tin for 5 - 10 mins.

Remove from tin and decide which is the 'right' way up to serve the cake. I think with bundt tins the bottom is the top bit, but I don't really like the look of this side.

This looks much better to me. Slice and eat while still warm, but it's great cold too.

Ingredients:
3 medium bananas
60 ml oil (I use olive oil)
3 eggs
zest and juice of half a lemon (I use a little zest and a decent squirt of lemon juice)
1 tsp vanilla essence
200 g caster sugar (I use 140 g)
325 g plain flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp bicarb - or 325 g self-raising flour

Quick Apple Cake

When I made the Quick Apple Flan I said I would be interested to see how it turned out with self-raising flour instead of plain.

Thisevening I made the self-raising version, and it really worked out quite well. This time it was definitely a cake instead of a flan - much more fluffy and light, and less sticky. Quite a different dessert, which is why I decided to rename it and give it its own post.

Really good with custard. Original recipe here but replace the plain flour with self-raising.

This time I used two largish granny smith apples, and chopped them up a bit smaller to make slicing the cake easier.

Quick Apple Flan

I saw this recipe in the Frills in the Hills blog, using pears. I tried it and it was pretty good, but I thought the tang of apple would be better. So thisevening I made the apple version for dessert.

Helping me with the measuring were these pretty baboushka doll cup measures, sent to me by the lovely people at The Claytons Blog. Each one opens and has a different volume marked inside, and they all fit together neatly.

The original recipe calls for 1 kg of fruit, but I used four pink lady apples which weighed just under 500 g. Peel, core and slice.

In a large bowl, mix together eggs, milk and sugar.

Add flour and spice and beat until you have a thick batter.

(If the batter is very thick, add a little more milk.)

Add fruit and stir in well.

Pour into a greased baking tin which has baking paper in the base. Cook for 40 - 45 mins at 190 C until golden. Cool in tin for 20 mins and then remove to a cooling rack.


Serve warm with custard or ice cream, or eat cool as a slice.

This is a quick, cheap and easy dessert, which is a good alternative to apple pie or crumble, and everyone here really enjoyed it.

If I have one criticism, it is that the batter becomes a little 'leathery' and I wonder what would happen if self-raising flour were used instead. (Hopefully nothing too disastrous, as I'll be trying it next time!)

(for the self-raising flour version look here)

Ingredients:
500 g apples, peeled, cored, sliced
2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/4 tsp mixed spice and a shake of ground cinnamon