Perfect Gooey Dark Chocolate Cake

This is an incredibly tasty, gooey chocolate cake. Very very easy to make. The original recipe is from food.com.

I baked the cake in a heart-shaped tin, and took the picture only after we polished off the tail, Pliss to excuse. 🙂

Perfect Gooey Dark Chocolate Cake Recipe

Get all the ingredients out and arrange them on the table ok? Saves a lot of running around like a headless chicken in the kitchen.

 

Dry Ingredients

1. Flour – 1 ¾ cups
2. Cocoa powder – ¾ cup
3. Sugar – 2 cups
4. Baking powder – 1 ½ tsp
5. Baking soda – 1 ½ tsp
6. Salt – 1 tsp

Wet Ingredients

1. Milk – 1 cup
2. Vegetable oil – ½ cup
3. Eggs – 2 medium
4. Vanilla essence – 2 tsp
5. Boiling water – ¾ cup

Steps

1.     Preheat oven to 180C.

2.     Grease and flour (or grease and line with parchment paper) a 13×9 inch cake pan.

3.     In a large bowl, stir together the dry ingredients. You may also sieve them all together to ensure a good mix.

4.     Add eggs, oil, milk and vanilla essence. Beat with a hand mixer for about 2 minutes.

5.     Now is the tricky part. Mix the boiling water and stir by hand. ¾ cup water will give you a very runny batter, you may use slightly lesser than that if you feel that it is way too runny. Between ½ and ¾ cup. The batter must be runny.

6.     Pour into the prepared pan and bake at 180 C for 30-35 minutes. Don’t fill the pan up or the batter will rise and overflow.

7.     Check after 30 minutes by inserting a toothpick into the cake, it should come out clean. If you find sticky batter on the toothpick, bake some more.

8.      Cool in the pan for 10 minutes and then tip out to the wire rack to cool.

***

 

Don’t make these mistakes that I made

X      I mixed way too much boiling water into the mix, the batter became too runny and needed a very long time to cook.

X      To compound the above problem, I also poured a very thick layer (probably about 3 inches or more) of batter into the cake pan. Even after 40 minutes, my toothpick had sticky gooey batter on it.

X      Leave the temperature at 180 C. I got impatient and cranked it up to 200^o C after 40 minutes, and my cake had a sticky burnt crust.

I love this cake because

♥      It takes real effort to mess this recipe up (I managed to do so to some extent, thank you very much :D)

♥      The cake is so incredibly moist and gooey and utterly delicious.

♥      It tastes better after a day or two.

♥      Vanilla butter cream frosting works perfectly with this cake.

♥      The better the quality of cocoa, the better the cake tastes.

Bake Babe is my new profile

So this is going to be my new profile.  I will post recipes from this profile.

I made a new profile picture too for BakeBake. 😀

Bake Babe

Baking Classes in Trivandrum

So I went for my first ever baking class last week. I have been trying really hard to find baking classes that are accessible and not over-the-top expensive. An online search reveals a couple of baking institutes such as the Institute of Cake and Bake Art, Bangalore, and Culinary and Cake Decorating School, Delhi. I also found a few others that offer baking lessons along with their regular high-end culinary courses. If I lived in Bangalore or Delhi, I would have been more than happy to join these places.

But I live in Trivandrum and fortunately, I found Menna’s Delight, where Marina offers her baking expertise to help newbie bakers bake their cake and eat it too. Marina is a very friendly and approachable person, she very patiently explained the numerous queries that we had.

Marina has put up a complete list of all her baking and cooking lessons in Bangalore and Trivandrum. I did the first one in the list – Cupcakes (Vanilla, Strawberry, Orange marmalade, Chocolate and Choco chips) & Tea cake with Fudge icing – and will be back for more next month.

Baking has really gotten into my head, I keep watching youtube videos on baking and cake decoration :D. I even have an India Baking Facebook page already, and that speaks for itself, being the Facebook junkie that I am. http://www.facebook.com/indiabaking

All I can say is I am loving it.