This chocolate cake recipe is adapted from a recipe that the chocolatier Paul Young developed. I say adapted – I followed his sponge recipe but didn’t make the Mayan spiced syrup. Now, to set the scene I love to bake, and I especially love producing homemade cakes for my friends on their birthdays if the opportunity arises. My good friend Miss B had a birthday a few weeks ago and I decided to be a cake fairy. I planned to make chocolate cakes with a Nutella centre covered in buttercream and cookie icing. Super sticky right? Unfortunately, I had a bit of a baking disaster. Two batches of cake sunk before I realised that there was something wrong with the flour I had bought. J was (as usual) the true hero of the hour. He rushed out to get more ingredients to make these cakes because I needed a heavier cake recipe I could rely on.

This cake recipe is a great one if you like to gage how well things are mixed with your hands as it works best if you work the mixture with your hands as opposed to a spoon. So its good to make if you don’t own a food processor to much baking equipment.

To make the chocolate cakes you will need

110g self-raising flour

65g dark cocoa powder (the higher the quality the better)

185g butter

225g  muscovado sugar

85ml double cream

2 medium free-range eggs

85ml water

 

For the buttercream icing you will need (approx)

140g butter softened

280g icing sugar

1-2 tbsp cream (used the leftover cream from your cakes)

7 small chocolate chip cookies

(You may need to make more buttercream icing depending on how thick you like to ice your cakes)

 

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line a 12 hole muffin tray with cake cases.

Put the flour, cocoa, salt and butter in your mixing bowl. Rub the mixture between your fingers until the mixture has consistency of breadcrumbs (like you would when making crumble). Add the sugar and mix well.

Fill a measuring jug with the water, cream and eggs. Whisk together and add to the breadcrumb and sugar mix and mix together until smooth – it doesn’t have to be perfect. I was rushing and mine cake out fine.

Fill your cake cases with the mixture. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes until a skewer comes out of one of the cakes clean.

While your cakes are cooling, make your buttercream. Beat your butter and sugar together.

Once the buttercream is smooth, crush your cookies (take any frustrations you have out on them). Add the cookies to the buttercream. Loosen the mixture by adding the cream.

Decorate your cupcakes with the buttercream as you wish. Mine don’t look particularly amazing because I was rushing out to Miss B’s birthday!

Now you might have noticed a lack of pictures in this post – this is mostly because your hands get extremely messy making these! These cakes are tasty, but one is plenty. I’d definitely advice having one of these with a cup of tea or coffee as they are very sweet. Miss B loved them though, which is the thing that matters most. Special thanks to J and his speedy Asda trip!