Celebrating National Chocolate Cake Day | Baking

Happy Saturday lovelies! It has been absolutely ages since I blogged!! Just when I thought I'd gotten to a better place with my insomnia, I finally got my period. If you're a regular reader of my blog, then you might remember when I blogged all about getting my contraceptive implant removed; since August 2016 I have only had one other proper period so this latest surprise appearance was somewhat of a shock to my body and it certainly responded accordingly. I have felt so drained and groggy all the time, ugh >.< I was definitely relieved at first because I was getting a little worried, but after a few days it just wanted it to stop so I'm glad that it's finally over, haha! Anyhow, apologies for my lack of activity once again! :D I know that 2018 blogging-wise has not gotten off to a good start, but I have plenty of time to fix that! And so on with today's post...

If you didn't know, today is National Chocolate Cake Day. To be honest, all of these interesting national 'holidays' and celebrations are a US tradition but I really like how there's so dates marked to appreciate the most random of things so I don't care if I'm from the UK, I'm still going to join it with the occasion, because there's never a reason not to celebrate something! Especially when that something involves chocolate and cake, two of the best things in existence, wouldn't you agree? I spent this afternoon baking and so I thought I'd share the recipe, so that you can have a go at making a chocolate cake yourselves :) I hope you enjoy reading, and if you don't have some chocolate cake in your lives right now, take a trip to the shops and get some! 

I originally wanted to make a Devils Food Cake, because they are super chocolatey and make me think of the iconic cake from the movie Matilda :) however the ingredients was more than I could justify spending at the moment, so I went back to my usual baking tradition of using a recipe from Be Ro. My mom always talked about recipes from Be Ro when I was growing up and so whenever I wanted to make something that's traditional, then I take a look for one of their recipes. So that's where I found the chocolate cake recipe that I used today. You can find the original one here but I'm still going to write it up for you on this post :) 

What you'll need to make your own chocolate cake

♥ 200g self-raising flour

♥ 225g caster sugar

♥ 25g cocoa powder

♥ a pinch of salt (half a teaspoons worth)

♥ 100g margarine

♥ 2 medium eggs

♥ 5 tablespoons of water

♥ 5 tablespoons of evaporated milk 

♥ some vanilla essence 

Also you'll need two baking tins, a mixing bowl and other baking utensils for mixing and measuring out your ingredients. 

What you'll need to make the milk chocolate icing/frosting 

This is also a Be Ro recipe & I doubled it, using one batch for the middle of the cake and the other for decorating the top and sides :) Here's the ingredients for one batch: 

♥ 1 tablespoons of cocoa powder 

♥ 250g icing sugar 

♥ 3 tablespoons of hot milk

♥ 60g margarine

♥ a teaspoons worth of vanilla essence

Then, whatever you want to add to your cake for decoration :) As you can see from my first photograph, I opted with chocolate fingers and maltesers for my chocolate cake. 

This mixture tasted so delicious and was really tough not to eat! I love how it looks like angel delight too *nom nom* 

How To Make Your Chocolate Cake 

1. Firstly, set your oven at 180C (Gas Mark 4) to pre-heat it whilst you are preparing your cake mixture/batter. Also grease your baking trays. I just use a little margarine for this and coat the entire base and sides a little.

2. To start your cake mixture off, add the flour, sugar, cocoa and a pinch of salt into a large mixing bowl and stir them together until everything is mixed thoroughly. 

3. This next part is a little messy, but I love it! It reminds me of making crumbles when I was a teenager in my high school food tech classes. You add the margarine into your mixing bowl and rub it in with your hands. Basically you mix and rub the ingredients together, rolling it between your fingers and thumb, until you have created an almost crumb-like mixture. I think it's really fun, haha :) 

4. If you're using an electric whisk then for the next step you can just add the ingredients and whisk it, but I prefer to mix my ingredients by hand so this is what I did. I cracked my eggs into a bowl and whisked them up with a fork, then I added the milk to the egg mix and continued to stir until it was all mixed together. 

5. Now, you pour this egg-milk liquid into your big mixing bowl with the other ingredients, and stir it until it looks like the chocolate paste in my photograph above. Add a few drops vanilla into this as well and give it all a good stir. 

6. You can then separate the mixture as evenly as you can between your two baking tins, and cook for 30-35 minutes. Mine were done in 30 minutes :) 

Method for the Milk Chocolate Frosting

1. Wait until your cakes are cool, then remove them for the baking trays and pop them onto a plate, before starting your frosting :)

2. Add your icing sugar into a mixing bowl first. Then, pop your margarine into the microwave for approx. 30 seconds, stopping and stirring at 15 seconds, until it is liquid. 

3. Now, Add a little milk into a jug or a microwave bowl for 2 minutes, but sure to keep an eye on it stopping it at a minute to check and such. Once your milk is hot, set it aside until needed. The next step is to add a tablespoon of cocoa powder into your melted butter and stir until it's thoroughly blended. 

4. I then made a little hole with a spoon in the centre of my icing sugar, and poured the chocolatey mix in. I added my three tablespoons of the hot milk to it and a teaspoons worth of vanilla essence, then it's mixing time!

5. Keep mixing until you are left with a thick chocolate icing paste, which is delicious by the way! I recommend eating some right away :p haha! It's thick enough to spread onto your cake using a knife. 

6. As I mentioned earlier, I used an entire batch for the centre (which was probably a little too much but I'm happy with my 'death by chocolate' cake XD). Then, I repeated this milk chocolate frosting recipe all over again, and used this lot to spread all over the top of the cake and down the sides too. 

7. Lastly, I covered the sides of my cake with chocolate fingers and popped a few maltesers on top in a random pattern, and ta-da! I have a very chocolate cake! Keep scrolling to see my masterpiece XD (FYI, it's super messy!). 

So, here's my finished chocolate cake for National Chocolate Cake Day! As you can see, whenever I make a cake it never turns out as pretty as I intend. I only had square tins and I wanted a more round shape so I attempted to cut the cake to a better shape without using anything circular to trace around :D and this is the result. I also didn't have anything to smooth down the chocolate frosting so it doesn't look neat but it tastes amazing so I don't mind. Another mistake I made was because of my crappy spatial awareness, I put my cake more towards the bottom of the oven instead of in the middle like you're supposed to. Thus I had some burn parts on the bottom of my cakes, that I had to cut off. Despite all of my baking failures, I had an awesome time making my cake and so it doesn't really matter. Baking is all about the fun and the yummy creations at the end of it. It may not look like a cake from a magazine but it tasted scrumptious! What do you think guys? I hope that you all enjoyed today's post :) Have a lovely weekend! 

Thankyou for reading! 

♥

Tell me all about your baking 'disasters' guys!