Thursday, June 25, 2009

Chocolatey Butter Cake

This cake is making me a believer in The Cake Bible.

It is chocolatey, moist and soft... and makes eating one just not enough.

That said, there are things I can improve on the next time around. Firstly, adjusting my oven temperature so I don't get the big ugly crack on my cake. Secondly, a little more butter would be nice (I really should follow the recipe for that, but I didn't have enough butter today...) Thirdly, I should really try to use cake flour instead of plain flour. And lastly, making some brandied cherries to go with the cake would make the cake really fantastic.

Here's what I did today. Today, I weighed everything instead of using cups and spoons to measure.

Ingredients
63 g (1/2 cup + 3 tbsp) Dutch processed unsweetened cocoa (Hersheys)
236g Boiling water
3 Large eggs
9g (2 and 1/4 tsp) Vanilla
235g (2 and 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp) Sifted plain flour - I didn't have cake flour, which the book reccomended, supposed to give it a finer flavour. I thought plain flour was ok.
15g (1 tbsp) Baking Powder
5g (3/4 tbsp) Salt
300g Sugar
200g Softened Unsalted Butter - Recipe reccomended 237g, or 1 cup.

What I did
(Note: I used only 3 bowls, a whisk and a spoon, to minimise washing up, as always.. And since I didn't have a mixer, I did it all by hand. If you use a mixer, beat at medium speed, or high speed if using a hand-held mixture)
1. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl and mix well
2. Combine the cocoa and boiling water in a medium bowl and whisk until mixture is smooth. Allow it to cool to room temperature
3. Combine eggs, 1/4 of the cocoa mixture and vanilla in another medium bowl, beat well
4. Add butter to the dry ingredients in large bowl (from step 1) and beat well. Add remaining cocoa mixture (from step 2) and beat well
4. Add the egg mixture to the large bowl into 3 batches, mixing well after each addition

Bake in 2 9-inch cake pans, greased and lined with parchment paper at the bottom, greased and lightly floured.

Being lazy and having all those aluminium disposable pans, I used those.

Bake in preheated oven at 170 deg Celcius for 25 - 35 minutes.

This picture of a tiny piece of the cake doesn't really it justice, since you can see how moist and soft it is, but here it is anyway..

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