31st July 2008
*** UPDATED to say it’s SELF RAISING FLOUR! Sorry! ***
After the day before yesterday’s cake baking revelations I meant to publish the revised recipe as part of that entry but I got distracted by proof reading etc., which is lucky because it would have still been wrong. Mum called me early yesterday morning to also admit that the recipe I have also calls for too much butter! Sabotage! I made another cake today and while it didn’t rock my world it’s slowly improving. I am thinking of moving on to another chocolate cake recipe which I can call my own. If anybody has any good recipes they feel keen to share, please do!
But due to popular demand, today I can provide for you the FULLY revised, spot-on chocolate cake recipe. Here it is:
Melt 85 grams (3 ounces) of butter.
Put in bowl (in order of appearance) with 1 cup of sifted self raising flour
1 cup of caster sugar
2 Tablespoons of cocoa (sifted) — not drinking chocolate, but real cocoa
2 cold eggs
dollop vanilla
pinch of salt
1/2 cup of whole cream milk
combine & beat 3 minutes
Cook for 45 minutes on 180°c
Clearly this is a very brief recipe… you will need to tip it out of the tin when it’s cooled a little and then ice it with something delicious.
Mum’s tips: If it’s a cold morning, warm the (preferably metal) mixing bowl with hot water and then dry before adding the butter. Use stale eggs. Use fresh self raising flour.
The cake recipe was given to my mum from Dad’s young cousin, who used to come and spend weekends away from boarding school with them back in the late 60s, early 70s. She used to cook this cake in Mum’s kitchen, cover it in cream and take it back for the school week. She told my mum “If you’ve got cake, girl, you’ve got friends.”
And just for fun, here are some photos from the family album of the cake in action.
This is my brother c. 1975 enjoying the cream on the top of the cake on a family picnic:
This is me, in our backyard in Adelaide, on my 10th birthday (showing off my new watch):
And here is Dad, Amelia and me in Mum and Dad’s kitchen on Amelia’s 1st birthday, almost five years ago – that must be a 1.5 sized cake because it sure looks huge:
It was Amelia’s first experience of cake! It looks as though she had about four bowls full.
And on that same occasion this is Mum pouring some kind of sparkling burgundy, probably saying “oh yes, definitely cook it for an hour, and definitely 3.5 grams of butter…” and I look very trusting (or drunk) but the cake was obviously good because we seem to have eaten it all.
And this is Lily from last month on her second birthday … just LOOK at that slice of cake! Sensational!
29th July 2008
Ahhhahaha!!
Let me say that again; AHAHAHHHHAHAHAH!
That’s ten years of pent-up baking angst.
We have had an ongoing cake drama, my mum and I – well actually, mostly just me. It’s been going on for nearly ten years. Mum has a fabulous chocolate cake recipe which she has cooked ever since I can remember. It’s light and moist and supposedly super easy; minimal ingredients, minimal fuss for maximum taste. It’s a simple little cake which will suit almost any occasion.
A long time ago I got the recipe from her and have tried to cook it many times with unvarying results – it always sucks. No matter how many different times I have tried, and how many different ways I wooed this little baby, it always came out resembling something more like a dried up slice than a cake. I know it’s just a tiny thing in the bigger life picture, but over a decade it has really bugged me that I can’t master this “simple” cake. How lame can I be?
I tried all sorts of tricks; new flour, warm eggs, cold eggs, old eggs, fresh eggs, sifted cocoa, unsifted expensive cocoa, small tins, big tins, and so on – finally we decided the difference in our success with this recipe must be the difference in our mixing bowls – we both had 1970s Kenwoods, but mum has a metal bowl and I had a plastic bowl. Because melted butter is the first ingredient added we theorised that perhaps it’s the hot butter hitting the cold metal bowl and the resulting cooling reaction that is the KEY step. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a Kitchen Aid with a metal bowl. Mum’s chocolate cake was my first test run of our new toy, but…
NO GOOD!
I don’t know if you can see it in this photo, but although the cake tasted ok, the crumb was dense and dry. The metal bowl seemed to make no difference at all. I stomped around the house cursing and shouting “Sabotage! GRRR!”. You see, it’s been my secret theory all these years that mum had deliberately altered something on the ingredients list she gave me back sometime in the 90s so I would never make as good a cake as she. This is a great theory which kind of ignores the fact that my mother is not a vindictive, petty minded person even in the slightest. But even so, this supposedly easy “never really fails” cake once again… well… sucked.
Once again I rang mum and tensely read the list of ingredients down the phone so that she could reconfirm (as she has done on numerous occasions over the years) that I had the right stuff. Yep, yep yep. So I suggested that mum could actually make the chocolate cake when she came over today, with my kitchen aid, in my oven while I watched… with beady, searching eyes… determined not to miss a beat.
So today we threw out my old self raising flour and opened a new bag just in case my flour was stale, we watched as the hot butter hit the cold (but not too cold) bowl, we mixed it thoroughly for three minutes and carefully poured it in the ring tin and placed it in a slightly cooler than previously tried oven, taking in to account that our old oven might be just a bit too hot. All this time I was studiously checking off the ingredients and the directions in my copy of the recipe. So far it all matched Mum’s moves.
3/4 of an hour later mum said “ok, let’s look at it.” We carefully opened the oven and mum peered into the blackness, she gently pulled it out and poked at it’s surface and showed me how it sprung back and then she said “Yes, I think it’s done.”
“Really?” I felt a little surprised, “because according to my instructions I would have left it for another 15 minutes. I always cook it for an hour.”
“Oh no! What? No… an hour?? Never! That’s way too long!”
“But it’s tiny! It hasn’t risen up over the edge of the tin yet!”
“But it never does, not if I’m making these proportions, but usually I’m making a 1 and a half times sized cake.”
Which explains the size of my cake! – I was always expecting my cake to match mum’s 1.5 cake.
“But my recipe says cook for 1 hour!”
“No! Not unless it’s for 1 and half sized cake! Didn’t you ever check to see if it was done?”
“Well no! Because I was scared that the rush of cold air from opening the oven door would make the cake sink! And any time I did look, hoping to find it rising over the edge of the tin, it was always so tiny that I thought I had made it sink by checking! So then I would always leave it to cook for the rest of the hour! Always!…
…BECAUSE, LOOK!”
I opened my recipe book and stabbed my finger on the “Cook for 1 hour at 180c”
“ahhh…”
“I knew it! Sabotage!”
No wonder my cakes have always looked like a little shriveled, dried up thing.
Much laughing ensued — and check out the guilty look on my mum’s face!
and here’s mum poking at the cake saying, “Oh, it’s a good one”.
So hooray! It’s not me! It was the recipe all along (and maybe the plastic bowl had a hand in it too)! I never thought that perhaps mum was altering the ingredients to make a bigger cake… and I never thought to read back to mum the amount of time it needed to cook for, not in all those years. Why it never occurred to me to cook it for less time even though my cakes always looked a bit crispy around the edges, I’m not sure… I think it’s because I’m not a terribly experimental cook, I am a bit of a stickler for instructions.
But I knew it! It was Mum! She sabotaged me! (Though she is claiming that she’s just a little vague – but just look at that evil smile…).
