The classic chocolate cake - delicious, dark, smooth and light
- Audette
- Oct 4, 2018
- 4 min read
was the star of the show in my baking week. This past unprecedented, gorgeously sunny, very real and very hot summer in London, I found myself in the midst of a baking week. Soaring temperatures and humid conditions are not the best to ensure a good rise or a fluffy consistency but in life and in the kitchen we have to take the good with the challenging and I’m not complaining! Enjoying sunshine every day for weeks on-end, I felt like I was back in Africa- almost. Bliss.
I’ve been told I’m more of a cook than a baker, which is true I guess, but my adventures in the kitchen definitely started with a baking bowl and a spatula in hand. I was an expert in scraping out every last bit of cake batter that my Mom had left behind for me in the mixing bowl. I vividly remember my first baking lesson. I baked scones. My Mom stood beside me giving me careful instruction and direction, step by step. I wrote the recipe down with the beautiful pencilled ‘soft-up and hard-down’ cursive handwriting of my eight year old self learning not only how to master putting the letters of the alphabet together but on how to embark upon the art and science of baking.
I was asked if I would bake the birthday cake for the fabulous brothers, Daniel and Oliver. They were having a combined party and their Mum needed a helping hand. How could I resist? I fished out my first put-together recipe book, a Baskin-Robbins notebook, the one with my mother’s scone recipe in it and my little brother’s “AJ was here” scribbles on the cover. I came to the page of chocolate cake recipes with copies of handwritten notes; stained, tried and tested. As a teenager I would have been able to whip up a chocolate cake blindfolded, almost, anyway certainly without consulting a recipe but it’s not a regular on my kitchen table nowadays so out came the instructions.
It was between Erica, Annette, Dawn and Diana... their recipes all had pretty much the same ingredients with just a few subtle variations on the quantities needed and on how best to put the elements together. They all called for folding in stiffly beaten egg whites
so that certainly seemed to be the way to go. My curiosity was sparked and now I was intrigued to find out what, if any these differences would make to the outcome. I was ready to choose my own favourite recipe so it was time to test out my oven when baking chocolate cake.
After trialling two of the original recipes for size, taste and fluffiness, making sure that the continental shift of my GPS coordinates and the consistency of the ingredients on the other side of the globe would not greatly influence the outcome, I opted for a local and completely different recipe. There were no folded egg whites to be seen and now I had no time spare to re-bake if this final version flopped- talk about living on the edge!
Plain flour at the tip of Africa is super refined and bleached, at least it was when I last baked in my Mom’s kitchen. I’m not sure nowadays, but it was definitely nothing like the flour we get here on this island. The recipes worked perfectly fine but I wasn't completely happy. I left cake one in the oven a fraction longer than I would have liked but it made for a perfect accompaniment to a friend’s picnic.
Cake number two had a supporting role in the final show, part of it formed the volcano which would erupt spectacularly with a big, fat sparkler while dinosaurs were traipsing around on planet chocolate. The last layer of cake number three appeared to be the best but developed a large split as it was cooling, it was ‘meant to be’, or so I told myself anyway- perfectly fitting for the accompanying earthquake that would have gone hand in hand with the volcanic eruption.
The party cake ended up far more moist, perhaps a bit too dense if I'm honest, no definitely not quite fluffy enough, three-layered version. So the moist and fudgy description of the cake was apt. The birthday boys and their little friends couldn’t get enough to eat and the adults had their fair share so I was pretty pleased and relieved.
Now that I was baking inspired and on a roll I decided that I had yet another chocolate cake in me that week. I get together with a group of amazing ladies every fortnight, which made for a perfectly good reason to whip up one more of the tried and tested recipes. So in record time I bought a few missing ingredients, followed Diana’s instructions this time and baked another chocolate cake. I didn’t leave myself a huge margin so was working against the clock but I was having fun and the pressure was off this time. The layers were still cooling en-route to my friend’s home and the cake was assembled at the last minute. I spread a thin layer of watered down apricot jam in-between the layers and powdered a dusting of icing sugar on top with some fresh, sweet strawberries and whipped cream on the side. You cannot get fresher than that! I'm still none the wiser as to whose recipe is superior but think I'll stick to folding in clouds of eggwhite.
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