ONE BOWL CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE FROSTING

It was my daughter Arabella's 8th birthday party today and she wanted a Harry Potter cake - I checked out some of the amazing creations on Pinterest but they were way too ambitious!! So I then decided the best option was baking a chocolate cake and buying some Harry Potter Edible Wafer Cake Toppers from Amazon. I normally cheat when I make a cake and use a Betty Crocker mix however this time I decided to complicate matters for myself and make the entire thing from scratch. I chose the one bowl chocolate cake recipe from Kate Doran's Homemade Memories cookbook as it seemed less "messy" and the frosting from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.

The cake took about an hour to make and bake and the icing took about 10 minutes, however you need time in between for the cake to cool. According to the recipe the cake feeds about 8 people however we managed to cut it into 16 slices so it depends on how hungry you are. 

Ingredients for a 20 cm chocolate cake:

3 tbsp cocoa powder
125g plain white flour
2 tsp baking powder
150g butter, softened and cubed, plus extra for greasing
150g caster sugar
25g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
A pinch of salt

Chocolate Frosting:
900g icing sugar, sifted
300g unsalted butter at room temperature
120g cocoa powder, sifted
120ml whole milk

I forgot to put the baking powder in the original photo!!

Preheat the oven to 190 C / 170 C fan / gas mark 5. Lightly grease a 20cm round loose-bottomed cake tin with butter and line with baking parchment.

Sift the cocoa powder into a large bowl, add 3 tablespoons of warm water and whisk until smooth. This was easier said than done for me - my result was not very smooth and was quite "bitty" even though I whisked for about 3-4 minutes.

Sift over the flour and baking powder, and then add the butter, sugars, eggs, vanilla essence and salt and beat until just combined. You can do this with a wooden spoon (if you have a lot of energy) or an easier option would be to use an electric whisk, a stand mixer or a food processor. Mine was still quite lumpy but I figured it would all come together in the oven.

Scrape the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 35-40 minutes - you can check whether it is ready or not by inserting a skewer into the middle and if it is cooked through, it will come out clean.

When it is ready, leave to cool in the tin for 5-10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Once cool, slice the cake in half horizontally using a serrated knife.

While the cake is cooling, you can make the frosting. As I said, I used a Hummingbird Bakery recipe for this - my ultimate favourite. I was on the phone to my brother when I did this so I didn't concentrate and added the milk too early - thankfully it didn't matter - however here is how to do it properly!

Sift the icing sugar and cocoa powder into a bowl. Then beat together with the butter using an electric whisk on a medium speed until the ingredients come together and are well mixed. I made a right old mess doing this - cocoa powder was literally flying everywhere!!

Then add the milk a couple of tablespoons at a time and mix together at a slow speed until all the milk is incorporated. Next turn the mixture up to a high speed and beat until the frosting is light and fluffy - this takes about 5 minutes. The longer the frosting is beaten, the lighter it will be. 

Finally, spread the frosting on the top of one half of the sponges, put the other sponge on top of this and cover the rest of the cake (top and sides) with the remainder of the frosting. I managed to actually break the cake as I did this but thankfully covered it up with the icing!

Finally decorate as you like - with haribo, marshmallows, maltesers, smarties or Harry Potter edible wafer papers like us. My only advice it decorate when the frosting is still very fresh as it then sticks better.

Not to blow my old trumpet, but this cake was really really yummy. It was extremely rich and chocolatey but so decadent and delicious. A real winner. Even though most of the time when I was making it, I felt I was doing it wrong and the ingredients weren't mixing like they were meant to, it still worked out fine - thank goodness! I would recommend this recipe to anyone wanting a chocolate cake - I especially loved the fact it was all made in one bowl however I did manage to trash the kitchen in the process but I guess that is part of the fun of cooking (or something)!

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