Light chocolate cake

Despite my sweet tooth, I’m not actually a big fan of chocolate. Or of cake.

That is, except for my mom’s decadent chocolate cake with coffee icing.

Our wedding cake, baked by my mom

As you can see, she baked these for our wedding. (I’ll have to explain about the wheat ears another time…!)

I always start to crave this cake when the weather turns cold as it has this past week, and baking 5 cakes is Goal #22 on my list. So I decided to start off my first cake with our family’s favourite recipe.

I would have followed my mom’s recipe exactly if I’d had all the ingredients, but as it turned out my ‘lite’ version was delicious in its own right.

 

So here’s her recipe first:

Ingredients for chocolate cake

¼ C cocoa

1 C boiling water

4 large eggs, separated

1½ C brown sugar, firmly pressed into cup

½ C oil

1 t vanilla essence

250 g flour

1 T baking powder

2 ml salt

Method for chocolate cake

1. Grease and line two cake tins.
2. Mix cocoa and water. Leave to cool.
3. In processor, beat egg yolks until light. Gradually add sugar.
4. Add cocoa, oil and vanilla essence.
5. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt and gradually add to mix.
6. Beat egg whites until fluffy. Blend in with a metal spoon.
7. Bake at 180 °C for ±35 min or until a knife inserted comes out clean.
8. Cool completely before icing with coffee icing.

 

Ingredients for coffee icing

75 g butter, softened

250 g icing sugar, sifted

1 egg, separated

1 T cocoa

2 T strong coffee

½ t vanilla essence

Method for coffee icing

1. Blend butter and icing sugar.
2. Dissolve cocoa in coffee. Add vanilla.
3. Add egg yolk to butter and icing sugar.
4. Add cocoa mix.
5. Stiffly beat egg white and fold into mix.
6. Ice cooled cake and decorate as desired.

 

This makes for a rich and dreamy cake that’s perfectly complemented by the unforgettable flavour of the coffee icing.

Even so, I’m glad I risked making my version with the limited ingredients I had, because it made for a light and fluffy, not-too-sweet cake that I’d happily make again. Here’s my revised list of ingredients:

Ingredients for light chocolate cake

1/8 C cocoa (I halved the cocoa because I’m not such a chocoholic)

1 C boiling water

3 large eggs, separated (I only had 3 eggs)

1 C brown sugar, firmly pressed into cup (I only had 1 C brown sugar)

½ C oil

1 t vanilla essence

250 g flour

1 T baking powder

2 ml salt

 

For the icing recipe I had to exclude the cocoa, coffee and egg. Anyway, I made one small square cake and a few cupcakes with the mix. Next time I think I’ll skip the cupcakes and make a bigger cake.

Freshly baked cake filling the kitchen with a choc aroma

I was itching to use my new cake-icing set…

Cake-icing set

…but since it was late and I was tired, I ended up turning my first cake into something of a cakewreck! (Plus the pictures are all blurry hand-held night shots, sorry guys.)

First cake(wreck)!

How not to decorate a cake: write ‘Yum’ on top in suspicious brown goo…! 😀 Haha, it really cracks me up! 😛

At least the cupcakes looked a bit more presentable:

Butter icing

The icing was fun to work with, even though butter icing always seems a bit rich to me. I usually pick/smear/scoop off the butter icing on other people’s cakes as it is (am I the only one?). So I didn’t overdo it this time around.

Anyway, the flavour of the cake was spot on. Even Ninja enjoyed it, since it wasn’t sickly sweet or so chocolatey that it resulted in headaches.

‘Yum’ indeed

And the whole experiment reminded me not to take myself so seriously in the kitchen, because baking is supposed to be fun.

Of course we all want our goodies to look lovely, but sometimes it’s much better to play around, doodle icing all over and lick the batter from the bowl 😉