Last weekend was Becca’s birthday, and since I’d been promising her I’d make her a birthday cake I ended up scouring the internet for a nommy sounding recipe. Somehow I managed to miss the fabulous sounding recipe that Becs recently posted on Lay the Table, and instead settled on one from the BBC Good Food website, even though if I’m honest it didn’t visually appeal to me too much. As Becca said about the Good Food cake: “It looks like a f*cking breezeblock!”.

I’m ridiculously happy that I looked past that initial photo. What I ended up with after I tweaked things a bit was frankly fantastic. It’s ridiculously rich though, and definitely not something I could see myself making every week – it’s most certainly a treat cake.

Takes one hour and fifty minutes – twenty minutes preparation of the cake, one hour cooking, half an hour icing.

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 250g self raising flour
• 250g soft brown sugar
• 50g cocoa
• 250g plain chocolate
• 250g butter
• 4 eggs
• 200ml water

For the sauce and icing:

• 150g plain chocolate
• 250g milk chocolate
• 300ml single cream
• 25g butter
• 700g icing sugar

Instructions

The Cake

1. Preheat the oven to 160ºC.

2. Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa in a bowl.

3. Melt the chocolate, butter and water together in a pan.

4. Allow to cool slightly, and beat the wet into the dry mixture along with the eggs.

5. Dollop your mixture into a cake tin and bake for one hour.

The Icing

1. Whilst the cake cools, it’s time to make the icing.

   Melt the chocolate, butter and single cream in a pan, and mix until it becomes smooth and comes together.

2. Allow the sauce to cool for about 20 minutes.

3. Beat in about 250g of icing sugar.

   At this point the sauce should be rich, thick and dark.

4. Slice the cake in half, and spread as much of the sauce as you want between the slices. Put the top of the cake back onto the bottom.

5. Beat in the remaining icing sugar.

   The sauce will now have become icing, will be a lot lighter in colour and will form peaks in your bowl.

6. Apply the icing to the cake. Make it as messy as you want – there’s something magical about a fully iced cake covered in dozens of little peaks and troughs.

7. Allow the cake to set.

   Over the next couple of hours the icing will harden, allowing it to crunch when you bite into it. The inside of the cake and the rest of the icing will remain wonderfully moist and rich.

8. Host a party, or take the cake into work. This is one cake you certainly don’t want to keep to yourself.