How to make the perfect chocolate cake

Chocolate and cake. Need we say more? All too often many chocolate cakes are just Victoria sponges made brown by the addition of cocoa powder, but not this one… 

To celebrate National Cake Week we’ve selected this recipe from our popular Men’s Baking Manual for an amazingly moist chocolate cake. The key is in the ganache coating, which gives it extra moistness and more chocolate flavour. Enjoy.

Chocolate Cake Ingredients

For the cake
100ml of full fat milk (at room temperature, or warm a little in the microwave)
250g of unsalted butter cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing
200g of 70–80% dark chocolate
250g of plain flour
60g of cocoa powder
250g of caster sugar
4 teaspoons of baking powder
5 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
50ml of water
50ml of vegetable oil

For the ganache coating
225ml of double cream
350g of broken-up plain chocolate

How to make a chocolate cake

1. Preheat oven to 140°C.
2. Grease and line a deep 23cm springform cake tin.
3. Sieve a glass bowl over a pan of barely simmering water and add the milk, butter and chocolate. Gently heat until thoroughly melted and combined.
4. Place the flour into a bowl and add the cocoa powder, the sugar and the baking powder.
5. Fold in the chocolate mixture, the eggs, the vanilla extract, the water and the oil, and fold gently together until combined.
6. Pour into the cake tin and shake a little to even out the batter.
7. Place in the oven and bake for 60–75 minutes. Check with a skewer – it should come out of the cake clean.
8. Leave in the tin on a wire rack to cool.
9. Wash and dry the bowl you melted the chocolate in. Add the cream and the broken-up chocolate and heat gently until fully combined. Leave to cool and when set use a palette knife to apply to the sides and the top of the cake in a coating.

Depending on how thick you like your ganache, you might end up with some left over. Don’t waste it – place it in the fridge to set and then, using a teaspoon (a melon baller would be better, but who’s got one of those? Not me), scoop out a good chunk. 

Roll into a ball quickly using your hands and dust in a little cocoa powder. You’ve now got chocolate truffles. You can eat these separately, or use them to decorate the top of the cake