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This cake is insanely chocolatey and moist but it's not super sweet. It pairs well with chocolate
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buttercream or ganache and also almost every flavour of filling and frosting. Vanilla, raspberry
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peanut butter, strawberry, caramel, coffee. It's an easy recipe to follow with simple ingredients
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and in this tutorial I'm going to share my tips for mixing and baking it to perfection. The
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chocolatey part of this recipe is cocoa powder and to mix it evenly through the batter we're
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going to mix it with hot water first. Cocoa powder will dissolve in hot water making a
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chocolatey paste. Prepare this first so it has time to cool down before you add it to the cake
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batter. Now let's talk about ingredients. Everything needs to be at room temperature
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This means taking the butter and eggs out of the fridge three hours before baking because
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cold ingredients don't mix well together. You can tell the butter is at room temperature when you
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can slice through it easily with a spatula. Mix all of the dry ingredients together, flour, baking
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powder, baking soda, salt and now you're ready to start. Add the butter first and you can use a
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stand mixer or a handheld mixer, whatever you have. I like to mix just the butter for a few
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seconds first and this is a good way to check that it is at room temperature because it should lose
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its shape and not look like sticks of butter anymore. Add the sugar and mix at medium speed
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for about two minutes and this process is called creaming. You'll find the printable recipe for
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this cake with ingredients in cups and grams on britishgirlbakes.com. This isn't ready yet, it
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still looks crumbly and chunky. Keep mixing until the butter and sugar cream together and get lighter
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in colour and it will look creamy and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, mixing for about 30 seconds
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after adding each one and this way they'll mix into the batter better than if you add them all
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at once. Scrape down to the bottom of the mixing bowl to scoop up any egg stuck at the bottom and
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that way it'll mix into the batter when you turn the mixer back on. Add the vanilla next and real
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vanilla extract will give the cake a deeper, richer flavour than artificial vanilla. Now we're going to
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add the dry ingredients in three parts and I'll show you why and also what that means. Add a third
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of the dry ingredients first and this is the flour and baking powder and baking soda and salt you
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measured out and whisked together earlier. It doesn't have to be exactly a third, you don't have
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to measure it, just guess what about a third is. Mix this into the batter using the slowest speed
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setting and as soon as it's mixed in and you don't see the flour in the batter, turn the mixer off
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and now add half of the cocoa powder mixture and mix that in. The reason we're adding the flour
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and cocoa powder in parts is that flour contains gluten and when gluten mixes with a wet ingredient
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like this cake batter it starts to develop and if you over mix it it will make your cake tough
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and dense so you only want to mix your batter just enough to incorporate all of the ingredients
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together but no more and adding the flour a third at a time makes it easier and quicker to incorporate
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After mixing a third of the dry ingredients, half of the cocoa powder, another third of the dry
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ingredients, the rest of the cocoa and the rest of the dry ingredients, the batter is finished
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This is a very runny batter so if yours looks like this you haven't done anything wrong, it's
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supposed to be a bit soupy. Divide your batter into three cake pans and bake them for 38 minutes or
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until you can touch them and they bounce back slowly or a toothpick poked into the middle comes
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out clean. Leave the cakes in the pans to cool for 10 minutes and then turn them out onto a wire
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cooling rack and let them cool completely for about three hours before you assemble your cake
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The recipe on britishgirlbakes.com is for an 8 inch cake but in my Basics of Cake master course
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I provide measurements for 4 inch, 6 inch, 8 inch, 10 inch and sheet cakes as well as cupcake
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conversions. Frost it, decorate it and enjoy! This cake tastes best at room temperature but you can
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store it in the fridge for three days. Just take it out of the fridge at least two hours before
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you eat it so that it has time to come to room temperature. Learn every step of making a cake
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mixing, baking, making fillings and frostings, leveling and dividing layers, assembling, frosting
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and decorating, storing, transporting and serving in my Basics of Cake master course on my online
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cake school. The link is up here in the top of the screen and in the video description or go
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to britishgirlbakes.com. Thank you for watching
