Chocolate Cake For Dummies

"Nic made her first real cake from scratch yesterday. (There's never been any cause to learn before, really, because cake-eating is not a daily occurrence, or even weekly, but the GF thing happened and suddenly shop-bought cakes and mixes were out of the question, when they were in question at all.)

So. This fudgey chocolate cake was made. And she saw that it was good. And so did the others. (Fingerprints on the plate are testament to that - it was made for a friend's birthday and appears to have been a success!).

It is called (wait for it, wait for it) 'Chocolate Idiot Cake'. 'Nuff said...

(We are not, however, discussing the cake made before this one. Because it was a travesty to cake-dom, a shameful parody of spongey goodness, an embarrassment to everything baked that came before.)"

Of course, I'm not counting the times when I was wee where I 'helped' my Mum in the kitchen making sponges, Eve's Puddings, or Mrs Laidler's American Devil's Food Cake (and if I can find that recipe ever again, I'll give it everything I've got to turn it gluten-free), but apart from a failed attempt at baking in first year home-economics class (it may have even just been an apple crumble), everything else has been either shop-bought already, or made out of a packet. Don't judge. I chose to do woodwork and metalwork at school, and even though I say so myself, I turned a mean lathe.

So, I have to admit to being a little nervous making this cake. When I say the first effort was a travesty to cake-dom, I think I'm being unfair to travesties to cake-dom in general. Thankfully for the author, I can't remember what the recipe was, but it included a list of interchangeable flours. The author lied. You CANNOT change almond flour with coconut flour gram for gram. It is known. (Now it is known, anyway.) Coconut flour LOVES the liquid, so it does. That, coupled with the suggestion of using 3/4 of a cup of caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of water instead of half a cup of agave syrup, was just asking for Trouble. With a capital T.

I called it my Learning Cake.

I also called it other things. Unprintable things. It did, after the addition of a cup of water (I started to wing it after realising that coconut flour, cocoa, caster sugar and a tablespoon of water will not make anything remotely resembling cake batter) change consistency from cocoa-coconut dust to something that could be coaxed in to a cake tin, but in all my years of watching cakes being made on telly I've never seen something come out of the oven that drips water on to the cooling rack. A soggy bottom that would have made Paul Hollywood run for the hills. It was, once it had dried out a little, surprisingly edible, although I do admit to not really wanting to finish it all before it went mouldy. (Cake-making for one: you either need an enormous freezer for your amazing and delicious creations, or be enormously bad at baking so that you don't want to keep it for longer than necessary. There is another option, but that entails putting back every pound that I've lost over the last three years, and as much as I'm an advocate of Life Without Cake Is No Life™, a line has to be drawn somewhere...)

But the Chocolate Idiot Cake was a dream come true. Squidgey in the middle, with a chocolatey crust on the edges, even consistency throughout, rich, sumptuous, and meltalicious on the tongue.

I need to make another one to see if it freezes okay.  

For science.