Weekend Cooking: Bung-in Chocolate Cake

A few months ago I posted about Kate Bracks' book The Sweet Life in a Weekend Cooking post and included a recipe for Lemon Syrup Cakes which were totally delicious! Kate Bracks won the Australian version of Masterchef and when we met her at a local book signing event she was incredibly generous with her time.

When I posted about this book I mentioned that there were quite a few different recipes that I wanted to try and one of those recipes was Bung-In Chocolate Cake. Now, to explain a colloquialism before we get too further much further on, to "bung in" means basically to throw it in, so you might bung a cake in the oven or in this case you bung in all the ingredients in a bowl together.

We have now made this cake several times, and it is just so easy, and it tastes soooo good! There is no melting of chocolate or anything complicated and it comes out with a beautiful dark chocolatey colour and flavour.

It's so easy to make that the little chef (who suddenly is much taller than I am...how did that happen?) has made this all by himself. There were a couple of small mishaps. The first was that he iced it while the cake was still hot and still in the tine which made it a bit awkward to get out of the tin when I got home. When I was cleaning up the mess all the mess, I took a look at my sieve  and was wondering what the stuff stuck to the bottom of it was. Turns out that he added the vanilla essence to the icing sugar while he was sifting it which I must confess made me laugh, but even despite those mishaps the cake still turned out pretty well!

We are at home on a Saturday night tonight, and I think that we are going to try her Choc-Chunk cookie recipe next.

If you happen to be looking for a really easy, really tasty basic chocolate cake recipe, then look no further as this one fits the bill!

Cake
300g (2 cups) self-raising flour
350g (1 1/2 cups) caster sugar
35g (1/3 cup) cocoa powder
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tsp vanilla extract
350ml (1 1/3 cups) milk
150g butter, melted (preferably not unsalted butter)

Icing
200g (1 1/4 cups) icing sugar mixture
2 tbsp cocoa powder
30g butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius. Grease a 23cm (base measurement) square tin and line the base with baking paper.

2. Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl, and stir to combine. Make a well in the centre and add the wet ingredients. Whisk gently, gradually taking in the dry ingredients from the side of the bowl. Keep whisking until the mixture is smooth.

3. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 40-50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes and then run a knife around the edge to separate the cake from the tin. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

4. To make the icing, sift the icing sugar and cocoa powder into a bowl. Add the melted butter and vanilla extract, and enough milk to get it to a paste consistency, stirring vigorously until smooth. You may not need all the milk. If it is too thick, add more milk. If it is too runny, add more icing mixture.

5. Once the cake has cooled, smother the top with chocolate icing.

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