Exploding Chocolate Cake

Helpful Hubby cleaning up! After all of the amazing and supportive comments I received on my last post I am feeling much more optimistic and inspired. Thank you all so much for your support. It really has made a huge difference. I've decided not to go back to that mothers group because I think its just too much for me to have to handle right now... I'm not quite there with the acceptance of my situation with feeding I think... but I'm getting there.

So yesterday it was a horrid rainy wintery day and there was only football on the TV instead of Olympics to watch so I decided I might bake something yummy and share it with you all. I decided on a chocolate cake recipe that is a "secret family recipe" of my mother-in-laws. Unfortunately, her "secret family recipes" have a habit of being also readily available in most Women's Weekly cookbooks, but I let her believe that I think they're special and secret nonetheless.

Ingredients

• 500ml water
• 660g sugar
• 250g chopped butter
• 35g cocoa powder
• 450g self raising flour
• 1 teaspoon bicarb
• 4 eggs

I'm not going to win any prizes for my butter chopping

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and grease a big, deep springform pan. I like to cook my springform pans with a baking tray underneath in case of leaks.

Now, here's why I called it an EXPLODING CHOCOLATE CAKE. You see, my mother in law says to use a "medium sized saucepan". So that's what I did. In that saucepan you put the water, sugar, butter, cocoa and bicarb and you stir it over medium heat until the sugar has dissolved. So that's what I did. After the sugar has dissolved you bring the mixture to the boil before reducing the heat and simmering for 5 minutes. Everything was going smoothly until I realised that by "medium sized saucepan" she actually meant "HUGE sized saucepan" and so my little medium saucepan ran out of room for this boiling sugary mixture and the whole thing EXPLODED all over my kitchen. I have one of those ovens which has two layers of glass in the front and I somehow managed to get the sticky chocolate mess BETWEEN the layers of glass! I'm still not sure how I am going to clean that up!

So my advice, when making this super yummy cake is to use a BIG saucepan!!

Anyway, once that mixture has simmered uncovered for 5 minutes put it to one side off the heat and let it cool a bit. Meanwhile put the self raising flour and eggs in a big mixing bowl. Add the cooled chocolate mixture and beat with an electric mixture on low until the ingredients are combined. Then up the speed to medium and keep mixing until its smooth.

Pour it all into the pan. Bake for 50 minutes. Let it stand for about 10-15 minutes before removing it from the pan. Its one of those cakes that is fine like this with a dusting of icing sugar on top. However, if you want to go all out, I like to put a bit of chocolate fudge icing on top.

Icing Ingredients

• 90g butter, softened
• 80ml water
• 35g cocoa powder
• 110g sugar
• 240g icing sugar

Method

This also involves a saucepan but by this time I had learned by lesson and was using the biggest saucepan in the cupboard just to avoid any more spills!

Stir the butter, water, cocoa powder and sugar over low heat until the sugar is dissolved. Then remove from heat and let cool a little.

In a medium bowl put the cocoa and icing sugar. Then gradually add the chocolate mixture.

Put the bowl in the fridge for about half an hour. Mix the frosting until its spreadable and cover the cake!
I added sprinkles - because everything tastes better with sprinkles
So what do you all think? Do you think you'll try making this one? Its actually not very hard to make at all - as long as you have the right sized saucepan hopefully your chocolate cake will just be a chocolate cake and not an EXPLODING chocolate cake!