Rich Moist Chocolate Cake

I know I said on my Facebook page that I was going to share a cookie recipe next, but I loved this cake so much, I just had to share! I hope you love it too! The cookie recipe is coming up soon too! :)

Today, we celebrate 9 years of marriage. What a roller coaster ride it has been! :) And the best part of the 9 years? Our little girls, of course! I wanted to make a chocolate cake for my husband because that is his favorite kind of cake.

Usually, I keep my pantry well stocked with baking essentials. Mainly because you don't know when a baking urge is going to hit! Today, I was just a little low on almost everything - surprisingly even on basics like flour and sugar - I blame it on the sleep deprivation! When baby has a cold, no one sleeps. Sigh!

When you're baking at 5:30 AM while the kids are still asleep and the husbands still at work, you can't really hop down to the neighborhood store. After a little middle of the night googling, I found a recipe for which I was certain I could (almost) scrape up the ingredients for. Joy the Baker to the rescue!

The recipe sounded perfect and I would have made it exactly as she wrote it, if I wasn't running short on flour and sugar. I made minor substitutions. I was short of about 1/4 cup flour and used a mix of whole wheat flour and corn starch to make up the difference. I am going to say that cake flour would work well here. The recipe called for 3/4 cup of white sugar, but I could only manage 1/2. So I used 1/4 cup of light brown sugar. Apart from that I followed the recipe as she wrote it. 

Rich, Moist Chocolate Cake

Adapted from Joy the Baker

Ingredients 

1 cup freshly made strong black coffee

3/4 cup cocoa powder, sifted 

1 tsp vanilla extract 

1/2 cup milk 

2 cups cake flour 

1 1/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup (227 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature 

1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar, packed

1/2 cup white granulated sugar

1/4 cup light brown sugar 

4 eggs 

Method

1. Mix together the cocoa and the coffee until smooth. Stir in the milk and vanilla and set aside. 

2. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt and set aside. 

3. In a large bowl, cream the butter with the sugars until light and fluffy. 

4. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating in each egg until completely incorporated. 

5. Alternating between the flour mixture and the cocoa slurry, add the remaining ingredients to the bowl. Make sure you start and finish with the flour mixture. The mixture may look a little curdled, but that's fine. 

6. Divide the mixture between two greased and floured 8-inch/ 9-inch round cake tins and bake in an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius/350 Fahrenheit. I used 8 inch rounds and got a pretty tall cake. 

7. Bake until the a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean and the cake begins to come away from the sides of the tin. This took about 30 minutes in my oven. 

8. Allow the cakes to cool in the tins, remove from the tins and frost with your favorite chocolate buttercream or with a chocolate ganache like I have. 

I loved the flavor and texture of this cake. It had a rich, complex flavor due to the brown sugar-coffee-cocoa combination. Divine! The cake was perfectly moist and dense - exactly how a good chocolate cake should be. And I just LOVED how beautifully this cake sliced up. Gorgeous, neat slices! Don't you hate when your moist cakes sometimes don't yield clean slices?

I blame my silliness for the uneven layers. I measured them out and they came out of the oven perfectly even! And then when I took them out of their tins and left them to cool on the rack, I put one of them (the lower layer) upside down. That flattened out the layer of course. And the top layer retained the height. I know this happens, but I was negligent this time. Next time, they're both cooling in the same direction!

Uneven layers or not, this cake did not disappoint at all!! Everyone here loved this cake and I am sure you will too! You must try it!

I'll be back in a few days with the cookie recipe! Until then... xoxox