The Baker Monkey Presents:
Chocolate Cake
Last night I built a chocolate cake, rather than risk a second disappointment (as I experienced when I tried to build a banana feijoa cake a few weeks ago) I opted for a fast and easy packet mix… Edmonds Chocolate Cake Mix!
It’s a simple recipe, and only cost about $2 at Foodtown… The chocolate bits were also about $2 for a couple of hundred grams.
INGREDIENTS 360g box of Edmonds Chocolate Cake Mix; 2 eggs; Butter; Water; Chocolate; Pistachio nuts which Little Red wouldn’t let me include in the mix.
PREHEAT oven to 180°C or 160°C for a fan forced oven. This is the sentence with which I finally confirmed that every time I type ‘oven’ I fuck it up and type ‘over’ instead, this is lame. If it was a horse, you’d shoot it.
LINE base of one deep 20cm round or square cake tin with baking paper or lightly grease a non-stick pan. As you can see, I chose to coat a non-stick pan with massive gobbets of butter. Yum.
POUR cake mix into a small mixing bowl.
ADD two eggs.
ADD 2/3rd cup of water, 45g soft butter. I also put in a teaspoon of vanilla essence, artificial, obviously, as I don’t bake much, and am a filthy heathen when it comes to having adequate supplies in the larder… Come to think of it, I don’t have a larder at all, just some workshop shelves I knocked together.
MIX it all up real good… I must say, my wooden spoon technique is well nigh perfect. At this stage I diverted from the recipe a bit and put about 100g of melted chocolate bits into the batter… Don’t complain, I’m allowed to take these sort of risks, it’s my fucking life, so butt out.
POUR the mixture into the well greased (or lined) cake tin.
GENTLY place the cake tin into the preheated oven.
NOW would be a real good time to clean up your mess, you filthy fat pig.
37 MINUTES later, the cake is ready to come out of the oven. You can’t quite see from this angle just how very dome shaped the cake is, if I knew more about baking I’d be able to explain it, I suspect it’s probably got something to do with black magic, or KZ7, or some other boat, don’t ask me how.
SLAM the cake out of the tin with a mallet, or a brick, or your flatmates head — it’s also acceptable to allow it to gently slide out of the tin using gravity, though this technique is frowned on by purists — and leave it to cool on a rack.
THIS is a cup full of chocolate sitting on a set of scales, I’m using it to illustrate the fact that as well as all the chocolate bits that I put into the mix, I also put a-fucking-lot (this is new-metric equal to around 150g, or well over twice as much as the recipe calls for) in the icing. Also a good tablespoon of butter… Then melted them together in the cup, which I floated in a bowl of hot water. This is where I would have added some of the pistachio nuts, smashed up… The rest I would have sprinkled on the icing once it was pasted into place.
ADMIRE my freshly iced cake.
DROOL as you realise you’re not getting any.
DROP BY in the next day or so (if you’re a friend of mine), and tell me you want some of my cake because … Today is 28 May, 2002.
… THIS is all that’s left, and I haven’t had any yet today.
That’s all she wrote.