Chocolate cake therapy

Happiness is knowing there is chocolate cake in the oven.

I tried my hands on my first cake and for very obvious reasons I picked the chocolate cake. Since I am very new to baking, I focus a lot on taste so that even if baking is screwed, you still have something to eat. Now it was very difficult to pick a recipe out of many on the internet. This is the one I went with. It’s a fairly simple recipe.

Ingredients Required:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour or maida
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp vanilla/chocolate essence

It a one bowl recipe. So not a lot of mess in the kitchen.

Preparing the mixture:

1. Grease the tray properly. Oil the inside of the baking dish, even the inner side walls. Dust the oiled pan with some flour/cocoa powder and dust off the excess flour from the tray. If the pan isn’t greased properly, the cake won’t come out well, or like in my case, won’t rise from sides, and will be uneven.
2. Now that tray is ready, start preheating the oven to 175 degrees celsius.
3. Sieve the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda) in the bowl. I prefer to sieve the ingredients together over mixing by hand, because one:  you are supposed to mix dry ingredients lightly, and two: it removes the lumps in the flour/cocoa powder.
4. Add egg and essence to the mixture. Essence not only provides the flavour but also kills the egg smell.
5. Add egg and oil to the mixture.And mix the ingredients.
6. After the mixture is consistent, add boiling water to it slowly. Keep the mixing.
   The mixture will have a much thinner consistency now, more of flowy.

By this time, the mixture tastes good, so worst case scenario, there going to be a tasty lumpy thing.

After preparing the mixture:

• Put the mixture in your tray. Do not fill up more than half of the height of the dish. You have to give room for it to rise. 
• Put it in the oven for 35 minutes on the middle rack and make sure your oven is heated up uniformly. I kept checking after 25 minutes passed to make sure it’s not getting burnt. But it took its own sweet time.
• After the cake is done, insert a toothpick in the center and see if comes out clean. If it does, your cake is ready. if not lower the temperature to 150 and put on the lower rack for 5 more minutes. If it is still not done, but seems more or less done, let it sit in the oven for some time while off. The heat will help the cake to reach completion.
• What follows next is the toughest of all, because you have to wait till the cake cools down. No, you can’t shove it in the fridge and make it cool faster. Make sure the pan is cool before you take it out unless you want to eat the yummy lumpy thing.

Once that long wait is over, you will get your reward.!