Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
I can make the best chocolate cake you have ever eaten. And I really like making chocolate cake, so that’s a good combination. It’s the only cake my six year old daughter likes to eat.
The reason I can make such an amazing chocolate cake is that I have a cake cookbook called ‘The Cake Bible’ by an American woman called Rose Levy Beranbaum. I found out about her from Stephanie Alexander’s book, ‘The Cook’s Companion’. Stephanie says ‘anyone who is passionate about cake-making must read this book’. That’s what I did, and what a revelation it’s been.
The Cake Bible is a such a good cookbook not only because the recipes work every time without fail, but because it’s a really good read. For a cake nerd like me it’s fascinating, because Rose goes into all the reasons why you need to follow her instructions, how it will make your cake better, and what will happen if you do things differently. She explains, for example, the technicalities of why you need to put proportionally less baking powder in to your cake mix if you have a larger cake. I love this. (It’s to do with surface tension.) She even tells you how long to mix for, and how much your eggs should weigh without their shells. The less anal among us may choose not to go to this level of exactness, but it’s there if you want it. And it’s probably why all the cakes in the book work perfectly every time.
The chocolate cake I make is called ‘Perfect all-American chocolate butter cake’. Honestly, how can you go past a cake with a name like that? I seriously did not know how good Americans were at cakes until I made this one (and until I went to New York). This is not like a mud cake, which I think are horribly sickly sweet and heavy. It’s rich and dark at the same time as being light and crumbly and buttery.
Mostly I just make one layer but you can make two. It’s best the day it’s been baked when it’s soft and moist and velvety. You can also freeze it. You can ice it with buttercream, or water icing, or even just dust it with icing sugar.
I have made this cake for most of my daughter’s birthday parties and the parents come asking if it’s the one from that cake book and can they have a piece, because they remember it from the year before. I made it for my aunt’s ninetieth birthday a couple of years ago. I did two layers and covered it with cream and filled it with morello cherries and more cream. It was delicious.
I have never had a failure from The Cake Bible (except for the time I forgot to put the sugar in the chocolate cake!). Whenever I make something from it, people say ‘wow, where did you get this recipe?’. It’s a wonderful cookbook and the chocolate cake is one way to make yourself and the people you are feeding just that little bit happier.
