Our 4th Anniversary Cake

For our 4th anniversary, I baked a chocoholics cake. I don't remember where I got the original recipe because I handwrote it on my recipe notebook like years ago. But I do tweak it a bit, using dark cooking chocolate because I love dark choco and in my opinion, it taste better than cocoa powder. 


Here's the recipe for the Moist Choco Cake :


250 gr plain flour
50 gr shifted cocoa powder (I use one and a half block of Nestle DCC)
100 gr dark muscovado sugar 
250ml boiling water
125 gr soft unsalted butter
150gr caster sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs

Method :

• Preheat the oven to 180 °C, line a 18x10cm round baking tins.
• Chop the chocolate blocks, put it on a microwave safe bowl, set for 1 mins 30secs, paused every 30secs to avoid burning the chocolate.  
• Put the muscovado sugar into a bowl and add the boiling water until dissolve, set aside. 
• Put the flour, baking powder and bicarb in another bowl, set aside.
• Beat the butter and caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Add vanilla extract to the butter mixture, still mixing, then add the eggs one at a time, then add the flour mixture. 
• And the last, fold in the melted dark chocolate and muscovado sugar mixture. 
• Pour into the baking tin, bake for about 30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Let cool. 

For the decor, I want to try making the shaved chocolate or chocolate curl, but I don't have those proper tools (flat metal spatula and metal scraper), so I just use my knife and a ruler (!). Please look for tutorial on the web for more precise and professional steps. 

I just melt the rest of the chocolate block with 70ml vegetable oil (as substitute of 1 tbsp of Crisco shortening) in a microwave. Mixed until even, then pour into a clean and dry and flat surface, spread it as thin as you can. Then leave it until firm and set, after that you scrape it to one small section at a time to make a curl. Since I don't have those nifty tools, I ended up with rather thick layer of chocolate mixture (you can see it in the pic), and it's a bit hard to scrape. As the result, instead of chocolate curls, I got chocolate barks because they resembles tree bark :) Looks awful but taste good tho.. 

Then, I made a frosting, not from heavy cream or butter or other type of usual suspects of frosting. My frosting is mascarpone cheese and icing sugar, sounds weird, isn't it?

For my frosting :

3 tubs of mascarpone cheese, softened in room temperature.

75gr-100gr pure icing sugar ( you can use more or less to suit your liking)

Beat them together until even.

To assembly :

• Slice the cake horizontaly with serated knife. I got 3 even layers and 1 super thin top crust, I only use 3 layers because the frosting is for 3 tiered cake.
• Place one cake layer on a plating dish/base, spread with 1/3 of the frosting. Repeat with the other 2 layers. Decorate as you desired, but in my case, I cover it with chocolate barks.