This recipe is a great recipe to make a simple choclate cake. It uses ingredients that can be found in most kitchen cupboards. You just need to gather all the ingredients, put them into a big bowl and mix them with a blender or mixer! It can also be used to make cupcakes too, if you adjust the cooking times as mentioned below. Then you can decorate your cake however you'd like to. My favourite is Nutella and sliced banana.
First let's preheat our oven to 350 degrees F. or 176 C. Then let's mix together our dry ingredients with a whisk or a sifter. We want to make sure to break up any cocoa clumps that might be in there.
Now let's add our milk, oil, eggs, and vanilla extract. At this point we want to switch to a wooden spoon or a hand mixer to mix the ingredients. The batter will be very thick at this point.
Lastly we will at our very hot water slowly, while the mixer is on low, until it is all incorporated, your batter will be kind of runny which is good. Use a spatula to scrape the sides.
Now let's take a couple of 9 inch cake pans and we want to use some butter or shortening and using our fingers push it all around the pan coating it, then take about a tablespoon of flour and place that in the pan, move and tap your pan around until the flour coats the pan, then tap our the excess flour. The pans are ready to go. We don't want our cakes to stick, so don't skip this step, even if you have a nice non-stick pan like I have here, it is still a good idea to prep the pans. Next using a cup evenly distribute the cake batter between both pans. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes at 350 F (176 C) until when you poke the center with a toothpick it comes out clean..
Now time to make the yummy chocolate buttercream frosting. First in a large bowl cream together your softened butter with your cocoa powder, using a mixer. Then add your vanilla extract, next add about 1 cup of your powdered sugar at a time, then mix, then add the sugar, etc. until it is all incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. Now add about 1/3 of the milk, and see what kind of consistency you want. If you want the frosting thicker, leave it like this, if you want it a bit thinner, add another 1/3 of the milk. You may not need all of the milk. Just depends on how you want your frosting. :) All right our frosting is ready to go.
Let's frost the cake now using a cake spatula, or butter knife, etc. A little trick I learned on how to keep your cake board or cake pedestal from getting messy near the base of the cake is you add four strips of parchment paper, set in them in such a away that you have an open square in the middle. Then place a dollop of frosting there, this will act like glue and hold your bottom layer of cake in place. Add the first layer of cake, then frost the top, add the next layer and cover the whole thing.
Now we want to remove the parchment paper by gently pulling them away. At this point you may want to chill the cake in the fridge, to let the frosting set, but it isn't necessary, you can serve right away if you want. Enjoy!