How To Make Delicious Gooey Chocolate Honey Cake

Here's a recipe for making a rather marvellous chocolate cake.

Now, there are at least a zillion chocolate cake recipes out there. And heck, anything with chocolate as a primary ingredient is going to taste damn good, so I'm not going to try and argue that this recipe is the Greatest Recipe In The World. But it does taste pretty good, and it's been used to make birthday cakes in my family for at least 30 years if not longer. YUMMY.

So here we go. You're going to need 227g butter, 227g castor sugar, and 227g self raising flour. Plus 2 dessert spoons of runny honey, 4 eggs, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 6 tablespoons of milk, 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder and 5-6 drops of vanilla essence.

Measure out your sugar and butter:

Beat the sugar and butter together. Then beat in the eggs. And then beat in everything else. And that's basically it:

Transfer the mixture to two cake tins (I use 8 inch tins) and bake in a pre-heated 190 degree Celcius oven for about 25 minutes. The exact cooking time will depend on what size your cake tins are, and how hot your oven gets, so check in at 20 minutes and see how things are looking. When the cakes are ready they will be firm and springy on top, and a skewer will come out clean. Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool:

Next up, you need to make your icing. You'll need 57g of butter, 28g of cocoa powder, 142g of icing sugar, 1 dessert spoon of runny honey, 2 tablespoons of milk, and a few drops of vanilla essence.

Melt the butter, honey, milk and vanilla essence over a very gentle heat. Meanwhile, sieve the icing sugar and cocoa powder into a bowl. Pour the buttery liquid into the icing sugar gradually - you may not need all of it. You'll see from the photos that I didn't take my own advice here, but I've been making this cake for a good twenty years so I'm a pro, y'all. Then leave the icing in the fridge for a couple of hours:

Making this cake weirdly requires an unexpected number of spoons:

Sandwich the cake together with a generous layer of icing in between and on top. It can be helpful to use a warm knife to spread the icing evenly. I like to decorate birthday cakes for adults with things like smarties, maltesers, and those multi-coloured sprinkles. This time I used white chocolate buttons: 

I think the cake lasted less than 24 hours. Loving it.