Recipe review

My favourite simple chocolate cake: moist, dense, and always loved

This is the chocolate cake I come back to again and again. It is easy, reliable, and always goes down well with both kids and grownups.

If you want the original recipe, I use the BBC Food Easy chocolate cake as my base.

What I love most about it is the texture. It comes out super moist and quite dense, but never dry. For birthday cakes, family gatherings, or a simple weekend bake, it has been one of my most dependable recipes.

My practical baking notes

• It usually takes a little longer to bake than the recipe timing, so I always keep an eye on it and test in the centre before taking it out.
• Use sandwich tins, not springform tins. The mixture is very runny, and sandwich tins are much safer and easier for this batter.

How I finish it for parties

This is a 2 layer, 8 inch cake in my kitchen. I usually fill the middle with ganache rather than buttercream, because the chocolate flavour stays rich and the cake still slices nicely.

If I am decorating for a party, I use ganache as a crumb coat first, then let it harden before adding buttercream on top. That gives a neat finish and makes the final decoration much easier to control.

Buttercream amount I aim for

For this cake, I aim for around 525g buttercream, made with:

• 175g butter
• 350g icing sugar
• a little milk
• a little vanilla extract

If you want to scale that up or down, these tools are helpful:

• Quick Round Cake Buttercream Calculator
• Custom Shape Cake Buttercream Calculator

One thing I do not recommend

I do not recommend covering ganache directly with fondant icing. In my experience, the two can react and the fondant can go slimy.

I have had better results with a sugarcoat layer in between, but that is a topic for another blog post.