Basic crafting ingredients
- 3 parts dark chocolate (at least 70% cacao or whatever they call it)
- 1 part salted butter
- 1 part fine sugar (whatever colour makes you happy)
- 4 large eggs (or about 2 parts worth of eggs)
- A bit of vanilla essence (mebbe 1/2 a teaspoon - it varies depending on your essence strength)
- Some cocoa powder (however much makes you happy)
Make dat cake!
- Mix sugar and cocoa until stuff is a lightish brown. If you want to add extra powdered flavourings (e.g. chai powder, etc) this is the time.
- Plop eggs (minus shells) into sugar and cocoa mixture, dollop in vanilla essence and any other essence you like.
- Mix it all together until nice and bubbly and uniformish. Use a friendly electric mixer if you have one, or just whisk if you don't.
- Melt the butter and chocolate in whatever way makes you happy. I like using either a rice cooker (slow), or a microwave. If you're using a microwave, plop the container holding the choc and butter into a plate with some water in it. It's sort of like a lazy nugget's version of a microwave water bath, and it works. Nuke for 1 min, stir, then nuke for 30s each time, taking out to stir until lumps are gone.
- Galoosh the melted choco-butter mixture into the egg-sugar-vanilla mixture, and stir it a lot until it is a smooth, rich, dark brown batter.
- If you want to add extra solid tasties (e.g. nuts, berries, whatever), fold them into the mixture now.
- Pour the whole lot into a greased (yay more butter) metal baking cake pan thing.
- Stuff in oven and bake at 180 celsius / 350 farenheit (conventional) for 45-50 minutes.
- It's done when you poke a toothpick into it and it comes out just a tiny bit crumbly dirty, which I think is what the cookbooks MEAN by clean. Honestly, I have no idea. ._.
Let it cool then eat eeeeet!
It's also very good if you make chocolate icing out of a combination of nuked chocolate chips, sugar, butter, and a bit of cream. I have a lazy version of that which you can do in a rice cooker, or a microwave. Also, better pictures later. I blame my guildie who was asking for this!
Salted buttar? Yes. Salted buttar. I use salted butter because I'm lazy, and I only buy salted butter. If you want to use unsalted butter, then add salt yourself, or omit the salt altogether, that works too. If you're adding salt, mix it together with the rest of the powdered stuff.
For a slightly 'lighter' version, use 2 parts chocolate, rather than 3 parts. The reviews on the 2 parts vs 3 parts are divided. I think it depends on how much of a choco monster the eater is. As a non-choco-monster, I like the 2 parts better!