Fiona Weir is Starts at 60’s resident cook, sharing a new recipe every Tuesday. She is based in Gerringong on the NSW South Coast and runs hands-on cooking workshops from her family’s Buena Vista Farm.
At some point I got out of the habit of making cakes.
After years of baking cakes with kids on Sundays and on tricky days and on great days and for fete stalls and occasionally for breakfast, my beloved husband Adam looked forlornly at a tall jammy sponge cake in our pantry and said something along the lines of, “perhaps a few less delicious baked things might be a good idea?”
The day had finally come when there were less people in the house and a warm cake was not polished off in one, maybe two sittings.
Cakes now sat around for long enough to actually lose their perfect moist crumb, a hitherto absolutely unbelievable prospect.
We have a glass cloche that sits over cake plates, and at 3pm that afternoon the jammy sponge glinted beneath it, and in the interest of waistlines and blood sugar levels, I deliberately reigned in my baking love, packed away the cloche and stocked the pantry with dried fruit and nuts, crackers and tuna.
But friends, THERE ARE BIRTHDAYS! And every birthday needs a cake, particularly an utterly awesome one. This cake below is our family birthday cake.
Everyone orders it. People expect it. It’s simple but looks like a performance, which is exactly what you want. You can pimp it up with flowers or Maltesers or Freckles or swirls of piped buttercream or melted white chocolate, or just dress it with creamy chocolate icing, as shown. Old school.
A gloriously chocolatey chocolate cake that doesn’t actually use chocolate, which is convenient because it’s a lot harder to snack on a box of cocoa powder in the pantry than on a block of 70 per cent. Or even budget cooking chocolate. Everything that looks good at 3pm in the afternoon.
Can we talk about recipe provenance? Once, many years ago when we still lived in Sydney, my friend Anne-Marie made this cake for her son’s birthday party and I begged for the recipe. It was, she said, her friend Carol’s recipe. It was handwritten. Did Carol make it up? Was it a family recipe? Or did she find it in a book? I never even met Carol.
And after you’ve reduced the sugar and the oil and upped the cocoa and baked it for every birthday in your family for fifteen years, does it count as yours? I don’t even know. Here’s what I’d like though: I’d like this to be your recipe. Please take it! Make it on a Sunday! Or for a birthday! It’s delicious. And easy. Thank you, utterly awesome chocolate cake, wherever you came from.
330 g (11½ oz/1½ cups) white sugar
185 ml (6 fl oz/¾ cup) grapeseed or rice bran oil, or other neutral-flavoured oil
2 free-range eggs
250 ml (8½ fl oz/1 cup) coffee, cooled
250 ml (8½ fl oz/1 cup) full-cream (whole) milk
300 g (10½ oz/2 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
125 g (4½ oz/1 cup) unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
2 tablespoons butter, softened
3 tablespoons full-cream (whole) milk
310 g (11 oz/2½ cups) icing (confectioners’) sugar
60 g (2 oz/½ cup) unsweetened cocoa powder
Preheat the oven to 165°C (325°F). Grease and line two 20 cm (8 in) round cake tins.
Mix together the sugar, oil, eggs, coffee and milk in a large bowl.
Sift together the flour, cocoa, salt, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet mix and beat well until the batter is smooth (don’t be alarmed, this is a very wet batter).
Pour into the prepared cake tins and bake for about 35 minutes.
Leave to cool in the tins for 10 minutes, then gently remove and cool on a wire rack. To do this, run a knife around the edge of the cake, place a plate on top of the tin and carefully flip the cake upside down onto the plate. Place the cake rack on top of the cake and carefully flip again to get it onto the rack the right way up.
For the chocolate cream, beat all the ingredients together well. Use approximately one-third of the mix to sandwich the cakes together and the remainder to ice the top of the cake.
Recipe from From Scratch by Fiona Weir Walmsley, Published by Hardie Grant Books
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