I Tried Nigella Lawson's 'Old-Fashioned' Chocolate Cake And It Was Fudgy, Moist Perfection

The cake on the left, a slice of it on the rightI’m extremely, unapologetically fussy about baking recipes. After all, they take far more time and often even more money than their store-bought counterparts.Still, Nigella Lawson’s advice has previously proved helpful for my crumble, carrot cake, and scones. So, when I got a hankering for chocolate cake last Sunday, I knew who to hand over my hard-won trust to.Her recipe for an “old-fashioned chocolate cake” is, she writes, the “quintessential” one, supposedly “luscious and mood-enhancingly good”.Great, I thought. I wasn’t in the mood to bake a cake at all, but I was definitely craving eating one – so I figured I’d put Nigella’s claim, that the recipe is “scarcely harder than making one out of cake-mix” to the test. The cake batter in a blender (left) and in cake tins (right)My mood certainly was lifted when I realised how Nigella makes her cake’s batter. She recommends putting all the sponge ingredients (sour cream, flour, sugar, cocoa, eggs, vanilla extract, and baking powder and soda) into a food processor and whizzing it in one go rather than getting involved in fiddly creaming or folding. My impatient self whacked the ingredients in a blender in the hopes of achieving a “smooth, thick batter” (I don’t have a processor). This worked; I poured it into two lined tins about a minute later. While that baked, I made the icing, which was arguably more involved than the cake itself. This required melting better and chocolate together before adding some Golden Syrup, sour cream, and vanilla extract to the delicious puddle. I then mixed the combination with icing sugar (as you would buttercream) – I was about 100g shy of the icing sugar amount, so I made up the difference by blending some caster sugar in. Mixing the icing for the cakeI will say this part seemed a little excessive to me – until I tasted it. If you try nothing else from this recipe, make the icing, which is blissfully thick, fudgy, and moreish. It’s since replaced every other chocolate icing recipe in my cookbooks. The cake, assembled and two-thirds iced, on the left; the sponges cooling on the rightHere’s my verdictThe cake, meltingly tender and surprisingly light, was great (sour cream helps to achieve a light, fluffy crumb, and it did its job well here). But for me, the real triumph was the icing, which felt like the lovechild of ganache and buttercream who’d gotten the best genes of both. It thickens as it cools, turning from what feels like the inside of a chocolate lava cake in the first couple of hours to a gently biteable fudgy satin overnight.This might be because my sponges were still a tiny bit warm when I made the cake, though. Still, both toppings are delicious. I’m ashamed to admit that the cake only lasted my partner and I two evenings – not bad for a cake made in a blender and cooked in about an hour, right?The cake on day one on the left, with runnier icing; on day two with fudgier icingRelated...I Tried Nigella Lawson's Secret To The Best Tiramisu, And I'm AddictedI Tried Gordon Ramsay's Secrets To The Best Steak, And I'm Never Going BackI Tried Mary Berry's Simple Trick For Preventing Flat Scones, And It Works Every Time

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