This Ramadan turned out to be prime time for me to experiment with new recipes and try my hand at baking. As much as I love cooking, baking has never really been my thing so I thought I’d try a new recipe as it promised to be simple. (I swear, it even said it in the title). The recipe is from the ‘Together’ cookbook by the Hubb Community Kitchen and available here.

Or if you’d just like the recipe, along with my (hopefully) helpful comments, read on!

Ingredients
125g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
3 tbsp milk
125g self raising flour
3 tbsp cocoa powder
150g butter, room temperature (plus extra for greasing)
150g caster sugar
3 eggs, beaten

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius. Butter and line the base of a 20cm round cake tin with baking paper. (My oven runs hot so I heated it to 140 degrees Celsius, and you definitely need baking paper to lift the cake out properly afterwards).

2. Place the chocolate and milk in a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of barely simmering water, making sure the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Once melted, leave to cool slightly. (I used a glass bowl and took the chocolate off the heat when it was almost fully melted, as the residual heat did the work for the remaining few bits).

3. Sift the flour and cocoa powder together and set aside.

4. Using a handheld electric whisk, beat the butter until soft. Add the caster sugar and whisk again until creamy and light. Add the beaten eggs, a little at a time, whisking thoroughly after each addition. (Definitely use an electric whisk for this, I made the mistake of doing it by hand and it takes far too much effort. My butter also wasn’t at room temperature so I melted it in the microwave instead about halfway).

5. Using a metal spoon, fold in the melted chocolate and then the flour and cocoa mixture, until just combined, without over mixing the batter. Add the milk at this point and give it a quick mix again. (I’m not sure why it has to be a metal spoon specifically but that’s what I used and it worked well).

6. Pour into the prepared tin, smooth the top and bake for 35-40 mins, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake tin comes out clean. Leave to cool completely in the tin, before turning out. (As I mentioned above, my oven runs hot so I checked mine at 30 mins and it was fully cooked so I took it out early. I also got far too excited and decided to take it out of the tin early and almost dropped it - I’d recommend actually letting it cool down first!)