Nigella Chocolate Fudge Cake

Theo has been nattering to make a chocolate cake for a while now.  Ever since he made one with Adam for my birthday infact.  So that's what we did this morning whilst Louis was at nursery.

Todays photo is the page from the Nigella cookbook.  You can see I've written in it, changed the measurements from metric to imperial (I've only got imperial weights for our kitchen scales at the moment).

The cake was very nice, we've tried some already.  I made a 2nd one to take to Lisa's tomorrow when we go for Christmas dinner.

Did I mention that I didn't realise how much it was going to rise so when we took the first one out of the oven we had to peel half of it off the grill element.  Oops lol.  Still, it's a sandwhich cake so that was only half the cake and it needed trimming so it would sit together nicely anyway.  Just as well.

Hmm, Baking

The boys nursery had a BBQ this afternoon. We all had a great time and the weather was glorious too, fortunately :D

Initially there was going to be a baking competition but after some discussion about whether the entries should be restricted to childrens entries rather than the parents entries, it was decided it would probably be safer (and more edible) if the competition was to decorate a cake, allowing for adult baking / buying of the cake itself.

I was going to buy a pre iced cake then let Theo decorate that but after seeing the price difference between that and a plain victoria sponge cake, I decided on the latter. I bought ready made vanilla icing and chocolate fudge icing together with sugared animal shapes, hundreds and thousands and orange & lemon thingies. All of those things together came to less than the price of the pre iced cake and I still have over half of all those packets / tubs left.

Anyway, in my opinion a childrens competition should be just that, so I sat with Theo whilst he decorated his cake,

and Louis decorated a couple of Rich Tea biscuits.

I opened the jars and tubs for him, made a few suggestions here and there and helped him mix some icing with food colouring when he wanted black, but apart from that it is all his own work.
It paid off, Theo won the competition :D He will get his prize when he goes to nursery on Tuesday.

And we get to eat the cake, yummm