Chocolate Mud Cake

So Sunday in fact ended up being beautifully sunny after the rainfall in the night, so my beau and I headed out for the day to catch the rays. I made sure to stop by the shop for ingredients though, as I've been meaning to try this recipe from Sarah-Jane's blog since she posted it in March. Unfortunately for me, she posted it during lent, and every year (don't ask me why or how it started!), I give up chocolate. It's not for religious reasons, it's just to prove to myself that I don't need to eat chocolate - yes it does always end with me stuffing my face on Easter Sunday, so yes it probably is pointless, but it's sort of a tradition. Anyway giving up chocolate means all things chocolate; cake, biscuits, milkshake, hot chocolate etc etc. Basically anything that has chocolate/cocoa powder in it, therefore everything I love!

Anyway, I gave this chocolate mud cake a try, and as Sarah-Jane says, this does make a mammoth amount of mixture and needed my biggest mixing bowl. I took her advice and ladled this into a jug before attempting to pour it into moulds. I made four extra wide cupcakes, using Zeal silicone moulds, six heart shaped cupcakes, and a CAKE cake mould, which Sarah-Jane sells in her online shop. And that wasn't even all of the mixture used up!

I greased and floured my moulds, but I think I will just grease in future, as I found the flour stuck to the side of the cakes and didn't look very nice. I didn't have any trouble getting the cooked cake out of the heart shaped moulds or the large cupcake moulds, but sadly for me being as impatient as I am and trying to pop it out straight away, my CAKE cake didn't make it. This cake is fragile, especially when hot, and unfortuantely the C and the K broke. I would have recreated the broken letters to make a complete CAKE, but my sticky-fingered friends snatched the intact A and E, and ate them, so I gave up on that idea.

With the extra wide cupcakes, I tried out a decorating idea from a book by Lily Vanilli entitled 'A Zombie Ate My Cupcake' for the first time. This book features many deliciously gory recipes, and I would like to review the book in a later post, but I am aware this one is dragging on. Anyway, thus, my Zombie Hands were born! These cakes are a little gruesome, so not for the faint hearted!

They didn't come out perfect, and I apologise for my bad photography skills here, but you get the idea - zombie hands breaking free from the soil in a graveyard.

For the hearts I went a bit more cutesy, filling my cake moulds with about 1cm of chocolate to make solid chocolate toppers, as Sarah-Jane did in her post. Mine did not look nearly as perfect as hers did, and I should have placed the mould onto a baking sheet prior to putting it in the fridge, as it bent slightly picking it up, causing the molton chocolate to run up the sides and leaving me with wonky toppers. But we live and learn, and I am just learning as I go along!

This cake was as I expected - deliciously sweet, gooey, and completely sinful, and I loved it. They weren't my most picture perfect cakes, but nobody seemed to mind!