Recipe | Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge icing

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Mary Berry’s heavenly chocolate cake with fudge icing

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars 2

This recipe is from Mary Berry’s Traditional Puddings & Desserts.

Ingredients (makes 8 very generous slices!)

  • 125g / 4oz butter
  • 200g / 7oz dark chocolate, broken into pieces
  • 2 tbsp water
  • 3 eggs, separated
  • 125g / 4oz caster sugar
  • 90g / 3oz self-raising flour
  • 60g / 2oz ground almonds

Fudge icing ingredients

  • 60g / 2oz butter
  • 30g / 1oz cocoa powder
  • 3 tbsp milk (you may need a little more)
  • 250g / 8oz icing sugar
  • White chocolate shavings or anything else you like to use to decorate

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars

Method

Note: one cake or two? Mary’s recipe calls for one 20cm / 8in cake tin and then you have to cut the single cake in half horizontally to make the sandwich. I’m terrible at doing this, so I just split the mixture between two 20 cm cake tins but, of course, this affects the baking time.

Grease and line your cake tin/tins. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C / Gas Mark 4 / 350 degrees F.

Melt the chocolate together with the butter and water. You can do this is a heatproof bowl over a pan of hot water or you can use the microwave. Make sure the butter and chocolate have melted completely and the mixture is smooth (as in the picture below). Leave to cool.

Heavenly chocolate cake chocolate mixture

Whisk the egg yolks and caster sugar together using an electric whisk or mixer until fluffy and very light in colour. Add the cooled chocolate mixture and stir in. Carefully fold in the flour and ground almonds.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry (I interpreted this as: formed peaks but there was still some liquid in the bowl). Fold into the chocolate sponge mixture, gently but thoroughly. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin/tins.

If you’ve done just one cake: bake for 50 minutes or until risen well and firm to the touch. If you do two tins, like me, you’ll only need to bake for around 35 minutes.

Leave the cake(s) to cool in the tin for a few minutes, turn out onto a wire rack, and peel off the lining paper. Cool completely.

Make the fudge icing. Melt the butter in a pan, add the cocoa powder, and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Stir in the milk and icing sugar. Beat until smooth. Leave to cool until thickened.

Heavenly chocolate cake fudge frosting

If, like me, you find the icing is a bit stiff, just add a little milk.

If you’ve made one cake, now cut it in half horizontally to get two layers. If you’ve used two cake tins, you’re ready to go! Sandwich the cakes together using half of the fudge icing. Use a spatula and/or knife to spread the rest of the icing over the cake. It’ll look something like this:

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting before decoration

Now decorate as you wish! I used a paper template to create neat eights and alternated white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars.

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars 3

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars cut

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings slice

While very chocolately, this cake is a bit dry for my liking. In my opinion, it’s best served warm with some ice-cream – then it really is heavenly! In fact, I’ve been experimenting and, if you have a microwave, I recommend you heat your slice for 10 seconds before eating – it makes all the difference to the texture and re-softens the frosting beautifully.

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting gold sugar stars slice

A plea from this baker/writer

If you’ve read this far and have found this recipe, or any of my recipes useful, please consider returning the favour by buying one of my books! The ebooks cost less than a coffee and they are free with Kindle Unlimited.

Claire Huston romance novels Twitter pinned pic June 2022

Claire Huston / Art and Soul

36 thoughts on “Recipe | Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge icing”

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  16. Happy to find your experience journalized. We love Mary Barry in our house and found a copy of this recipe in her book. I was really stumped that after following the directions precisely, both cake and frosting were a real disappointment. I questioned that I failed to let the chocolate mixture cool enough as that was the only step I was uncertain. The cake was dense and dry. We removed it well before the timing of the recipe. The fudge frosting was also so thick it would not spread. Admittedly, this was my first ever chocolate cake from scratch, but I expected better. We are not wasting it, but find it absolutely necessary to have the cake warm with milk and vanilla ice cream. I can best describe it as a dry brownie.

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