Baked a cake today and inspired by Cooking for Engineers decided to blog the experience.

Ingredients

• 6 eggs
• Half a teaspoon vanilla essence
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup castor sugar (you can use regular sugar if you are desperate)
• 2 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder
• 2 level teaspoons baking powder
• Half a cup of water
• Half a cup of oil
• 1 extra teaspoon of baking powder

Method

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Centigrade (350 Farenheit)

Separate the eggs and add the vanilla to the egg yolks.	Sift the dry ingredients together.	Measure out the oil and water.
Add the oil and water to the dry ingredients and mix well.	Beat the egg yellows until they are a creamy yellow colour.	Add the egg yellows to the chocolate mixture and mix well.
Your mixture should look like this.	Add the extra teaspoon of baking powder to the egg whites and beat well.	Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks.
Fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture.	Your mixture should look like this when you are done.	Take out a Chiffon tin.
Pour the cake batter into the tin.	Put the cake into the oven for 35-40 minutes (at 180 degrees C / 350 F).	Don’t worry if cracks appear on the surface of the cake.
Take the cake out of the oven and check that it is cooked using a skewer (or a toothpick).	Place the cake upside down and until it is cool.	Loosen the cake and ice if desired.

Most of the time, I simply serve the cake with ice cream and don’t bother to ice it. I did ice the cake today as it is for a party that I am going to, only the icing for the top was too thick so it did not spread easily and the resulting cake looks rather unprofessional. The plan is to make another cake later in the week. Will have another go at the icing and blog it the icing recipe if it goes well. Am still taking my rather homemake cake with me tomorrow as even though the icing “flopped”, it still tastes really good.