The Ultimate Chocolate Cake Recipe | Cupcake Jemma Channel

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cup

cake

Gemma

channel

and the crumb and mat shop here in Soho. Sam and I came over earlier today with the rest of the gang to tidy up and clean up because we just left. in lockdown 2.0 here in the UK and I feel like everyone needs a bit of a pick-me-up and I don't know about you but when I'm feeling down I need

chocolate

and I'm pretty sure most of you will all agree and if you don't agree then I don't believe them because

chocolate

is key to feeling better, so today I'm going to show you how to make the best chocolate

cake

: it's a chocolate mud cake.

I really can't believe we've gone five six years through these videos without showing you this

recipe

it's absolutely delicious. You guys will love it. You will have a chocolate cake. It will have chocolate buttercream. It will have a ganache on the outside. and it's delicious and it's sure to cheer you up so let's start over here on the stove and in this saucepan I have 250 grams of unsalted butter and in that we're going to add 250 grams of dark butter. chocolate now I really recommend going for a 70 something really deep and intense and also a little bit of coffee, so I have 180 ml of coffee.

You can use freshly brewed coffee if you have it fantastic. If not, you only want 180 ml of hot water. and they are going to add two tablespoons of granulated instant coffee. Now I know that many of you are thinking that you don't like coffee very much. Can you substitute the coffee with something else? But they have to use the coffee. Guys, it's part of the

recipe

and it won't taste like coffee. Coffee is great in your cakes and brownies because it really intensifies the flavor of the chocolate because it's a little bit bitter and it really makes it super super chocolatey, so go ahead with it now. what we're going to do is put this on low heat and we're going to stir it all the time, we don't want it to stick and burn on the bottom so keep stirring until it's all melted so you can find that towards the end It looks like it's splitting a little bit, that's because we have water and we have the fats from the chocolate and the butter and they tend to separate, but don't worry, it will all come together a little bit, so we're going to let it cool a little bit. and in a large bowl you should start by mixing four eggs just to break them and in that we are going to add 150 ml of buttermilk. use buttermilk or sour cream, both are delicious and tangy and will make this cake even fluffier than it already will be, but if you don't have buttermilk you can make a very easy substitute and I will link to it. in the description box below of a video that Nikki made and she shows you a great trick on how to make your own buttermilk, so it's going to go into the bowl and finally we'll whisk it into this bowl. for three tablespoons of oil I have vegetable, but you can use sunflower, any unflavored type, give it a good mix and now it's time to add our chocolate mixture here so it cools a little bit, but don't worry, it's not necessary. is cold what I'm going to do is pour it in slowly and whisk at the same time to incorporate everything and this is already making me feel so much better it smells amazing so now we're going to go in with some dry ingredients starting with some powdered sugar or granulated sugar and we have 430 grams of that, so just whisk it and now I'm going to do the next part through a sieve, so inside of me I'm going to put 150 grams of all-purpose flour and self-raising flour and on top of that we have 60 grams of cocoa powder just so that make it even more chocolatey and then we have three quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda to give it a little bit of lift and then a good pinch of salt, probably about half a teaspoon, and now let's sift this and give it a good stir if you feel like it's looking a little bit lumpy with some flour clumps in there, just go back. with your whisk and just stir it gently we just don't want to over mix it at this stage and now it's lovely and smooth we're going to put it in our tins so the recipe I'm giving you here is for a seven inch cake with four layers , which I appreciate is huge, but I'll give you a few different options in the description box below so there's something for everyone.

You can make a two-layer cake, a one-layer cake, whatever you want. So, of course, we need to grease them, so I've got some cake spray here, but you can also do this with a little bit of butter and flour and now we just need to distribute our dough as evenly as possible between the four tins. We bake it. I'm actually just going to level each of these out because it's a very thick batter and it thickens very, very quickly and this is a good way to make sure that you have them all evenly so spreading them out and our cans will be half full and now It's time to bake them, so my oven is preheated to 170 degrees C, that is, fan assisted, we will bake them for about 22 minutes doing the skewer test. place it in the middle of each tin because remember they can be a little uneven so one might bake and the other is still a little sticky so make sure to taste each one until they come out clean okay guys once you Your cakes have arrived.

Out of the oven, you want to let them cool for just five minutes and then you'll take them out of the mold. If you let your cakes, this goes for any cake, cool completely in the pan and then turn them upside down. Go down and try to take it out, it will probably stick, crumble, break and make you cry, so don't do that and then you should let them cool completely, like I did with these. and I actually put each piece in a little bit of fat because it means I can move it around a lot easier, so now we're going to move on to making our fillings, so before we make the actual filling, which is the chocolate buttercream, Let's go to make our ganache stick on the outside so that it has time to harden and thicken so that we can use it, so in this bowl, in this bowl I have 100 grams of butter and I'm going to To add 200 grams of chocolate now, this time I have I went with a 50 chocolate because that's my kind of personal preference for ganache, but if you want to use the same 70, then do it now, usually when we make ganache.

In the microwave we would also put the cream in, but a little tip for you: we want to make this nice and thick right away so we can use it right away, so I'm going to melt the chocolate and butter together. and then we're going to add the cream so I'm going to pop this in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time until it's completely combined and now all we're going to do is pour in 100 ml of double cream and then leave it. to set, this shouldn't take long to thicken, so now we can move on to making our chocolate buttercream, a very standard, simple chocolate buttercream, starting with 125 grams of softened butter.

Remember that it has to be soft when you make the buttercream and we. We're just going to beat it for about four or five minutes so that it's very pale in color, very creamy and very fluffy, so to this I'm going to add a pinch of salt and since the buttercream is really very sweet, then the salt Just beat that and salt and chocolate are a perfect combination so mix it up a little bit and now we can add some icing sugar so I have 225 grams of icing sugar that I already sifted out. I will put it in two halves, beating very well between each addition.

I'm actually just combining the sugar and butter with a spoon first because the powdered sugar gets everywhere. I'm just not in the mood to be covered in powdered sugar today and at the end. but obviously not least, it's time to add some chocolate, so I have 80 grams of melted chocolate here again. I've gone for the 70's but whatever you want to do is fine with me so let's put it on and fold it by hand, this is the queen of buttercreams, it's absolutely delicious and it takes all my willpower not to just jump right in with face first but now it's time to get our cake so first of all what we need to do is make They're all lovely and level, it's a pretty level cake anyway, they don't rise too much rounded on top, but just to make sure it's as level as possible, I have a serrated knife or a bread knife here, um.

I tend not to do this with the leveler because we are not trimming the edges of the levelers. It can be a little difficult to get in there, so I prefer to use a knife, so I'm going to slide it in very gently. my knife along the top making big back and forth motions and turning my cake at the same time just to remove the top of the cake so spend your time on this doing a little at a time especially if you haven't made. I've made this before, just do it carefully and whatever you do, don't throw away the cake cuts because they make a delicious snack and it's also the perfect cake recipe for making cake truffles and I think we should probably show you how. to do that, so stay tuned and I'll try to put together a recipe for you, but in the meantime, let's go ahead and level up all of our cakes and now it's my favorite cake to eat and that's decorating. cake, so if you want to grab your turntable, if you don't have a turntable, don't despair, as you could see when we were cutting out our cakes, we had them on this paper that you can turn, this is a really great way of how to not have a turntable, but you also know those Lazy Susans that sit in the middle of the table.

I don't actually know what they are for, but they make great turntables anyway, let's keep decorating. I have a little board here, you want to put it on top of your turntable and then you're going to take some buttercream and as usual, we're going to put some in the middle of our board and that's it. We are going to glue our first layer of cake, so very carefully take your first layer and place it in the middle of your board and now before you start filling with the buttercream, you want to make sure that the buttercream is very soft because if you put hard buttercream.

This cake will remove all the crumbs and leave you with a terrible mess, so if you feel your buttercream is too hard, you can loosen it with a little milk or you can put it in the microwave. a few seconds at a time until it's nice and smooth, so here we go, a big dollop of chocolate buttercream. I've now taken my buttercream to the edge of my cake, but I don't want to waste too much. because we are going to decorate it with the ganache and I don't want it to mix too much so once you have it up to the edge, smooth it out and then we are going to put the next layer of cake. and when you handle the cake you have to be very careful that it doesn't crack, so what I do is make sure I put as much of my hand on the cake as possible so that nothing is hanging like that. and you'll see it's actually pretty easy to do and then we line it up and place it and then we keep going until we get to the top, so now before we put the last piece of cake on top, what do you want? flip it over because this side is going to be a lot easier to freeze than the bad side so line it up again before you push it down just make sure everything looks as straight as possible because you can move it very gently and there we go now we're ready to decorate this, but if you are in a warm place or if your buttercream is a little soft and you feel it moving all over the place, put it in the refrigerator for five to ten minutes just so that buttercream hardens a little and You'll find it much easier to use the ganache on the outside, so it has a really good consistency.

You can see here how you can spread it, it's not going to fall off and I'm actually I'm going to do this with the biggest spatula over here and I'm going to cover my cake with the ganache and don't worry too much about trying to get it smooth as you go. We move forward, we are going to soften it at the end. or maybe you want to leave it like that, that's totally up to you, so I'm going to go to the side and make a little bit of ganache at a time because it's a lot looser than buttercream, so I'm just using my spatula, but with the same technique as frosting a buttercream cake, pushing it back and pulling it forward, so like I said, you can leave this as is if you want, but if you want it to be super smooth, get a cake.

Smoother now, sorry guys, I only have this Smoother short cake here and I made an incredibly tall cake, but you can get tall cakes at

cupcake

djammer.com. We have both the small and the tall one so I would recommend having both because it is much easier to do this with the softer right size but we will try. So far, so good. As you can see, as usual, I have my scraper unscraped, we're not scraping. smoothing, so I don't have it like this at a right angle, I have it very gently stroking the side of the cake because like I said, we're not scraping, we're smoothing and I'm using my turntable. all the time so you don't have to move your arm, it's easier and now we're going to move on to the top and this is when you want to grab some kitchen paper or a cloth because we want to make sure that our scraper stays nice and clean, so What we are going to do is cut thefrosting from the outside to the middle so oh my gosh it's finished it looks wonderful it smells absolutely amazing I think we better cut this out and have a huge piece of cake because we all deserve it guys so here we go ready Oh dear, look at this, I think I'm going to have to lay it down on the smallest plate in the world.

Ah, is there anything better in life than chocolate cake? I don't think there is, we have the buttercream in the middle and the ganache on the outside ready. The best thing about a mud cake is its softness, it melts in your mouth and if you want to make it uniform. more fogged, I would recommend making the sponge the day before, leaving it overnight and then putting ice on it because it gives the sponge a chance to relax and it gets even more moist, it's divine and also if you don't want to waste time. By making two different fillings and glazes, you can choose one and fill ice with the same delicious thing.

I hope you like making this cake and I hope you like eating it and I hope it makes you feel a little better because guys, it goes. Just to be okay, we are in this together, we have cake for you and we have many more recipes coming soon and if there are particular things you want to see on this

channel

that we haven't done before, always put them on. in the description box below because we love to hear what you guys want and we'll be bringing you recipes soon and obviously it's almost Christmas we have our Christmas selection on

cupcake

gemma.com so head over there. with all the tools and things that will make perfect gifts if you have been eyeing some turntables or any of the tools like spatulas and scrapers put it on your Christmas list because we have it all for you and we will be back very soon with another recipe so Enjoy this

ultimate

chocolate cake.