Chocolate sponge cake

A very good evening to all!

Today I bring you a recipe for a delicious chocolate sponge cake that I have just taken out of the oven.

I finished making it about half an hour ago and I have just taken it out of the mold and my goodness, it looks so good. It has been tasted, and I decided that I would share it with you through this blog.

Not only because it looks splendid and tastes great, but also because it is very easy to make.

As you will have already realised, on this Erasmus recipe blog, I write quick and easy recipes for those that don't have a lot of time to cook and that also may not be very good at doing so.

And this kind of person often tends to be students living on their own for the first time or Erasmus students.

Of course, there are always exceptions to these cases and there will always be a student that is very handy in the kitchen, but there are usually very few of these students, and I think that, deep down, we all have something is us that doesn't want us to get up and cook but to instead heat up a pizza or buy a kebab.

Personally, I am not the best at cooking, more than anything because I am too lazy to get all the ingredients and especially too lazy to clean up all the pots and pans after I have cooked. I am more suited to eating than to cooking, honestly.

But, given that over these past few years I have been forced to cook by myself because I have been in the situation where I've been living on my own, because I have lived in other countries for a few months, I had to learn how to cook.

Mostly because I had realised that it was costing me more money to buy junk food like kebabs, pizzas or ready meals, than it was to buy the necessary ingredients to cook myself.

And I'm talking about simple cooking. I'm not going to start making a duck stew when I live in a residence or a shared flat and don't have the necessary equipment to cook it.

So, I hope this recipe will encourage you to cook more often as it is quite simple and doesn't require too much time to make, maybe 30 minutes maximum. Although, I have just realised that the majority of my recipes are desserts.

I promise that I will try to vary the next recipes a little more when I come to write them.

Anyway, I found this recipe on a packet of baking powder while my mother prepared some kind of peculiar Arabic sweet and I helped her, hoping to learn how to make it.

Maybe I will teach you how to make these sweets in another entry, although I warn you in advance that they are quite complicated to make. It was the third time that I prepared those sweets with my mother and I still don't understand the trick to make them hard on the outside and soft on the inside.

I will leave you a photo here of what they look like. Even so, just like everything that I make, they came out really well.

These sweets are called gazelle horns or kaab el-ghazal in Arabic, and they are a mix between sweet and savoury, made up basically of almonds and flower water. Delicious.

When I make the recipe I will leave a link to it here. :)

Going back to the chocolate sponge cake, as I said before, it is very easy to make and it is really tasty. I am sure that I will make it again once I have finished it and it will be an essential on my list of desserts.

Ingredients:

• 126g of margarine.
• 200g of melting chocolate.
• 60g of plain flour.
• 120g of sugar.
• 4 eggs.
• Half a bag of yeast powder Royal (a Spanish brand).
• 60g of cornflour.

Method:

Divide the chocolate into various pieces and put it into a saucepan with the butter. Put this saucepan over another, slightly bigger saucepan to melt the chocolate and the butter as in a bain-marie.

As I mentioned in the recipe for a three ingredient Japonese cheesecake, to melt the chocolate you can do so with a bain-marie, or if not, you can melt it in the microwave with thirty second intervals. But, in this case I recommend that you melt the chocolate with the butter using the pans as a bain-marie, because that way they will mix together better.

The truth is that I have not tried melting them in the microwave, but something tells me that the butter melts too quickly and then ends up very thin and doesn't blend well with the chocolate.

So melt the chocolate with the butter in a pot bain-mari style. But make sure that you don't allow any water into the pan that has the chocolate in it because, as I always say, water is the worst enemy of chocolate and it will ruin the mixture.

Once the chocolate is well melted, remove the pots from the hob, but leave the pot with the chocolate and the butter on top of the pot with water so that the mixture does not harden whilst you mix the other ingredients.

Then, take a large bowl and crack the four eggs into it. Beat them well and add the sugar before beating them again until the two ingredients have mixed together well.

When you can see that the sugar has joined well with the eggs, add the flour, cornflour and baking powder and stir well until a consistent mixture is formed; not too thin, but not too thick either.

After having stirred well and having mixed all the ingredients together, proceed to pour the melted mixture of chocolate and butter into the bowl with the other ingredients, and stir well until everything comes together and the mix is chocolate coloured.

Leave the mix to rest a while and preheat the oven to 170°C and get out a mold. Before putting the mix into the mold, grease it with butter so that nothing sticks to it when the sponge cake is taken out. So be generous when it comes to covering the mold with butter, as it is always better to add more.

The mold that I used was a detachable circular mold, 25 centimetres in diameter, more or less, but I recommend that you use one that's a little smaller. Maybe a mold that has a diameter of 20 centimetres, or if not using a rectangular mold would be best.

According to the recipe I found on the package of baking powder, in the photo the cake shown was in a long, rectangular mold. So, next time I will use the rectangular mold, because when using the circular mold with a 25 centimeter diameter, the cake ended up being a little lopsided on one side, a little deformed.

So I would say to use a smaller circular mold, or use a long, rectangular mold.

Once you have greased the mold with butter, proceed to carefully pour the mixture into the mold and move the mold around a little so that the mix is spread out well across the whole mold.

Then place the mold into the centre of the oven, once the oven has reached 170°C.

Leave the sponge cake in the oven for 20 minutes exactly and then take it out.

Do not take the sponge cake out of the mold immediately. Instead, wait for it to cool first, about 30 minutes, more ore less.

In my case, I used a detachable mold, which makes everything much easier when you need to take the sponge cake out of the mold. But if you do not have a detachable mold then you don't need to worry, but try to take the sponge cake out of the mold with care, so that nothing is left stuck to the mold, and do not forget to grease the mold well with butter. I would therefore recommend that you really let it cool before trying to take the cake out of the mold.

After having taken the sponge cake out of the mold, you will have two options in regards to enjoying the cake.

• First option:

This option is to eat it as it is, which is what I did. It was very spongy and very sweet, but in a good way.

The best thing of all is that the heat of summer, after leaving the cake for a couple hours, melts the chocolate and gives the sponge cake a delicious texture that is soft on the palette.

• Second option:

And the other option is to melt more dark or white chocolate in the pans, bain-marie style, or in the microwave and then cover the top of the sponge cake or, better yet, the whole cake with the melted chocolate.

Once you have covered the sponge cake with chocolate, put it in the fridge so that the chocolate cools and hardens around the cake.

After it has cooled well you can add some melted white chocolate piping, if you used dark chocolate to cover the cake, or add some dark chocolate for the piping if you instead used white chocolate to cover the spongecake. Or you can use the same type of chocolate twice.

But, to be honest with you all, I still haven't tried the second option. It is an idea that came to me whilst I was eating the sponge cake, and I believe that it would come out quite well and would be quite tasty.

Tomorrow I shall make the sponge cake again and this time I will add the melted chocolate and white chocolate piping on top and I will tell you if it is good;).

*Tips:

To sum up a little the pieces of advice that I have given throughout the recipe, I could summarise to these:

• Melt the chocolate and the butter in a pan, bain-marie style, and not in the microwave.
• When you take the melted chocolate off of the heat, keep it over the other pan with boiling water in so that it does not harden.
• Grease the mold well with butter so that the sponge cake does not stick to the mold, and try to use a long, rectangular mold. If the mold is detachable then even better.

And that is everything for today.

I hope that you have liked this recipe and that your sponge cake comes out as delicious as my own but if not, as you will already know, never stop trying! :)

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