With it being my birthday yesterday, it left little time for baking…. But it’s the birthday of one of our good friends today….. and we were due to go for drinks at 8pm…. I don’t get home from work until 6pm…. I need to bribe people with cake to be my friends….. Ready, set, go!

I also used this stuff for the first time (I had bought it to try out while shopping the other day):

I had decided to make a big-ish cake, but wanted it to not take too long to cook so figured a 6 inch tin would do the trick…. Used my standard 3 egg chocolate cake mix, but using the baking liquid instead of butter/margarine.

The mixture was very liquid, pourable, but looked lovely and chocolatey.

Then came the baking…. It took about an hour, which is when I started talking to it to try and hurry it along!

Interesting effect on the top there. I think the baking liquid effected the cooking time, making it take longer as the mixture was so wet. This meant the top had, not burnt, but was a little crispy and tinged with brown/black.

Thankfully I cut that off.

The cake was still steaming at this point. But a lack of time meant that I broke the number 1 rule and didn’t wait for it to cool before frosting…. I sliced it into layers, sandwiched the steaming layers back together with some chocolate buttercream… Bit on top to finish it off….

Then I thought ah…. what to decorate it with? The drinks were a bit of a joint gathering for both him and I, so I used some green icing leaves out of my box of sugar flowers…. and some sugar paste to construct some numbers…

Oh yes. That’s right. Between us we were 70 years old!

The cake turned out well… ish in the end. The rush in frosting it meant it was perhaps a little messy…. But tastewise? It was moist, chocolatey, and in fact, when we ate it? It was still slightly warm. Delicious fresh cake. Lush.