How to Make a Chocolate Birthday Cake?

Answer 1

Everybody likes birthday cakes. Almost everyone likes chocolate. So for many people the best of all birthday cakes to make is a chocolate one. There is more than one way to make a chocolate birthday cake: Buy a mix, follow the directions on the box, bake, and frost, using canned frosting. Some people who eat it will be able to tell you used a mix. The mixes available to make birthday cakes – or other cakes – with have certain common ingredients and preservatives, which gives them a particular underlying flavor. If you want to avoid that, make your chocolate cake from scratch.

It has happened at least once that someone interpreted the recipe’s call for “cocoa as requiring the use of instant hot chocolate powder. However, that is not what is wanted. Instant hot chocolate powder is mostly sugar and dried milk, with a little cocoa added. When a chocolate cake recipe calls for cocoa, what it means is pure, unadulterated cocoa powder such as Hershey’s, Nestle’s, or Droste’s. Similarly, when a recipe calls for chocolate what it means is unsweetened hard chocolate, found in the baking section (often near the baking cocoa) of the grocery store. Some brands are Baker, Ghirardelli, Lindt, Scharffenberger – there are others, also. The other ingredient found in recipes for birthday cakes that can be confusing is “shortening.” The inexperienced baker can look at term and wonder, “what is that?” It is butter, or margarine, or Crisco, or equivalents; essentially, some form of fat, which provides flavor and texture. If the recipe doesn’t specify a certain kind, use butter. It gives the best flavor. Note: Use real vanilla, not imitation vanilla. The flavor improvement from using real vanilla is extraordinary.

Cake recipes sometimes call for pastry or cake flour. This is not usually an absolute requirement. It is possible to turn out excellent cakes while using the more common “all – purpose flour’. If substituting all-purpose flour in a recipe that calls for pastry flour, remove one tablespoon of the all-purpose flour from your measurements. (Measure it out, then remove one tablespoonful). Do not use rice, potato or other non-wheat flours unless you are experimenting. Wheat flour has gluten, which helps hold the finished cake together and gives it structural integrity. Non-wheat flours have little or no gluten and the finished texture will be very different, and usually flat. Equipment: To mix up cake and frosting you need either a mixer and bowl, or willingness to mix by hand, and, of course, a large enough bowl to do it in.

Cakes are done when a toothpick stuck through the middle comes out clean, or when the batter in the pan looks solid and has pulled away slightly from the edges. Now, the frosting. Follow that recipe exactly as you mix it up. Normally a chocolate birthday cake would be baked in two layers and the top of one layer would be frosted, the other layer would be placed on top of the frosting, and its top and the sides would be covered in frosting. If the cake is being made for a real frosting lover or chocoholic, first double all the ingredients in the frosting recipe, mix as directed, then slice the cake layers horizontally in half and frost the top of each half, placing each on top of the next, as above, then frosting the sides. This makes a four-layer cake. Decorate with birthday candles and decorative icing from the grocery store if wanted.