This chocolate birthday cake is simple to make, tastes delicious and is perfect for decorating for a special celebration.
I hate getting questions that I can’t give a helpful answer to, so over the past few weeks I’ve been a busy bee trying to perfect my chocolate cake recipe. Now this couldn’t be just any old chocolate cake, it had to be perfect for a birthday which meant it…
I get a lot of comments on my all-in-one vanilla sponge birthday cake and the ones that always makes me smile the most are when people say that they never bake and the simplicity of the recipe has given them the confidence to do more in future. I wanted this chocolate cake to be that simple to make… a cake even the novice-est of cooks can make.
This cake is so simple… chuck it all in and mix it up. The only piece of culinary skill you need is a bit of grating!
2) Must be suitable for decorating
When I make birthday cakes for my boys I love to go to town on the decoration (you can see some on my cakes in my cake gallery). In order for the cake to work as a decorated cake it can’t dome too much on top or sink in the middle and it must be sturdy enough to be carved into various shapes for decorating without crumbling.
3) Be chocolatey
This is actually the big reason I’ve not been able to recommend chocolate cake recipes until now. All the cakes I’d made in the past with the right texture (see point 2) used just cocoa powder and they simply weren’t chocolatey enough. To give this cake some extra chocolate-iness it includes lots of actual chocolate grated into the cake mix alongside the cocoa powder.
Photographing this cake caused a lot of confusion in my house as I decided it needed to be decorated just like a birthday cake with lots of colourful fondant. Josh (who’s 3) kept asking whose birthday it was and then started getting all excited about Father Christmas coming (because apparently, he delivers presents for birthdays too). I probably didn’t help matters by deciding to light the candles – a completely unnecessary step as I really only wanted to photograph the inside of the cake after they’d been blown out – we had fun doing it together though 🙂
Chocolate Birthday Cake
Ingredients
- 200 g self-raising flour
- 40 g cocoa powder
- 230 g caster sugar
- 4 large eggs
- 230 g soft margarine you can also use softened unsalted butter too
- ¼ tsp vanilla extract
- 100 g milk chocolate choose something from the baking aisle in the supermarket as it will cope well with the heat in the oven without going grainy.
- 2 tsp milk
Instructions
- Pre-heat your oven to 160ºC/140ºC fan.
- Line your tins (2x 20cm sandwich tins) with liners or greaseproof paper.
- Grate the milk chocolate (100g).
- Put all of the ingredients into a large bowl (200g self-raising flour, 40g cocoa powder, 230g caster sugar, 4 large eggs, 230g soft margarine, ¼ tsp vanilla extract, 2 tsp milk and the grated chocolate) mix on a low speed until fully combined.
- Divide the mixture evenly between the two tins and spread it out so it’s pretty even (it doesn’t have to be perfect as it’ll even out in the oven, but roughly flat is good).
- Put the tins in the oven and cook for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes put a skewer in the middle and check if it comes out clean. If it does it’s done, if not pop it back in for a couple more minutes and check again.
- Once cooked, remove the cakes from the oven and leave them to cool in the tins for 10 minutes.
- After 10 minutes, remove the cakes from their tins and pop them onto a wire rack to cool completely before decorating.
Notes
If you would like to make this cake in a different size then you can use my chocolate cake calculator to find the ingredients you need. You can find my recipe for the chocolate buttercream to cover the cake here. If you want to make this cake in one deep tin rather than two sandwich tins then the cooking time will need to be increased to 45-50 minutes.Nutritional Information
Free From/Suitable For…
- Suitable for Vegetarians
- Nut-Free
The ingredients for this recipe are easily available free from all these allergens. However, please ensure you double-check allergen information for all ingredients.
Hi I’d like to make this for a cushion or pillow style cake and will be decorated with fondant, will this Cake Be sturdy enough?
This cake is good for carving so it should be absolutely fine.
This is delicious! Thank you for sharing as I too was struggling to find a great chocolate cake for my chocolate cake adoring 3 year old.
I wonder- have you tried freezing the (in-iced) cakes? And are they still lovely after defrosting?
They’re absolutely fine. Just make sure you wrap them in clingfilm before freezing to protect them.
This is my favourite chocolate cake recipe! Thank you Charlotte for sharing and for the amazing ingredients converter which I have used twice. I used this recipe last year for my son’s birthday cake and it was delicious – everyone loved it – nice and moist not dry! So I am using it again tomorrow for his 6th Birthday (Castle cake!).
Hi charlotte,
I recently used your vanilla sponge recipe for my sons cake and everyone was raving about how nice it was so now its my daughters birthday and she prefers chocolate cake which is good cause i do too 🙂 so i was going to try your recipe however she wants a unicorn cake which from what i have seen online are quite high would the chocolate sponge hold on its own with 3 or 4 laters or do you think i would need to add something in for extra support?
Thank you
I usually make three layers and it’s absolutely fine. I would expect four to stack with no problems.
Just made this cake. Not sure how it tastes yet, the batter was yum (of course you have to lick the bowl!) And smells lovely too!
I made as one deep cake and it needed more like an hour and a half to cook through though.
I’ll let you know how it goes down. 🙂
Made this cake in 2 x 23cm tins then made an additional layer for a triple layer birthday cake. It didn’t rise much but tasted so chocolatey. Excellent recipe and a big hit with my 20 5 year olds.