Almost All-in-one Fudgy Chocolate Cake

I'm always delighted when I find a new recipe which uses oil instead of butter in cakes, as although I'm quite good at adapting recipes to produce variations, I'm no good at all at producing recipes from scratch. I think part of the problem is the fear of wasting expensive ingredients if things go so wrong that the result has to be thrown away.

That, and the fact that I'm always baking because we need something to eat - if things go wrong, we go without! I sometimes envy those who bake for work colleagues - if they get baked goods they are happy, if nothing appears, they just assume the baker had other things to do, and don't know, or care, whether there's a disaster back in the kitchen.

Which leads me to this super easy to mix chocolate cake; called a fudge cake by Good Food, I think it probably only deserves that name if you add the frosting. It is a dense, rich cake, but ever so slightly on the dry side (although I might have overbaked it slightly - I knew I should be checking it earlier when I could smell it baking, but was distracted by other things). Although there was nothing wrong with the cake, I think it would have been better with a frosting - I chose to serve it with just a dusting of cocoa and icing sugar.

I've called it an 'almost-all-in-one' cake as everything but some chopped plain chocolate was mixed together at the same time. You do need a measuring jug and a small bowl in which to dissolve the coffee, but there are no stages to mixing the batter. The chocolate is chopped in a food processor too, making this a really quick cake to prepare.

The coffee is there as a flavour intensifier - it can't be tasted in the finished cake. I was in two minds about chopping the chocolate - should I leave it as rubble or reduce it to grated filings? I left it as rubble, meaning little pockets of chocolate were detectable in the cake - I'm not sure if this was the intention, or whether a smooth texture was what was needed. I'll try it the other way next time, and decide which I prefer! This is definitely a cake to repeat, especially when something more rugged than a delicate sponge is needed.