Another Chocolate Cake

My son's birthday follows hot on the heels of my own this month, but I know what he likes without needing to ask - chocolate! However, apart from celebrating his birthday, this cake was baked as a test of the beautiful, but huge, cake pan I found in T K Maxx. You can imagine my relief when, with the aid of cake release spray, the cake slipped neatly out of the pan, with not a single crumb left behind. It's a shape that's impossible to line, and although I've used butter and flour to coat bundt tins, that can sometimes leave a visible residue behind.

I had worked out, with the aid of smaller cake pans and measuring jugs, that I needed roughly 1.5 times a recipe designed for an 8" square tin. I already had this Dan Lepard cake recipe in mind, as it rises evenly and gives the moist, rich, solid (but still quite light) kind of chocolate cake you want for special occasions, and fortunately it was simple to make it half as big again - no halved eggs for instance! It was perhaps a tiny fraction too much batter, but didn't overflow and still rose evenly, and more importantly, still looked in proportion when cut.

Once I'd got a perfect cake, it seemed a shame to lose all the definition by slathering a frosting or glaze on top, so I contented myself with blobs of chocolate frosting on each segment to hold a mini-Oreo cookie or sweetie. The rest of the chocolate frosting was used as a hot fudge sauce to accompany the cake, and a topping for a coffee and chocolate semifreddo, made for the same birthday dinner.

The cake makes 16 huge portions, which meant, after we each had a piece for dinner, both son and daughter could take a decent sized portion home with them.