Devil's food cake

So after making my apple cake last week, I came to the horrible realisation that I'd never actually made a chocolate cake. Not a proper one, I have made cakes in which I added a load of cocoa powder, but that doesn't make it an 'official' chocolate cake. So I dove into Mary Berry's recipes, and decided to make one that was called 'Devil's food cake'. I'd never heard of this cake before, but after making it, I have an idea of why it's called that way. Read on, and you will know too.

To manage expectations; this cake did not turn out well. It must be Murphy's law, because just a couple of days earlier someone (my mom) told me that my cakes always turn out great and that I've never had a bad bake. Well...
I've put the recipe below, adding in italics the points where something went wrong with my cake, and how you could avoid making my mistakes in the future. And also how I could avoid making my own mistakes again, as I will be making this cake again, to do it properly.

Ingredients
for the cake:
50 g cocoa powder
255 ml water
100 g butter
275 caster sugar
2 eggs
175 g flour
teaspoon baking powder
teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

for the frosting:
175 g caster sugar
1 egg white
2 tablespoons hot water

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease two 20 cm sandwich tins and line the base with baking parchment.
Ah, yes. I went wrong on the first step. Now I usually don't include the 'grease and line your tin' bit, because it is so obvious that it is second nature. However, as it turned out I did not have two 20 cm sandwich tins. I had one 20 cm sandwich tin, and one 20 cm loose-bottomed tin. I did however have two 24 cm sandwich tins. So I used those, figuring that with all those raising agents, the cakes would come out pretty big anyway. I was wrong there.
Second, I had lots of little bits of baking parchment left over, and was too lazy to cut out one big piece to line the bottoms. Usually with cakes, if you have a small bit you can pull on, the rest comes out easily too. As you can probably guess now, I was wrong there too.

Blend the cocoa and water together until smooth and set aside.
Have you ever tried to blend cocoa and cold water? It is weird. Somehow the cocoa is extremely hydrophobic and wants to stay on top of the water, or in clumpy bits at the bottom. It looks pretty horrible:

Weird lumpy cocoa-water mixture.

Luckily, this bit resolves itself once you blend it together.

Mix the butter and sugar by adding the sugar gradually and beating well in between until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one until you have a smooth mixture.

Sift the flour with the baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.
Yes, I went wrong here. How? How could one possibly mess up this bit, you wonder? Carefully read the first word: sift. I never sift. I am a quick and easy baker, who does not sift her flour. Usually I get away with this, because you mix the flour in the with the rest, and the lumps get beaten to death. However, this cake was of the 'fold in' variety, so that did not happen. Also, the flour was pretty old and hard. So I had lumps. A lot of lumps.

Fold the flour mixture and cocoa-water mixture alternatively into the butter-sugar mixture until well blended. Divide the mixture between the tins and level the surface.
So at this point, I could see it would be a lumpy thing. I tried breaking up the flour lumps, but you cannot really put any force on the mixture, as 'folding' means 'try to work as quickly and lightly as possible or the air will escape from your cake and leave you with a horrible flat pancake'. So I managed to get a few of the larger lumps broken up, but most medium-sized lumps just bided their time at the bottom of the bowl. The irony is of course, that I still ended up with a pancake, because it could not rise properly. Anyway...

Lumpy lumpy cake mixture.

Bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes until well risen (hah!). Leave to cool in the tins for a few minutes then turn out, peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack.
My cakes were not well risen. One had stayed exactly the same size, the other had somewhat doubled in height, but not nearly as much as one might expect with this amount of raising agents. Most likely because the tins I used were too large and because the lumps made the cake quite heavy. Also, all the lumps had gone to the bottom, so once I turned them out you could clearly see the cratery landscape I'd produced. And as you can probably guess from the first mistake I made; it was almost impossible to get the cakes out of the tins without breaking them. They stuck to the un-parchmented parts of the tins like frosting to a spoon. I incurred several breaks before I had them both out.

The frosting, on the other hand, was a breeze. Put the sugar, egg white and water into a heat-proof bowl and set over a pan of hot water. Whisk for about 10-12 minutes until thick, then sandwich the two cake halves together and put the rest on the top and sides. This stuff hardens out quite quickly, so work fast. Leave to set 'in a cool place, but not in the fridge' (apparently this is not a summer cake).

So, how did it turn out? Surprisingly good on the looks, but as predicted, very stodgy on the taste. The lumps (luckily!) did not turn into powdery flour explosions in your mouth, but were rather just hard chewy bits. If they'd been made of chocolate sprinkles, it might have been quite nice. As it is, my guinea pig friends were all pretty positive, but that may have been because I'd down-played it so much it could only be better than expected.

Frosted devil

So, learning points:
- use the correct size tin as stated
- properly line your tins with baking parchment
- sift your flour before you add it.

Conclusion: the devil's food cake is devilish because it pretends to be a very easy run-of-the-mill cake, but then it tricks you into making all kinds of basic rookie baking mistakes that make your cake come out like a lumpy pancake.