Happy Birthday To Mel: Chocolate Mud Birthday Cake!

Today is Melissa’s birthday, so yesterday I visited her at work with a home made Mud Cake to celebrate her birthday early. The cake was delicious, even if I do say so myself!  It was adapted from a recipe in 'Bake' by Allyson Gofton.
  
For the cake you will need:
2 teaspoons good quality drinking cocoa (the original recipe uses coffee granules but Melissa and I both detest coffee)
1 cup hot water
¼ cup fruit juice (I used ‘Just Juice – Tropical’ as it is nice and sweet, the recipe states you can use juice or whiskey)
200 grams dark cooking chocolate chopped
1 1/2 cups sugar
250 grams butter
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1. Preheat the oven to 140˚C.  Grease and line a round 23cm cake tin with baking paper (I only had a 20cm tin and it worked fine, I found the cake a nice height).
2. Put the dinking cocoa, hot water and juice into a saucepan and bring to a simmer.  Remove from the heat.
3. Add the chocolate and butter and stir until melted.
4. Add the sugar and stir until it is dissolved.  Allow to cool.
5. In a large bowl sift the flour and baking soda together then make a well in the centre.
6. Beat the eggs together with the vanilla essence and stir into the cooled chocolate mixture.
7. Pour the chocolate mixture into the dry ingredients and stir gently to mix (I found I was getting clumps of flour so I beat it very gently with the electric beaters for under a minute as not to overwork the ingredients).
8. Pour cake batter into the prepared tin and place in to oven for 75-90 minutes.  Allow the cake to sit in the tin for 20 or so minutes before removing and placing on a cooling rack.

I iced the cake with a chocolate ganache.  To make it I used 250 grams of dark chocolate, ¾ cup of cream and a tablespoon of butter – combining the ingredients in a heatproof bowl sitting over boiling water. Once ingredients are combined leave the ganache to cool for a couple of hours on the bench. I spooned the thickened but still runny mixture over the cake and let it run over the edges. To make the truffles I stored the remaining mixture in the fridge overnight and rolled single teaspoons of the mixtures into balls coating in cocoa and placed them on the cake. For a little bit of extra ‘sparkle’ I added little silver cachous.

Happy Birthday Melissa xx.

P.S. There aren’t any photos of the inside of the cake because it all got scoffed before I had a chance to take any – so damn, I’ll just have to make it again so I can share with you ;-)