Chocolate Fudge cake

This is my trusty chocolate cake recipe, given to me years ago by a good friend. I have made so many of these over the years as I made them for my local garden centre cafe for a couple of years. They have a 99% success rate and never fail to please adults and children. I made this yesterday for my nephews 10th birthday, he adores chocolate cake. I let rachel do the icing, which I thought looked pretty good for a beginner. The cake will stay fresh for a few days if it manages to last that long. It also works well as a dessert heated up with cream or ice cream.



Ingredients
Serves 10-12
110g light brown soft sugar
110 g Dark chocolate, 70% cocoa
300ml of milk
150ml sunflower oil
350g Plain flour
2 tbspn cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp  bicarbonate of powder
a pinch of salt
4 eggs
225g Caster sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract

Method
Melt the chocolate, milk and soft brown sugar in a bowl in the microwave until smooth and combined. Stir in the sunflower oil, it looks quite separated at this point. Put the flour, cocoa, bicarb and baking powder in a large mixing bowl. Add the wet ingredients to it and beat the mixture until well blended, I use my freestanding mixer for this, but this could be done with a electric whisk or by hand. Add the beaten eggs a bit at a time and the caster sugar. You will end up with quite a smooth and runny batter. Pour the batter in to a round 9" wide and quite deep cake tin, lined with greaseproof paper and bake at 160C for one hour. A skewer should come out clean after this time, put back in if it still seems a bit soft. Leave the cake to cool for 10 mins in the tin then remove to a baking tray.

Icing
110g butter, mixed with 4 tbspns water melted in the microwave mixed with 285g of icing sugar and 28g cocoa. Mix this together until blended, smooth and not too runny. Add more icing Sugar if it's too runny. Slice the cooled cake in half then spread the icing in the midde of the cake then on top. Decorate as desired.