The Spoon of Joy turns one: Chocolate Fudge Cake

Today indeed is a grand day and this post out of the ordinary!  Today I celebrate a breathtaking milestone I started a year ago,  The Spoon of Joy!  Ahem! A year older, a year completed,  and so much has changed !  This inspires me to go back and time and reflect on the wonderful experience of this year with The Spoon of Joy!  I started writing this blog as an expression of my love for cooking. The relationship with Spoon of Joy changed the way I looked at life, my passion of cooking reached to a different altar altogether. The responses that came from friends and people unknown in form of comments, and emails made these wonderful people part of my life. And it wasn’t long when I realized that The Spoon of Joy metamorphosed from being a blog to a diary of a my travelling experiences inspiring me to look more for new recipes, foods from different cultures, meeting of new people and friends who taught me different ways to cook and a deeper insight to their recipes being passed down from generations.  This blog has become my dream which I live every day, and this helps me find motivation every day and everywhere I go to look for a new recipe, new way of presenting the recipe to the world! Talking about motivation, this blog gave me a new motivation for photographing food and presenting the beauty of food in its different stages, this helped me welcomed my new Canon Digital SLR not long go on my birthday, and my very dear friends Farzana and Mehedi made  use of my new camera to take pictures of this awesome chocolate fudge cake to celebrate the birthday of my baby turned one, and wish for many more celebrations to come! And a special thanks to all my friends and well-wishers who made this dream come true!  Happy First Birthday Spoon of Joy! 

225 gms of unsalted butter          

½  tsp vanilla extract

225 gms of plain chocolate,

55 gms muscavado sugar,

5 tbsp evaporated milk

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas mark 4. Grease and line the bases of two 8 inch sandwich tins

In the mean time prepare for the icing by putting the chocolate, sugar, butter and the evaporated milk and the vanilla extract in a heave based saucepan. On a low heat, keep stirring until melted, transfer to a bowl, let it cool. Cover with a cling film and chill in the refrigerator for an hour. The icing should have become spreadable by then.

In another mixing bowl, take the butter and sugar and beat with an electric beater  until light and fluffy. Gradually add in the eggs, then the golden syrup and the ground almonds.  Take another bowl, sift in the flour, salt and cocoa powder and fold this in the bowl with the egg mixture. If the batter looks too thick add in some water to make the batter of dropping consistency.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tins and bake for 30 minutes, check with the tooth pick test.

Let the cakes cool in the tin for few minutes, then transfer to the wire racks to cool completely. Sandwich the cakes with the help of the icing, spread the remaining icing on the top of the cake with the help of the spatula knife, swirling it to give a frosted appearance.