Mini chocolate fudge cakes

Winter seems to be approaching and there are very few scarier things for a Spanish student living in London... You know, the idea of being cold, rainy, cloudy and maybe even snowy... it's not really what you're used to. And when the idea of winter approaching comes to your mind, the only solution you can find is baking. Chocolate and sweet in general is the best solution to problems: a slice of cake will always cheer you up!

I therefore decided to experiment a little. I hadn't done chocolate fudge cake before (how could I not? It's amaaaazing) so I thought Thursday afternoon was a great time for it. I bought a pack of Devil's Food Cake Mix - I don't usually use these sorts of packs when baking but everyone recommends them so I thought I'd try it and I'd make the fudge myself (although I also bought the fudge, just in case my experiment didn't go as planned). Luckily, I got the perfect texture for the fudge, which made me very happy, I must admit.

I'll introduce you to Miss Amazingly-Delicious-Mini-Chocolate-Cake.

Now that you've seen it, it's probably time I tell you how I did it - yes, I know, I didn't do much but still... I want to tell you.

First of all, you buy the packet - kind of obvious but nevermind, if I didn't write these things I would have nothing to say because it really was very easy to make. Then, you preheat your oven to 180ºC. You have to mix the powder that comes in the box with:

-  90 ml vegetable oil (about 6 tbsp)

- 3 eggs

- 250 ml water

And since I felt like I had to do something, I added a tbsp of cocoa powder but you can do whatever you want. I feel like I should've added pecan nuts, but I'll leave that for next time.

The icing:

- 200g 85% chocolate bar

- 40g butter

- Lots of icing sugar (many many tsp)

- 2 tbsp cocoa powder

Now, to be perfectly honest with you, I didn't follow a recipe. Icing usually contains cocoa powder, butter, icing sugar and a very tiny little bit of milk. In this case, I used an 85% chocolate bar. I melted the chocolate together with the butter, then mixed this with the cocoa powder and slowly mixed it with the sugar (just put enought to get the right texture). You can add a tsp of milk if you see it's not mixing properly.

I used these cute little moulds to make my mini cakes.

So what you need to do is fill them to half their depth with batter and put them in the oven for about 15mins but this depends on the size of your mould. Mine were very shallow and as you can see, quite small. They are meant to be used for pie-baking but I haven't tried that yet.

Once they're done - which you should test by sticking a wooden stick in the middle and taking it out perfectly clean - you take them out of the oven and start with the icing.

You cover the batter that's in one of the moulds with icing (on the sides and on top) and then put the next part of the cake on top. Repeat the same procedure and you'll get something like the next picture. 

The batter was enough to make 3 small fudge cakes and a normal loaf of chocolate cake (no fudge in it,  for a change).

As you can see, it's really easy so you should try it if you feel like having some chocolate!

Hope you enjoy your cakes.

Regina xxx.