My Best Chocolate Cake

I have tried a great number of different chocolate cake recipes over the years.
Since I started baking when I was about 10 years old, that's a lot of chocolate cakes.
Of all the cakes I experimented with, this is the best one.

It was originally a stout beer chocolate cake recipe.
The original recipe was perfectly good, but it went through several metamorphosis and has settled into what it is today a few years back.

It no longer uses stout beer at all, but molasses, which to my mind has similar dark and somewhat bitter quality.   It also uses less sugar.


1 tbs molasses
110ml hot water
125g butter
35g good quality cocoa (unsweetened)
150g brown sugar
70ml sourcream
1 egg
140g self raising flour


Combine molasses, hot water, butter, cocoa and brown sugar in a saucepan and stir over low to medium heat till butter has melted and cocoa dissolved.

Add sour cream and stir.  When it has cooled down a little, add an egg and stir.

Mix 1/3 of the liquid with the flour, then mix the rest in.  You need to do it this way as the batter is very runny.

Bake in a 20cm cake tin in a moderate oven.  How long it takes to bake depends on the oven.  Anything between 20~50 minutes really.  Shake the cake tin and if it does not wobble on top, insert a bamboo stick and see if it comes out clean.