My first Chocolate cake

This is my first blog for an food Event !!!

Also my first food blog !!!

Let me tell you how I came to know about this event...

The story starts like this, In a day most of the time I will be sitting with my Laptop (He,he,he ... i guess everyone does the same thing, either at work or at home). In particular I hunt for food blogs to try new things and surprise my Hubby in the evenings. One food blog leads me to another blog and the chain goes on and on ...

Last week when I was browsing , I was captivated by a photo of a Chocolate cake which was posted by Dhivya Kudua. And when I read the post I learnt about the cake event that she was organising to commemorate her 300th blog entry

In this great cake event I wanted to show my eggless chocolate cake which i did first in my life. Also this was my first cake.

This cake we did it for our friend's Birthday to surprise him at night. This friend of ours was spending his first birthday away from his home and I just wanted to ensure he did not miss the cakes and the celebrations. Slowly I started to do this at 8.00 pm.

Cake recipe I followed from my Favorite site 'Chef in you'

Here comes the Ingredients :

*** 1-1/2 cup All purpose flour
*** 3 tsp cocoa powder
*** 1 tsp baking soda
*** 1/2 can condensed milk
*** 1/2 cup butter
*** 1 tsp vanilla essence
*** 1/2 cup walnuts
*** 1/2 cup raisins

In original recipe DK has used soda bi carbonate, I didn't use it (Didn't have at that time LOL!!!), Trust me still my cake tasted good :))

Here comes the method :

*** Preheat the oven 350°F

*** Sift the flour, coco powder, and baking soda.
My God, I will never forget this, since I didn't had a big sieve, I used the one which I bought to filter the tea and it took me an hour to complete the sifting.

*** Melt the butter and cool it to room temperature

*** Add the sugar, condensed milk, Vanilla essence, walnuts and Raisins to the melted butter.

*** Mix all the dry ingredients separately.

*** Combine both dry ingredients to the wet one
I did it very slowly and in batches using my normal plastic spoon. Untill there is no lumps.

*** Pour it to an 9″ greased pan.

*** Bake it for 20 - 25 min or or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.
I used the knife to check and made big dent in the middle of the cake (Ha,ha,ha...) and later covered it with the Chocolate frosting.

*** Before tasting or frosting the cake, cool it on wire rack.

For decorations I used the ready made Pillsbury chocolate frosting and vanilla frosting. Since I was very new to baking and was much confused with the terms 'Icing' and 'frosting'. After a lot of frantic googling - this one was outsourced to my husband - I still do not know :-)

Tick,tick,tick...The time 11.00 pm and it was just an hour before our friend gets older by an year, I finally decided what to do. First one layer I did Vanilla frosting and levelled the surface. Kept in fridge for 20 minutes, then applied one more layer of Chocolate.

Exactly at 12 'o clock I finished my first cake, All My Hubby's friend gathered for surprise party and tasted the cake. Got a good appreciation from all...