I hope you're all healthy and doing great 😁

I made a nice chocolate bundt cake for my family; also made a simple but delicious and eye catching decoration. Decoration is not my thing, but I find it relaxing anyway if it's easy 🙈 How do you like it?

My family is addicted to chocolate cakes. I made this one to share with them in my father's house.

The batter for a bundt cake is a mystery for some of my friends and relatives and more if it's chocolate.

If you're among those people who have a hard time trying to get their chocolate sponge cakes easily out of the bundt baking pan, you may want to stay some minutes with me and check out this easy recipe.

My father is very enthusiastic about cakes. He doesn't eat them often and even less if they contain sugar; so when he can finally taste a traditional cake, he really enjoys it.

When he was a child, my father had very few opportunities to enjoy sweets and snacks. Life was different; besides, he was born and raised in a rural area where you learned to work at about the same time you learned to talk and walk. So when I arrive at his house with a cake in my hands, he smiles like a child. Of course, he only eats one slice and if it's too late at night, he saves it for the next day.

As for me, I have a slight intolerance to almost anything in a cake, so most of the time I have to be satisfied with just looking at the happy faces of those who devour the cake I have been working on for hours 😐 Everything depends on the alignment of the planets that day.

This cake recipe has three parts:

1. chocolate sponge cake
2. chocolate fudge
3. decorations

Ingredients for the Cake 😋

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup melted margarine
  1 cup slightly beaten eggs
• 2 1/2 cups self-raising wheat flour
• 2/3 cups cocoa powder (unsweetened)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 4 teaspoons vanilla essence

---

Add 1/2 teaspoon salt if the margarine is unsalted.

---

Let's Make Delicious Chocolate Sponge Cake

Take two bolws out.

Mix sugar, melted margarine, and vanilla essence in one bowl. Just mix it a little. Let it rest so the sugar absorbs the liquids.

While the sugar is absorbing the liquids, sift the flour and cocoa powder in a separate bowl. Mix them dry.

Add the slightly beaten eggs into the wet mixture.

Combine the two mixtures and beat well with a paddle just until the mixture is homogeneous.

Grease well your favorite bundt cake pan. I use margarine only.

I love this mold. It has no festive patterns, but the cake is sober and elegant, even if you don't want to decorate it. This one is 18" wide.

I put margarine generously on it so I don't have to use flour, as I don't like the texture that results from this nor do I like having to cut all the crust out of the cake. I love the crust.

^{I left some of the cake batter as a base to make the cookies for the decoration.}

I baked the cake for 40 minutes at 300 °F. I used my small electric oven, with top and bottom heat.

Let's Make Some Fun Decorations 🖤🍪

I had bought these ones for decoration, but then I thought I should add more personality to the cake by adding some homemade details.

^{I paid 2.88$ per box of 10 units. I used 8: 4 wafers covered with white chocolate and 4 covered with dark chocolate. Personally, I don't love *St. Moritz*, but I thought these wafers were great and my nieces and nephews loved their flavor and crunchiness. So for this time, there was love.}

I used a handful of toasted cashews and a handful of raisins, plus 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder. I mixed all this with half the batter I left from the cake and I also added 1/2 cup of crushed chocolate cookies to add texture without having to add more flour--adding more flour to cookie batter is not a wise thing to do; the cookies turn out chewy and, well, floury.

After mixing this very well with my hands, I pressed it against the table into a heart-shaped cookie cutter.

I made three hearts and some round cookies. The rest of the batter went into a well greased mini baking pan to make a mini cake to get the crumble.

The mini cake and cookies were done in 15 minutes. I baked them at 300 °F.

I crumbled this mini cake with my hands. I really like the look it gives the decorating over the fudge.

Now I had the decorations and the cake.

It was time to make the chocolate fudge.

Ingredients for the Chocolate Fudge 😀

• 1 cup condensed milk (sweetened)
• 1 cup evaporated milk
• 1 cup milk
• 1/3 cups cocoa powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• 1/2 cup water
• 4 egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch (not in the pic; I use Alfonso Rivas
• 1 tablespoon butter

---

Add more sugar if needed.

---

Let's Make Delicious Chocolate Fudge!

Mix the milks, coca powder, an vanilla essence in a saucepan. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly over medium-low heat.

Mix the egg yolks, cornstarch, and water and add this mixture into the cooking pot. Continue cooking for another 5 minutes. Then turn off the heat and add the butter. mix well until the mixture loses some of its heat.

Start covering the cake while the fudge is still warm.

What I do to get a thick layer of chocolate fudge is to put layer upon layer. As soon as one layer cools, I put another, and another, and another.

And if you really want to continue following my amateur decorating tips, ha, ha, ha, ha, the next thing to do is to throw handfuls of crumble on the cake, so they stick on the surface.

When the cake has the appearance you want, you can start sticking the cookies.

Put each cookie in its place and put a little pressure on it. They won't move; I swear.

Arrange the wafers in the center hole so that it looks like a crown.

The cake was perfect for me. But my husband came up to me and said, "It lacks color." Ugh! Why, dear Lord?! I thought, what the heck, let's put some color on it.

I'm not very open to criticism when I've been cooking for hours and I'm finally done. You see, I might be an amateur, but I have the soul and the bad humor of a chef who charges you $50 dollars for a cookie, ha, ha, ha, ha. You better not come and bother me when I'm cooking. We witches are to be feared 😁

The cake was soft, moist and delicious. My nieces and nephews were delighted with the wafers and cookies, too; they negotiated and distributed their shares.

Oh , I got compliments on this cake, both on the looks and flavor 😁👍

My father was particularly pleased. I felt happy 🖤

All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.

Thank you so much for your visit :)

Banner by Hive account@andresromero 🖤