How decadent! I am not a huge chocolate cake fan I usually go for vanilla or fruity but some times you just need that melt in the mouth chocolate cake! YUMMY!

Hey you happy Birthday! Yeah for making our own birthday cake!

The first chocolate cake I mastered was from this very fine cookbook. It was one where you poured boiling hot water over the chocolate to melt it and to this day I think that's brilliant.

I hope your birthday was as rich and satisfying as this cake.

Someone needs some ice cream to go with that delectable-looking cake, don't you think?

if you like really rich chocolatety desserts try the raspberry cream cheese brownies posted by my friend canadian baker. they are lovely!
www.canadianbaker.blogspot.com

This is exactly how I make my chocolate mousse (sans flour of course!)... sounds amazing! Definitely will have to try

I tried this recipe this last weekend for a party of 10 people and everybody was deligthed. To my taste, it was a little dry (perhaps it was a little overcooked since I left the cake 8 minutes longer than recommended...). However I served the cake with vanilla ice cream and yogurth-blueberry - strawberry ice cream (both home made) and the result was great....
I needed as much as 4 tablespoons of water to disolve the chocolate, and used 70% bittersweet chocolate.... Very tasty.... The addition of orange peel is a must. Next time I´ll try adding some walnuts to the batter.....

This cake is excellent! I made it for my mom's birthday because she is a chocolate lover. I felt it needed a little something extra (I must be crazy!) so I made a simple chocolate sauce to go over each piece. Sinful!

Thanks for posting the recipe.

Terribly confused about adding water and chocolate!

My good friend Robin and I rolled up our sleeves on Saturday night and set out with all the correct ingredients and good chocolate. We recoiled at the idea of adding water to chocolate and watched in horror as the smooth, shiny, rich and velvety chocolate instantly turned into the consistency and matte-finish of chocolate cake frosting when we added our 3 tbs water. What happened?

The rest of the cake was so difficult (how can anyone delicately fold thick and lumpy chocolate masses into beautiful stiff egg whites)! We still baked it and it was still rich and delicious, but we know that its intended consistency was vastly different from the thick and dense cake we baked.

Can someone please let us know what went wrong? Were we alone in this experience?

Why not just add milk? It's a lot easier to handle and the water makes the chocolate shrink anyway. I just made a marble cheesecake and had to do the same. Water + Hot chocolate = Shrinkage. Milk + Hot chocolate = delicious.

I think it's a bit risky adding water to chocolate. It just might work and it just might not. I make a very similar cake to this recipe (without so many eggs--yikes) and to get perfectly melted chocolate every time, I first melt the butter in the microwave, then add the chocolate, stir and let sit for a few minutes until the chocolate melts completely. Chocolate has a very low melting temperature and I have used this method successfully dozens of times. It also eliminates the annoying melting-over-simmering-water step.

I was so excited when I saw this recipe, and tried it last weekend for a friend's birthday. My cake spilled all over my oven, and took about 2 hours to bake. It tasted great and had a nice consistency, but the whole baking of it was just plain weird. Thoughts?

The only thing I can think of on the cooking time is that if you opened the oven too often to check, that would slow down the cooking time. As for the spillage, perhaps the batter was just a little too close to the rim? ~Elise