traditional chocolate cake

why?
Well... the year is coming to an end, and there are many ingredients in my kitchen cabinet that I hope to use up and not to have to dump them away! I decided that yesterday was a good day to use up half of my cocoa powder and most of my icing sugar. I searched allrecipes.com for a recipe that would use these 2 ingredients A LOT and this came up!

success?
This is the first cake I made that I managed to replicate the "cake-frosting-cake" layers technique and was glad that the cake turned out moist and spongy but not too light as the chiffon cake texture might not hold all that frosting. The taste wasn't overly sweet because I reduced the amount of sugar from the original recipe and added coffee to give the cake a tinge of bitterness.

failure?
There was also too much frosting, I guess I could have not slapped on so much frosting, but I was trying to not waste anything! When LR ate the cake, he had to remove the frosting and he commented it looked like cement! Grrrrr...... and I told him to be grateful he had cake! Haha.... Somehow the taste wasn't as refined as I would like for it to be, perhaps it could be the use of vegetable oil instead of butter in the recipe? If I were to bake this cake again, I might use melted butter instead. The recipe was called Extreme Chocolate Cake, but I didn't think anything extreme about it, to me it was a good and safe cake to make for birthdays and would suit most people's palate. Hence, I would rename this recipe to Traditional Chocolate Cake instead.

Traditional Chocolate Cake (9 inch cake pan x 2)

INGREDIENTS

350 g white sugar
220 g all-purpose flour
65 g unsweetened cocoa powder
1.5 tsp baking soda
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
235 ml milk
120 ml vegetable oil
2 tsp ml vanilla extract
235 ml boiling water with 1 sachet of 3 in 1 coffee added


170 g butter
130 g unsweetened cocoa powder
640 g confectioners' sugar
155 ml milk
5 ml vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 175 degrees C. Grease and flour two 9 inch cake pans.
2. Use the first set of ingredients to room temperature.
   
3. In a medium bowl, stir together the sugar, flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
   
4. Add the eggs, milk, oil and vanilla, mix for 3 minutes with an electric mixer.
   
5. Stir in the boiling water and coffee by hand.
   
6. Pour evenly into the two prepared pans.
7. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes in the preheated oven, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
   
8. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pans to cool completely.
9. To make the frosting, use the second set of ingredients.
   
10. Cream butter until light and fluffy. Stir in the cocoa and confectioners' sugar alternately with the milk and vanilla. Beat to a spreading consistency.
11. Split the layers of cooled cake horizontally, cover the top of each layer with frosting, then stack them onto a serving plate. Frost the outside of the cake.