chocolate cake recipe

Milk Chocolate Layer Cake
Milk Chocolate Layer Cake

Milk Chocolate Layer Cake excerpted from American Girl Birthday!: Cakes, Cupcakes & Specialty Treats by Weldon Owen. Photography by Nicole Hill Gerulat.

American Girl Birthday!: Cakes, Cupcakes & Specialty Treats by Weldon Owen

Make every birthday a special and delicious celebration with 50 party-ready recipes for cakes, cupcakes, and ice cream treats—plus ideas for party favours and games—from American Girl.

American Girl Birthday! features 50 sweet recipes suitable for every taste and any day of the year: fabulous cakes with fun frostings and toppings, cupcakes for every season, fruity and colourful ice pops, sundaes, and more.

Guarantee every party will be a hit with great flavour, sparkly decorations, and shareable treats. Kids can select their favourite cake or desserts for the big day, and make edible gifts for friends, all while gaining confidence and baking skills in the kitchen.

50+ RECIPES: Kids will learn to bake delicious cakes, cupcakes, ice cream treats, and more to mark and celebrate birthdays for friends and family.

EXPERT TIPS AND TRICKS: Young chefs will learn baking know-how and while mastering measuring, rolling, frosting, and decorating!

INSPIRING IMAGES: Beautiful colourful photos inspire birthday celebrations and ensure success. (more…)

Italian Christmas chocolate cake with chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts
Italian Christmas chocolate cake with chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts

Italian Christmas chocolate cake with chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts excerpted from Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to warm the soul by Diana Henry. Photography by Jason Lowe.

Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to warm the soul by Diana Henry

Diana Henry’s classic cookbook, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, is now revisited, revised, and refreshed nearly 20 years after its first publication, with a new foreword by Nigel Slater and seven new recipes.

Full of comforting delights from cold-weather climates, it features recipes gathered from Diana’s travels to Scandinavia, the French and Italian Alps, Scotland, Ireland, and New England. This is irresistible food you’ll cook over and over again.

Choose Alpine dishes of melted cheese; autumnal pies and substantial winter salads; pastries from Viennese coffee houses; festive snow biscuits and – closer to home – Diana’s definitive recipe for warming Irish stew. Of course, there is also a recipe for Sugar-on-Snow as well.

These recipes will bring warmth to your heart as well as your home. And Diana’s evocative writing about both place and food make this a book well worth reading, as well as cooking from. (more…)

The Chocolate Cake

Chocolate Cake, Canal Hosue Cook Something, Photography by Christopher Hirsheimer

Canal House’s Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hirsheimer are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks. From a lifetime of making dinner every single night, they’ve edited their experience down to the essentials: 300 simple recipes that reveal the building blocks of all good cooking guaranteed to make you a better cook. (more…)

Hazelnut Maple Chocolate Cake

Celebrated the world over for their health benefits and dynamic flavours, cultured and fermented foods are becoming everyday meal mainstays. In this extensive collection, fermentation pioneer Holly Davis shares more than 120 recipes for familiar—and lesser-known—cultured foods, including yogurt, pickles, kimchi, umeboshi, scrumpy, and more. This inspiring resource contains more than 100 photographs, plus plenty of helpful how-tos and informational charts offering guidance on incorporating fermented ingredients into the diet. With a luxe textured cover and brimming with engaging projects for cooks of all skill levels, this cookbook will be the cornerstone of every preserving kitchen. (more…)

FAMILY RECIPES: Etelka’s Cocoa Chiffon Cake

I’ve come to realize that many of us have been bequeathed a cherished family recipe. Be it simple or elaborate to prepare, it’s a dish so fiendishly delicious that it is the unmistakable star of the family meal, whether celebrating triumphs, comforting woes, or keeping family traditions alive. Withholding such heirloom recipes from the world seems almost cruel. Hence, I am championing the family recipe. I will entice the people in my universe to share favourite, nostalgia-infused family recipes, and I will give one of them centre stage in this very space on a monthly basis. In the end, we are all family, and these recipes represent the legacies of our shared passions. This month’s post is written by my good friend Eva. Enjoy!

 

Etelka’s Cocoa Chiffon Cake
By Eva

The grand finale of every family birthday dinner was THE CAKE.  My mother, Etelka, always served her signature Chocolate Chiffon Cake. Festooned with  tiny, lit candles, it was ceremoniously placed before the celebrated one as the room broke into a full-throated, charmingly off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” (We are not a family of gifted singers.)  A hasty, silent wish, a quick whoosh to blow out the candles, and then bliss ensued as the cake was sliced, handed around and savoured.

The cake’s appearance underwent a few metamorphoses over the decades.  Sometimes it was rectangular, at other times round, depending on the baking pans my mother had on hand.  The cake’s magic lies in its ratios rather than its aesthetics. It has just enough cocoa and sugar to give chocolate lovers their fix without overpowering its rich texture, a combination of moist, delicate cake and silky icing.

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