Moist and rich chocolate cake

Did I mention how much I love making desserts, sweets and cakes? I was organising my journal entries and realised that I have more sweet recipes than savoury ones.. I believe part of my enjoyment in making them is seeing people enjoy eating them - I find my reward for my efforts there. Pity I don't enjoy eating these rich desserts as much as I love making them.

This is quite a rich chocolate cake, however it is not as rich as the Death by Chocolate cake I made before. I used the standard recipe my mum use for her delicious butter cake, but I used additional flour, some cocoa powder and dark chocolate to make it a moist chocolate cake. I also made ganache to ice the cake. I brought this cake to a friend's engagement bbq, and it was quite well received. In fact, Rob enjoyed the cake so much that he personally went around to pass out the cake =)

A couple of notes:
1) Apparently the butter should not be melted as it changes the texture of the cake. Just leave it out of the fridge at room temperature for a few hours.
2) I didn't use cooking chocolate - I used the ones that you eat. I compared the ingredients of the Nestle cooking chocolate and their 'candy' variety (those plain blocks) and there isn't much (if any) difference between the two, except that the cooking chocolate is more pricey for some reason).
3) Also, it's better to melt the chocolate in a double boiler, or if you don't have one, improvise like I do and use a bowl (with a high-ish neck to prevent steam getting in the bowl) in a pot of simmering water. Just make sure you don't get any water/steam/moisture of any sort in the chocolate otherwise it will seize and render the chocolate quite unusable.
4) Apparently due to the high sugar content of ganache, you don't need to refrigerate it. Which is a plus because storing the cake in the fridge will dry the cake. So it's best to store the cake outside the fridge and invert a large bowl to cover it. Unless of course, if you have great discipline and the cake isn't finished off within the next couple of days, then it's best to store in the fridge.

Ingredients
¾ cup (170 g) butter, softened at room temperature
¾ cup (170 g) sugar
3 eggs
2 cups (230 g) plain flour
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 tablespoons water or milk (my mum's recipe doesn't call for this, but I used more flour than she does)
50g dark chocolate, melted

Method
Preheat oven to 180degC. Grease a cake tin (I used a 20cm springform round tin) - I never understood why some recipe say to line AND grease the cake tin - a bit of an unnecessary overkill I think. Cream the butter with the sugar then add the vanilla extract and one egg at a time, mixing well between each egg. Sift in the flour, baking powder, cocoa powder and mix well. If the mixture needs more moisture, add some hot water or milk. Stir in the melted chocolate, and pour into the cake tin. Bake in the oven until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean (around 40-50minutes). Cool the cake, remove the crusted surface and frost/ice with the ganache.

Ganache
Heat 1/3 cup of cream (I used whipping cream) in a saucepan but don't let it boil. In the meantime, grate or finely chop 120g dark chocolate. Remove cream from the heat and stir in the grated/chopped until smooth then let it cool before frosting the cake. To test that it will thicken sufficiently, transfer a tbs of the frosting into a chilled cup and place in the fridge for 15 minutes. If it is too thin, add some more melted chocolate. It it is too thick, add a few tablespoons of cream, stir until smooth, and test it again.