The cake on the left, a slice of it on the right

I’m extremely, unapologetically fussy about baking recipes. After all, they take far more time and often even more money than their store-bought counterparts.

Still, Nigella Lawson’s advice has previously proved helpful for my crumble, carrot cake, and scones. So, when I got a hankering for chocolate cake last Sunday, I knew who to hand over my hard-won trust to.

Her recipe for an “old-fashioned chocolate cake” is, she writes, the “quintessential” one, supposedly “luscious and mood-enhancingly good”.

Great, I thought. I wasn’t in the mood to bake a cake at all, but I was definitely craving eating one – so I figured I’d put Nigella’s claim, that the recipe is “scarcely harder than making one out of cake-mix” to the test.

The cake batter in a blender (left) and in cake tins (right)

My mood........

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