Chocolate Cake (Red devil's food cake)

Ingredients

• 260g flour (500ml)
• 60g cocoa (150ml)
• 5ml bi-carb
• 2ml salt
• 180g stork margarine
• 5 ml vanilla essence
• 320g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 125ml sour milk
• 125ml boiling water

Instructions

• Heat oven to 175 degrees C.
• Grease 2 x 20cm tins.
• Sift together dry ingredients.
• Cream marge, essence & sugar until light & fluffy.
• slowly add egg.
• Add dry ingredients alternately with sour milk.
• Pour in boiling water & mix till smooth.
• Divide between tins & bake for approx. 35 mins.
• Leave in tins for 5 mins before turning out to cool.

Whenever we had milk that had gone sour, we'd hope my mom would make this chocolate cake. It really is incredibly rich and delicious. She'd often make it in big batches for parties or church events, scaling the recipe up and baking it in an enormous roasting tray.

Stork is a South African brand of standard spreading margarine, i.e. yellow, salted margarine. I don't know why it in particular is necessary. It might be that that's just where she originally got the recipe from.

(8 September 2009) I made this the other day and it really turned out well. It's best iced all over with a chocolate butter icing, which keeps it really moist - sometimes the edges can get a little dry when baking, but the icing remoistens it all lovelily.