Eggless Chocolate Cake for Mr MN's birthday

So I landed upon the ultimate birthday cake recipe just in time to bake Mr MN a gorgeous chocolate cake for his birthday....

it was a small delicious eggless cake and we enjoyed every slice of it...  since my piping skills are far from perfect.... instead of the customary "Happy Birthday" icing on the cake... i scribbled a birthday note on a paper towel and perched it atop the cake. i thought the note looked more cute than lazy.  and i kind of loved the signature it lent to the cake specially with those 2 disorderly strokes that our boy drew for his dad......

anyway... so my cake of the week is the cake that i baked for Mr MN's birthday and this how the recipe went...

The recipe of the eggless chocolate cake has been adapted from Anushruti RK's Eggless Chocolate Birthday Party Cake Recipe and the decorations were inspired by K Bakes' 4 Layer Birthday Cake .

ingredients 
for the chocolate cake
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocochips
7 oz + sweetened condensed milk
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup milk
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 +1/8 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract

what i did.

• first i preheated the oven to 300 degree F and greased my 6inch round springfoam pan and lined the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. 
• next over a double boiler i melted the butter and chocochips along with the milk and condensed milk and set it aside to cool.  
• I then sifted the dry ingredients and gradually folded them into the chocolate-butter mixture after it had cooled down. 
• finally i stirred the vanilla extract into the batter, poured the batter into the prepared pan and baked it in the preheated oven for 1 hour, until a chopstick   inserted came out clean.

once baked, i kept the cake aside for 2 hours, until it cooled completely. i then proceeded to wet it with sugar syrup and frost it with cream cheese frosting.

For the sugar syrup, i added 1 tablespoon of sugar to 1/4 cup water and heated the mixture over medium flame, till the  syrup came to a boil. once the syrup cooled completely i wet the cake by spooning the sugar solution over the cake.

my cream-cheese frosting wasn't the best. i would have liked it creamer and fluffier. however for the sake of completion i type out what i did.

ingredients

8 oz cream cheese

1/4 cup butter

1 tablespoon milk

2 cups confectioners sugar

1 cup granulated sugar + 1 tablespoon cornstarch, ground together in the coffee grinder

1/4 cup cocoa powder

what i did.

over a double boiler, i melted the cream cheese and butter along with milk. then slowly whisked in the sugars.i whisked for quite sometime and then put the mixture in the refrigerator.

though i had whisked the cheese-butter-sugar mixture for sometime.. the end result was grainy. anyway, after 20 minutes or so i took out half of the cheese-sugar mixture and hand mixed the cocoa powder into it till i got a uniform brown dough. i then rolled out several small brown balls out of the cocoa dough and decorated the cake with the dough balls as shown below. just before Mr MN was going to cut the cake i decided to pour some Hershey's chocolate syrup over the edges and in the center. We thought the cake looked cuter with the flowing chocolate syrup.

though as a whole  the cake tasted great, for next time i'll probably use store bought cream-cheese frosting and choco-nuts to do the cake decorations. 

so that all about the cake... in case you are wondering if the cake was all that i made for his birthday... yes that was all. i was pretty exhausted from our Sunday outing at the zoo.. so we Mr MN generously treated us out for his birthday :) 

Talking of birthdays... do you guys like celebrating your birthdays with a lot of gust and show or you prefer to keep it personal and low. somehow these days we are preferring the toned-down-celebrations. even for our sonny's first birthday we didn't do much... had a small party over the weekend and then did little things which we thought would make his day...  

P.S : Pradyot's first birthday.