Mississippi Chocolate Cake

I have no idea why this cake was named Mississippi cake, but it is a cake I often come back to. Back in school I used to make it whenever we had a cake sale to raise money for something.
Now that I cook more I often like to try new recipes, make fancier cakes than this chocolate cake. But today I came back to the recipe from my childhood because I needed a simple quick but chocolaty and delicious cake for a friend's birthday. You see, this is the ideal procrastination cake.
I should be working on a seminar paper right now. And I am. But I also want to make a birthday cake for this friend, because everyone should have a birthday cake on their birthday. This is where this cake comes in. As you will see in the directions, it is a add-and-stir cake. One bowl, add, then stir. Repeat. Simple like that. And then you leave it in the oven for quite some time, and end up with a great, portable chocolaty cake. And while the cake bakes you have more than an hour to work on your seminar paper.



Mississippi Chocolate Cake
barely adapted and translated from the Betty Bossi book: Kuchen, Cakes und Torten

175g butter, softened
250g sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
1 pinch of salt
4 eggs
50g unsweetened chocolate powder
50g sweetened chocolate powder
250g all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp instant coffee powder
2 tbsp water
1dl milk

a few chocolate candy bar (I have difficulty finding the right English word for what I mean, just look for chocolate bars that have a softer center (think praline) and some nuts in it) about 150g total, cut up into largish chunks

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C. Line a cake pan with parchment paper.
As I mentioned above: Add and stir.
In a large mixing bowl, add the butter and beat until soft. Then add the sugar and beat until soft and uniform. Add the vanilla sugar, salt and the eggs. Beat until smooth. Add the chocolate powders, flour and baking powder, mix until well incorporated. Mix the coffee powder with the water, add diluted coffee and milk to the batter and mix until incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chunks.
Pour batter in the cake pan and put it in the oven. Bake for about 80 minutes (the original recipe says 65, but that never worked for me. Maybe check out how it looks after 65 minutes and decide yourself if it needs longer in the oven. Not all ovens are created equal!)