Today, January 27th, is Chocolate Cake Day.

Chocolate cake itself is a rather vague term, covering a wide range of cakes. At its most basic, a chocolate cake is a cake that contains chocolate or cocoa powder as a flavouring.

Once the process of mechanically extracting cacao fat from cacao liquor was perfected, chocolate stopped being an expensive luxury and starting being an inexpensive snack, making it much cheaper to make chocolate cake.

Chocolate cakes can range from the simplest chocolate sponges - often topped with chocolate frosting - to such things as Black Forest gâteau, which is made from layers of chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries between the layers and topped with more whipped cream, cherries and chocolate shavings.

Image: Morguefile