Red wine cake

Why am I doing this? 5:30 in the morning (or shall I say in the night) and I'm busy in the kitchen baking cake. Because I want to have cake, when visitors are coming today? That would be a possible answer. But I could buy a cake. That would be an option. Nevertheless, I'm baking myself. You know what you get! Usually! At least you know what's in it. Homemade you get things you very likely, in fact, for sure will not get in the shop.
Here once again I found myself digging through my old papers and I came across the cookbook: Now I help myself! In fact it's not a cookbook in this kind of sense. It is a collection of recipes from some old friends. Back then, when I left the secure shelter of my family home to go out and have a place on my own, these friends made this collection of recipes to help me survive. Some of these recipes are hand-written, other typed with a typewriter, photocopied, or printed from the computer. Honestly, it was very nice of them to provide me with this, but I haven't been through most of the recipes. Already at that time I had been into cooking and knew a few things, that would already sufficed to aid in my survival.
Now here is the recipe I picked from this collection: Red wine cake.

First of all I like to give you the recipe as it was in there. It was written by typewriter with some hand-written notes ("Super easy!", "Nathan has chosen this as his favourite recipe ..."). I only made slight adjustments in accord with what I had at home.


Ingredients
250 g butter
250 g sugar
4 eggs
4 teaspoons of vanilla sugar

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of cocoa powder

100 g of chocolate cut into small pieces

125 ml red wine

400 g flour

2 teaspoon of baking powder

Instructions
Bake for one hour at 175°C.

That was it. No instructions. As the handwritten note said, this recipe is to be classed as "super easy!", that should be sufficient to get satisfying results.
Right, you could like cream the sugar with the butter, separate the egg white from the yolks, mix in all the ingredients apart from the egg whites, be happy, then continue with beating the egg whites and folding them in, grease a springform tin, put it in the oven and ... here you are. Have I forgotten something? You could put some icing sugar on top later.
Since this recipe was for a poor and helpless let to survive in the great, mean, dangerous world, you should manage to reproduce this cake.
Have fun!

Here are some other cakes I did lately. I would say "cakes around the world", but the number of countries represented by these is quite limited, so not really too much around the world.

Blue berry cake

Berry tart

Caramel apple cake

Chocolate tart

Far Breton

Lemon cake

Pear ricotta cake

Lime cream cheese cake (or maybe Caipirinha cake)

Pistachio cake

So far about baking and cakes. Five more days and it is May the 19th - time for Food Revolution Day. Make sure you enjoy that day with some real food. I will. Later I tell you more about it, afterwards. Only four days, though, and it is time for food travel for me. More about this later as well.
I hope you enjoyed the red wine cake. What, though, you don't have an open bottle of red wine at hand? I guess you need to substitute or open one and enjoy the remaining red wine at another occasion.