cake! need to learn to make a cake

[Cappuccino]

I make great muffins but crap cakes. They are hard and flat.

My mother said she would make dd's birthday cake last week since I had a cold and didn't like making cakes.

Cake was not brilliant. It was kind, but not brilliant at all. Surely I can do better than that.

so I need a nice idiot's cake recipe please. Dh says that his mother used to have one and just add cocoa to make it chocolate for a change.

Please help me. My dd's deserve better than endless batches of muffins with candles precariously wobbling on top

make sure the oven is hot before putting cake in .. pre-heat for at least 5 mins

So have you made a cake yet?!

Greasing and lining - take a piece of baking paper or tear off a bit of the butter wrapping and use it to hold a knob of softish butter which you rub on the bottom and around the sides of a cake-tin. You can use margerine instead.

Line the base of the tin: place the tin on a sheet of baking paper. Mark around the outside with a pen and cut it out. That circle you put in the tin to sit on the bottom. For some recipes you then need to grease the paper once it's in the tin, i.e. rub over with butter or margerine.

havent had a go at baking yet, have had a bad headache saturday and sunday. Shall have a go either today or tomorrow depending on behaviour of children