The Chocolate Cake That Wasn't ...

I made this one for Christmas last year, i.e just over a monce ago. It wasn't strictly described as a Christmas cake on the website I used for reference, but it was supposed to turn out all moist and chocolatey if done right. That seemed to be good enough for Sushi and me!

Well, we thought we did everything right - had this ready reference hard copy of the recipe, we measured out all the ingredients in the exact quantities mentioned. We even had a calculator handy, so we could divide the numbers mentioned in there, to scale down the size of the cake. Things seemed to be pretty encouraging up until that point, we got ready what looked like the perfect cake mix. Picture below -

As our confidence levels grew, we deviated a bit from the written (in hard copy) instructions, but not too much - we changed the shape and size of the baking utensil. We went with the above glass bowl, what was mentioned I believe was something more rectangular and ceramic. But that ought not to have made such a difference ? Right?

Anyway, the other glitch was that we don't have an oven at this point of time, so we used our trusty microwave. It has served us well.... We did pre-heat it and everything though. To cut a long story short, the cake refused to bake right. Convection, microwave, microwave + grill, just grill, pre-programmed cake setting, nothing made an impression. The cake acquired a hard exterior, broke up like it thought it was supposed to be doing an impression of an erupting volcano. Here's what I mean -

It sat in the microwave for all of an hour, but then I tried the "Knife Test" on it (Stick knife in cake, If Knife = wet, cake not baked, else if knife = dry, cake baked end if). This here knife that you see on the side, comes out clean on the sides, but is all sloshed in chocolate when stuck in the core.

Any ideas?? Anyone?