Flop-Proof-And-Proved Chocolate Cake!

Not a very elegant title I know, and we all have our own "flop-proof" chocolate cake recipe, but since I also didn't have any butter in the house yesterday and needed something to serve guests, this one really did come up trumps! I have no idea where it came from as it's hand-written in my own recipe book!

Ingredients
250ml boiling water;     125ml oil (sunflower, vegetable I don't know whether it'll make a difference!);     125ml cocoa powder;     375ml sugar;     1ml salt (is there a 1ml measure available?! A dash is good enough!);     3 eggs;     15ml baking powder;     5ml vanilla essence;     450ml plain flour.

Method
1.  Mix boiling water, oil and cocoa and bring back to the boil, then leave to cool.
2.  Beat the sugar and eggs with a hand mixer to make it nice and light.
3.  Add the flour, baking powder and salt to the sugar mixture, fold in and mix well.
4.  Add the essence to the water-oil-cocoa mix then add this to the flour mixture - it doesn't need to be totally cold, it will have had time to cool down while you were beating eggs etc. Mix well.
5. Pour into 'something' - whether it's cup-cake cases, a round tin, two round tins, a square tin - and bake at 180C. The length of time probably depends on how deep it is - cup-cakes or one square or round tin. I did it in a 20cm square tin 8cm deep (8" square 3" deep).  The 'original' recipe says to bake for 25-30minutes. On a previous occasion I'd crossed out the 25, but this time it needed 35minutes! Also depends on your oven of course!
6.  Ice as you like! I cut the square cake into squares then dribbled plain water icing over each individual one.

Many years ago I remember reading that Peppermint Essence goes well with Chocolate Cake, and I have tried it; gives it that 'Oooh' factor!