Chocolate Cake

So I'm entering into (Not Quite) Nigella's baking/chocolate cake competition:) Not because I'm a stellar baker, but because droolworthy recipes should really be shared:)

This is my favourite cake recipe at the moment. It’s moist and fudgy, with a dark rich chocolate flavour and is covered with mouth-watering ganache. The recipe can be found here from the Epicurious website and is designed to produce a double layered cake but I usually make two separate cakes (I get twice the amount of icing/decorating fun lol).

Coffee and chocolate mixture

At first I was a bit apprehensive about the coffee content in the recipe, but you really can’t taste it at all in the end product, it simply acts to bring out the flavour of the chocolate:)

Dry Mixture

Wet Mixture

The addition of buttermilk helps with keeping the cake moist, almost fudgy. Another great thing about this recipe for me is that the fat content is attributed to oil and not butter. Firstly, it’s better for our hearts, and secondly, it adds to the softer crumb and overall texture of the cake, which would otherwise be a little harder if butter were used.

Into the oven

I use two 20cm round cake tins and the mixture almost comes to the top of them.

Ready for icing

At this point, the cakes have been baked for just over an hour and have been left to cool completely. The recipe says at this stage you can wrap it up in cling wrap to keep overnight if you want to ice it later, but I never do – by this stage, I’m hungry for cake! Being the time efficient person I am, the ganache has already been made and ready for spreading:)

Chocolate for the icing

Ganache

The ganache is easy to make, simply heating up the cream, sugar and glucose syrup and then adding chocolate. The recipe also asks for some butter to be melted in afterwards, but I always forget and never seem to notice anything wrong

The first one was sprinkled with cachous. I’m sure other people will think of more creative and exciting ways to decorate a cake, but I love these silver balls – so pretty!

The second cake was topped with little coloured chocolate pieces, what better to dress a chocolate cake than...more chocolate!

Goodness inside

This is a great recipe, being easy to make and utterly delicious. I’ve considered cutting the recipe in half (to only make 1 singular cake), but having 1.5 eggs in a recipe is awkward and there’s nothing like the comfort of knowing there is More Cake, even if we finish this one lol.
I highly recommend this recipe - give it a go:)

Orange Almond Cake

Herr Moutarde rarely makes baking requests, but recently, he asked if I could make him this almond cake. The recipe is from Jane Lawson’s Cocina Nueva, The New Spanish Kitchen, which darling H gave me as a birthday present a couple of years back.

I still haven’t cooked my way through the entire book yet, but this cake is really yummy. When I first got the book I would make it quite regularly, but haven’t done so in a while….

The cake is deliciously moist, sweet with the orange permeating through. In the book, it also gives the recipe for a citrus ice cream to serve, which looks great in the photo, but I’ve never bothered to make lol.

Butter mixture

The butter (yes, I used Real Butter), was beaten with the orange and lemon zest with quite a lot of icing sugar and touch of vanilla. Using icing sugar made this step soo much quicker than with normal sugar!

Adding egg yolks

Finely ground almonds

I toasted the almonds lightly and finely ground them. I’ve recently gotten a new food processor so any reason to use it is fine by me! These almonds were added to the butter mixture along with a touch of milk.

Egg whites at firm peak

I really appreciate all recipes which manage to incorporate the egg yolks AND whites:) There’s no waste and I don’t have to think about what I’m going to do with the unused part lol.

Combining egg whites with almond mixture

After everything was combined, I put the mixture into a rectangular cake tin and baked it in the oven for about an hour.

This cake can be served warm – which I love, and I recommend serving it in smallish portions as it’s quite dense lol.

Dusted with more of that icing sugar!

Like I said, I haven’t managed to get through most of the recipes in this book, but if this anything to go by – I’m definitely looking forward to it!