Rich Chocolate Cake

I woke up this morning and felt like chocolate – now I don’t have a really sweet tooth so I figured this was a call to action!

There was my baking chocolate, but nothing baked ready to eat. This situation was beginning to feel like a complaint from the ‘chief tester’ last weekend – “there’s no baking so I had to eat the ingredients”  🙂

I figured the next best thing was to rustle up a Chocolate Cake?

Ingredients:

• 150g butter
• 1 cup hot water
• 1 tsp instant coffee
• 3/4 cup dark chocolate, chopped
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla essence/paste
• 2 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• Icing Sugar

Melt the butter in a large pot – remove from the heat, and then stir in the hot water, coffee and chocolate.

Mix until the chocolate melts. Add the sugar, and stir until dissolved.

Add eggs and vanilla essence/paste and beat well with a wooden spoon until all of the ingredients are well mixed.

Sift all of the dry ingredients into the pot and mix well. (The batter will be quite thin but don’t worry – that’s how it should be!)

Pour the mixture into your prepared 20cm cake tin. Bake at 180°c for 50minutes, or until the cake ‘springs’ back when your lightly touch it.

Leave in the tin for 10minutes before turning cake onto a cooling rack.

When cold, dust with sifted icing sugar or ice with Ganache if you are feeling fancy 🙂

Ganache – break 125 g cooking chocolate into a small pot, adding 2 tsp butter heat gently, stirring untitled chocolate has melted. Remove from the heat & add 1/4 cup cream. Mix well. Refrigerate until firm enough to pipe.  (You can flavour Ganache with a tsp of liqueur for an adult option)

Well this cake sure did take care of my chocolate craving…and with just two of us at home, will do the job all week I suspect! 

Chocolate cake makes a good dessert too…gently warm in the microwave, and add ice-cream or a velvety caramel sauce and you are onto a winner.

Especially if you have children with ‘hollow legs’ – my  mother-in-law always had bread & butter on the table and I wondered why until I had two sons. Mine preferred something sweet however, and a lesson learnt during the teen years was how to turn a 2-day old cake into something special with a sauce and some ice-cream!

Happy baking xx