chocolate – Lessons To Date

Pinot Noir Chocolate Cake – yes really!

Does your letterbox get flooded with loads of retail brochures, and real estate flyers? Ours too – and after the long weekend of Queens Birthday there were even more than normal! As an aside I did wonder how the retailers would feel if they knew that the flyers arrived ‘after’ the weekend when the sales were advertised for as I browsed through them 🙂

In amongst the paper recycling were the normal Real Estate advertising ‘ I’ve sold more houses in your street’ flyers which I generally give no more than a cursory glance too, however I did spy something a little different from the norm – a recipe.

Clever agent I thought – as I unfolded the whole flyer to see what else I might find amongst the housing news. “Housing market flat – Auckland values down – restricted lending by banks” – nothing new in there. So back to the recipe I went.

Pinot Noir Chocolate Cake

Ingredients

90 grams softened butter
170 grams brown sugar
60 grams caster sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup Pinot Noir
3/4 cup cherries
150 grams plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1/2 cup dark chocolate, chopped

Preheat the oven to 180°c – and line a 20cm cake tin with baking paper.

Cream the butter and two sugars together until light and fluffy.

Beat in the eggs one at a time, and then add the vanilla – ( I like to use vanilla paste however essence is just fine).

Mix in the red wine gently, and then sift into the mixer all of the dry ingredients. Add the chopped chocolate in next. Do not over mix, as you fold in the cherries.

Bake for 30 minutes, or until your cake skewer is clean from mix when you test the cake.

Now the Real Estate agent calls this a ‘lavish cake, velvety and moist’ and she was not wrong. The Pinot Noir compliments the cherries with complex fruit undertones – goodness now I sound like a wine connoisseur not a humble home baker 🙂

Serve with an unsweetened thick yoghurt to cut through the sweetness; trust me you’ll need it if you ice the cake like I did.

A nice hot black coffee or if you feel like continuing the indulgence, a glass of that Pinot Noir will be a lovely accompaniment in front of a roaring fire, and a candle-lit room….oops sorry day dreaming just a little!

Oh, and the moral of the story? read those pesky flyers from cover to cover as you never know what useful information or recipe may be lurking amongst the propaganda 🙂

Happy baking xx

How to satisfy Chocolate cravings – bake a cake!

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!