I’ve been working on the chocolate magic cake, the one where you mix the ingredients together and in one bake, a magical transformation happens during the baking and the cake mix changes into three layers, the middle is a rich chocolate custard. The only thing is, I haven’t got it quite right and it takes a lot of ingredients not to mention washing up involved.
So, whilst the effort will pay off eventually, what I wanted to do yesterday was to make something seriously simple and easy, but also rich, indulgent and fill the house with a chocolatey aroma that’s warm and comforting.
Looking through all the cookery books, I found a recipe that fulfilled all the requirements, everything in a store cupboard, and a seriously easy, no effort bake.
Hidden within Nigella’s feast recipe for Halloween called Ghoul-Graveyard cake, was the chocolate cake ingredients, all of which are in my store cupboard and fridge:
Ingredients:
250ml milk
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar (white distilled vinegar will work too)
225g plain flour
50g coca
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
200g caster sugar/soft brown sugar
110g softened butter
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of real vanilla extract
To make the Chocolate Loaf Cake:
Put all the ingredients, except for the milk and vinegar in a food processor and blitz into a soft dough.
Scrape the sides down and pour in the milk and vinegar slowly (milk and vinegar should be combined in a small jug – you’ll find that as the vinegar is added the milk starts to curdle, this is ok and I’d say looks like and has a similar consistency to buttermilk).
Once all the ingredients are combined pour into a cake tin. The instructions were for a 26 cm spring form cake tin.
As I didn’t have one to hand and I didn’t want to grease the square cake tin I had – this would have required effort…. I used a loaf tin with a paper case lining. No effort again, just poured the cake mix into the loaf tin.
In a preheated oven, I left the tin to bake for 45 mins on gas mark 3 (170c)
That’s all there is to making this cake. Once cooled, dust with some icing sugar. It doesn’t need much as it’s the richness of the chocolate thats lovely about this cake recipe.
The only thing left to do is, serve it, with a mug of hot chocolate to make it a proper guilt trip of chocolatey indulgence.
