Moist chocolate cake with honey glaze

Moist rich chocolate cake. I'm always up for trying a new chocolate cake recipe, and this one from Dan Lepard is a little different in technique to a standard sponge cake (as is often the case with his recipes, usually for good reason!). I was reminded of it as I was tidying up in my kitchen (something which should happen rather more often than it actually does) and came across the tapioca flour that I had bought especially for this recipe. I thought I'd better give it a try, and I'm really glad that I did.

I didn't want to make the chocolate treacle frosting that Dan recommends, and as it was late in the evening when I finally got round to frosting the cake, I decided to make a simpler icing. I'd been flicking through 'Feast' by Nigella Lawson, as you do, and the delicious picture of the honey chocolate cake with its shiny glaze jumped out at me, so I decided to try that instead. Yum! The honey flavour does come through quite strongly, so use a honey you like! And when she suggests sifting the icing sugar, it's probably worth it. I didn't bother and had to beat my mixture for ages and ages to try and get all the little lumps of icing sugar out, and I think a few still escaped. Will I ever learn???

I made a half recipe and baked it in an 8" sandwich tin, which was perfect. I don't think that I'd bake a double recipe in one tin, mine rose quite a lot, and I'm not sure how it would turn out. But double the mixture and bake in two tins to make a much taller, more decadent cake. The original recipe is here.

Moist Rich Chocolate Cake
140g caster sugar
90g plain flour
25g tapioca starch or flour
38g cocoa powder
scant tsp baking powder
scant 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
190ml boiling milk
50g dark 70% chocolate, chopped fine
1 large egg
40ml sunflower oil
20g treacle (original recipe says 25g, but I couldn't measure out 12.5g, it just wasn't going to happen!)
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

- Heat the oven to 180C/Gas 4 and line the base of a 20cm diameter shallow sandwich tin with non-stick baking parchment.

- Weigh and sift all of the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl.

- In another bowl, melt the chocolate in the boiling milk, leave to cool for 15 minutes, then beat in the eggs, oil, treacle and vanilla.

- Whisk the liquid into the dry ingredients for 30 seconds until smooth, and pour the batter into the tin.
- Bake for 35-40 minutes for a shallow tin, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

When cool, pour over the chocolate honey frosting/glaze:

Ingredients

(again I used a half recipe, which made loads and loads for this size of cake - you could reheat leftovers and pour over vanilla ice-cream - yum!)

30ml water

60ml runny honey

90g dark chocolate

40g icing sugar

Method

- Bring the water and honey to the boil in a small pan, then turn off the heat nad add the finely chopped chocolate, allowing it to melt in the hot liquid.

- Leave it for a few minutes, then whisk/stir together. Sieve in the icing sugar (see note above!) and whisk again until smooth.

- Pour the icing over the cake.

The glaze stays tacky for ages, so leave plenty of time before you want to cut the cake (I left mine overnight). You can find the original recipe (and lovely picture) on the newly revamped and very attractive (naturally!) Nigella.com website, here.

A final picture of the whole cake. I wasn't that bothered about making it look beautiful - rather more interested in the taste to be honest! You can see that the cake cracked on baking, but since the original picture also sported an excellent fissure I was quite pleased that my cake was mimicking its original!

The cake and icing were both really lovely - the cake was really moist and the icing stayed soft and luscious, but set just enough to be able to be cut (albeit with much wiping of the knife inbetween slices).

Many thanks are due to both Dan and Nigella for this rather scrummy chocolate cake. Need I say that this was snapped up rather quickly by my colleagues - very positive feedback!!!