Chocolate Chip Cake

Well, the reason for making this one was really simple. I fancied chocolate cake. What more can I say? I wanted a simple, yet delicious cake that would be good to eat as a dessert, and was inspired by this chocolate chip cake that I saw on the Caked Crusader's blog. The CC does good work and the CCBF is a lucky man!!! I have to admit that the CC's cake looks far more spectacular than mine - it's two layers high, it's covered in a rather delicious looking Swiss meringue buttercream. However, I cannot realistically eat an entire two layer cake with frosting on my own. So the decoration (which is fab on the original!) had to go.


You can see how lovely and moist this cake is, and you can just see the little chunks of chocolate peeking out from the middle of the cake. I did take a picture when they were still all melty and delicious, but the light wasn't good enough. Pity, the melt-y bits looked really yummy!


I'd seen (somewhere, on somebody's undoubtably lovely blog - must learn how to bookmark things I've seen) a cake using custard powder as a replacement for some of the flour, and decided to give it a go. I have to admit that this wasn't really the recipe to try it with - the cocoa/chocolate flavour is quite intense and so any subtle flavour from the custard powder was always destined to be lost. I didn't really notice any difference in texture, but I'm going to try again in a cake where I'll be able to see the difference.

Chocolate Chip Cake
Ingredients
110g butter, softened
110g caster sugar
2 large eggs
70g self raising flour
20g custard powder
25g cocoa powder
50g 70% chocolate, chopped fairly small (or use chocolate chips)

Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and base line an 8"/20cm sandwich cake tin. I think I used a deep, loose bottomed tin, because that's what came to hand. I didn't lose any mixture though, so it worked quite well!
- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Gradually add the eggs, flour, custard powder and cocoa powder until well combined and of dropping consistency. If the mixture is a bit stiff, add a couple of tablespoons of milk to make it slacker.
- Spoon into the prepared tin and level off.
- Place in the preheated oven and bake for 30-35 minutes until the sponge is springy to touch and a skewer inserted comes out clean (but watch out for hitting pockets of melted chocolate - they'll never come out clean ;-))
- Remove from oven and when cool enough to handle, turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

I took some of this into work, where it was well received. My current colleagues aren't very vocal about cakes, which is somewhat disappointing!!! but I assume it was well received, because I took it into work the same day as this chocolate chunk banana slice, and both of them had disappeared by the end of the day. It isn't a very big department!!!

I served my pieces with strawberries, which was a really lovely combination. The dark chocolate cake, which was quite intense due to the cocoa powder and dark, bitter chocolate that I used contrasted perfectly with the sweet, juicy strawberries. A drizzle of cream or a dollop of creme fraiche would have been a great accompaniment, but I didn't have any available. Next time.