I had a bit of a disaster with this one, but I'm sharing it anyway because I think that it could easily be rectified. The recipe comes from the book Divine - Heavenly Chocolate Recipes with a heart by Linda Collister, which I've had for ages and not managed to bake anything from until now. I have a lot of cookbooks that I've never made anything from (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this!) so I think this cake should be the beginning of a new series on the blog, the MM posts. Marked and Made. I think I should credit Chele at Chocolate Teapot for inspiring this idea, with her Cookbook Challenge posts; I've always thought that this was a really good idea, so thanks Chele! I don't know how frequent these posts will be though....Anyway, back to the cake. I was really pleased to be able to find this cake already on the internet here, so I can share the recipe with you. I'm sure that if you've been following for a while you'll have realised that I love all things chocolate and ginger is one of my all time favorite flavours so a combination of the two in cake seemed perfect to me. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to make this recipe, as it was really good! I made one change only; to use dark rather than milk chocolate because I'm that way inclined! and I love the contrast of sweet cake and bitter chocolate (and I have loads of dark chocolate in my cupboard and no milk!). I used Divine brand chocolate and whilst searching the internet for the recipe I looked at their website and spotted lots more delicious looking recipes, as well as lots of info about Divine chocolate which I'm definitely going to be looking at in detail!
As I mentioned at the beginning though, I had a slight disaster. The recipe in my book specifies a 450g loaf tin, which I duly used. The mixture overflowed. Luckily I had thought to put a baking tray on the shelf below in the oven before I put this in (the amount of mixture in the tin made me suspicious that it wasn't all going to stay put during baking!) so I didn't get the nasty burning smell as cake mixture hits the oven floor that I hate! The cake also took longer than the specified 45-50 minutes to cook, so it's rather brown on the top. A little too brown really. However I think that next time if I use a 900g loaf tin it'll be much better - the cake will cook more quickly and not overflow. And I really hope there will be a next time, because this was one delicious cake. Large hunks of chewy crystallised ginger and big chunks of bitter chocolate made this a very more-ish cake.
You can see the waterfall effect on this side of the cake where the mixture rolled off in the oven. I bet people would pay good money to get that effect deliberately and I've managed it anyway..... or perhaps not! Anyway, make the cake, it's moist and gingery and chocolatey and good. And one of my colleagues asked for the recipe because she liked it so much. Yay!
10 comments:
C, I love the combination of chocolate and ginger! And I think the "waterfall" effect is quite in vogue! :)
On the point of reprinting recipes, you might find this article of David Lebovitz' interesting..
http://foodblogalliance.com/2009/04/recipe-attribution.php
Cheers, Celia
Hello! Sorry to hear about your slight disaster with the size of the tin - we'll have to change that! Glad you've discovered more of the recipes on our website - we've got a batch of 6 new recipes coming up soon from Divine celeb chef fans!
Rosanna from Divine Chocolate
My pleasure Hun ;0)
And what a great looking cake to start your challenge off with. Yum.
This looks a fab cake - great texture and lovely combination of flavours.
Thanks Celia, that was an interesting post. Completely co-incidently I was browsing David Lebowitz's own blog archives yesterday and came across a very similar post. On a different note, I was hoping someone would say that the waterfall effect was in vogue!
Rosanna - Thanks for the comment. I wouldn't immediately change the tin size, I'd check first! I'll be keeping an eye on the Divine website then for your new recipes!
Chele - thanks for the inspiration! I really, really need to do this challenge and use some more books!!!
Lucie - thanks!
What a delicious combination. Love the big chunks of ginger in it. Well planned with the tray to prevent the oven getting burned - I've had this happen so many times
I am a great fan of Linda Collister - she has written lots of great cookery books.
The chocolate ginger cake looks delicious.
This is one of the first cakes I made after starting my blog and I think the first cake I made from Linda's book. As I only have a 900g tin, that's what I used - sounds just as well from what you've said. I seem to remember it filled the tin up pretty much.
That looks well worth a try. I've recently done a chocolate gingerbread with ganache recipe - am yet to blog about it (always behind), but this is a link to where I found it (which is a lovely blog I've had several great recipes from)... http://www.citrusandcandy.com/2010/08/chocolate-gingerbread-bars-with-ginger.html - well worth a try, if you're keen on chocolate and ginger together.
Looks lovely, one of my favourite combinations of flavours too, I think I made some speedy muffins with these two flavours so a proper cake sounds even better.
There are differences between UK and USA copyright laws, though how that works on the internet is beyond me a bit. When I first started posting on the internet I used Dan Lepard's notes on his forum as my guide as he was writing in the UK.
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