I was really excited when Chele of Chocolate Teapot and Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog announced a new blog event involving, you've guessed it, chocolate! You can read all about the challenge here on Chele's blog. I was even more pleased to find that the added ingredient this month is raspberries. I may have mentioned (just once or twice...) that I really love raspberries - the sweet sharpness and the way they sort of pop in your mouth. Yum! Can't get enough of them, so the difficulty for this challenge was to think how to combine my two favourite ingredients. Eventually I decided to match bitter dark chocolate with the sharp sweetness of fresh raspberries. The cake I chose has quite a light sweetness; it's moist and delicious and sweet but isn't too rich or complex in flavour. I wanted the raspberry to shine as well as the chocolate and I think I achieved that with this cake recipe. 
The recipe for the cake came from an Australian Women's Weekly cookbook 'Mix' and if you go to their website and search for 'chocolate cake', I'm sure you can probably find this recipe in there somewhere, but I'm not searching through 1003 recipes, 20 at a time to find it, so I'll give it here!Chocolate Raspberry Cake
Ingredients
125g butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
275g caster sugar
2 eggs
200g self raising flour
50g cocoa powder
160ml water
fresh raspberries to sprinkle, around 200g plus more to serve
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line a 23 x 19 cm shallow tin.
- Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs, extract, flour and cocoa along with the water and beat slowly until combined.
- Increase the speed of the mixer and beat until lighter in colour and smooth.
- Pour into the tin and sprinkle over the raspberries - some will sink but some will stay up.
- Bake for around 35-45 minutes (again I've forgotten to make a note of this time) until a cake tester inserted comes out clean.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack.
Serve as you wish - as a dessert with more fresh fruit and creme fraiche or double cream, or simply on its own with a cup of coffee.
I served it with some more fresh raspberries and it would have been perfect with either a big scoop of raspberry sorbet, or a generous dollop of creme fraiche, but my planning ahead skills didn't reach to either of these accompaniments! This is quite a sweet cake on its own, but paired with the juicy tart raspberries it is perfect, the flavours compliment each other really well. I'm really looking forward to finding out what the next challenge will be!
9 comments:
Mmmmmmmmmmm - that looks like one wonderful cake! Perfect with a cuppa no doubt! Thank you very much for taking part in our first challenge ;0)
This looks very light and tasty.
Yum! Have to love those AWW recipes!
This looks great - am always keen on a chocolate cake that isn't just overwhelming - to alternate with some of the richer ones! The AWW Mix cookbook is one of my regular go-to places - everything I've tried has come out almost like the picture, and I'll definitely be adding this to the list, now, too.
Looks wonderful - I love the way your raspberries retained their shape.
Chele - my pleasure, looking forward to the next one!
Suelle - it is light, but moist too!
Celia - yep, love the AWW recipes and lots of them have a good twist that I wouldn't have considered, making them more attractive to make.
Blue Penguin - it's a good light cake, quite sweet but not too rich. Mix is such a good book!
Brownieville Girl - thanks! I was pleased that the raspberries didn't all sink!
Love the way that the raspberries stayed red in the cake rather than take on the chocolate colour - looks divine!
Looks like a lovely light sponge C and adding the raspberries was a great idea. They do go so well with chocolate. I hate to disappoint and I haven't announced it yet, but I think you'll probably want to give next month's challenge a miss.
Yummy! chocolate and raspberry always go great together.
Post a Comment