Chocolate and Dried Fig Cake

Another one of my 'everyday' type cake recipes. It may not be much to look at, but this is a tasty cake, and perfectly complements a cup of coffee at morning break time. This cake follows the frugal theme and is not my recipe for We Should Cocoa this month (although it was for a while... for my submission see here), making the most of Christmas left overs. Chele set the challenge for this month and specified that our chocolate submission should also include leftovers. For me this was a packet of dried figs, bought with no specific purpose in mind. I quite like dried figs, but never seem to get around to eating them, so thought that incorporating them into a chocolate cake seemed like a good way to go.

Again in the frugal vein I was using up some low fat creme fraiche that was hanging around the fridge (leftovers from the banana cake recipe) and also wanted to see how the combination of creme fraiche, a relatively lower egg content and wholemeal flour would work in combination.

This was quite a light chocolate cake - it was moist from the creme fraiche, and sank very slightly on coming out of the oven, which I guess is due to the wholemeal flour. However, it did stay level, without a dip, which is encouraging - I hate it when cakes sink after coming out of the oven, it's really depressing! So this is my recipe, created as I went along...

Fig and chocolate cake
Ingredients
120g butter, softened
120g caster sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
120g self raising wholemeal flour
100g low fat creme fraiche (I used Yeo Valley, which doesn't have any added stabilisers or other ingredients)
50g dried figs, chopped small (about 4 dried figs)
40g 70% dark chocolate, chopped small


Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and base line a shallow 8"/20cm round cake tin.
- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs, flour, cocoa powder and creme fraiche and beat again until well mixed.
- Fold through the figs and chocolate and dollop into the cake tin, spreading the mixture out.
- Bake for 35-40 minutes until springy and a cake tester comes out clean.
- Cool on a wire rack, then cut and eat.


You could also add a chocolate frosting or glaze of some sort, but I was too lazy, sorry, frugal to do this!

Some of my colleagues really enjoyed this cake, but personally it's probably not one I'll make again. I think there are probably better ways of using dried figs up, and better chocolate cake recipes but you don't know until you try do you? I'm glad that I chopped the chocolate and figs very small - they stayed suspended in the cake rather than sinking to the bottom. I was pleased with the use of wholemeal flour, I should definitely do it more! The fig flavour wasn't obvious at all until you bit into a piece of fig, unsurprising I suppose. I wonder if you could stew the figs, make a puree of them and fold this in, modifying the flour content to account for the moisture - I'm sure this would make the cake more figgy. An evolving recipe I feel....