Pam's Chocolate Cake

I'm looking for a fudgy chocolate cake recipe that I can fall back on for special occasions. There are already lots and lots of chocolate cake recipes on this blog (see the index at the side - not yet completed for chocolate but getting there), but thankfully, this doesn't stop me wanting to try new ones! There are just so many delicious looking recipes out there for me to try and this is just one of them.

The recipe is published in Pam Corbin's book 'Cakes'. This is one of the River Cottage series of cookery handbooks, and is full of seriously enticing recipes. It has also got some lovely tips in the getting started chapter on ingredients and then a chapter on filling, topping and decorating too, and is generally a good book to read. Well, if you like reading about cake as much as I do that is.

This cake is entitled simply 'Chocolate Cake' but the delicious looking photo makes the cake rather more enticing that the title would have you believe. I made a couple of small changes and a couple of minor errors in the method too, so this is an adapted version of the cake in the book. I decided to make a half recipe as suggested in the variations at the end of the recipe and bake in the suggested 7"/18cm deep tin (this is another lovely feature of the book - there are often ways you can change the recipe slightly to give a recipe another flavour combo, or serve it in a different way - can you tell I'm a fan?!)

Chocolate Cake (my ingredients)
Ingredients
25g cocoa powder
150g plain flour
1/2tsp baking powder
1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
90g butter (mine was salted)
50g light brown sugar
50g caster sugar
2 eggs
75g half fat creme fraiche
few tbsp milk (probably about 3)

The original recipe calls for a proportion of ground almonds in the cake, along with either buttermilk or a mixture of milk and yogurt instead of the half fat creme fraiche - guess what I had in the fridge! I made a slight mistake with the method too. I started by creaming the butter and sugar, all well and good, and then added the other ingredients as instructed. When I was pretty much finished I looked at the batter, which was a lovely golden colour and remembered I was supposed to be making chocolate cake. Hmmm! The cocoa powder is mixed with boiling water to a paste and then set aside to cool. Guess who forgot to add it until the last minute? It was supposed to go in after the butter and sugar. Ooops, but no harm done. My cake, in an 18cm tin (I used my new pushpan) was baked in around 40-45 minutes.

I sort of wish I hadn't added the milk, as it curdled the mixture slightly, with being so cold from the fridge and being added at the last minute. Thankfully this didn't seem to matter when it came to eating the cake.

There is a suggested chocolate fudge icing for the cake, but as I ran out of time to make this, I decided to go the simple route and simply split and fill my cake with black cherry jam. As a slight aside, I'm glad it's not just me that has problems with fruity jams with bits in them. Many recipes tell you to allow the jam to cool for a period of time before jarring, to allow the fruit to remain evenly distributed through the whole jar. The makers of Waitrose's Black Cherry conserve hadn't heard this trick and pretty much all of the cherry pieces were in the top third, used for these jammy muffins. So it was effectively cherry jelly that I spread in the middle of my cake. No less delicious for that though!

It was a lovely, soft moist cake. Nice and chocolate-y but not overwhelmingly so. I wonder if adding melted chocolate to the recipe would improve the depth of chocolate flavour. I think I would describe this as an excellent afternoon tea chocolate cake - not too rich and not particularly fudgy or gooey but a good light, moist cake. It was lovely with jam, but would be equally delicious with a more decadent gooey icing.