Chilli Chocolate Fudge Cake

It seems only right that my celebration of Chocolate Week should contain my submission to We Should Cocoa, the challenge designed to celebrate chocolate in all ways throughout the year. This time, Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog is hosting and she has chosen chilli as the ingredient to pair with chocolate for this month's challenge.

A tricky one, I'm sure you'll agree, but instead of remembering things I'd like it to, my brain is littered with the sparks associated with recipes I've seen and been meaning to make for ages. So when the chilli challenge  was announced, this recipe from Dan Lepard immediately popped it's head up and demanded attention. Apparently my memory is pretty long for cake related issues, as this recipe was first posted in September 2008.

I made only minor changes to the recipe - I substituted crunchy peanut butter for the tahini, as I don't have tahini and I do have peanut butter and wanted to use it up. I used the smaller amount of chilli flakes (1/4tsp). I also used the stipulated 8" square tin rather than the pictured round one!!!

The recipe was a little involved to make, with a few different steps, but none of them were difficult. I think the cake was probably done at 1 hour, but I left mine a further 10 minutes, which may have been a mistake...

The chilli heat was a slow build, you couldn't really tell it was there at first, but there was a chilli aftertaste. The predominant taste was of peanuts, and the contrasting lime icing was really delicious and refreshing, I wish there had been more icing to cake - perhaps baking in a shallower tin would help here. The cake was very crumbly in texture, and I don't know whether this is how it was meant to be, or whether I'd overbaked it, but it was tricky to pick up and eat! It was really well received at work, and I had a recipe request (with the requestee being directed to the Guardian website!) too!

All in all, not my favourite chocolate cake, but definitely an interesting and different kind of chocolate cake for the more adventurous baker/eater of chocolate cakes!

Chocolate Crackles

When I was contemplating what I could bake to celebrate Chocolate Week, I thought that really, baking seven cakes was a bit much, and I'd be better to break it up a bit with some biscuits! I've wanted to make chocolate crackles for ages now, I just love the way they look, and always wondered if I'd be able to get as good a result as those printed in the books.

I've actually got a couple of books with these little biscuits in them - Easy Baking (by Linda Collister) and the Great British Bake Off second series book, which also contains them (also by Linda Collister) but with slightly different proportions in the recipe, it must be a relatively forgiving recipe. I decided to follow the recipe in the GBBO book. I'm really enjoying using this book, and fully recommend it!

Chocolate Crackles
Ingredients
100g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
100g unsalted butter, softened
150g light muscovado sugar
1 large free range egg, at room temp
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
175g self raising flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
icing sugar to roll - about 3-4 tbsp
(unusually for me, I was using unsalted butter, and my egg was at room temp!)

Method

- Melt the chocolate, either over hot water, or in the microwave if you prefer (I didn't).

- Stir in the butter and leave to melt for a bit. When completely melted, add the sugar, stir in and leave a couple of minutes to cool.

- Beat the egg and vanilla (in a large bowl) just to combine then add the chocolate/butter/sugar mixture to this.

- Sift the flour and bicarb onto the wet mixture (this is why I used a big bowl) and mix well to combine. The mixture will be pretty wet, and you're not going to fancy making biscuits out of it, but don't panic! Cover with clingfilm and allow to chill for at least one hour (I ended up leaving mine much longer - about half a day!)

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- Preheat the oven to 200C/Gas 6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. I only baked one tray at a time.

- Divide the dough into 30 equal pieces (mine weren't so equal, and I got 32 eventually) and roll into balls.

- Just before baking, roll the balls in the icing sugar. I found that if I did them in advance the icing sugar dissolved, so do them just before you bake them.

- Bake for 10-12 minutes (12 minutes will give a crisper biscuit and is what I went for).

- Remove from the oven and after a minute on the baking tray, move to wire racks to allow them to cool completely.

Notes

- My biscuits didn't really spread that much.

- The first batch I left as balls, the second and third I helped along a bit by squashing them gently, just a little. I think this helped and would do it again.

- Don't be tempted to over-bake. I left the first batch in for 15 minutes and the icing sugar started to catch and burn. Boo!

- I also reduced the oven temperature just a little to about Gas 5 1/2 for the second and third batches.

These were really good. The outsides were really crispy from the icing sugar crust, and very sweet and then the inside was still nice and soft, but also a little crumbly. I had thought they would be somehow more chocolatey, but they were delicious as they were, especially with a cup of tea. And I'm pleased to say that they came out looking every bit as good as the photograph in the book - always a sign of a good recipe, when your results look like the authors results!

Stay tuned for more Chocolate Week goodies.....





Ginger chocolate chip pound cake

My celebration of Chocolate Week continutes with another great chocolate flavour combination... ginger and chocolate are such a winning combination and I don't use them together nearly often enough. I can't quite think to myself why I haven't got round to making this recipe before now, given my love of this combination. It was originally published in April and can be found on the Guardian website here.

A cake with a very attractive crack as it baked! I had to make one minor modification (extra plain flour instead of ground almonds) and give my ingredients below:

Ginger chocolate chip pound cake
Ingredients
100g unsalted butter, melted
200g caster sugar
125g full-fat cream cheese
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp ground ginger
75g chopped glacé ginger
125g dark chocolate, chopped into small chunks
250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and line the sides of a 2lb loaf tin with baking parchment.

- Cream the butter and caster sugar until smooth. While the butter is still warm, beat in the cream cheese thoroughly and then add the eggs one at a time, continuing to beat until the mixture is light.

- Add the vanilla, ginger (ground and glace) and chocolate pieces, beating well to combine.

- Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and stir through the mixture until no flour remains.

- Pour/spoon into the prepared tin and bake for 60-70 minutes until a cake tester inserted comes out clean, remembering that hitting a piece of chocolate will never give you a clean tester!

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

I left mine in for longer than specified until it seemed done. Sorry about the unhelpful vagueness of this comment - I must have lost track of how long the cake spent in the oven altogether.

I wanted to like this more than I actually did. Don't misunderstand me, I really did like the cake, but perhaps I had set my expectations unrealistically high, or was expecting a different kind of cake. I think that this was an excellent example of a pound cake - the crumb was soft and moist and the crust a little dry and crumbly, just as I was expecting. I think perhaps my current ground ginger is a bit under-powered because I didn't really get much ginger flavour from the cake mixture itself, although biting into bits of crystallised stem ginger was lovely and, well, biting into bits of chocolate is always lovely!

Some parts of it were absolutely stuffed full of chocolate and ginger, but in the interests of fairness, a good proportion of the loaf had more of the add-ins towards the bottom than the top. Although they didn't all sink, which is an excellent thing! A good cake, and one to make again if the occasion to use some cream cheese up arises.

Keep visiting for more Chocolate Week goodies....

Chocolate and raspberry marble cake

It's nearly here! What, I hear you cry, what is nearly here? Well, Chocolate Week of course! This annual event (this year the 10th-18th October) was established eight years ago now, and you can find out more about it here, on the Divine website. Divine have been the main sponsor for this event since the start, and there are lots of yummy chocolate ideas on their website (as you'd expect really!). There are lots of events around the country that you can find out about. I love the idea of chocolate week (as a chocoholic this should not come as a surprise to regular readers..) because it's essentially an excuse to eat as much chocolate as possible... mmmm, chocolate induced stupor coming right up.

I thought I'd have a bit of a chocolate theme on the blog this week, so this is the start, although you might want to check out the insanely, intensely chocolate-y double chocolate ricotta scones I posted last week - if I'd thought ahead I'd have saved them for this week, but wanted to share their sweet goodness with you as soon as I could.

To kick off chocolate week, I decided to make a marbled cake, just to ease us in and based it partly on this recipe by Dan Lepard for a crumble topped chocolate marble cake, and also on the availability of ingredients in my fridge (yes, raspberries that I wanted to use up!) I decided to combine a few ideas and came up with this original. (As an aside, said chocolate crumble cake is pictured in Dan's new book, Short and Sweet and looks absolutely delicious. The chocolate crumble on top looks fab, I must do that some time!)

Chocolate and raspberry marble cake
Ingredients
175g butter, softened
175g caster sugar
3 large eggs
200g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
For the chocolate layer:
2 scant tbsp cocoa powder
1 scant tbsp hot water
100g chocolate (70% cocoa solids), chopped
For the raspberry layer:
70g fresh (or frozen, defrosted) raspberries, crushed
1-2 tbsp plain flour

Method

- Grease and line an 8" square tin with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C.

- Cream the butter until light and fluffy.

- Add the eggs one at a time, along with about 25g flour if the mixture looks as though it'll curdle.

- Sift in the remaining flour and the baking powder. Mix well.

- Transfer half of the mixture to a smaller bowl containing the crushed raspberries. Mix well, and then add the extra flour and mix this in. My mixture curdled a little.

- Add the cocoa powder and hot water and mix well, then add the chopped chocolate and mix in.

- Dollop alternate blobs of batter into the prepared tin and when all used up, swirl with the handle of a spoon to marble.

- Bake for 40-45 minutes (I think, can't quite remember the exact timings) until well risen and a cake tester/cocktail stick inserted comes out clean.

- Leave to cool on a wire rack.

I was pleased with the way this cake worked. The marbling was pretty good throughout the cake - always difficult to tell when the cake goes into the oven whether you've over or undermixed the colours. The chopped chocolate in the chocolate portion stayed well suspended and was a really tasty addition. I was really surprised by the flavour of the raspberry portion - I had expected this to be pretty non-existent if I'm honest, but even though I only used 70g raspberries in it, the flavour was definintely raspberry! Admittedly, the colour wasn't pink, but then I didn't really expect it to be. If you want a pink colour, add food colouring!

Keep an eye out for more chocolate goodies this chocolate week.... all will be revealed in good time.

Chocolate ricotta scones

I knew it was only a matter of time before I turned my new favourite scone recipe into a chocolate version, especially after seeing Choclette's lovely scones during international scone week. That time came when I realised I needed to use up some ricotta cheese sitting quietly in my fridge (undemanding stuff, that ricotta) before it expired.

As with lots of the best things in life, these are quick and easy to make, but more satisfying than you would think. The original recipe can be found here on the BBC Good Food website.

Double chocolate ricotta scones
Ingredients
175g ricotta cheese
100g caster sugar
175g self raising flour
25g cocoa powder
50g butter
60g dark chocolate, chopped fairly small (I used Lindt 85% and broke each 10g piece into 16.....)
1-2tbsp milk (or water)
demerara sugar, to sprinkle

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas 6/200C. Line a baking sheet with parchment.

- Mix the ricotta with half of the caster sugar. Set aside.

- Rub the butter into the flour and cocoa powder until like fine breadcrumbs. Add the remaining sugar.

- Spoon in the ricotta mixture and mix until well combined, adding the chopped chocolate part way through. Add a tbsp or so of milk or water to get a soft but not sticky dough.

- Tip onto the work surface (I worked on a piece of parchment to stop it sticking), knead very briefly, and shape into a round 4cm 11/2 inches deep. Mark into 6 or 8 sections, as desired.

- Sprinkle with demerara sugar and bake for 20-25 minutes.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

I definitely left mine in for longer because it's really difficult to tell when something brown is 'risen and golden' and think I probably overbaked it a little as it was slightly drier than the other versions I have made.

Oh so good. If you are a chocolate lover this is one for you - very, very chocolate-y with both the cocoa powder and chunks of intense 85% cocoa chocolate providing the requisite hit, these are something to be enjoyed alone - not a scone for jam or clotted cream, but one to be savoured as it is. Bliss. I love them.