Cherry Chocolate Crispy Cakes

This is cheating really, but too good not to mention in my chocolate CakeQuest. The night before the Jam’s birthday party I decided that there wasn’t enough cake for all the guests so I raided the cupboards and came up with nearly all the ingredients for cornflake crispies: butter, golden syrup, cornflakes rice crispies and milk chocolate Green & Black’s dark chocolate with cherries. Somehow the posh chocolate transformed them from a sickly sweet treat for the kids to a bittersweet fruity bite for grown-up chocoholics. I didn’t even get a photo…

Ease: 10/10 (no cook baking!)

Appearance: 5/10 (they look like rice crispies covered in chocolate)

Taste: 9/10 (nothing fancy, but very moreish!)

Overall: 8/10

Chocolate Cake #2 – Fruity!

Half gone already!

CakeQuest continued this week with an adaptation of Rachel Allen’s Dutch Apple Cake. She suggests substituting the apple slices for pear and raspberry but I decided to go one step further and make a chocolate version (after all, pear / raspberry and chocolate are both great combinations). I omitted the cinnamon and substituted 15g of flour for cocoa – simple but successful.

The cake was very moist (much more than the unadulterated apple version); it was more of a pudding than a proper sponge cake, though this may be because I misread the instructions and cooked it for 20 minutes at the higher temperature then 15 minutes at the lower. I don’t think it’ll last longer than a couple of days without becoming soggy, but I don’t think it’ll last longer than a couple of days anyway! Dinner guests agreed it was a great success so I’ll be repeating my mistake next time.

Ease: 9/10 (perhaps because the Jam decided not to help this time!)

Appearance: 7/10

(particularly pretty served upside down, as in the photo)

Taste: 8/10

Overall: 8/10

Chocolate Cake #1 – Stripy!

A while ago (before I got buried in mountains of exam scripts) I wrote about my favourite recipes and how I needed to find a selection of good chocolate cake recipes. There should be at least five, maybe in different categories (Indulgent, Fruity, Spicy etc) because a rank order is just not necessary (or even possible) when it comes to chocolate.

The Jam and I started to compile the shortlist yesterday with Lorraine Pascale’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Zebra Cake, which was surprisingly easy to do even with a young assistant. I did the vanilla bits and the Jam did the chocolate “by self!”  It cracked a little in the oven, which was a shame as the appearance of this cake is part of the fun, but it still looked fabulous when cut. The sponge is moist and lighter than most chocolate cakes with an appreciable tang from the orange zest. An excellent start!

Ease: 8/10

Appearance: 6/10

(for ours but in a cooler oven could be 9/10 next time)

Taste: 9/10

Overall: 7.5/10

Cake Quest

Like most people, I have favourite recipes that I use again and again. There are millions of variations for simple things such as cupcakes and cookies, some brilliant and some disappointing, so it’s good to have a few that have been tried and tested (and tasted and treasured). Here’s my essential selection:

1. Carrot Cake – one of the first recipes I tried from Cupcakes from The Primrose Bakery (it’s actually a recipe for carrot cupcakes, but that’s even better because you can ice them as you need them which avoids the ‘fridge to keep the icing fresh or tin to keep the cake fresh’ dilemma).
2. Chocolate Chip Cookies – Lorraine Pascale (either the white choc chip ones in Home Cooking Made Easy or the double chocolate version in Baking Made Easy).
3. Fruitcake – Mary Berry’s marmalade traybake in her Baking Bible.
4. Vanilla Cupcakes – after much testing, this one goes to The Hummingbird Bakery (the one in Cake Days is the best).
5. Victoria Sponge – Nigella (the one in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, which has a fantastic lemon and mascarpone variation).

Mine probably won’t look like this. (Image from Wikipedia.)

Shockingly, while writing this I realised that I don’t have a ‘go to’ recipe for chocolate cake (probably because I’m the only one in the family who really likes it). This must be rectified asap…but how can I can I choose just one favourite chocolate cake? It clearly needs its own top 5! Let the search begin….