#chocolatecake

Charmalade Cake

Cakes

Hey Joe

There’s a letter I’ve been working on following on from clown school but it needs a bit more time! For now, I hope you like this cake. I like it A LOT. Funny, just as I’m writing this, you’ve sent me text.

Me and a friend were sat on a bench by a train track talking about ice cream flavours. He could choose chocolate but then he wouldn’t get caramel. I could choose caramel, and I wouldn’t get the chocolate. Big stuff, I know. It struck me that the worry of the flavour we might have missed out on by making a choice was equal to, if not greater than, the pleasure we’d get from eating the flavour we did choose.

The Charmalade Cake – two layers of soft chocolate cake and salty chocolate mousse, with marmalade, white chocolate water ganache, and raspberries – is a cake about choice.

The idea was to make a cake which required me to make a series of decisions, meaning the cake had to have several components to it. And I could only make each decision in turn, like making a move to get to the next level of a game. In other words, I wasn’t allowed to have a plan, so I had to choose what I wanted in real-time. That’s how the charmalade cake was made.

I’m aware that at this moment, being able to make any choice has been put in perspective by the war happening now in Palestine. Right now, especially, it’s a privilege to make choices. This is so sad. I hope that whoever is reading this might hold that thought in their mind for a bit, like I have the last week while writing this to you. There isn’t an acceptable way to move on to the recipe now, it just will be as clunky as this.

Ingredients

Cake

  • 150g Dark Chocolate
  • 150g Boiling Water
  • 300g Sugar
  • 225g Salted Butter, softened
  • 3 Medium Eggs
  • 150g Yoghurt, get one with a 7 or 8 percent fat content. I use plain Greek-style natural yoghurt
  • 225g Plain Flour
  • 3/4 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
  • 75g Cocoa Powder

Salty Chocolate Mousse

  • 50g Dark Chocolate, roughly chopped
  • 370g Double Cream
  • 200g Cream Cheese
  • 1tsp (4g) Salt
  • 50g Icing Sugar

To Assemble

  • A couple of tablespoons of marmalade, I used thick-cut marmalade made by my mum and from my Oma’s recipe.

White Chocolate Water Ganache

  • 85g White Chocolate
  • 8g Golden Syrup
  • 20g Boiling water straight from the kettle

To Finish

  • Raspberries

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 / 160 fan. Grease and line two 8 inch / 20cm round cake tins.

Chop up the dark chocolate roughly and add it to a bowl you can cover. To this bowl add the boiling water then cover with a lid (I used a plate) and set aside. In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until fluffed up slightly. Add one egg at a time, beating into the butter mixture until fully combined before adding the next. Remove the lid from the chocolate which should now be melted and liquid. Stir to ensure the chocolate is fully melted then mix into the butter mixture. The batter will be quite liquid now, that’s fine. Add the yoghurt, flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder to the bowl. Give everything a good mix to combine, this is easiest with electric beaters. Divide the batter evenly between the two tins and bake for 35mins or until a knife inserted into the cake comes out with a few moist crumbs. These cakes are likely to sink a bit in the middle, but that’s ok.

Now make the mousse. Start by making a chocolate ganache by heating 70g of the cream in a small saucepan until just simmering at the sides and pouring it over the dark chocolate in a small bowl. Cover the bowl with a plate and set aside Add the cream cheese, salt and icing sugar to a large bowl and beat with an electric whisk for about a minute. The mixture will initially go very loose and then stiffen. At this stage, mix in 100g of the double cream to slacken the mixture again and then the remaining 200g. Beat the mixture until soft peaks. All these steps just make sure the mixture is stable and doesn’t end up as a soup. Stir your ganache to make sure the chocolate is all melted and use a spatula to quickly fold through the cream mixture. Just be aware that the ganache will stiffen when it hits the cold cream, that’s why you are folding it through quickly.

Next, the cake is ready to be layered. Spread about a third of the chocolate mousse on the first cake layer. Add the marmalade to the middle of the first layer and use the back of a spoon to gently spread it out a little, making sure to leave a generous border with no marmalade (it will get spread to the edges with the weight of the second cake). Place the second cake on top and cover the top and sides with the rest of the mousse. Put the whole cake in the fridge to firm up while you make the white chocolate ganache. You could leave the cake in the fridge over night at this point.

Lastly, make the ganache. Roughly chop the white chocolate and add that to a large metal or glace bowl with the golden syrup and water. Place the bowl over a bain marie. Mix with a spatula until all the chocolate has melted. Top the cake with raspberries and finish by pouring over the ganache wherever you choose (preferably not on the floor).

Have a good sunday. Caitlin xx

Chocolate Orange Cake with Chocolate Fudge Buttercrem. They Will Never Know It’s Dairy Free.

Cakes

Hi Joe

This cake is peng and also dairy free. This is the best chocolate cake you will ever eat and the only chocolate cake I will ever make. Mmm bold. A dark, moist chocolate cake flecked with orange zest, sandwiched together with an orange cream cheese buttercream and slathered in a chocolate mousse like fudge icing. You can’t always have your cake and eat it. But sometimes you can haha. So when the opportunity comes along you have to jump on it.

you can get one of these aprons fron my giftshop located in the bread aisle of your local Sainsbury’s

I’ve actually been drafting this post for about 6 weeks, I’ve gone through 29 different versions of this intro. Not because the cake is hard to write about (it’s actually very easy to write about how good this cake is) but because of the reason that I made the cake. That was harder to write about. I’ve realised there are some things that I don’t want to write about on here, and that day is one of them. Joe, you know why, and that’s good enough for me. So… cake.

Me and Sue spent a day making this. It deffo didn’t have to take that long but we really drew out the process. We adapted the cake from thetasteofkosher.com and the fudge frosting from loveandoliveoil.com. The actual cake part of this is honestly the best chocolate cake in the world, so moist and dark and deep, lots of layers to the flavour. You could eat the chocolate fudge buttercream straight out of the bowl with a large spoon, the trick is cream cheese. It does great things.

This is turning into a bit of a confessional post. The white buttercream in the centre is a tub of Betty Crocker’s ‘Cream Cheese Style Icing’, mixed with some orange zest and salt. We needed it to be dairy free and we didn’t want to make a liquid, yellowy icing that you get when you use df butter and cream cheese. Cheers Betty, you’re a legend.

Note on Cake Tins. This recipe will give you a 3-layer chocolate cake, using 3 7inch round cake tins. You can also bake this in 2 9inch round tins, just increase the baking time by about 10 mins. If you only have one tin, like we did, you can bake the cake in batches. As one cake comes out, remove from the tin straight away, wipe the tin, grease it again and pour the next round of batter in. Honestly, with this batter there is no difference at all in the finished cakes if it has waited out for a bit before being baked.

Ingredients

For the Chocolate Cake

  • 255g / 2 cups plain flour
  • 395g / 2 cups caster sugar
  • 75g / 3/4 cup cocoa powder
  • 2 tsp cornflour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 470ml / 2 cups hot black coffee – just use cheap instant coffee here
  • 120ml / 1/2 cup vegetable or sunflower oil
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • Zest of 2 oranges

For the Orange Cream Cheese Buttercream

  • 400g/1 tub Betty Crocker Cream Cheese Style Icing – achieved by walking to your local supermarket
  • Zest of 1 orange
  • 1/2 tsp salt

For the Chocolate Fudge Buttercream. This icing sets in about 20 mins so you can’t make it in advance. Only start this once you have sandwiched the cake layers together.

  • 450g / 2 cups dairy free butter, softened – or regular butter
  • 300g / 2 cups + 1 tbsp icing sugar
  • 150g / 1 1/4 cups + 2 tbsp cocoa powder
  • 100g / 1/4 cup + 3 tbsp dairy free cream cheese – or regular cream cheese
  • 100g / 1/4 cup + 3 tbsp hot water
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 285g dark chocolate

Method

Pre heat the oven to 180 / 160 fan oven. Grease cake tins and sprinkle lightly with flour, banging the sides of the tin to remove any excess.

In a large bowl, mix all dry ingredients; flour, sugar, cocoa powder, cornflour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Set this aside.

Make the coffee. To 470mls water you want about 3 teaspoons instant coffee.

Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and add in all the wet ingredients; coffee, oil, eggs, vanilla extract and orange zest.

Pour the batter into the prepared tins and bake for 25 mins or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. If you want even layers, weigh out the cake batter, you want roughly 450g in each tin. Once out of the oven allow cakes to cool completely before icing.

Prepared the orange cream cheese buttercream by mixing all ingredients in a bowl.

Place the first cake layer on the place/board/cake stand you want to serve the final cake on. Spread an even layer of the orange buttercream over the top of the cake making sure it reaches the edges of the cake. Place the next cake layer on top and repeat. If you want to, fill in any holes and smooth out any bumps in the sides of the cake with any extra buttercream. Place the cake in the fridge to firm up while you make the fudge buttercream.

For the chocolate fudge buttercream, use an electric whisk to cream the butter for 4 mins. You want a really fluffy consistency, I promise the time is worth it. If you don’t have an electric whisk, go at it with a wooden spoon.

Sift in the icing sugar and coco powder. Add in the cream cheese, hot water, vanilla extract and salt. Mix everything to combine.

Chop up the chocolate and melt it. I give the chocolate 15 second bursts in the microwave, stirring in between so it doesn’t burn. When this happens, the chocolate goes lumpy 😦 .

Pour the melted chocolate into the butter cream and beat everything together for another 2/3 mins. This whips air into the buttercream, giving it the chocolate mousse like melt in the mouth ting.

Remove the cake from the fridge and cover the whole thing in buttercream.

Now, eat the cake.

Caitlin xxx