The quest for the ultimate chocolate cake
Discussion
Traditional chocolate cake is too sweet and insufficiently chocolatey for my and my wife's taste. We've recently renewed our interest in home baking and have started experimenting with recipes in an attempt to make something that matches our aspirations. We didn't fancy a gooey gateau, finding such stuff to be a bit sickly.
We started with a Nigella Lawson recipe that has a special ingredient, marmalade. Quite a lot of it too. So we tried out the recipe but instead of the 150g of caster sugar specified we used 100g of dark muscovado. The result was very promising and very pleasant too. The flavour was darkly chocolatey and lingered pleasantly on the palate. The marmalade provided the bitterness needed to offset the sweetness, and there was also the sharp and delicious tang of the orange which blended perfectly with the chocolate and widened the flavour spectrum.
The next week we tried it again but also included some Grand Marnier and a drop or two of orange oil. We also iced it with a layer of melted dark chocolate. Still very nice but we figured the texture could do with improving and decided we needed a filling. Traditional filling for this sort of cake would be a chocolate flavoured buttercream but we didn't fancy that. My wife suggested mascarpone. So we got 250g of the 30% less fat type and mixed it with 150g of melted dark chocolate, not knowing what to expect.
Turned out to be perfect, just enough creaminess to give a scrummy mouthfeel without getting sickly . Will post a photo tomorrow if we haven't eaten it all before then.
We started with a Nigella Lawson recipe that has a special ingredient, marmalade. Quite a lot of it too. So we tried out the recipe but instead of the 150g of caster sugar specified we used 100g of dark muscovado. The result was very promising and very pleasant too. The flavour was darkly chocolatey and lingered pleasantly on the palate. The marmalade provided the bitterness needed to offset the sweetness, and there was also the sharp and delicious tang of the orange which blended perfectly with the chocolate and widened the flavour spectrum.
The next week we tried it again but also included some Grand Marnier and a drop or two of orange oil. We also iced it with a layer of melted dark chocolate. Still very nice but we figured the texture could do with improving and decided we needed a filling. Traditional filling for this sort of cake would be a chocolate flavoured buttercream but we didn't fancy that. My wife suggested mascarpone. So we got 250g of the 30% less fat type and mixed it with 150g of melted dark chocolate, not knowing what to expect.
Turned out to be perfect, just enough creaminess to give a scrummy mouthfeel without getting sickly . Will post a photo tomorrow if we haven't eaten it all before then.
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