A giant chocolate cake

Make this vast – 30cm – chocolate cake for Jan’s birthday party, which I helped do the catering for along with Dom and Fran.

Traditionally, large-scale cakes for events tend to be fruit cakes, as they’re solid and hold their structure well. However, fruit cakes are dull, nay yucky. Thankfully, I’ve discovered this recipe, which is a variation on an original from The Moosewood Cookbook and works really well as an alternative. The original recipe is for a “Cardamon coffee cake”; I’ve already posted my metric conversion of that recipe, over here when I used it for a wedding cake that.

For Jan’s do though, as we also did a Madeira cake which Fran did a fancy icing job on, the second cake had to be something different – chocolate!

So here’s my chocolate variation recipe. This quantity will suit a cake tin 23-25cm wide.

Cake batter:
450g soft butter
400g light brown sugar
4 eggs
2 t vanilla essence
450ml sour cream
400g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
2 t baking powder
2 1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt

Nut mix
25g light brown sugar
1 t cinnamon
30g chopped walnuts
30g chopped dark chocolate

Ganache
250g dark choc (min 60% cocoa solids), chopped
250ml double cream

Preheat the oven to 150C. Grease and line the tin.

Make the nut mix by simply combining the sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and chocolate then set aside.

Make the sponge by creaming together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then the vanilla.

Sift together all the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, raising agents), then add this to the creamed mixture a bit at a time, alternating with additions of the sour cream. Fold in gently – don’t beat or over-mix. Start and end with the flour mix.

Put half of the sponge mix into the prepared tin, then sprinkle over the nut mix. Dollop the other half on top.

Bake for for one and a half hours. If your oven is cooler, it’ll take longer. Test with by inserting a skewer. Leave to cool in the tin, then turn out and cool completely.

For Jan’s cake, once cooled, I brushed it with warmed and strained apricot jam, then covered it with ganache. To make the ganache, simply heat the cream until it’s starting to simmer then pour it over the chocolate and whisk. Keep whisking until well combined. Cool until it’s nicely thickened. You might want to do this in the fridge – but don’t leave too long, or it’ll get too stiff to spread on the cake.

For the 30cm cake, I did 4x quantities, and it had to bake for an awful long time…