Recipe #23: Chocolate Fudge Cake

Half the fun of going on a diet is in the chocolate gorging party you have when you lose that first kilo.

-          Me

This here is a cake for that very party. When the weighing scale reads 1kg less than last week, and you have finished jumping (and after the people downstairs have evacuated in fear of an earthquake). You say to yourself, “I did something good, now I deserve a chocolaty mouth watering prize.”

Yes, you do.

And here it is.

 

This recipe is actually very simple. But there were two ingredients that attracted me to it. One was Golden Syrup (yes, this was the reason I went on an exploration of that recipe) and second was evaporated milk.

Now, like most people I thought evaporated milk would be condensed milk, since like the ignorant boy I ‘am, I had no clue of it. Anyway, evidently one can make evaporated milk at home by simply mixing sugar, milk and little water and giving it all a whistle or two in the pressure cooker. Super simple, again it doesn’t give you the flavor of the store bought but works when you just don’t give a damn.

Or, you could be a little lazy like me and pick the can off the shelf at the store. We can’t find golden syrup, but there’s plenty of evaporated milk in India. I wonder why the partiality. Oh well.

Another interesting ingredient for me was Muscovado sugar. I had never heard of this till date. On some research it was revealed that this is a slightly unrefined form of sugar which is used for baking, it has quite a few additional minerals which add to its health qualities. In India, we have a traditional unrefined form of cane sugar called Jagggery. It is as sweet as sugar, and has a brown color. Locals from different places add different ingredients to their Jaggery to improve the quality and thus the price. Date palm sap, nuts, raisins and many others are added to improve the taste. Date palm and sugar cane mix Jaggery is supposed to be the best and the most expensive one in the market.

Anyway back to the cake at hand. The icing required Muscovado sugar, well you know me. I didn’t have the ingredient, but that wouldn’t stop me. Instead I take 20gms of Jaggery and 1 tbsp of brown sugar and grind them together. This worked just as well, since both brown sugar and Jaggery thicken when heated and give the icing the required consistency that the Muscovado sugar was supposed to give.

So this here is a fun recipe, with some new ingredients which I tried for the very first time.

Have a look and let me know how they worked for you.

Here is the Recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup melted butter.
• 2 cups caster sugar.
• 3 eggs.
• 2 cups golden syrup (find the recipe here). Please not here that the syrup I am using is my homemade solution (3 sugar : 2 water), it is not as sweet as the store bought version. So if you are using store bought golden syrup please reduce the volume here to only 3 tbps of it, unless you are using the cake to make your candy cottage in the woods.
• Fist full of almonds.
• 50gms cocoa powder.
• 2 cup flour.
• 1 tsp baking soda.
• 2 tsp baking powder.

For Icing:

• 100gms chocolate.
• 20gms Jaggery + 1 tbsp brown sugar.
• 1 tbsp caster sugar.
• 100gms butter.
• 5 tbsp evaporated milk.
• ½ tsp vanilla extract.

Directions:

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and baking powder.

In a bowl beat the butter and sugar till nice and fluffy. Add the eggs.

Add them one by one, or beat the whites seperately, beat the yolks in with the butter and then add the beaten whites. It worked well for me.

Warm the almonds in the microwave, then grind them in a mortar-pestle. Add them to the egg+butter mix, stir in the golden syrup.

Sift the flour and salt into the liquid mixture, keep stirring to avoid lumps.

Line and grease two cake tins. Scoop out the dough into each of them and bake @ 220 degrees C for 15-40 minutes. Once risen and the toothpick through the center comes out clean. Take them out.

Now that we are done with the cake, try to restrain yourself from licking the bowl. Oh well, you have suffered enough I guess. Go ahead, lick it clean. Yum…!!

While the cakes are baked and cooled, we can work on the icing. For that we need to first grind the 20gms of jaggery with the 1tbsp of brown sugar. Then place the butter, chocolate and evaporated milk in a double boiler and let them mix. Slowly add the Jaggery+brown sugar mix and the vanilla extract. Stir until everything is melted and looks thick. Remove from heat and cool.

Now remove both the cakes from the tins. Take the first one, spread a layer of icing on it. Then lay the other cake on top of this. Now cover this with icing from all sides and top. Make whatever design comes to mind. I made quite a mess out of it, but it was super fun doing it.

I was so enthralled in the layering process, the thought of stopping to click a picture completely slipped my mind. I’m telling you chocolate is evil, it can hypnotize you.

Leave to cool in the fridge. Within an hour your cake should be ready to cut.

Credit for the original recipe goes to may favorite book so far: frame>by>frame baking.

Though the above mentioned changes and experiments were my inputs.

Do tel me how they worked out for you.

Happy Cooking.