Category: Baking

Extreme Chocolate Cakery

The trick with chocolate cake, and our excuse for making more of them, is experimenting with how much of the flour can be replaced with cocoa without the cake losing structural integrity.
In principle, the cake is just a version of a standard Victoria Sponge cake (equal weight of egg, butter, sugar, and self-raising flour). Now, your average chocolate cake maker will foolishly suggest adding a tablespoon or two of cocoa powder. We have found that replacing more than half of the flour with cocoa and you’ll start to have problems (think about it – flour mixed with water has a very different consistency from cocoa mixed with water), but you can just about get away with that – certainly a third of the flour can be replaced with cocoa although you might need to add a bit more baking powder to replace the self-raising flour.

Victoria Sponge Cake

Ingredients

  • 4 eggs
  • 200g margarine
  • 200g sugar
  • 200g flour

Method

  1. Blend the margarine and sugar together, then beat in the eggs.
  2. Finally fold in the flour.
  3. Bake for 20 minutes at 180 C.

Extreme Chocolate Caking

Additional ingredients

  • 70g cocoa
  • 2 tsp baking powder (to replace the 70g flour
  • banana
  • jam
  • walnuts – chopped
  • Anything else that takes your fancy – a splash of kahlua?
  • MORE CHOCOLATE! You’ll need about 375g more maximum-cocoa (e.g. cooking) chocolate

Method

  1. Once you’ve got your basic cake mix (i.e mixed your flour/cocoa, eggs, butter, sugar) break up about 125g of chocolate into smallish lumps (half single squares) and mix that, walnuts, kahlua, etc into the mix.
  2. Bake in two dishes for 20 minutes or so. Note: because of the additional chocolate, it won’t firm-up in the same way as your average cake.
  3. After cooking, let it rest for a while on a couple of wire racks. When it has cooled a bit, put one of the cake halves on a large plate and generously spread it with jam, and cover in slices of banana.
  4. Melt the remaining 250-ish grams of chocolate in a saucepan with a tablespoon or two of water (better still: brandy!) on a very low heat. This should give you a fantastic replacement for boring conventional chocolate icing.
  5. Spread a layer of your melted chocolate over the banana/jam then plant your second cake-half on the first. cover the whole thing melted chocolate.
  6. Welcome to the world of extreme chocolate-cakery!

Lemonade Scones

Ingredients

  • 3 1/2 cups of self-raising flour
  • 1 Cup of double cream
  • 1 cup of lemonade

Method

  1. Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees celcius
  2. Put all the ingredients in a large bowl
  3. Stir enough for ingredients to be thoroughly mixed but no more than you have to to make the dough
  4. Sprinkle flour (self-raising or plain) on the bench to make an area where you can roll the dough
  5. Spread dough on the floured surface, and roll out to about 2 or 3 cm thick
    Prepare the baking tray where you will cook the scones by putting baking paper on it so the scones don’t stick
  6. Cut into scone-size pieces and place on the baking tray (make sure there is enough space around each scone for it to grow
  7. Put the tray in the oven for about 20 or 25 minutes

Eating

Fun fact: Traditionally scones are eaten with jam and cream. This works really well, but jam can be replaced with chocolate spread or honey. Banana also works well instead of, or as well as, cream.