Steamed Puddings

A few months ago, I went to one of our regular wine tastings and had a scrumptious chocolate cake made by my friend Jo.  She happily shared the recipe – from the back of the chocolate packet – with me.  I wanted to bake something special for my group of moms from work, who came around this week for one of our regular catch-ups, so I made “that awesome chocolate cake”.  Everyone asked for the recipe, and several friends took extra cake home with them to impress their partners.

Dark chocolate dessert cake

For the cake:

• 250 g unsalted butter, chopped (this is 1 1/4 cups of butter for you Yanks)
• 200 g Cadbury dark cooking chocolate, chopped (7 ounces, and this is 45% cocoa solids)
• 1 tablespoon of instant coffee powder + 1 1/2 cups of boiling water, or I suppose you could use brewed coffee instead
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• vanilla to taste (it’s not listed in the original recipe’s list, but is in the instructions!)
• 1 1/2 cups self-raising flour, OR substitute (1 1/2 cups flour + 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder + 3/4 teaspoon salt)
• 1/2 cup cocoa

Preheat oven to 160 °C (or 140 °C if you have a fan-forced (convection?) oven).  Line a cake pan with baking paper.  The recipe calls for a 28 cm pan, but I used a 24 cm springform pan with no problems.

Combine the butter and chocolate in a double boiler or poor student’s equivalent – a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water.  Seriously, does anyone actually have a double boiler?  Everyone I know uses the bain-marie bowl-over-water trick.  Anyway, you can see what’s coming – melt the chocolate and butter together over a low heat.  Don’t overheat the chocolate or it will go grainy.  Remove the choc-butter from the heat, add the dissolved coffee+water and the sugar, stir, and allow to cool for 10 minutes.  At some point during the cooling, transfer the mixture to a mixer bowl, or otherwise get ready to use an electric mixer.

Using the mixer, add the eggs and vanilla, then flour and cocoa.  Mix a further 2 minutes or until evenly combined.  Pour into cake pan and bake for 1 to 1 1/4 hours.  Test with skewer inserted into the middle of the cake.  Cool in pan for 30 minutes before turning onto wire rack.

For the chocolate frosting:

• 150 g Cadbury dark cooking chocolate (5.3 ounces)
• 40 g butter (about 2.7 tablespoons)

Do the bain-marie thing again to melt the chocolate and butter.  Allow to cool slightly and spread over the top of the cake.

The end result is a very moist, fudgy chocolate cake that tastes almost like a flourless version, but is densely chocolatey and extremely good.  Here’s a scan of the chocolate packet, complete with nutritional information, so you can try to find a similar type of chocolate in your own locality.  Maybe semisweet baking chocolate would work?  (Click below, and again on the resulting picture, to embiggen.)

This cake is so delicious that it was all gone before I had a chance to photograph it.  Jo is having us around for dinner later in the week, and I offered to remake the cake, so I’ll post pictures then.

Update: here are some pictures of the cake.

The finished, frosted cake

A cross-section