Monday 13 May 2013

BAKING | It's Chocolate Cake time!

I have a major sweet-tooth and I absolutely love baking. When I was younger, I baked on quite a regular basis. Lots of traybakes, cakes, muffins.... I loved trying out new recipes. I would sometimes trade recipes with my aunt, talk about new things we have tried, school bake sales were awesome, although, admittedly, mum had to do a lot of baking for me then, since I was lazy and not organised enough. Thanks, mum!

When we moved to the UK, I just didn't get back into it, until I started working at my last job and people would bring in home made cupcakes. Cupcakes was something I had never tried before, so I looked online and tried. Over the last 2-3 years I have baked more regularly again, which my workmates possibly benefited from the most! More recently I have looked into more healthier ways of baking, including vegan baking. I am not confident enough with vegan baking just yet, but it is something I want to explore more.

Browsing the web for some new cook books, I came across a book called Cook Yourself Thin. It had the "Look Inside" option and after having a little peek at some of the recipes, I decided to buy it. At the time I did not realise that there had been a TV show with the same name on Channel 4 with Gizzi Erskine, who is one of the writers of the cook book. When I found out I could watch episodes on YouTube, I was obsessed with watching it! She had so many great ideas! The only downside was the lack of vegetarian friendly dishes on the show, but I think you could probably just swap the meat for a Quorn, or another veggie-friendly products.

Anyways, back to baking. I saw her make a orange chocolate cake on the show and remembered, that I had the cook book, which had a desserts section in it! It was not the same cake, although you can get that recipe from the Channel 4 website, but it sounded very delicious, so I tried it yesterday. 


Sounds strange, but it is such a rich cake! You don't taste vegetable in there at all! I have had to improvise a little with the recipe, for example instead of muscovado sugar I just used light brown cane sugar and I have had to substitute the maple syrup with agave nectar. In this recipe it also says to use a high loose bottomed tin, but I only had two sandwich tins and divided the batter up into both and halved the baking time. It turned out fine! Instead of flower petals, I grated a little white chocolate over the top of the cake. Even my dad, who is probably the only person in this family without a sweet-tooth, liked it.






If you like dark chocolate and baking, you should give this a try! 

Thank you for reading and have a lovely day!


x ♥ x


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