Enduring guilt of chocolate pleasure

Yesterday I had a craving for moist chocolate cake.

Normally I wouldn’t list chocolate cake among my top favourite desserts. I like chocolate very much, but somehow when converted into an alternative form in cakes, ice cream and drinks… I sometimes find the chocolate richness watered down.

Some chocolate ice creams taste like nothing more than frozen milo. And in case you didn’t know, I’m not a big fan of milo. Call it a result of a childhood trauma, but the smell of hot milo in milk has this ill effect on me and often even produces a gag reflex.

But good quality rich chocolaty desserts are an indulgence I don’t mind enjoying enduring once in a while.

To make sure the cake has maximum chocolate richness, I thought it best to make it myself.

There’s heaps of chocolate cake recipes on the Internet. I chose one from the Cadbury website as I happened to have a bar of Cadbury milk chocolate in my pantry.

Here’s the recipe I used…

Melt 250 butter with 1 standard 200g chocolate bar (I did this in a heatproof bowl over a pot of simmering pot of water, but I’m sure you can do this in a microwave as well).

Dissolve a teaspoon of instant coffee and 1½ caster sugar in 1½ cups of boiling water (I cut down the sugar a little to 1 cup and it still turned out quite sweet).

Add coffee mixture to melted chocolate/butter, stir to combine and set aside to cool for 10 minutes.

I then transferred the mixture into a food processor and added 2 eggs (lightly beaten), ½ a teaspoon of vanilla essence, 1½ cups self raising flour and ½ a cup cocoa powder, and then whizzed up everything in one go (I use a food processor to mix all my cake batters, not having an electric mixer, and my cake usually turns out okay).

Pour batter into a cake tin (I lined mine with baking paper) and bake in a 140ºC fan forced oven (or 160ºC conventional oven) for 1 to 1¼ hours. Cool for 30 minutes in cake tin before turning out onto a wire rack.

For the frosting, I made a chocolate royal icing by whipping 2 egg whites with 1½ cups icing sugar and ½ a cup of cocoa powder.

Enjoy and endure the guilt with the pleasure.