Short and Tweet 1: Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake
I originally suggested that we bake the Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake on pg 142 of Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet because I was curious about the texture of a cake with oatmeal and ground almonds.
Unlike the adventurous Choclette of ChocLogBlog I’ve never made “chocolate porridge” so I was impressed when she confessed, “the raw mixture of this cake tasted like an enriched and sweeter version of my porridge - I could have happily eaten it just as it was”.
Choclette’s Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet.
Carl Legge posted a beautifully-presented version of the Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake, baked by Deb.
The lovely Zeb_Bakes of Zeb Bakes has had several attempts at the Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake but gremlins seem to be running amok for her and her most recent attempt had a molten centre (which might/not reflect the substitution of Oatly Cream for the milk). Update from Jo who reports these notes: ” Oatly, 50/50 Lindt milk and 68 % Valrhona, 3 eggs, I just buy them by the dozen from the farm when we go, so I have no sense of what a medium egg is (I would like weights of everything personally), made in a 19 cm tin.”
I baked the Chocolate and Almond Fudge Cake twice, both of them for elderly neighbours. My neighbours don’t like bitter chocolate so I used 50% solids chocolate rather than 70% or more, and I added both chocolate extract (1 tsp) and almond extract (2/3rds tsp) to adjust the taste. My cakes both cracked which made me slightly apprehensive about having to extend the baking time but both needed 50mins as at 40mins the centre was liquid rather than wobbly.
When I de-tinned the cooling cakes they were gently deflating. There was a 1.5cm circle around the outside that was so much higher than the gently-swansdown-settling inner part of the cake that I engaged in some reckless manoeuvres to turn the cake onto its top while still warm in order to flatten it. I inverted the cakes a couple of times to try and make the top and bottom as even as I could but I can’t recommend this as I’ve a gnawing impression that there are times the cake would gracefully part into several moistly chocolatey pieces like an unevenly sectioned well-known chocolate orange.
As you can see, I left the cakes ‘undressed’ as they were easier for me to transport and for the neighbours to store in the fridge that way. They opted to serve the cake with rum sauce.
It is intriguing to see how different these cakes are, eg, Jo’s cake is nowhere near as cracked as mine. I don’t think this is just a reflection of the different cooking time as I seem to recall that both of mine were already cracked when I checked them at 40mins. I should note that both bakes cracked although one was cooked in a gas oven and the other in a convection oven where it isn’t possible to turn off the fan.
Amongst the teething-problems that made it a good idea to try out a soft launch of this challenge, Twitter is acting up so it’s entirely possible that there are more #shortandtweet entries that are not showing up (I know some people sent entries but Twitter won’t let me see any that older than 4 days). If so, please tweet a reminder to me and I’ll add it into this post.
The next challenge is in the following post and I hope that some of the teething troubles will be resolved by the time I need to compile the next selection. Update: for example, it seems I’ve finally managed to enable comments.
