Recipe: Chocolate Buttermilk Cake

Every time I see the Lindt 100g blocks on special for less than $2 a block, I always go and buy a few of the 70% ones. They are starting to pile up now because I haven’t made anything chocolatey for a while so I went hunting for a chocolate cake recipe.

Most of the chocolate cake recipes I found use cocoa powder for the cake and/or the icing. That’s disgraceful! A chocolate cake should have use for real chocolate somewhere! Even though the recipe I chose doesn’t use real chocolate in the cake itself, the icing does use 200g of it so it more than makes up for the lack of real chocolate in the cake! I was also intrigued by the need to whisk the egg whites separately and wanted to see the result to the texture of the cake.

This recipe comes from my Australian Women’s Weekly Bake cookbook. The recipe called for splitting the cake into 3, but my cake was quite flat and I was lucky to be able to split it into two! I have also halved the recipe for the icing (the recipe actually called for 400 grams of chocolate!!) which still coated the cake well. I brought this cake over for a family dinner so the cake making and photographing was very rushed!

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake

Ingredients
180g unsalted butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
330g caster sugar
4 eggs, separated
110g self raising flour, sifted
35g cocoa powder, sifted
180ml buttermilk

Chocolate Icing
200g dark eating chocolate, chopped coarsely
125g unsalted butter, melted
40g icing sugar, sifted

Method
1. Preheat oven to 180C (160C fan forced). Grease a deep 20cm round cake pan and line base with baking paper.

2. Beat butter, extract and sugar in a small bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in egg yolks, one at a time.

3. Stir in sifted flour and cocoa, and buttermilk.

4. In a separate clean bowl, beat egg whites in small bowl with electric mixer until soft peaks form.

5. Fold egg whites into cake mixture in two batches.

6. Pour cake mixture into pan and bake for 1 hour.

7. Cool cake in pan and in the meantime, make chocolate icing (see below).

8. Once cooled, split the cake into two layers. Remove top layer and spread some icing over bottom layer.

9. Replace top layer and spread remaining icing all over cake.

10. Refrigerate 3 hours before serving.

Chocolate icing
1. Stir chocolate and butter in a medium saucepan over low heat until smooth. You can also do this in the microwave but be careful not to overheat the chocolate.
2. Remove from heat and stir in sifted icing sugar.
3. Cool filling to room temperature and beat with wooden spoon until thick and spreadable.

Results: The cake was rich and chocolatey but not as dense as a chocolate mud cake. It also had a very smooth and soft texture, not the crumbly moistness of normal chocolate cakes. I really liked the icing – it set hard unlike a ganache. It tasted better refrigerated the next day and it freezes well.

Would I make it again? Yes, though I probably won’t bother to split it in two.

Over & Out, Rilsta xx