When A Simple Slice Of Chocolate Cake Is Good Enough…
I’m the first one to admit my love of complex well-designed individual desserts. This includes anything from plated desserts served at restaurants to ice-cream sundaes to inidividual cakes from a fancy patisserie. However, sometimes, just sometimes, I want to eat a simple unadorned piece of moist chocolate cake. Some cakes are made to be paired with buttercream, whipped cream, or ganache. However, with a good recipe, a plain piece of cake can be a beautiful thing.
The cake that I made yesterday for the one-year anniversary of Dessert By Candy exactly fits that description. It’s moist, chocolatey, and light, with a healthy spicy kick just to give it that special something. It is adapted from the Chocolate Domingo Cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible.
Ingredients
- 160g sour cream
- 2 large eggs
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 42g Dutch processed cocoa, preferably Valrhona
- 156g sifted cake flour
- 200g sugar
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
- 5 turns of fresh ground pepper
- a pinch of ancho chili
- 200g unsalted butter, softened
Method
- Preheat oven to 350F. Line a 9X2 inch round cake pan with parchment paper.
- In a small mixing bowl, stir together the sour cream, eggs, and vanilla until homogenous. In the mixing bowl of a standmixer, combine all the dry ingredients (cocoa, flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices) and mix on low speed for 30 seconds.
- Add butter and half of the liquid mixture to the mixing bowl and mix on medium speed for 90 seconds. Add half of the remaining liquid and mix on medium speed for 20 seconds. Add the rest of the liquid and mix for another 20 seconds.
- Pour batter into the cake pan and smooth with an offset spatula. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes until a tester insert in the centre of the cake comes out clean and the cake springs back when lightly pressed.
- Cool the cake in the pan for 10 minutes and unmold. I prefer to cool the cake upside-down so that the smooth flat side is the top. Serve with a dusting of icing sugar.
