Chocolate Birthday Cake

Hello, 2021.

I’ve often done year-end posts in the past, but my capacity at the moment to process 2020 is minimal. It was an extremely intense year of high highs and very low lows. Instead, for now I’ll just write about chocolate cake (warning: this is not your typical new year healthy post).

Given a choice, chocolate cake is not something I would typically bake or consume. I generally just find it too rich, particularly with a chocolate base and icing. BUT this was a celebration. One of the upsides of the end of 2020 was that we were finally able to travel to Canada. We were therefore able to celebrate my mum’s birthday with her, in person, at the end of December. For many, many months this is something I thought would never happen and I’m still somewhat incredulous that I am actually here.

Mum is a huge chocolate fiend so I wanted to surprise her. I found the recipe via Food52. It was one of those cases where I didn’t even have any plans to bake anything, but decided to when I saw it (plus the story was about mothers and chocolate cake so it seemed appropriate). It seemed the perfect fit as it also happened to be dairy-free.

I’ve never made a two-layer cake before, and this wasn’t exactly the best test case because I didn’t have a round cake pan. Instead I used two loaf pans. The result was that the cake was rather high and narrow! Hehe. Instead of a whipped cream icing (which I generally would have preferred), I made a modified ganache by melting semi-sweet chocolate chips and soy milk.

The end result was….um, well, it didn’t look great — I really need to work on my icing skills! BUT it did taste good. And the description is right: it is REALLY easy. It’s a one-bowl cake, which I don’t ever think I’ve seen before. It’s literally dumping everything into a bowl, mixing, and baking. Give it a try.

Wishing you health, peace, and happiness this year.

Chocolate & Coffee Cheesecake

Every year I try to make/bake H. something for his birthday, since he has a huge sweet tooth. 🙂 This year happened to be the first time that we weren’t together on the actual day (and the same will happen for mine, coming up soon!). As he is a huge cheesecake fan I decided to make this one a couple of days before I left for Scotland for a conference. Aside from cheesecake, coffee and chocolate are two of H.’s favourite things. 😉

I only made a couple of modifications to the recipe. Instead of 250g cream cheese, I used about 150g and substituted quark for the rest, which made for a slightly lighter cake. I also forgot to dust with cocoa powder, so mine looks shiny compared to the magazine’s photo.

This is a fairly simple but delicious cake. My only complaint is that it did not taste enough like coffee; if I make it again I will increase the quantity of coffee quite a bit.