Speckled Chocolate Cake... with Love

Do you know what DIY is? Well, I didn't until last week when Ina explained it to me. DIY = "do it yourself". Handicraft means to Ina what baking means to me. While I visit my favorite food blogs every day, Ina reads her beloved DIY blogs. "That's my daily business!" she claimed. So I had Ina over yesterday and she brought all sorts of gadgets from the art supplies shop and we tried to make our own necklace. Of course, we had cake, too!

These pictures are what happens when a food blogger and a DIY freak join forces :-) Ina had passed her time during the train ride to Zurich with trying to form the word "love" with a golden wire. I thought it was so cute that I wanted it on the photo. All of a sudden, Ina thought that we also need some pearls for decoration. I think that was one of my funniest photo sessions ever! And I like the pictures very much. By the way, this cake is great! No big deal to make and with ingredients that probably any baker has in stock anyway. Cut it into thin slices, it's rather heavy.

Recipe

(from a book I love and should use more often: Warm Bread and Honey Cake by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra)

200g ground almonds

100g flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 - 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

150g dark chocolate, coarsely grated

3 eggs

225g sugar

125g butter, melted and slightly cooled

Preheat the oven to 160°C and grease a 24cm diameter springform tin and line the base with parchment paper.

In a bowl, mix together ground almonds, flour, salt and cinnamon. Set aside. Before adding the chocolate to the mixture, weigh it again when you have grated it to make sure that you have the correct weight. Then, add to the almond-flour mixture.

In another bowl, whisk eggs and sugar together with an electric hand mixer until thick and pale. The mixture should fall off the whisk in a thick ribbon rather than a thin stream. Gently fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture. Don't whisk, use a spatula and make figures of eight. Add the melted butter and fold in until there are no more streaks of butter evident in the batter. 

Transfer the batter into the prepared tin and smooth the surface with your spatula. Bake for about 45-55 minutes until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean except for the odd smudge of melted chocolate. Leave to cool in the tin for a few mintes, then release from the tin and transfer to a wire rack.

Well wrapped, this cake should keep for a few days at cool room temperature.