Tag: chocolate

Yelly Eats

Indulgence

Yelly

Chocolate is indulgence!  And the best chocolate indulgence is a chocolate cake.  There’s nothing more satisfying than baking a chocolate cake yourself and enjoying the fruits of your labour!

This is my version of Hummingbird Bakery’s Chocolate Guinness cake.  This is my chocolate cake with morello cherry filling and it was dee-vine! 🙂

Hummingbird Bakery's Chocolate Guinness Cake with Morello Cherry Filling

Yelly Snaps

Chocolate cake and Audrey Hepburn

Yelly

“Let’s face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake
does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me.”
~Audrey Hepburn

I agree with Audrey Hepburn completely.  Chocolate can and will make things better!

Chocolate Guinness Cake with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting and Morello Cherry Filling

Yelly Eats

Easy-Peasy Chocolate Tart

Yelly

Mind you, this recipe still needs refining.  And I used store-bought pastry.  It was too hot today to deal with making my own pastry today (plus I was being slightly lazy!).  As a shortcut, I melted the chocolate in the microwave (brilliant tip that I found online, 90 seconds in the microwave on medium heat per 100g of chocolate.  200g should require a bit more than that, about 3 ½ minutes should do quite nicely!).  But if you like ooey-gooey chocolatey tarts, this is the one to try!

Ooey-Gooey Chocolate TartIngredients:

  • 200g plain chocolate, melted
  • 50g plain flour (I added another 25g to make the chocolate more solid as opposed to runny)
  • 500g shortcrust pastry pack , rolled out to the thickness of a 20p piece and used to line 23cm flan tin
  • 100g golden caster sugar
  • 4 eggs
  • cocoa, for dusting

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 180°C.  Line flan tin with pastry (I used the sweet short crust) and blind bake pastry for 15 minutes (don’t forget your baking beans!!!).  Set aside to cool.
  2. Lower oven temp to 150°C.  Melt chocolate and brush about a fourth of the melted chocolate on pastry bottom.  Set aside remaining chocolate to cool.  In separate bowl, mix eggs, sugar and flour in a mixing bowl.  Combine egg mixture and chocolate.  Pour into pastry-lined flan tin and bake for 20-25mins (surface might crack a little).
  3. Cool on a rack and dust with cocoa powder and serve.
Yelly Reads

My new toy!

Yelly

This arrived yesterday (and I have been waiting for this for ages!  I preordered this in…early February, I think!).  I received an email from Amazon saying they expected the package to be delivered on March 18.  I waited, and waited and then Mr Postie came and it arrived!  Let me tell you, I was doing tiny jigs of happiness inside!

Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook: Cake Days

This is my second Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.  I knew it was going to be worth waiting for the cookbook because the recipes are never-fail ones.  As long as you stick to the recipe and have no major deviances from the recipe and the directions, the recipes always, always come out perfectly!

The first recipe I tried was the Chocolate Guinness Cake (I found it quite cute that it was St Paddy’s Day 2 days before and a pint of Guinness would’ve been a good drink to down on the day.  Instead of drinking Guinness, I baked with it!).  You might think I was being over-eager, but I’d waited for this book for absolutely AGES!  I’d heard about the book late last year.  And having used the recipes in the first book (where I got the pecan pie recipe and where I learned to bake my favourite kind of cake: lemon drizzle!)

Anyway, Saturday dawned lovely and sunny and…I WAS ILL!  But I wasn’t about to let a little thing as an illness stop me from trying out the recipes in the new book (I’d bought all the ingredients the night before!  I was that determined!).  2 hours later, there it was, that beauty of a chocolate cake, iced and dusted with cocoa powder.  IT WAS DELICIOUS!!!  The slice was so pretty that I had to take a picture!

Chocolate Guinness Cake

So for anyone wanting to start baking, I would recommend getting either of the Hummingbird Bakery cookbooks because their recipes are so easy to follow!