Hello! If you've stumbled across this post doing a google search for My Friend the Chocolate Cake a.k.a David Bridie, you need this site, not mine. I LOVE MFTCC. And I love chocolate cake. Listening to the former while eating the latter is pretty much utopia.
The reason cake is making ANOTHER appearance today notwithstanding all my talk of healthy, organic, sugar-free eating is because we had a special visitor today!
Our lovely friends Nell and Johnno (or The Captain) currently live in Reading, England. They have a six month old (divinely beautiful) baby, Charlotte. There's been a bit of a complication with visas while they were here visiting family last month and as a result Johnno went back and Nell and Charlotte stayed to wrangle with the consulate. Nell was due to come for morning tea today, for which we still had Carrot and All-Bran muffins to serve.
At about 9am we got a call from Johnno, from the airport. Checking our address. On his way. BIG surprise. So Nell arrives, Johnno's out the back, we meet Charlotte, it's all marvellous, then he knocks on the back door and wanders in. His wife, a solicitor and a very adept talker, is speechless. There are tears, not just theirs. He's here for a week and let's hope the consulate get their arses into gear and they can go home together.
After all that, what else was there to do but make a chocolate cake?
Given that I don't have an 'open' kitchen and it's too far from the loungeroom to hear the conversation, I wanted the quickest cake I could make.
Here it is:
Quick and easy chocolate cake
125g butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup wholemeal self-raising flour
1 cup cocoa
1.5 cups milk
(note: you can just use 2 cups white self-raising flour & leave out the baking powder, but the wholemeal gives it texture and I ran out of plain flour!)
Cream butter and sugar. Mix in the 2 eggs. Add one cup flour and the baking powder. Add the cocoa. Add half the milk. Then add the other cup of flour and then the rest of the milk.
Cook for about 35-45 mins in moderate oven (depending on what type of tin you use.)
That's it. You can make it in 2 sandwich tins and join them with jam. You can make it in a ring tin (it'll cook faster). Or you can make it as a loaf. We ate it hot & (as you can see) didn't bother icing it!
I have to confess, the Breakfast Biscuits were no good for my two. Maybe if I try them again with more butter or another egg, lose the linseed and use more maple syrup? My friend Estelle makes muesli biscuits and has promised the recipe - let's try those!
On my mission to increase Tilly's fibre, I have increased the fibre-ness of the bread I make.
I'll post some bread recipes another day. This had the desired effect though.
As I was photographing...
she was waiting...
and didn't even want it buttered. Better than a Breakfast Biscuit. FULL of fibre. All good now!!!
xxx
