2. Cloud Forest Chocolate Cake

For the cake:
180g cacao, finely grated
250g unsalted butter
6 eggs
50g light muscavado sugar
125g golden caster sugar
100g ground almonds

For the icing:
250ml double cream
75g golden caster sugar
90g cacao

1. Preheat oven to 170C. Line a 25cm springform cake tin with baking paper.

2. For the cake, melt the cacao and butter by placing them in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water.

3. Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the muscavado and caster sugar until pale and doubled in volume.

4. Stir the cacao mixture into the eggs. Fold in the ground almonds, then top the cake mix into the prepared tin. Bake for 35 minutes, or until slightly but evenly risen all over and a knife inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin.

5. Prepare the icing by gently heating the cream and sugar until almost boiling. Remove from the heat then stir in the cacao until it has melted. Leave to cool then spread over the cake.

This recipe comes from Willie Harcourt-Cooze's 'Willie's Chocolate Factory Cookbook'. Bursting with recipes and the story of how he came to build his own chocolate factory, this book is fab! I got some of his Venezuelan Black Caranero Superior a while back as a present and it's been difficult to use it because it's one of those things that you end up never wanting to use, if that makes sense?!

Anyway, so i finally decided to use it on this recipe. Overall, pretty simple and satisfying to make, although grating the cacao was a bit of a chore! I did use a smaller tin (about 20cm) which meant that i added about 30 minutes cooking time during which i lowered the temperature and covered it with some foil.


Also for the icing, having used up my only cacao in the cake, i substituted some odds and ends of chocolate we had around- some Hotel Chocolat dark chilli easter egg, Green and Blacks 70% dark and Sainsbury's Basics dark. I don't think my icing set as much as it perhaps should have, so i didn't put it on as thick and the top smoothed over, rather than having nice rough sweeps through it, and started to dribble down a bit! Still as yummy though and, given the richness of the cake, perhaps a good thing to not have so much pure chocolate and cream around it!

The cake itself feels quite substantial to cut through and looks quite dense or truffle-ey almost. But to eat it is surprisingly light and soft in the mouth (i guess that's where the name comes from!). It is, as mentioned before, very rich and not too sweet...definitely a grown up cake!