Chocolate & Cardamom

Cardamom Chocolate Cake

Bakery's open on weekends here at home. I often ask my husband (aka Mr. Taster) what kind of cake he wants for the week. He always comes up with a couple of suggestions, depending on if we have extra fruits or any new recipe bookmarked. Last week I didn't even have to ask. Do you know you have 5... FIVE! different brands of chocolate bars in the pantry, plus 2 halved?? The remark was meant to express how he hates my (very) untidy pantry, and my messy shopping habits. Oh do I? I had no idea. (I can play the angel role with a fairly convincing voice when I want...) What do you think of a chocolate cake? I asked. Sure! All's well when it ends well. Except I wasn't in the mood to bake a layered, decadent, creamy chocolate cake. My gut feeling kept pushing me to the spice stand... Spices love chocolate. Cardamom loves dark bittersweet chocolate! I remembered Sue Lawrence's On Baking had a recipe featuring cardamom and chocolate. I did a few changes to suit our taste. This is a very fragrant cake. Decrease the cardamom amount if you dislike strong flavoured cakes.

Cardamom Chocolate Cake
Slightly inspired from Sue Lawrence's On Baking

1 Loaf (or 12 tea cakes)

125 grs unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup soft light brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs, beaten
100 grs dark chocolate (I like Lindt 70% cocoa), cut into large chunks
2 cups self-raising flour, sifted
2 Tbsp milk
3-4 large green cardamom pods (or more, to taste)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (360ºF). Sift the flour into a bowl. Tip the the cardamom pods into a pestle and mortar and crush. Use a sieve to mix only the ground cardamom into the flour. In another bowl, cream together the butter and sugar, until light. Beat in the eggs, a little at a time, until thoroughly combined. Stir in the flour and milk, and beat well. Add the chocolate chunks to the cake mixture and stir to combine. Spoon into a buttered loaf tin and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake for 40-45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

You can dust the cake with powdered sugar and good quality cocoa or leave it plain. Serve with whipped cream or lemon curd.

Cardamom Chocolate Cake

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zlikrofi

Image
As a special treat, my mother used to make a tasty dish she called wonton dumplings. They were large, meat-filled triangles made of noodle dough, boiled and then served in soup or topped with browned bread crumbs.  Sometimes she called them kreplach, like our Jewish friends. But she never suggested they were Slovenian.  I wasn't sure she even knew what I had just discovered:  Filled, boiled dumplings are considered a Slovenian specialty, highly touted on all the tourist websites. "So Mom," I asked her, "did Grandma ever make something like wontons?  Called, maybe, zlin-krow-fee?" I hesitated over the pronunciation, since I'd seen a few different variants of the Slovenian name in my cookbooks: zlinkrofi, zlikrofi, zinkrofi. But my mother didn't hesitate at all. "Oh, sure.  Only we called them zhleee'-kro-feh." Amazing.  Not only did she know all about them, but she had come up with the proper Slovenian pronunciation, right dow...
Read more

Bleki, Slovenia's Favorite Noodle

Image
Bleki are nothing more than homemade pasta or egg noodles, cut into square or rectangular shapes. I discovered bleki in the course of tracking down my grandmother's Mystery Soup, which turned out to be the Slovenian take on pasta fazool, or pasta and bean soup.  But evidently the pasta had the starring role, at least in my mother's family, since she referred to the soup simply as "black-eh." In fact, bleki have an oddly exalted status in Slovenian cooking.  An entry on the official Slovenian Tourist Board website describes this "simple dish"  as a "special treat." Bleki were associated with special occasions in rural life, like finishing up the harvest or picking grapes.  A recent cookbook by a Slovenian academician and cooking expert describes it as a "high dish," often served with a cream sauce and pancetta. To make the bleki for the pašta fažul ,. It's a simple recipe: 2 eggs 1 1/4 c. flour 1/4 t. salt Mix and knea...
Read more

Baked Flancati

Image
My grandma used to make us a sweet, beignet-like treat we called by their American name: Angel Wings.  Slovenians call them flancati (flan-tsa-tee) or sometimes pohanje. She twisted strips of dough into fanciful knots and shapes and plunged them into a simmering pot of oil. (Back then, it might have been Crisco, perish the thought!) They emerged brown and crispy, ready to be mounded on a plate, buried in a snowstorm of powdered sugar, and inhaled by a tribe of hungry grandchildren. I don't do deep-frying.  So I figured angel wings would remain a distant childhood memory. Then I spotted a recipe for baked flancati.  I figured it couldn't possibly be legitimate.  But it turns out the recipe came from  More Pots and Pans,  another cookbook put out by the Slovenian Women's Union of America.  So I figured it was worth a try. The recipe, I realized, was simply a variant of the rich pastry dough, made with either sour cream or cream cheese, that i...
Read more