Butterscotch Layer Cake, Nigella Lawson, How to be a Domestic Goddess

I realise that I've been doing A LOT of chocolate recently. Probably too much. What can I say. A girl just loves chocolate.

Bucking the trend, I baked Nigella's Butterscotch Layer Cake for my mum's birthday (once again, with the able assistance of my brother).

This recipe surprised me. It's basically a sponge cake recipe with light muscovado sugar and a butterscotch-cream cheese icing.

It was great fun to make and a wonderful revelation. I loved it, even though it didn't contain any chocolate! (Oh, and mum and the others at our small party enjoyed it lots too.)

It was moist but not too damp. As always, the light muscovado in the sponge gave it a beautiful sweetness. It was very rich, but you could just go on eating and eating. The sweetness of the cake and caramel balanced by the sour-saltiness of the cream-cheese, so it was never cloying.

I would definitely bake this cake again. It's a gorgeous cake. And I hardly ever consider a non-chocolate cake as being gorgeous.

Chocolate Honey Cake, Nigella Lawson, Feast.

This recipe is from Nigella Feast, which has got a great section on chocolate cakes. I decided to bake this cake for my Dad's birthday party. It would be too small for the over 80 people expected to attend, but I thought it would provide a really pretty visual treat.

It's a damp, moist cake that is easy to make. Just dump the ingredie

nts into the food processor and blitz.

Honey is used in both the cake and the icing. And because of it, it's one of those cakes that some people love, and some others could hate. It looks dark and chocolatey, and so it is what your tastebuds are expecting. If you didn't know it was a honey cake, you would be surprised by the taste of the honey, which is quite pronounced. Therefore, you need to choose the type of honey you use carefully. It wasn't something I thought about and so I used whatever was already open in the cupboard. The fact that I didn't actually like the taste of that particular type of honey very much, somewhat compromised my eventual satisfaction levels. You could also probably reduce the amount of icing sugar in the icing, which was very very very sweet.

I did, however, love the decorative bees, which are made with marzipan and almond flakes and drawn with the honey chocolate icing. They were adorable.

The cake was generally well-received. The kids, especially, came back for seconds and thirds, and asked to eat the bees. I thought it was nice, in an OK kind of way. I'm not sure I'd make this cake again, since I have other chocolate cake recipes to try out and ones that I've tried before that I know are winners. As a chocolate cake, it's not the best I've tried. As a honey cake, with better honey, I think I might like this more. Love the bees though.

Oh, and I need to acknowledge my brother's help with this cake. It's useful having an assistant!

Chocolate Truffle Cake, Nigella Lawson, Feast

Forgive the pictures this time. I forgot to take a picture of the cake when it was ready and by the time I remembered, it had been cut and messed up.

This Chocolate Truffle Cake recipe is from Nigella Feasts. It's a relatively simple recipe, although it does comprise 2 parts, which can be quite easy to mess up.

The first part, and the only baking part, is the making the chocolate meringue base of the cake. I made twice the amount required, as I didn't have a 20" springform tin, only a 22" one.

The second part of the recipe, involves melting down

the chocolate, which as highlighted in a previous post, can be a treacherous affair. This time round, I had to melt 400g (!) of dark chocolate with some golden syrup and rum, then mix it with double cream. First of all, I only had baker's chocolate and a couple of bars of 75% chocolate. So my chocolate was very very very dark. Then, the melting didn't seem to go as smoothly as before, possibly because there was just soooo much to melt. It was impossible to get the chocolate into that nice smooth paste. After mixing it with the cream, it realised that there were small chocolate lumps in the mixture!

The cake didn't turn out too badly, despite the few lumps of unmelted chocolate in it. It was very very rich, and because I used bakers chocolate, it was also very very very bitter, to the point of being sour! This is one recipe from Nigella's vast collection that results in a very unsweet cake. Even if I had used 70% chocolate, I think it would still have retained that bitterness, though probably not so intensely. The chocolate meringue base gave the cake a nice twist, and was a nice light touch juxtaposed with with intensity of the truffle.

I love chocolate truffle, but I'm not sure I would do this recipe again as I wasn't able to get the truffle smooth enough. And, in my book, that counts for everything in a chocolate truffle cake.

THAT Chocolate Cake

This is the absolute best chocolate cake recipe I have tested.  It's from "The Essence of Chocolate" by Steinberg & Scharffenberger. I made it for the hubby's birthday.  My decorating skills are pathetic, so it doesn't look so good. But ignore how it looks. 

It's a lovely and moist cake, with a deep rich chocolate taste.  And it tastes better the day after! I could swoon about it all day, but I'll spare you, so I'll just leave you with these pictures (ok, my photo taking skills leave much to be desired...).