This Anytime Chocolate Cake is named so, because nine times out of ten, you will have all the ingredients hanging around waiting to be used in your store cupboard and it takes no time at all to put together. It was actually the very first cake I ever cooked all by myself….aged 40.
I know that 40 is a little late to start baking cakes, but if you are a late starter too, believe me, learning to run up a few easy cakes is well worth it. Grateful and greedy recipients, for some reason, treat you like you've just come up with the solution to world poverty, rather than simply thrown a few ingredients together and hung around the oven for an hour.
For this reason, all you grannies out there who've never cooked a cake - I would like this one to be your first. As I lost my baking virginity with my Anytime Chocolate Cake, it's still the sweetmeat love of my life and the recipe comes out time and time again, most recently two days ago when it was rustled up in two different forms for sale at our village Xmas coffee morning. I'm proud to say that they got snapped up in thirty seconds flat.
Before I get on with sharing the recipe, I'd also like to say that this is a great first cake to make with your grandchildren and a vital recipe to pass on if any of them are about to go off to University.
Educating them on making Anytime Chocolate Cake will absolutely ensure that they forge new friendships and influence people - and have a little bit of home comfort on hand anytime when they go through exam stress, party celebrations and broken love affairs.
It's rather smart adorned with decorations - even bought chocolate hazelnut spread with a few drops of orange oil stirred in, will do the trick. But it is also fabaroo naked as the moment it comes out of the oven, served as a pudding with a dollop of ice cream or paddling happily in a hot pool of custard.
So 'nuff said, let's get going.
Ingredients:
300g thin cut marmalade (alternatively bramble conserve or a mix of whatever happens to be hanging around in jars)
125g unsalted butter
100g dark chocolate
150g caster sugar
Pinch salt
2 large eggs
150g self-raising flour
20 cm cake tin, lined if not silicone (to make life easy, invest in a silicone one - nowadays they sell them in pound shops.)
Incidentally, unlike most cakes, this one seems to turn out perfectly, even if you don't happen to have the exact size cake tin, so don't stress about it. Pour the mixture in to muffin cases for that matter, and it still won't let you down.
Preheat oven to 180/ Gas mark 4
Method
1. Put the butter in a heavy bottomed pan over a low heat to melt. 2. Stir in the chocolate until nearly melted. 3. Take off the heat and stir to amalgamate. 4. Add the sugar, salt eggs and Marmalade to the pan and stir together. 5. Beat in the flour, little by little. 6. Pour the mixture in to the cake tin and bake for about 50 minutes or until a skewer or thin knife blade comes out clean. 7. Cool in the cake tin for 10 minutes then turn out on to a plate.
That's it!
If you don't want to add adornments, but think it's a little rude to present the cake totally naked, then sprinkle some icing sugar through a sieve on to the top.
It's a sturdy cake, half a pudding almost, rather than a fragile creature to be treated with the utmost care - all the easier for lugging about should you be taking it round to a friend's for supper and all the more reason to make it a family favourite. Just get ready to pass on the recipe. EVERYBODY asks for it!
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