Chocolate Mud Cake

Yesterday afternoon I decided that Marc and I would need something nice for supper, for after the kids had gone to bed.  What better than a chocolate mud cake then?  One of my all time favourite web sites, Exclusively Food have a super easy recipe for Chocolate Mud Cake with Chocolate Ganache Icing on their web site, so I thought I would give it a try.  Everything I have ever attempted out of their extensive repertoire has worked perfectly, so I was pretty sure this cake of theirs would follow suit.

As always, the recipe was easy to follow with pictures throughout the instructions and some great comments by both the authors of the blog and their readers/testers.

The recipe calls for buttermilk, which I didn't have, so I substituted this with 1 tablespoon vinegar plus enough milk to make 1 cup.  But please keep in mind that you only need 1/2 cup of buttermilk for the recipe.  I did forget this, and had poured almost all of the cup of milk into my egg/oil/vanilla mix before realising my error!

Because the cake took so long to cook, and I needed to feed the three boys dinner, the cake was put aside for the night (probably a good thing) before getting ganached today!

And here is my end result.  I'm pretty impressed with it - even though I thought I had stuffed it up!  It has great texture and flavour and is not over chocolatey (yes, that is a word in my vocabulary!), but chocolatey enough to not need to go back for a second slice (although I'm sure you could twist my arm!!).  My two taste-testers were very happy with this one!

 

Sultana Lunch Cake

Ingredients
350g sultanas
225g butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
3 1/2 cups plain flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk

Method
Preheat oven to 180.
Lightly grease a 20 cm cake tin and line the bottom.
Cover sultanas with water and boil for 10 minutes. Strain and cool.
Cream butter and sugar, then add eggs one at a time, beating well.
Add sultanas, sifted flour, baking powder and salt.
Stir in milk.
Pour into prepared tin and bake for 90 minutes, or until cooked.
(it only took 65 minutes in my oven at 140!)

Here's the finished product :)