This recipe is from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet, and makes a wonderfully unassuming loaf cake with a rich chocolate flavour and molasses-like sweetness from the brown sugar. He notes that cakes with a high proportion of fat and sugar to flour are susceptible to sinking, which as you can see mine did. Lepard’s suggestions for avoiding this are to add a little more flour, or an extra tablespoon of egg white to the batter.

I was not particularly inclined to locate glycerine for one recipe, and instead replaced it with a mixture of oil and glucose syrup. I’m not sure if this was particularly effective or whether I could have just left it out – it didn’t seem to be a disastrous decision is all I can really say about it.

ingredients:

50ml cold water
25g cocoa
100ml boiling water
50g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
100g butter, softened
175g muscovado sugar (I used dark brown sugar)
125g condensed milk
2 medium eggs
2 teaspoons glycerine
200g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

method:

Line a large loaf tin with baking paper, and pre-heat your oven to 180C (or 160C fan-forced).

Mix the cocoa with cold water to make a paste, then stir through the boiling water. Add the chocolate and bicarb soda, and wait for the chocolate to melt.

While you’re waiting, in another bowl beat the butter, sugar, and condensed milk together until smooth, then beat in the eggs and glycerine (or freakish mixture of glucose and oil). Lepard suggests mixing together the flour and baking powder in a separate bowl, but I always ignore those instructions because having three bowls to wash up after making a cake seems excessive. Beat in half the flour mixture (or if you’re me, half the flour and all the baking powder) into the sugar mixture, followed by the chocolate mix, and then the remaining flour, until well beaten together.

Scrape the mixture into the loaf tin, and bake for around 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out mostly clean (“with only a few crumbs sticking to it”). If your cake has sunk, comfort yourself with the thought of the exciting pocket of icing the middle slices will contain. Leave to cool in the tin and peel off the baking paper when cold. I mean, if you’re incredibly cautious and don’t feel like eating cake right away. It’s not that delicate, and it survived being de-tinned after 20 minutes or so in my kitchen.

Lepard suggests a Treacle Chocolate Fudge Frosting, which you can find a recipe for here. I just made a plain chocolate butter icing, and the cake is wonderful enough to stand perfectly well on its own without icing should you be so inclined.