I just want a chocolate cake!

Because at the end of the day, we are eating cake, doesn´t matter how artistic, how decorated, how innovative it is, we are eating a cake.

During these last months in the middle of this quarantine and social distancing, I´ve been meeting through social media new cake friends from all over the world, amazing artists with: out of this world cakes and confections; skills and techniques that I can only dream of and I am in awe about it.

As amazed as I am, I have a small feeling of missing something. In Portuguese, there is a word called ” Saudades” that according to the dictionary means: “a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament”.

I definitely have ” Saudades” of a cake!

just a Cake!

a simple chocolate cake!

entering your mom´s house or visit your grandmother and smelling that steamy fresh cake just out of the oven.

Going back to the basics, to baking, to tasting a cake by itself, I decided to dedicate this week´s of work to an old-time favorite flavor: CHOCOLATE!

Being me, I decided to have a small bake-off in my kitchen and this past Sunday I baked two recipes of my favorite chocolate cakes and have my family be the judge of it. None of them won, they ate them both!

Both cakes being of chocolate are very different in taste, moist and sweetness. One is my all-time favorite rich chocolate cake recipe that I found a long time ago on a magazine and the other is a Stout Chocolate Cake that someone gave me the recipe many years ago.

I´ll share one of them today and the other on a next post, so let´s begin:

Rich Chocolate Cake:

Ingredients:

1 cup of butter

350grms of golden sugar

5 eggs

1 chocolate tablet of at least 55% of cocoa or more

150 grams of flour

1 tablespoon of baking powder.

butter and sugar

Mix together the butter and the sugar until light and fluffy. Add each egg at the time and mix well after each addition.

Melt the chocolate in bain Marie and let it cool before adding it to the mixture. Mix well and finally add the sifted flour.

( in the last picture you can see both recipes of chocolate cake, the Rich Chocolate Cake is the one on the left)

Now, my special twist to this cake: add a pinch of sea salt and just a 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon, this will enhance the chocolate flavor!

This cake doesn´t rise too much, so for a taller, double this recipe and divide the batter into two molds of the same diameter.

Bake at 180º C for 40 minutes. This cake tends to sink in the middle so decorating requires a lot of leveling and carving. However, this cake is absolutely delicious and moist, it is similar to a brownie and is very rich in flavor.