In the afternoon I kept a promise I made a couple of weeks earlier and made a chocolate cake filled with chestnut puree partly for the family, partly for my work colleagues and partly for me.
The album on the player that afternoon was Peter Gabriel's second album now commonly known as "Peter Gabriel 2" or "Scratch" and the fifth track White Shadow with its atmospheric, icy guitar lines certainly matched the weather outside.
In a mixing bowl I beat together two hundred and fifty grams of low fat margarine and two hundred and twenty five grams of caster sugar. I beat the margarine and sugar together with a metal tablespoon until the margarine took on a fluffy appearance.
In another mixing bowl I combined two hundred and twenty five grams of self-raising flour, two teaspoons of baking powder thirty grams of dark cocoa powder. I find that with this recipe it helps if you mix the margarine and sugar and the other more dry ingredients separately as this gives them chance to bind together and enhance the taste.
In a small bowl I whisked together the whites and yolks of four eggs that I had removed from the fridge about an hour earlier so as to bring them to room temperature. Once the eggs were combined I added them to the margarine and sugar together with the dry ingredients. It is this part of the preparation where this recipe will either succeed or fail on an epic scale. The trick is to reconcile all the dry ingredients with the eggs sugar and the margarine. If they are not mixed together fully then you will end up with an overly sloppy mixture that will not cook well. Ideally the mixture should be the consistency of a dark chocolate milkshake when it has been stirred together properly.
Once the ingredients were mixed I placed them in a cake tin that was around ten centimetres deep and twenty five centimetres across. I had been sure to grease the tin with plenty of margarine and dust its base with plain flour prior to adding the cake mix. I then cooked it in the oven at 160 degrees, 170 degrees for non-fan ovens, for fifty minutes. I undertook the usual test of poking a skewer into the cake to check if it was done in the middle and when only a small amount of cake came off of the skewer I knew it was ready.
After removing the cake from its tin and I left it to cool on a wire rack for about an hour. While the cake was cooling it made the filling. I took a dark chocolate bar, that amounted to about two hundred and fifty grams worth of chocolate and one hundred and twenty five grams of margarine, put them in a heatproof bowl and then balanced the bowl over a pan of boiling water until the margarine and bar of chocolate melted to form a thick and strong tasting paste.
I took the bowl off the heat and added a can of chestnut puree, that contained around four hundred grams of puree, mashed the puree and mixed it into the chocolate paste. Once the cake had cooled I sliced it lengthways, and put the top part upside down on the wire rack while I spread the puree mixture onto the top of the base of the cake. I then added the top part of the cake onto the base to create sandwich. I spread the excess mixture on top of the cake.
This is a cake that despite the puree is not too rich for its own good as the melted dark chocolate and the chestnut puree in the filling coupled with the dark cocoa make sure of this. Although the cake is fairly sweet it is not sweet enough to stop you coming back for several further helpings as the family and my colleagues found out subsequently.
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