Verdict: Devil's blood cake

Well, as experiments go, it was definitely an interesting one. The cake itself was certainly not bad, but not quite the roaring success that I'd hoped it would be. It was really lovely and light and the flavour of the wine did come through as I'd hoped it would. That said, the taste of wine was the tiniest, merest hint in the backdrop - if you didn't know there was most of a bottle of wine in it, you probably wouldn't have been able to say what the source of the flavour was. I think I used too much treacle - it overwhelmed the wine quite badly. Nonetheless, the cake has quite a distinctive flavour to it - unlike any other cake I've ever baked, that's for certain. Quite pleasant, but also slightly strange. The icing was too sweet for me by far - I'd forgotten that I don't actually like icing. But it would have made it look very pretty if I'd bothered spreading it properly! I'd say the cake overall was a qualified success!

Devil's blood cake

Last time around, I'd been cooking with some red wine (and drinking some too) while I was baking with treacle, and it occurred to me that the flavours went together pretty darned well. So naturally, I decided to bake a cake around it. Why the name? Well, I think most of my cakes have had too boring names (though I guess most of them are boring cakes, so that suits), and I think the reduced wine is what I'd expect a devil's blood to be like - dark and syrupy. Anyway, the cake...

Devil's Blood Cake
Ingredients
For the cake

• 500ml Red wine
• 1 Star anise
• 4 Cloves
• 4 Juniper berries
• 275g Black treacle
• 150g Butter
• 60g Icing sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 3 Eggs
  
• 230g Self-raising flour
• 3tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 1tsp Cream of tartar
• 2tbsp Cocoa powder

For the icing

• 115g Butter
• 60ml Milk
• 480g Icing sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla extract

Method

1. Heat the red wine with the star anise, cloves and juniper berries and reduce down to ~75ml.
2. Strain the wine (discarding the bits) and add the treacle, butter for the cake, icing sugar and vanilla extract for the cake. Stir while heating gently to melt the ingredients together.
3. Allow to cool a little and beat in the eggs, one at a time.
4. Sift the dry ingredients in and fold in gently.
5. Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at 180C for ~30 mins.
6. Allow to cool on a wire rack.
7. Cream the butter, 260g of the icing sugar, vanilla extract for the icing and the milk together in a bowl until mostly smooth. (This is probably better done in a food mixer or with a hand-held beater if you have one - I don't).
8. Cream in the rest of the sugar a bit at a time until smooth.
9. Ice the cooled cake.

I don't think the quality of wine is critical, so I grabbed what I thought would be the worst bottle of wine from my wine rack. As you can see, I don't drink bad wine (o:.
It looks a bit like mud before going into the oven...But reassuringly, it looks like a cake coming out of it!
I couldn't be bothered to ice it properly, so it just got slopped on the top!