Mystery cake!

That was a bit of a long, unplanned hiatus - life got a bit busy again! Anyway, we're back for the moment at least. My friend Tracy invited Trisha and me over tonight, mainly so I can bug her husband, Ben, to explain MRI to me - and if that's not worth bringing a cake for, I don't know what is.

I've had a post-it note stuck to the front page of my Filofax for the last age. It's got a quick summary of a recipe for a coffee cake written on it, in my handwriting, written with one of my fountain pens and in the ink I used to run in that pen. The weird thing is though, I've got absolutely no recollection of writing it! I assume that at some point I saw this recipe and thought it looked good or interesting (and in fairness, I do still think it looks both good and interesting) and copied down crib notes intending to bake it at some point. Unfortunately, because of this, I have no idea where the recipe came from, so I can't credit the original author properly - sorry! Nevertheless, it's time to bake that mystery cake!

Mystery Coffee Cake
Ingredients

• 100g Plain flour
• 200g Caster sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp Cream of tartar
• 100g Cocoa powder

• 2 Eggs
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract (yup, that's a lot of vanilla!)
• 60g Olive oil (That was my guess as to how much 75ml weighed - it's a bit low though; more like 65ml)
• 150ml Milk
• 150ml Black coffee

Method

1. Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl together.
2. Whisk the wet ingredients together with a balloon whisk.
3. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk together.
4. Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at ~180C for 45-60 mins.

Here are the mixtures halfway through step 2. I whisked the eggs and oil together separately first to ensure that they'd distribute well through the other wet ingredients - but with hindsight, I don't think it was necessary!

 The mixture ready for baking. It's wonderfully glossy!

The finished article, fresh from the oven. It smells wonderful and looks ever so dark and fantastically rich - I think I might let it cool and cover it with a ganache just for that extra level of decadence!

What the heck, why not? I did cover it with ganache in the end - 200g of 53% cocoa dark chocolate and 150ml of double cream. That's a lot of ganache...