Cola revisited

Two years ago, I tried doing cola cookies, and it turned out to be one of the more memorable failed attempts for me. The taste of the cookies was fine, as I recall, but the texture was just not right - partly because I tried adding cola bottle sweets, and they just melted and went hard. Since then, I've had an otherwise untouched bottle of cola syrup (for a Sodastream machine), and I think it's time to try something else with it!

I figured cake is probably the safer way to go, and it just so happened that Serious Eats has a cola cake recipe that I can crib. I'm not following it exactly, but it's pretty close!

Cola cake
Ingredients

• 225g Dark brown sugar
• 100g Caster sugar
• 200g Butter
• 2 Eggs
• 3tbsp Cola concentrate
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 250g Self-raising flour
• 1/2tsp Baking powder
• 1/2tsp Salt
• 35g Cocoa powder
• 200ml Buttermilk*

Method

1. Cream butter and sugar in a bowl.
2. Beat in the eggs, cola concentrate and vanilla extract.
3. Fold in the flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder.
4. Stir in the buttermilk.
5. Pour into a lined, greased pan and bake at 180C for ~45mins.

*If you happen to have a Polish food shop near you, go there for buttermilk. It's called maślanka and is absurdly cheap compared with buying it in a supermarket (assuming, of course, your supermarket even sells the stuff) - a 400ml carton of the stuff cost me 40p from my local one!

Here's the mixture at the end of step 3 (before the buttermilk got added). It's a particularly satisfying looking mixture.

And after adding the buttermilk. I don't actually know how thick the mixture was supposed to be, so I was guessing - it's very reminiscent of chocolate Angel Delight in appearance! It was also about this time that Fiona told me that she's not sure she likes cola as a flavour...

Ready for the oven. I think this batter looks particularly good!

It still looks good after baking!

It was slightly underbaked - as you can see in the last photo, it's a bit fudgey in the middle, but not horrendously. Overall, it's not bad - especially given how many unknowns there were and how much guesswork was involved in the recipe itself. I was a bit disappointed that the cake wasn't a bit more cola-ey - really, the cocoa powder turned it into a chocolate-cake-that-tasted-a-little-bit-of-cola rather than a cola cake per se. The flavour did come through somewhat though, which was nice, and the sweetness was about right (which was one thing that I had been a little concerned about). I may have to revisit this recipe at some point, omitting the cocoa powder and upping the quantity of cola syrup - I think there's still a bit more to come from this idea!