Double Chocolate and Almond Cake

- chocolate almond cake studded with white chocolate and marzipan chips.

This was made using the basic proportions of a Madeira cake, which is ideal for the kind of plain cake you like to keep handy to eat with a cup of tea or coffee, rather than a fancy dessert type of cake.

Ingredients

175g butter, at room temperature
175g caster sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
150g SR flour
25g cocoa
75g ground almonds
2-3 tablespoons milk
100g white chocolate
100g good quality marzipan - I use Anton Berg which is 60% almonds

Method

Chop both the marzipan and white chocolate into cubes about 3mm across and set aside. Sift the SR flour, cocoa and almonds into a bowl.

Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy, then beat in the eggs, one at a time, adding a teaspoon of the flour mix to prevent curdling. Add the vanilla extract with the last egg.

Fold in the rest of the flour mixture in two batches, using enough milk to give a 'dropping consistency', which means that the cake batter is soft and liquid enough to just fall off the spoon with no effort on your part.

Gently fold in the white chocolate and marzipan chips.

Spoon the batter into a 19 or 20cm (8") prepared springform cake tin - I like to base line even tins claiming to be non-stick with baking parchment or a silicone circle - level the surface and bake at 170C for 75 minutes, or until done when tested with a probe.

Cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

This isn't a very good picture, I'm afraid - with typical bad luck, the next slice off the cake was not well endowed with either chocolate or marzipan chips on either surface, but I didn't think I could cut the whole cake up just to find a cut surface which would give a better picture. LOL!




I'm not a huge fan of white chocolate; to me it tastes of little except vanilla, so I only really use it when I want to provide a visual contrast. Here it gave a textural contrast too, as the chocolate chips set hard on cooling whereas the marzipan chips stayed relatively soft. Overall, the three elements of almond chocolate cake, white chocolate and marzipan worked really well together. The cake itself is not richly chocolatey, but I think you could add some melted plain chocolate - say 50-75g - if you wanted a richer, moister cake.