Pistachio Chocolate Ripple Cake - We Should Cocoa

Green is not a common natural colour for many baking ingredients. When you read that green and blue are two of the colours that are most likely to make people reject manufactured food, it's not surprising that there isn't much green around - apparently green and blue are associated with mould! So, when Chele at Chocolate Teapot set the theme of 'green' for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, in honour of St Patrick's day on March 17th, there weren't going to be many options available to me. In the end, it came down to mint or pistachio. Whilst I love the mint and chocolate combination in confectionary, I'm not too keen on it in baking, for some reason. You are welcome to call me contrary!

So, the decision to use pistachio nuts was made for me. I don't often make big cakes for We Should Cocoa, but on this occasion I decided to adapt the Alice Medrich Ripple Cake recipe that I've used several times before. It's a well-textured pound cake which has proved quite versatile in the past. It almost always ripples prettily during baking without any help from me - the swirls in the layers occur during baking.

This time, as well as reducing the size of the cake by 20%, to better fit my bundt tin, I exchanged some of the flour for ground almonds, reduced the proportion of the chocolate ripple, and added chopped pistachios, chocolate nibs and a little green colouring to the cake batter.

The results were very pleasing, although reducing the proportion of the chocolate ripple cut down on the chocolate flavour a bit too much. I did it to make the cake look more green for the challenge, but I think if I make this again I will go back to the original larger chocolate layers. I have to confess that I had to edit the photos a little to try to make the cake look as green as it was in real life - you may call it cheating, but I blame the camera for not capturing the colour properly!

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons cocoa
3 tablespoons caster sugar
2 tablespoons water

270g plain flour
50g ground almonds
scant 2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
320g caster sugar
200mls sunflower oil
4 cold eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
200mls cold milk
50g chopped pistachio nuts
25g cocoa nibs
green food colouring

Method
Preheat oven to 180C and prepare a 10-cup bundt tin.
In a small bowl, mix the first 3 ingredients to a smooth paste.
Sift the flour with the baking powder and salt, and whisk in the ground almonds to distribute evenly.
Beat the sugar, oil and vanilla extract until amalgamated.

Beat in the eggs one at a time, then continue beating with an electric whisk for about 3 minutes, until the mixture is pale and thick.
Reduce the speed of the whisk to slow and mix in the flour mixture and the milk in alternate portions, whisking only enough to incorporate the flour properly.
Weigh 300g of the batter into a small bowl and stir in the cocoa mixture.
Add green food colouring to the plain batter to taste, then stir in the nuts and cocoa nibs.
Layer the batters alternately in the bundt tin, 1/3 of each at a time, starting with the green batter.
Bake the cake for 60minutes, or until a test probe is clean, then cool in the tin for 15minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Dust heavily with icing sugar before serving.

We Should Cocoa is a monthly challenge co-hosted by Chele at Chocolate Teapot and Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog. Each month participants are given an ingredient (or method) which must be used in a chocolate product. The full rules are available here if you would like to join in.