Chocolate Almond Cake

with Chilli Chocolate and Marzipan Chunks

This was a hastily conceived cake, to replace the Salted Vanilla Oatmeal Cookies that were such a disaster.  Once again, I used this recipe as a guide for the ingredient quantities, as it always works so well, and used one recipe quantity to make two small loaf tins. Now that I'm not feeding CT, and Hubs and I are watching our weight, we find it difficult to get through a large cake before it gets stale, so a small loaf is an ideal size.

The dry ingredients (175g SR flour, 11/2 teaspoons baking powder, 75g ground almonds, 25g cocoa and 140g caster sugar) were mixed together in a large bowl. The wet ingredients (2 large eggs, 225g natural yogurt, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and 75mls sunflower oil) were lightly whisked together in another bowl, then the wet mix was gently stirred into the dry mix. Finally, 100g diced white marzipan (with a high almond content) and 100g of chopped chilli flavoured plain chocolate were folded in, before dividing between two 1lb loaf tins and baking at 180C for 40 minutes.

This was a really tasty cake (we all love marzipan!), although the chilli flavour of the chocolate didn't come through strongly. Maybe slightly on the dry side - it could have benefited from a little more yogurt, I guess. Because of the small scale of the loaf, the chunks of marzipan and chocolate looked huge, which was quite attractive.