Sinful After Dinner Chocolate Cake

.... fit for a truly sinful girl night in! Saturday night we congregated at a girlfriends for a BBQ everyone bought something, I in my usual fashion decided it was a perfect time to test out a recipe! It started off well, with my girlfriend using a Simon Johnson Thai paste on some chicken thighs and then a big bean salad, cinnamon potatoes - these are my favourite and were done at my request - and a lovely geen salad with feta and pumpkin (for our possible fructose malabsorption person who continued on to eat this cake but anyhooo), a few bottle of champagne we all started to as usual bag off the regular things in our lives, parents, jobs, boyfriends, friends of boyfriends along with the occasional chat of shoes and diamonds tossed in! After all there wasn't any men there to tell us otherwise or think we were dropping hints; none of us are that obvious or cunning!

This recipe was altered from the Australian Women's Weekly Chocolate Cake book.

After Dinner Chocolate Cake

35g (1/3cup) cocoa powder

80ml (1/3cup) hot water

150g dark eating chocolate

150g butter, chopped

300g (1 1/3 cup) brown sugar

90g almond meal

45g hazelnut meal

4 eggs, separated

Preheat your oven to 170deg and grease a round 22cm tin, lining the bottom with silicon paper (greaseproof). In a medium pot put the chocolate and butter on the stove over low heat and melt stirring till smooth; remove from heat.

In a small bowl or jug mix the hot water and cocoa until a thick paste forms.

Add this cocoa mix, meals egg yolks and sugar to the pot of melted chocolate and stir til combined.

Beat the egg whites in a separate bowl until soft peaks form. In two batches fold the egg whites into the mixture in the pot (hence the medium-large pot!).

Pour into the tin and bake for approximately 1 1/4hours. Not that the skewer doesn't really come out clean but there is a definite difference between the 1hour and 1 1/4hour mark. Take out of oven and allow to cool for 20minutes before turning onto wire rack.

Now, the recipe coated it in a chocolate ganache which was far to thick considering the richness of the cake, next time I will dust in icing sugar or in a thin drizzle of chocolate ganache and serve with a berry coulis and cream or icecream.

It was certainly a hit between us girls and we all much preferred the addition of hazelnut meal which added a further depth and texture to it.

Well..... it's now friday and I have probably an 8th left so make sure if you cook if you do it for a number of people as the servings you need are small. (It's also probably not best to serve children!) It has kept exceptionally well which is probably due to the thick ganache but it will definitely keep if you cook it a couple of days ahead and then coat with your preferred coulis or ganache on the night. It's definitely best served warm - but not hot!

Now, this delicious cake does take over an hour to cook, so don't do like I did and cook it after dinner, unless of course you've had a rather large dinner as we just had! It does take some time to set and we were a little impatient seen as we'd already waited for an hour and a half so ours was served warm and sort of fall apart-ish, but none the less plates were scraped clean!

*Picture to come!