Chocolate Coffee Cake...Without Coffee

It's a Baked Sunday Morning again and this week the challenge was Chocolate Coffee Cake. For those that are new to my blog every two weeks there's a group of bloggers that bake the same recipe out of Matt Lewis & Renato Poliafito's Baked Explorations cookbook.

This week I wasn't going to do the challenge as I'm not too fond of butter cream and only a few people in my family enjoy the flavour of coffee, but then I thought I'd soldier on and make my own version. For the recipe go here, Baked Sunday Mornings.



The recipe called for a Classic Chocolate Cake but when it came to assembling I did away with one of the three layers of cake as it was getting to high for my liking. Next came the Coffee butter cream minus the coffee & with an addition of more vanilla. Not being a fan of butter cream I only made half the amount to layer between cakes.

Then I made a rich ganache using equal amounts of thick cream and dark chocolate. I like a rustic homemade look so I doused the cake in semi-set ganache and swirled it with a palette knife until I was happy.

To finish it off I sprinkled it with caramelised cacao nibs dusted in gold shimmer. These two little monsters look impressed!

The cake was lovely and moist, the butter cream gave it an extra hit of flavour and the ganache turned it into what all chocolate tortes should be, deliciously decadent.

 And uhh, little Livy Lou enjoyed herself to!