Nigella’s Honey Chocolate Cake

Now that the holidays have quietened down a bit, I’ve been dedicating myself to my most cherished activity: slumming it in front of the tv and watching the Food channel. Ace of Cakes is my definite favourite (it’s my dream job!), along with World Kitchen (my second dream job), but I’ve always had a great fondness for Nigella and her midnight refrigerator raiding ways.

I saw an episode of Nigella Kitchen (btw does anyone else find it odd to say without an apostrophe ‘s’?) where she made a chocolate and honey cake adorned with marzipan bees, and I was overcome with cake-lust.

My friend Viv came over yesterday to help me make the cake. You can find the recipe here: Nigella’s Honey Chocolate Cake

Like most of Nigella’s recipes, it’s pretty simple. In fact on her show, she mixes all the ingredients at once in a food processor, which she says prevents too much air getting into the batter. But the food processor was too high up on top of the fridge (I’m short), so I went with my ordinary stand mixer.

Melting 100g of dark chocolate in a double boiler. Yum.

Ooo yeah.

Creaming the butter, brown sugar and honey. I just want to eat this with a spoon…

Adding cocoa powder with my brilliant Matryoshka measuring spoons that I won at the Food Blogger’s Picnic, thanks to the lovely Miss Piggy!

THERE IS JUST SOMETHING AMAZING ABOUT MELTED CHOCOLATE I DON’T KNOW…!

Adding the flour and eggs.

The recipe calls for a cup of boiling water! It turns the mixture into an amazingly honey chocolatey soup.

Word of warning about this recipe. The mixture is REALLY runny. It’s completely liquid. Nigella’s recipe calls for a springform tin. Being a novice baker, I just poured this batter into my springform tin with only the base lined. Whoops. After 30 seconds in the oven, it started to leak out! Aaaah! Nightmares. In the end we managed to transfer the batter into a smaller, more watertight tin that I completely (though inexpertly) lined with paper.

Anyway, thanks to google – I now know the importance of lining the whole cake tin, and how to line a round cake tin. THANKS GOOGLE!

Anyway, thanks to using a smaller tin, we were able to use the spare batter to make two smaller cakes.

It turned out ok, though the sides were slightly wobbly haha.

Now for the Chocolate Honey Glaze!

Dark chocolate melted in honey & hot water, and a little bit of icing sugar.

Yay!

Ok last photo of chocolate glaze… I promise.

Ok so I lied…

Time to make the bees!

We used marzipan mixed with a little yellow food colouring, and rolled them into squat little balls.

Toothpicks to paint on eyes and bumblebee stripes.

Will you believe I bought a whole bag of flaked almonds just to use as wings? If anyone has a good recipe that uses flaked almonds let me know!!

They are so adorbs though… totally worth it.

With 6 years of art schooling between us… is it a surprise that decorating and photographing was our favourite part of the process? (besides the eating of course)

I’m sure my neighbours find it weird that I’m always bringing food out onto the balcony to photograph it, but whatevs.

I actually think the little cakes turned out way cuter than the main cake! Though the bees do all look like they’re having some sort of heavy discussion.

After we took photos, we ate them of course! It’s YUMMY. I thought the combo of honey & chocolate might have been a bit too sweet, but the bitterness of the dark chocolate really helped. The cake was gooey and moist in the middle, I’m sure helped in part by the sticky honey glaze that permeated through the cake.

Though it was really hard to eat the bees….