Chocolate and nuts are the perfect combo don’t you think???
Although when I was little I never thought so!…how much you grow up and realise how wrong you are with a lot of things. I didn’t even like nutella when I was younger too! I know…it’s just not right.
I wanted to treat myself for my birthday and I wasn’t sure what kind of cake to make it was for a family gathering. My dad said ‘why don’t you make something you like’ so I was like yes, why don’t I. Then I thought what do I like? and would be good for treating myself calories weren’t included…so I thought chocolate, nuts, nutella and also ferreros as they are one of my favourite and if you didn’t know they nutella is filling inside the ferreros.
After browsing online I found a few recipes for ferrero chocolate cake, these cakes contain ground hazelnuts in their cake mix it was basically a hazelnut chocolate cake. I really wanted to give it a go but as I haven’t made it before I was worried about whether it would turn out so I stuck with a chocolate cake I’ve made before and used the icing from the recipe. The ferreros are not used in the cake but as a decoration on top of the cake. One day I will have to try the hazelnut and chocolate cake as it will be so yummy.
The sponge of this cake is not light and fluffy but more dense and very moist. It’s an American recipe so get your cups out! and it has coffee which you can’t taste I love the taste of coffee and I think coffee and chocolate work very well together. If your not a fan of coffee I’m sure you can just omit it.
The recipe makes quite a huge cake so I decided to make it into a four layer cake. I do like cakes that have been made into layers they look really professional.
- 1 large - egg
- 1 cup - caster sugar
- 6 ounces - Greek yoghurt
- 1/4 cup - vegetable oil
- 1 1/2 tsp - vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup - brewed coffee, room temperature or warm (I used 11/2tsp of coffee)
- 1/2 cup - cocoa powder
- 1 cup - plain flour
- 1 tsp - baking soda
- 1/2 tsp - baking powder
- 1/2 tsp - salt
- 200g - soft butter
- 200g - dark chocolate
- 5 heaped tbsp - Nutella
- 4 - hazelnut wafers (I added slightly more)
- 1. Preheat oven to 175°C. Either line a square 9" tin or 10" round tin.
- 2. In a large mixing bowl combine egg, sugar, yogurt, oil, vanilla, and whisk until smooth and combined. Add coffee, cocoa powder and whisk vigorously until batter is smooth and free from lumps.
- 3. In another bowl add flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and whisk until combined then add this mixture to the other bowl and mix vigorously until batter has just combined for about 1 minute.
- 4. Pour in the batter in the tin and bake for 25-30 mins, use a cake tester to test if the cake it cooked.
- 1. Melt the chocolate in either a ban marie or in the microwave in 30 sec intervals.
- 2. In a thick sandwich bag crush the wafers so they are still slightly chunky and not too fine.
- 3. In mixing bowl cream together the butter and nutella then and the cooled melted chocolate.
- 4. I wanted the topping of my cake to have a smooth top I took out a third of the mixture into a separate bowl and then added the crushed biscuits so it could be used in the filling...however this is optional.
