quadruple chocolate cake

utterly phenomenal. if you ever take anything away from this ol’ blog, take this recipe and make it. I baked it (almost) wholesale with instruction from my favorite domestic spinmeister-o’-words, nigella lawson, and it is the stuff of my chocolate-craving dreams.

deep and dark, and the most satisfying chocolate cake I’ve had – a tightly-bound fine crumb, the lightness of a good butter cake, the rich darkness of good bittersweet chocolate, and it keeps like a dream. and with a name like that, how can you resist? I certainly couldn’t.

dense chocolate cake

I’m sorry for the hiatus in recipe-provisioning – but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped baking! no, no – there is butter in the fridge, and so there must be cake.

but this one, well. I’m a little undecided about it – it’s a much-lauded nigella recipe, and I’m a huge fan, but the very quality she designed to be in the cake is precisely what I don’t really like about it: squidginess. and to call it a chocolate loaf feels a little like a stretch, because it seems rather incidental that that dark gold resides in this cake – it’s more a dense molassesy loaf. nothing wrong with that though – it could be well up your alley.

whole meyer lemon cake

I used the last of my lovely meyer lemons in this cake – a damp, hearty but fluffy cake of almond meal barely bound together. it’s a simple, fragrant cake – and good for tea time. you whizz up meyer lemons with a bit of egg and almond, throw it all into a pan – and bare moments later, there’s a delicious waft of citrus in the kitchen.