Mocha and Walnut Cake

Bake it Monday 

Because the house smells great with fresh baking and its always nice to lick the spoon of your creation and share a slice of cake.

Its nice to have some home baking in the house for the week, to feed hungry mouths when they come home from school, having tea and cake with fellow mummies over a play date, or 4 o'clock snacks between lunch and dinner wouldn't be the same without a cookie or two.  

What ever the reason its good to get into the kitchen especially with little ones to give them the practical skills in measuring, mixing and taste as well as satisfaction that they have created and cooked something themselves.

Every 1-2 weeks we will be sharing a cake recipe because we cant share a slice of cake with you and we encourage you to share a slice of your home baking with us and anyone else that links up to this post.  Please show some love to others that put post up,  as linkies only work if you share and i cant think of anything nicer to share that a good slice of cake. 

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To kick off this week lets share all bakes about Mocha:  If you have any new bakes or want to recycle an old post go to the link up at the bottom of the post. 


This is a recipe by Eric Lanlard. As Daddies request was for a Coffee cake that is what we made him

Cake
225g butter
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
225g self raising flour
50g cocoa powder
50g oven roasted walnuts
50g oven roasted coffee beans
100ml strong coffee

Butter cream
250g butter
200g icing sugar
4tbsp very strong coffee 4 tsp instant coffee cooled

First we roasted off the walnuts as this intensifys the flavour, we didn't put coffee beans in but used strong coffee instead.

We creamed the butter and sugar, then added the eggs one at a time.

Madam created a snow storm of flour and then cocoa and mummy folded the the flour into the mix

Soph then added the walnuts and coffee mixture and stirred this in too

 Some one really wants to eat the cake mix and if i wasn't there she would eat the whole bowl, i think i would join her, but the Spoon was licked clean including the bowl.

 If there was any criticism i would say that Eric was a bit stingy with the walnuts as you can see in the below picture i would add double the amount.

The cooking time was twice as long as i didn't use 2 thin tins just one tin and i cut the cake in half once cooked. what was stated was 25 mins for two tins.   One cake took 50 mins, i would do the knife test as i found after 25mins my cake was still raw and i had to do 2 lots of 15 mins in addition.  All oven are different so make sure you check before pulling your cake out of the oven.

 Once the cake is cooled and i mean really cooled cut the cake in half (we put ours in the fridge for a bit at this point) spread half the butter icing inside the cake and coat the outside with the rest.

 Now Eric said to decorate with chocolate cover coffee beans which you can get at any good deli, how posh!!.  However where i live we don't have anything as upper class as a deli, we have a Greggs and they do a nice sausage roll, which might appeal to decorate a cake with as you can get lunch and pudding in one sitting.  Anyway we decorated good old fashioned chocolate sprinkles and toasted walnuts.