Chocolate Espresso Cake with Café Latte Cream

We’re moving into Nigella’s Dinner-Party Cakes, even though we still haven’t made Chocolate Orange Cake, Chocolate Fruit Cake, and Tropical Chocolate Cake (can you see the issue? if I tell you that the surprise ingredient in Tropical Chocolate Cake is pineapple, do you get it? yes, we like our chocolate straight up, and yes, when we bite into chocolates and they turn out to have fruit in them, we put them back in the box).

This one was stressful. You beat SIX eggs with the sugar and vanilla until it is “thick, pale, and moussey,” in Nigella’s accurately descriptive terms. That takes a while, and I was skeptical it would happen, but finally it did. Then you have to fold in HALF A CUP of flour and some instant espresso powder (S told me it was ok to use finely ground French Roast beans, so I did). Anyway, that’s a lot of “thick, pale, and moussey” egg stuff and not very much flour, and the folding was a bit challenging. But I managed.

The big problem, though, was taking it out of the oven. Nigella said 35-40 minutes and “the top of the cake should be firm, and the underneath still a bit gooey” (don’t these quotes just epitomize why Nigella is so hateable and lovable all at once?). So at 35 minutes the top was hard and underneath was jiggly, and since the Chocolate Guinness Cake was ready right on time, I confidently pulled it out. But then, after it cooled, it was quite evident that there was liquid batter beneath the hard top. At that point I panicked and turned it over to the expert. S audaciously PUT THE CAKE BACK IN THE OVEN (would you have dared?! I wouldn’t). I couldn’t bear the pressure and left the house (M needed Mommy time, so we went off for a lovely rainy afternoon of reading at a café). When we came back, the cake looked great.

I put the Café Latte Cream together (melted white chocolate, heavy cream, and more coffee--another one of those simple Nigella marvels that you would never think of because you’re not Nigella) and M whipped it with the balloon whisk, all by herself, to a most excellent degree of whippedness. We served the cream alongside the cake.

How was it? Well, it was indeed a dinner party cake, albeit a dinner party of the familial sort--just J and J and the boys (and I must interject here that the children were all TERRIBLE--J said that she used to worry about whose kids were worse till she realized that sometimes it was theirs, sometimes ours, sometimes the younger ones, sometimes the older ones, and sometimes ALL FOUR ARE SIMPLY MONSTERS, like last night. Luckily the grown-ups had QUITE A LOT TO DRINK, and by the end of the evening all of us, children and adults, were rolling around on the living room floor playing Jenga and listening to the Beatles and having a grand old time, until the children became monstrous again and the evening ground to a halt.)

But the cake, you plead, enough of these parenthetical asides and please don’t tell us that you drink in the presence of your children so we don’t need to call D.S.S. on you, just tell us how the cake was! Well, I’m not quite sure. Everyone else loved it, and said it was ideally moist, chocolatey and coffee-ey. S said it tasted like chocolate-covered coffee beans. I liked it, but it didn’t make a very strong impression. Now whether this is because I remain besotted with the Chocolate Guinness Cake or because of the home-made Meyer Lemon Drops and the wine, I couldn’t say. But I think I’ll reserve final judgment till I’ve eaten some more.