Sour Cream Chocolate Cake with raspberries

This is the cake I made a few weeks ago for my uncle's 50th birthday; as you can tell, I couldn't decide which photo I liked the best, so you get all of them in a pretty collage. Don't you love little silver cachous? They make something clad in dull brown into something so glamorous, and they do it with such ease (just like an Italian policeman :-) ) Although I'm really keen to try the silver dusting powder Stephanie has used with her chocolate cake!

This is the recipe for the Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake in Nigella's newest book, Feast. When I was trying to decide on a recipe, I looked through her chocolate cakes collection and noticed with surprise that this recipe is almost exactly the same recipe as her Sour Cream Chocolate Cake with Sour Cream Icing in Domestic Goddess. Funny that when I saw that recipe in Domestic Goddess I dismissed it almost right away, thinking it sounded too fussy and a bit weird, but given a new name and the added wow-factor of a photo in Feast, suddenly I was considering it.
I thought the addition of the sour cream to the icing might appeal to those eating it on the night, who were mainly men not big on sweets or chocolate. Along a similar theme, instead of sandwiching it together with the icing, I made up the raspberry cream filling she gives for her Valentine's Day heart cake. Dark chocolate and tart raspberry cream is a great combination.
Out of the three gooey chocolate birthday cakes I've made recently (one I haven't yet posted about) I personally think this was my least favourite. I didn't quite take to the slightly acidic flavour of the sour cream in the icing, and found the texture of the cake to be a little heavy and dense. The raspberry cream filling worked well, but I think there needed to be a little more of it to really taste it.
However, my grandmother told me a few days later that it was the best chocolate cake she's ever had in her life, and the things I didn't like so much about it were exactly the things that made it her favourite! She enjoyed the sour cream icing and loved the raspberries in the cream. So, there you go....definitely worth trying, especially if you may have people around who are not as chocolate obsessed as you may be.




Read on for the recipe:


Old Fashioned Chocolate cake (sour cream chocolate cake with sour cream icing) with raspberries.
Adapted from 'Feast' Nigella Lawson

Cake:
200g plain flour
200g caster sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarb
40g cocoa powder
175g soft butter
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
150ml sour cream

Icing:
75g butter
175g goold quality dark chocolate, in pieces
300g icing sugar
1 tbls golden syrup
125ml sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla

Filling:
200ml whipping cream
200g raspberries

Preheat oven to 180C and prepare two 20cm sandwich tins.
Put all cake ingredients into a food processor and process until you have a thick, smooth batter.
Divide the batter, using a spatula to help you scrape and spread, into the prepared tins and bake until a cake tester comes out clean, which should be around 25-35 minutes.
Remove the cakes, in their tins, to a wire rack and let cool for 10 minutes before turning out of their tins. Don't worry about cracks as they'll be covered by the icing.
To make the icing, melt the butter and chocolate in a large bowl. While they are cooling, sieve the icing sugar into another bowl (or put in the food processor and blitz) to remove the lumps.
Add the golden syrup to the cooled chocolate mixture, followed by the sour cream and vanilla and when all this is combined whisk in the sieved icing sugar. Or just pour the mixture down the funnel of the food processor on to the icing sugar, with the motor running.
When you've done, you may need to add a little boiling water or icing sugar for consistency.
Choose your cake stand and cut out four strips of baking parchment to form a square outline on it (this stops the icing running down the plate), then sit one of the cakes uppermost (domed) side down.
Whip the cream until thick but not stiff. Add the raspberries and crush with a fork, though not too finely. The cream should turn wonderfully pink, in a rose-and-white mottled fashion. Sandwich the two cakes with this mixture.
Spread the top and sides with the icing and leave a few minutes til set, then pull away the paper strips.