Eggless Chocolate Walnut cake

With life being extremely hectic, with work, two weddings coming up in the immediate family, house repainting, cleaning, shopping etc, blogging has taken a back stage… I am however, cooking and baking quite regularly, but at odd hours or always multi-tasking with something else that taking pictures and blogging is taking the blow. There are however quite a few dishes still in the memory card, waiting to be downloaded! May be I’ll get them all to light in the new year!!
Till then, here is one cake that I baked for D’s birthday this time. With all the mentioned crazy schedule we had, I could not make any fancy cake with decoration. But this was one easy, quick and tasty cake. I tweaked m eggless sponge cake to make it chocolaty and topped with walnuts. This, along with another cake that’ll come up some other time, vanished right on the next day!

Ohh did I mention, our dear electricity board decided to paly spoil sport and cut off the power when my cake was almost 3/4th done and didn’t bother to turn it back on for more than an hour. I however, re-baked for a few extra minutes and thank God, the cake did bake well.

Here’s the recipe…

Eggless Chocolate Walnut cake

Preparation time : 15 min
Baking time : 35-40 min

Ingredients:
All-purpose flour/Maida – 1 ¼ cups
Cocoa powder – ¼ cup
Sugar – 3/4 cup (The original called for 1 cup)
Baking powder – 1 ¼ tsps
Baking soda – ½ tsp
Salt – a pinch
Thick curd – 1 cup
Cooking oil – ½ cup
Vanilla essence – 1 tsp
Chocolate essence – ½ tsp, optional
Thick coffee decoction – 2 Tbsp or Instant coffee powder – 2 tsp

For topping:
Walnuts – Shelled and chopped into pieces – ¼ cup
Cashews – Chopped into pieces – 2 Tbsp
Brown sugar – 2 Tbsp

Procedure:
• Pre-heat the oven to 200C/400F. Grease an 8 inch pan and set aside.
• Powder the sugar and in a bowl, mix the curd and sugar till the sugar dissolves.
• Stir-in the baking powder and baking soda into the curd mixture. Mix well and set aside for 2-3 minutes. The curd will turn frothy and start rising and increasing in volume.
• In the meanwhile, sieve the flour and cocoa powder thrice and set aside.
• Add the oil, essence and coffee to the curd mixture. Stir gently so that the air in the mixture is not lost.
• Next, gently fold in the flour. Don’t stir very vigorously; do it very gently. The batter should have a dropping consistency.
• Pour the batter into the readied pan and sprinkle the topping mixture generously and lightly tap so that the nuts stick to the batter
• Bake in the pre-heated oven for 10 minutes.
• Lower the temperature to 180C/350F, and bake for another 35-40 minutes, till the toothpick inserted comes out clean
• Once done, remove from oven and let the tin cool on a wire-rack for 10 minutes. Run a serrated knife around the edges and upturn the cake from the tin and let it cool on the wire-rack for a good amount of time before you can slice it.
• Once fully cooled, slice the cake with a serrated knife and enjoy!

Notes:
• Any nuts can be used for topping.
• The cake was not too sweet as is so the addition of brown sugar for topping did not make it too sweet
• Since the nuts are on the top layer, they get toasted on the cake itself, so no need to toast them before.

Now, My dear readers, here’s Wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2012!!!

See ya all in 2012!! Tata!!!