Description
A simple, moist chocolate bundt cake decorated with a boozy cream icing and Guylian chocolate praline seashell truffles – the perfect showstopper cake to serve this Christmas.
Ingredients
Scale
For the Chocolate Bundt Cake
- 65g cocoa powder, sifted, plus extra for dusting
- 120ml boiling water
- 4 large eggs
- 160ml milk
- 230g self raising flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 130g margarine, plus extra for greasing
- 360g golden caster sugar
- pinch salt
- 8–10 Guylian seashell truffles, plus extra to decorate the cake plate around the bottom
- 3 squares edible gold leaf
- tiny gold rice paper stars
For the Boozy Cream Icing
- 150g icing sugar, sifted
- 4 tbsp double cream
- 1 tsp cognac, Irish cream (or vanilla extract to keep things booze free!)
Instructions
- Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees.
- Place the cocoa powder and the boiling water into the bowl of your stand mixer and beat until it has formed a thick paste, scraping down the sides if necessary.
- Add the rest of the ingredients for the sponge to the bowl and beat until the mixture is uniform, again, making sure to scrape down the sides well with a spatula.
- Grease your bundt tin well with a piece of kitchen paper and a little more margarine, before dusting the tin with sieved cocoa powder. Tap out the excess over the kitchen sink.
- Pour the cake mixture into the tin, tapping it firmly a couple of times on the worktop to knock out any big air bubbles. Bake for 50-55 minutes until the sponge is cooked through and is starting to come away a little from the outside of the tin. Use a cake tester or a wooden skewer to check for doneness – it should come away clean.
- Leave the cake to stand in the tin on a wire cooling rack for 10 minutes. Then, use a blunt eating knife to prise the sponge away from the middle hole if necessary before turning the cake out onto the cooling rack. Allow to cool completely.
- To make the icing stir together the icing sugar, double cream and your choice of alcohol or vanilla extract until you have a smooth glaze. Drizzle this over the top of your bundt. If your tin produces a rounded bundt you’ll want to work right around the top and let the icing drip naturally over the sides. If you have a spiral tin like mine, drop spoonfuls of the icing near the top of each groove so it runs down each line both on the outside and down the middle of the cake. I like to put a cutting board under the cooling wrack to stop icing flowing all over the worktop.
- Decorate the top of the cake with a ring of Guylian seashells (I like to alternate between the milk and white chocolate shells, and the dark and white chocolate shells) or place one in each groove. Use tweezers to tear off little pieces of the gold leaf and stick them to the icing around the shells (the gold leaf will stick to your fingers) and sprinkle the finished cake with a dusting of stars.
- Allow the icing to harden for an hour before transferring the cake to a cake stand or serving plate.
Notes
Keep the cake in an airtight tin or under kitchen wrap overnight.