Chocolate Apricot Cake

Who doesn't like chocolate?? I love it ! My Step Father used to call me Chocolatey-Claire for a long time and I lived up to my name!
Whilst feeding Molly her breakfast this morning I was multi tasking and reading a cook book at the same time - well she was taking aaaaagggeeess eating her toast and I needed to something to read and just happened to have Nigella Lawsons - Domestic Goddess on the table. Flicking through the pages I stumbled upon the chocolate chapter and found a lovely recipe for a Chocolate Marmalade Cake which sounded slightly intriguing as did Nigellas' description especially saying that it isn't a pretty cake! It also sounded like an easy cake to make - melt some things and then fold the rest of the ingredients in ! no creaming of the butter and sugar which is something that I hate doing. Wish I had a Kitchen Aid! . I amended the recipe slightly , the original recipe is for marmalade which I didn't have but I did have some home made apricot jam lurking about in the back of the fridge which has been there for ages and the jar is so huge that it has been taking up all the room so I was delighted to find a good use for it.

Not very pretty!!! But tastes A-M-A-Z-I-N-G

 



It was so easy -peasey , will definitely make this one again and use different jams - It lovely and chocolatey with an aftertaste of apricot, it can be eaten hot (as we did with crème fraiche) or cold with a cup of coffee. We had it for dinner that evening and I put the rest of it in the freezer for emergencies of course otherwise I would have had it all there and the

125g unsalted butter
100g dark chocolate broken into pieces
300g Apricot Jam
150g caster sugar
pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
150g self-raising flour
Preheat the oven to 180′. Melt butter in a saucepan over a low heat, when it is nearly melted add in chocolate and remove from heat, stir until smooth. Into the saucepan add marmalade/jam, sugar, salt and eggs and stir with a spoon until combined, beat in flour bit by bit. Pour into a greased and lined baking tin no bigger than 23cm. Bake for 50 minutes, checking with a skewer at 40 minutes. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, turn out on to a cooling rack. If the cake isn’t left to cool, it will crack ( that's what happened to mine - I'm so impatient) .Store in an air tight container, eat within 5 days. The recipe serves 6.