A traditional European pound cake used a pound of butter, sugar, eggs and flour each and hence weighed four pounds. Later on bakers toyed with flavours, changed up the measurements and played with various frostings.
The base recipe of a pound cake works as a great platform to develop your own special cake recipe, and it takes a few delicious trial and errors – which I am sure nobody around would terribly mind!
The highlight of this cake is the rich and decadent dark chocolate ganache, which completely lifts the pound cake to another level. The ganache is poured over the cake within its tin, and set in the fridge for a few hours.
My pictures don’t do justice to this cake, (I was busy licking the ganache off my fingers!) but I can assure you that it will be very easy to devour half this cake on your own, with a cup of strong coffee!
By the way, if you don’t want the thick ganache (although I can’t imagine why), you can dust over some icing sugar or drizzle a simple vanilla or chocolate glaze.
NOTE:
Do not overbeat the batter. Make sure to grease and line your tin and leave the liner hanging on the edges for easy handling.
Cake tin: medium loaf tin
The Recipe
Serves 8
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup Butter, soft
- 3/4 cup Caster sugar
- 2 Eggs, room temperature
- 1 tsp Vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 tbsp Coffee, room temperature
- 1/4 cup Yogurt
- 1/4 cup Milk
- 1 cup Flour
- 1/2 cup Cocoa powder, unsweetened
- 1/2 tsp Baking soda
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 200ml Cream
- 120g Dark chocolate
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180°C.
- Grease and line the pound cake tin, leaving the edges to hang long.
- In a bowl sift the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking powder together.
- Whisk the milk and yogurt in another bowl.
- In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs, vanilla and espresso and whisk.
- Alternate four times in adding the flour mixture and the yogurt mixture to the butter mix. Do NOT overbeat.
- Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the oven.
- Allow the cake to cool completely before pouring the ganache.
- Heat the cream on low heat and bring to a simmer.
- Remove the cream from the heat and stir in the chocolate to melt.
- Pour over the cooled cake within its tin.
- Place the tin in the fridge for about 2 hours to let the ganache set.
- To serve, pull out the cake from the tin by the hanging butter paper.
- Slice and serve.
