Late Sunday afternoons are generally lazy and most people sleep after exceptionally large lunches or return, exhausted, from long days at the beach, on rivers or dangling from mountains. Those that have eaten don’t want anything savoury and those that have been active, need sugar.  Nothing is more frightening than realizing, at that point, that you’ll have guests in forty minutes and all you have is a hell of a lot of wine. A delicious moist and springy chocolate cake, when topped with insane quantities of cream and even more chocolate inspires poetry – but more than that, it’s really good with wine and coffee!

Ingredients

• 500 grams cake flour
• 350 grams caster sugar
• 6 teaspoons baking powder
• 4 jumbo eggs
• ½ cup oil
• 3 heaped tablespoons dark cocoa powder
• 1 cup boiling water
• 250 ml whipping cream
• 2 tablespoons caster sugar
• 2 tablespoons cocoa
• Method

Pre-heat oven to 180 C

Grease and prepare a spring form cake tin

• Whisk together eggs and sugar until light and frothy;
• In a separate bowl, combine boiling water, cocoa and oil and set aside to cool down;
• Sift flour and baking powder and add alternative quantities of flour and the cocoa, water and oil mixture until everything is well incorporated;
• Pour mixture into prepared cake tin and bake for 30 minutes until sides just move from the sides.
• If you have a convention oven, it may be shorter so keep an eye on it.
• Remove from the oven, allow to cool down for five minutes and turn out onto a wire rack;

Icing

• Whisk together all the ingredients to form a chocolate cream and pour over the top;
• Serve with lightly whisked cream and even more chocolate