Chocolate and potato?

The trouble with this one for me is that I’m the baker. I’m the one who brings a cake. Friends call me for cooking tips. So when I looked about to my Marrickville circle, I realised pretty quickly that I was going to have trouble finding someone with a tried and true recipe. I was tempted to stretch the definition of ‘local’ a bit and call my sister on the northern beaches or my oldest friend up in Toowoomba who bakes more than me. I almost dug into my Bourke Street Bakery cookbook for their delicious carrot cake recipe, rationalising that there was a local branch of their bakery and so referring to the cookbook was kind of like ‘asking’ them for a recipe.

But in the end, and at the last minute, Beth saved the day. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her earlier. Beth is a knitter so of course she bakes cakes. She’s another Marrickville mum, and when I bumped into her at the day care drop-off and asked if she had a good recipe, she didn’t hesitate.

And so began the baking of the chocolate and potato cake, thrown together in a hurry with a fussy baby in the sling and a husband sent out to purchase said potato when I realised at the last minute we had none in the pantry. The recipe is actually quite an indulgent one. Rather than melting chocolate and mixing it through the batter, it calls for the chocolate to be chopped and stirred through at the last minute, which results in yummy chunks throughout the cake. (Actually, the recipe said to finely chop the chocolate so maybe it wasn’t meant to be quite as chunky as mine turned out!) I decided the recipe warranted the use of the 70% cocoa Ecuadorian couverture that I purchased from The Essential Ingredient a few weeks back, and mixed it into the cake and the decadent ganache icing.

It came out of the oven a bit lopsided (definitely the fault of the oven, not the recipe) and I winged it on the ganache, so it wasn’t quite as shiny as in the picture. And I wasn’t about to traipse around looking for the recommended gold leaf decoration which would have made the cake look less like the brown lump it was. (Was it on ‘Masterchef’ last year that Donna Hay said brown food is hard to style?) But in the end, for something mixed almost entirely in a food processor, and considering there was a potato in it, it was a pretty bloody good chocolate cake. And we all know how I feel about chocolate.

Lola declared she didn’t want dessert, and that she’d have some cake instead. The husband was pleased to learn that it was a house cake – our general description for anything baked that isn’t destined for someone else’s place. We’ve just tucked into our second slice, and it’s as good the next day as it is fresh from the oven. Room for thirds, anyone?