Red Wine Chocolate Cake

 I’ll admit it. The purpose of my Blog’s “Epicuriosity” section is to share recipes that use ingredients and spices inspired by distant places and memorable travels. This cake is from no where yet everywhere to the same time. I absolutely love high quality chocolate and I absolutely love red wine. I combined the two and got the world’s richest, chocolatiest, smoothest, moistest, deliciousest (not a word, I know) CAKE in the world…

Depending on which wine you use, there will not be a strong wine taste after you bake the cake. Chocolate dominates. As it should. The cake doesn’t quite bake long enough for all the alcohol to evaporate, so I wouldn’t go making this cake for a child’s birthday party but one slice surely will not hurt.

What you can do however, is substitute the red wine for whole milk (using a bit less milk – 250ml) and your cake will be children’s-birthday-party-friendly.

250g Butter
250g Brown Sugar
250g All Purpose Flour
100g High Quality Cocoa Powder
100g High Quality Dark Chocolate 70%
3 Eggs
275ml of Red Wine (do not go for cheap wine here! use a full bodied strong red wine)
2 teaspoons of Baking Powder (Europe: 1 packet)
½ teaspoon of Salt
½ teaspoon of Cinnamon

Grease two small springform cake tins. For this recipe I use 2 pans with a 15 cm diameter (holds about 2.5 cups of liquid)

Pre-heat oven to 170 degrees Celsius (with fan) or 350 degrees Fahrenheit

Melt the chocolate in a bain marie and set aside to let cool.

Meanwhile, sift together cocoa, flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.

In a separate bowl, cream together the eggs and brown sugar and butter. When the chocolate is cooled, add to the egg and sugar mix and fold in the dry ingredients in 3 stages. Add wine in small increments.
Mix until well combined.

Place both pans in a hot oven and set timer for 30 minutes. Check the cake with a toothpick, as you will most likely need a bit more time. This varies greatly depending on the pan and your batter’s consistency.

If more baking time is needed, cover the top of the cake with aluminum foil to avoid it over-baking and drying out. Bake an additional 10 to 15 minutes until the tooth pick comes out clean.

Allow to cool completely. Carefully cut the top off of one of the cakes, to make a straight base. This will be the lower part of the cake.

For the cake pictured, I put a red wine buttercream layer in the middle by combining room temperature soft butter with powdered sugar and a drop of wine until smooth. The exterior of the cake I coated in a chocolate cocoa glaze – I did this by mixing 3 parts of powdered sugar with 1 part cocoa and adding a drop of red wine to create a thick glaze.