So I’m not sure why we decided to make an alcoholic cake, but somehow we did (and are now left with most of a bottle of nasty red wine, but it tastes fine in the cake!). Initially we were planning on cupcakes, but came across this recipe on smittenkitchen.com and had most of the ingredients already (plus it didn’t call for icing sugar, which doesn’t seem to be available here). It turned out really well – rich and dark, with a great chewy crust, wine-y, chocolate-y and cinnamon-y in equal parts. We ate it warm with ice-cream, and then had some more cold. Also with ice-cream…
Ingredients:
85g (6 tablespoons) butter, at room temperature
1 cup brown granulated sugar (original calls for a mix of dark brown and white granulated, but this was all we could get; it worked fine)
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
3/4 cup red wine (cheap is fine, but you will be left with the rest of the bottle)
1 cup + 1 tbsp plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 – 1 tsp cinnamon
– Preheat oven to 160c and grease and line a 9-inch cake tine.
– Beat the butter and then add the sugar and cream together. The combination of granulated sugar + doing it by hand meant ours didn’t cream very well and the cake was a bit speckley, but it didn’t seem to affect the taste!
– Beat in the eggs and then the wine.
– Sift over the flour, baking powder, cocoa and cinnamon and mix well.
– Pour into tin and bake for around 45 minutes (the original says 25-30 but ours was nowhere near done by then).
– Eat hot or cold, with ice-cream (or see the original recipe page for a marscapone-cream that we couldn’t face beating by hand).
Linguistics and Cake 