When it comes to gift ideas, I confess that I’m not really creative and always opt for safe gifts like chocolates. Perhaps this has something to do with my upbringing as my parents who usually prefer to treat my sister and I with either food or money. There is no doubt food is a welcoming gift to foodie siblings like ourselves. But as for money, my parents used to tell us:” It’s better if you get things you like rather we picked out something that you won’t like …” Very practical huh?
Mother’s day is one and half day away and many of the food blogs I have visited have already started planning for the occassion. Since my family is living 12,513km away from where I am now, special occasion like this always makes me feel more homesick than usual.
Knowing one of her favourite chocolates is Ferrero Rocher, this is my attempt of a Ferrero Rocher inspired cake – chocolate & hazelnut cake as a virtual Mother’s day gift to her as well as all the mothers in the world.
I love you mum!
Chocolate Hazelnut Cake
(slightly improvised recipe of “Frangelico chocolate cake with raspberry sauce” adapted from “Fresh & Tasty Chocolate Box”)
Cake Ingredients:
200g bittersweet chocolate, chopped
100g butter
5 eggs, separated
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1/2 cup hazelnut meal
Some roasted hazelnuts for decoration (optional)
Ganache Ingredients:
100ml thickened cream
100g cooking chocolate
1 tbsp honey
Methods for Cake:
1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees celsius / 370 degrees fahrenheit / Gas 5.
2. Melt the chocolate and butter over hot water, remove from the heat, and stir in the egg yolks, sugar, flour and hazelnuts meal.
3. Beat the egg whites until soft peak form.
4. Fold egg whites lightly into the chocolate mixture and pour into a greased and lined round 20cm cake tin. Bake for 40-45 minutes, or until the cake shrinks slightly from the sides of the tin.
5. Once the cake is cooled, pour ganache (see the method below) over the cake and decorated with some roasted whole hazelnuts if you wish.
Methods for Ganache:
1. Combine all the ingredients into a pot and gently heat through the mixture until the chocolate is melted
This looks like the chocolate cake I’ve been looking for! I just want to know if I can make it without hazelnut meal and what I would put in replacement of that… Thanks! 🙂
Instead of hazelnut meal, you can substitute with cocoa powder / flour and perhaps, add 1 tsp of butter/oil (as you may know there’s some oil content in nuts). Other possible substitutions are polenta (but the cake may be slightly gritty) and semolina. Having said that, I haven’t test these ingredients with this particular recipe. But I had in the past replaced hazelnut meal with flour and oil in some other cake recipes. Hope this helps and good luck! 🙂
I would love to bake this over the weekend!!
Any chance you could give these in grams to me??
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1/2 cup hazelnut meal
Hi IIse,
1/2 cup caster sugar equals 100g
1/3 cup self-raising flour equal about 60g
1/2 cup hazelnut meal is about 57.8g
I hope this helps! 🙂
Thanks – thats great!!!