Celebration Chocolate Brownie
Here is a sublime easy chocolate cake. The texture is like a moussy chocolate brownie.
Almost anyone can eat this dessert and enjoy it! You can feed it to all your friends and family, including those people with food allergies. This cake tastes amazing even though it can be vegan, dairy free, gluten free, egg free, nut free and soy free! I doubled this recipe for Gabriel’s 2nd birthday and everyone loved it. We served it with banana ‘soft serve’ ice cream.
Note: of course you can use conventional ingredients like eggs and normal flour. I have placed the alternative gluten/egg free ingredients in brackets().
200 g (6 oz) dark chocolate, broken into peices
2 cups milk (or rice milk for dairy free)
2 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups apple puree - from a tin or stew and puree your own
3/4 cup dark unrefined brown sugar
1 cup spelt flour (or 1 cup buckwheat flour plus 1 tsp xanthan gum for gluten free)
1 Egg (or 1 tablespoon dry Ener-G Egg Replacer for egg free)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Line the bottom of a 20 cm/9-inch Springform pan with greased baking paper.
Heat the milk to almost boiling. Place the chocolate pieces in a blender or food processor. Add the heated milk. Cover tightly! Blend until chocolate pieces are melted. Add the vanilla extract, apple puree, egg and sugar. Cover and blend until smooth. Pour into a bowl and cool in the fridge for 10 minutes.
Into a large bowl sieve flour, sea salt, baking powder, cinnamon or ginger. Pour in the liquids and stir briefly until just combined and smooth. It may seem runny… don’t worry!
Pour into the cake tin.
Bake until the centre of the cake is firm- anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes.
Cool the cake on a wire rack. Serve with berries, and cream or yoghurt.
Note: I made a vegan chocolate topping/icing for this cake, called ganache, using a 170 g block of dark chocolate melted with 1/2 cup coconut cream. (Usually chefs would use chocolate melted with cream). I spread it on while the cake was on it's serving platter but still warm.
