Hey Hey,

It’s Saturday morning here in Helsinki and I made a chocolate cake! We recently moved into the teeny tiniest studio with the world’s smallest kitchen so I wasn’t sure how this would work, but I really only needed one large mixing bowl, a measuring cup, and a loaf pan. Very few dishes with this one. And the only fancy ingredient here is ground almonds / almond flour, which I don’t even know if you reeeeally need. I need to try to make it again without it, but this time I did follow the recipe and it is delicious. I have a love/hate relationship with chocolate cake. It’s usually too sweet and I hate frosting, and it takes a long time to make and you need fancy springform pans. But this is a perfect quick bread like banana or zucchini bread. No fuss, but tastes like chocolate cake made love to a brownie.

This recipe is adapted from Solo: The Joy of Cooking For One by Signe Johanson. I love cookbooks, but I like to see pictures of the process and read reviews, so I thought I’d photograph the process. And I give this cake a 10/10.

INGREDIENTS

175 g salted butter (The recipe calls for unsalted, but unsalted is way more expensive here in Finland so I just used salted and didn’t add more salt)
125 g brown sugar
20 g honey (the original recipe asked for 175 g of brown sugar but I ran out so I added a little more honey. I usually add less sugar than the recipe anyways because most recipes are too sweet for me. You could even add less sweetener if you wanted to serve it with ice cream or whipped cream.)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs, room temp
100 g flour
75 ground almonds
75 cocoa powder (real cocoa powder is bitter and doesn’t have sugar or anything so double check this one)
40 g of black coffee (the recipe asks for a double shot of espresso but who just has that lying around at home? So I used filtered coffee.)
1 tbsp of diluted greek yogurt (totally optional, but it’s in the original recipe so I did it too. I’m not exactly sure why she added this so if you know, leave it in the comments!)
100 g dark chocolate chips

INSTRUCTIONS

Always preheat the oven first when baking. To 170*C or 340*F
Whisk together :: 175 g Butter, 125 g Sugar, 20 g Honey, 1 tsp Vanilla, 40 g of coffee
Whisk in the eggs, 1 at a time
Add the 100 g of flour about a third at a time. I switched to the spatula here because too much mixing causes gluten development and we don’t want a chewy cake
Fold in the 75 g of almond flour, 75 g of cocoa powder, 100 g of chocolate chips
Line your loaf pan with parchment paper. It makes taking the cake out and clean up so much easier. I think a scale and parchment paper are absolute musts in a kitchen.
It’s a pretty thick batter. Don’t be scared!
Put it in the oven. I checked my cake at 35 minutes but it wasn’t done so I let it go for 10 more and it was perfect. Enjoy !