Mint Chocolate Cake

A day off work for me is a day that I'm tempted to devote to cooking. So when last Friday rolled around and it was the first beautiful, warm, sunny day in a very long time, I was instead tempted to abandon my usual inclination and go to the seaside. But in the end I buckled, and I baked. I used the excuse of visiting my past-the-due-date pregnant friend whose sweet tooth has been in overdrive, and baked a mint chocolate cake.I think minty chocolate is a wonderful thing, but I know some don't agree with me. I find it refreshing without being cloyingly sweet, and chocolatey but with a deeper, complementary dimension to it. After Eight's ain't the pinnacle of style and taste for nothing.I found my recipe for the chocolate mint cake on the Nigella site, submitted by a reader. It was an eggless cake which made me a bit skeptical, but I was persuaded by the promise of a gooey topping. It was a valiant failure. I was right to be skeptical about the egglessness of the recipe, because the texture wasn't quite right - it was more crumbly than cakey, like a long-life snack cake. The gooey topping was good, and after I had increased the mint and the chocolate in the recipe, the taste was right, but the texture threw me off. I topped it with juicey berries in order to balance out the crumbly dryness of the cake. If I were to make it again, I would change the base cake recipe to make sure there is more moistness from the cake itself. I'm copying out the recipe I made, but let that be your caveat.Mint Chocolate Cake

• 1 C self-raising flour
• 1/4 C cocoa
• 2/3 C caster sugar
• 50 g butter, melted
• 1/2 C milk
• 1 tsp mint extract
• 50 g dark chocolate, melted
• 100 g mint-flavored chocolate, broken into small chunks
• 2/3 C brown sugar
• 2 Tbs cocoa
• boiling water

1. Pre-heat oven to 180 C
2. Sift together the flour and cocoa. Add the caster sugar and mix.
3. Combine the melted butter, milk, and mint extract, and stir into the dry ingredients.
4. Melt the dark chocolate in the double boiler, and stir into the batter.
5. Stir in the mint chocolate chunks until evenly mixed.
6. Pour into a dish big enough for a topping to be poured on - I used a 10 inch square dish and it worked perfectly.
7. Mix together the brown sugar and the cocoa in a measuring cup. Pour into it boiling water until the level n the cup reached 1 1/4 C.
8. Stir until everything is dissolved.
9. Pour over the cake mix, pouring it over the back of a spoon to keep the mixture from making a hole in the cake mix.
10. Place on a tray in case it boils over, and bake for 40-50 minutes.