The Friday List and a coffee, hazlenut and chocolate cake

Good morning! I hope you’ve all had lovely weeks. And just to brighten up your Friday, here are some good things to read, cook and think about over the coming weekend. Plus, I’ve also added a few pictures of Mum’s beautiful garden in this week’s rain, and a recipe for the chocolate, hazlenut espresso cake posted on Instagram this week – it’s an absolute winner this one so please save it and try it one day. Sophiex

The Friday List

Almond chocolate pots de creme from Green Kitchen Stories, making these for dessert tonight.

This year I will make a Christmas wreath just like this beautiful one from Call me Cupcake. Or this stunner from Nicky and Max. I will. I’ll try.

Sweet potato chocolate ice cream? Sounds a bit odd, looks delicious…

Getting a bit excited about the impending stone fruit season with this round-up of recipes by Nigel Slater.

Matcha latte and lavender almond milk – this is one of those drinks I love the sound of but don’t ever get round to making. The lavender almond milk might just get me over the line though – sounds so good.

Memories of meals past.

Bookmarking this recipe for cherries, walnuts and parsley salad – not long now till cherry season. Whoop.

Blueberry and violet buttermilk cake with honeysuckle cordial milky tea – yo to the yum.

Molly Yeh goes to Tuscany.

I love hands and people in food pics so am a big fan of this Pinterest board

Hazlenut, milk chocolate and espresso cake

This is such a delicious cake; it lasts for days and is fancy enough to serve with some double cream and poached rhubarb for pudding too. The quantities below make a large cake (I use a 26cm cake tin) which serves about 10 people so please feel free to halve the quantities and bake it in a 20cm cake tin if feeding fewer people. Also, I really think that using good milk chocolate here is much nicer than the bitter dark stuff I ususally cook with, but again, of course, whatever works for you works best! In this instance, we served it here with some lovely honeycomb and cold cream.
3 1/2 cups hazlenuts, toasted (I love our locally grown and roasted Fourjay Farm hazlenuts)
200g milk chocolate
250g unsalted butter
2 tbsp espresso coffee (from your machine if you have one, I don’t so just make up a little plunger of really strong coffee and use that)
6 eggs, separated
1 cup caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C and grease and line a 26cm cake tin* with baking paper. Blitz the toasted hazlenuts into a fine meal and place in a bowl. Break the chocolate into a small saucepan, add the butter and place over a medium heat and cook, stirring often until the mixture has melted together. Remove from heat and stir in the coffee and hazlenut meal. Now, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together until pale then fold this into the chocolate mixture.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form and very gently, fold through the chocolate mixture then spoon into prepared cake tin and smooth the surface. Bake for 35 – 45 minutes or until the cake’s centre is just firm/springy to touch. Let cool in the tin then turn out to a wire rack to cool.

*You really do need to cook this in one large tin or two smaller ones. basically the mixture shouldn’t be more than 3cm deep when it goes into the oven or it may not cook through the middle properly.