Coffee & Walnut Cake

Coffee and Walnut cake is a favourite in my home and I hope it will be in yours too, inshAllah

The recipe I took from the bbc for a round cake and by using the cake-o-meter I was able to adapt the recipe to fit my pan shape and size (21cm square), I highly recommend though if you are not wanting a cake deeper than the original recipe then you enter the same pan height as what is in the original recipe even if your pain is bigger. Now you may be asking how did I know the height of the original round cake pan/tin, well I saw it said 18cm springform so I went to Amazon as if i was wanting to buy the pan and found the dimensions….i suppose i could have looked at my 20cm round springform pan in the cupboard as I’m sure they are pretty much all the same, but you know the wonders of technology and I didn’t have to route around my ever growing baking cupboard.

You will wonder at the odd weights of ingredients in my recipe but I have rounded the original figures up or down accordingly to the nearest gram or for example the cake -o-meter said 3.1 eggs = 3 eggs.

Cake

Ingredient	Quantity
Unsalted Butter, room temp	193g
Caster Sugar	193g
Egg	3
Self-raising flour	193g
Baking Powder	1 ½ tsp
Coffee Powder	3 heaped tbsp
Water	150ml
Walnuts	75g plus more for decoration

Icing

Unsalted Butter, room temp	150g
Vegetable shortening	100g
Peanut / Walnut butter	50g
Icing sugar	400g

Method

Heat the oven to 170C/fan 150C/fan 3. Line a deep 21cm square cake tin. Mix up your coffee with warm water and leave to cool. Meanwhile sift flour and baking powder together, set aside. Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy then beat in the eggs alternating with 1tbsp flour to prevent the mix curdling.

Beat in 1 ½ tbsp of the coffee mixture and then add up to another tbsp little by little until the mixture drops easily off the spoon. Keep the rest of the coffee mixture for the icing and even then you will still have some left over.

Stir in the 75g walnuts, snapping them into small pieces as you drop them into the bowl. Spoon into the tin, level the top and bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out cleanly (mine cooked in 30mins which means I must invest in an oven thermometer immediately), Cool.

To make the icing, beat the butter, shortening and peanut/walnut butter until soft and then beat in icing sugar followed by the remaining coffee mixture, little by little. Stop when you have a depth of colour and flavour that you like.

Cut the cake into 2 slices horizontally and then sandwich the layers together with some of the icing, you need a reasonably thick layer. Ice the top and sides of the cake with the rest of the icing using a palette knife to smooth as you go (I need to practice this as you see I got it all over the board, I did buy a cake board but it was round and too small so I chose the next best thing a chopping board!  Decorate with walnuts, I went over the top but you can use as many or few as you want and even you could chop them up and sprinkle on the top so it’s less of a chunky mouthful when you have a slice.