This is one of the rare times when I'm fully satisfied with what I've made, although usually I am my biggest critic of all. It's quite a heavy cake but meanly delicious and a bit out of the box too :)
Ingredients for the cake layers:
- 250 grs of plain flour
- 3 eggs
- 120 grs of unsalted soft butter
- 10 dkgs of caster sugar
- 3 tablespoons of honey
- 1 tablespoon of baking powder
- 100 mls of milk
- gingerbread mix according to taste
- ground cinnamon and cloves according to taste
- zest of 1 lemon
- dried apricots chopped fine
- candied lemon and orange zest
Start whisking the sugar with the soft butter until it becomes fluffy and airy and then add the honey and keep whisking. Then add the eggs 1 by 1 and keep whisking. Add the lemon zest too. Measure the flour and mix in the dried fruit, the spices and the baking powder.
They next step is to combine the flour mixture with the eggs and the butter. Give it a good stir, then pour in the milk and keep stirring until you get a homogeneous but quite thick dough. 4 cake layers need to be baked separately, they need about 15 minutes at 180 deg Celsius in the oven, and you must let them cool down before you fill them with the prune cream.
Ingredients for the filling:
- 300 grs of dried prunes
- 50 mls of sweet dessert wine or any similar liqueur
- 150 grs of melted dark chocolate, at least 70%
- about a 100 grs of plum jam
- a bit of lemon juice
- a bit of cinnamon
- rum flavour
First, soak half of the prunes in the dessert wine. Then add the other half and in a food processor get it all creamy. Add the cinnamon, the rum flavour and the melted chocolate and give it a good stir. Then you can add the jam, just as much as you need to make the filling a bit creamier and easier to handle. A bit of lemon juice is also needed, just a few drops, to bring out the flavours and to balance the sweetness out.
Assembling the cake:
Place the bottom layer on the plate on which you will serve the cake, and spread one third of the filling on top. Then you can place the second layer on the top of the bottom one, and so on. When the cake is assembled, cover it in melted dark chocolate, about 100 grs should do the trick. It doesn't need to be in the fridge but let it rest for a while in a chill place so that the chocolate can set.
