Chocolate For Dark And Sumptuous Chocolate Cake

Our answer

NIgella's Dark And Sumptuous Chocolate Cake (from SIMPLY NIGELLA) is a vegan chocolate cake that will please all eaters, as well as being incredibly easy to make. The chocolate icing on the cake is a type of chocolate ganache, made with melted chocolate, water, sugar and coconut butter.

Nigella suggests using chocolate with a minimum of 70% cocoa solids as this has a deep chocolate flavour but is not bitter. It gives the icing a good balance of flavour and setting qualities. Some chocolates have 72% cocoa solids and this would also be a good choice and in the US a bittersweet chocolate with 68-70% cocoa solids would be ideal. A bar of 100% cocoa solids (sometimes sold as "unsweetened chocolate") is effectively very finely ground cocoa beans, with no added sugar or fat. It is slightly too bitter to use for the icing for our taste and we would prefer to stick to a chocolate with 70% cocoa solids. However, this type of chocolate is good for cake batters that use melted chocolate and a reasonably high proportion of sugar, such as brownies. If you did want to use 100% cocoa solids chocolate in the icing then we would suggest that you omit the cocoa powder from the icing ingredients, to help to reduce the overall bitterness.