Dairy-free Chocolate Cake

My men cherish their sweet tooth. My husband and I grew up during the good old times when nobody considered sugar harmful or dangerous. Sweet innocence! Nowadays I feel guilty that I did not raise our son sugar free. The list of harmful effects for consuming refined sugar seems endless: depression, diabetes, tooth decay, osteoporosis, insulin sensitivity…when you do a little research on the internet, you end up convinced that sugar is the enemy.

But what would be life without a little sweetness? When I read all the well meant messages about the evils of sugar I feel sometimes compelled to shout: Give me some sugar to blur the rough edges! Ok, I never really shout, but I want to enjoy a sweet treat once in a while and I want to be able to feed my men without feeling like a monster.

One way to avoid sugar would be replacing it with chemical substitutes. Unfortunately, these substitutes are at least as harmful as sugar itself. The only chemical without proven long term harmful effects seems to be sucralose which is widely sold now as sugar substitute for diabetics. The reason might be the matter of fact that sucralose is a relatively new product. On the packet is printed ‘not recommended for children’. Do I need to write more?

Honey does not offer a solution because it tastes different than sugar and is full of pesticides. I have tried stevia which I found as a dried herb. So far, all my experiments with stevia have failed miserably.

Luckily there is one sugar product available in India which - I hope - avoids most of the pitfalls of refined sugar: Raw sugar from the Mumbai-based company Conscious Food. I avoid advertising products on my newsletter, but here I make an exception. The company promises that no chemicals are used in making this sugar. It is slightly brown, but it tastes like ‘normal’ sugar. Whenever I can, I use this raw sugar in my sweets although it costs more than double than normal sugar. The philosophy of Conscious Food is to work to a standard, not to a price. They offer natural and organic food products that come from small organic farms all over the country. I am happy to pay some more money to support these people.

I developed the recipe for this dairy free chocolate cake with walnuts because my son suffers from food allergies. I use raw sugar for the cake and normal icing sugar to give it a polished look. If you want a really healthy cake, just forget about the icing.

Wishing you happy cooking, always!

Kornelia Santoro with family

Dairy-free Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:

• 6 eggs
• 2 cups raw sugar
• 200 grams walnuts
• 1 cup cocoa powder
• 1 cup cold pressed coconut oil
• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 tablespoon vanilla essence
• 1 cup icing sugar
• Butter or coconut oil to grease the cake dish

Method:

Preheat your oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

Spread butter or coconut oil over the walls of a round cake dish with a diameter of 26 centimetres.

Grind the walnuts in a blender.

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl. Add the sugar and the vanilla essence and stir it well.

Adjoin the cocoa, the coconut oil and the walnuts and stir.

Mix the flour with the baking powder, add it to the mixing bowl and combine well. Fill the dough immediately into the cake dish and put it into the oven.

Bake at 190 degrees for around 40 minutes. You can check if your cake is done with the help of a toothpick: Insert it in the middle of the cake. If it comes out clean, your cake is ready.

For the icing mix the icing sugar in a little bowl with just enough water to melt it. Around two tablespoons are enough to get a thick icing sugar solution.

Spread this over the cake and let it set.

For gas oven: Preheat the gas oven to lowest temperature for around five minutes.

Place the cake in the middle of the oven for around 25 to 30 minutes. When you see that the batter has set, turn off the heat from the bottom. Turn on the grill and give it five to ten minutes longer.

 

Red Wine Cake

Dear all, Recently I was invited to a wine tasting. Charosa vineyards presented its brand new line of wines. The Indian wine market is developing at an amazing speed. What surprises me most, are the prizes these new creations demand. Indian wine costs at least double than its European counterparts. I am not a wine expert, but I have grown up drinking quite a few drops. According to my palate, the latest generation of Indian wines are quite drinkable. However, I don’t know if their high price is justified. For sure, the Indian wine producers can command it because 150 percent import tax on wines from abroad make competition quite hard for wine importers in India. Last year, the Indian government pondered whether to slash this high tax down to 40 percent. But even this measure might not improve business for importers. Indian states might just raise their own taxes to make up the difference. I don’t know anything about the costs of producing wine in India. For sure, Charosa vineyards spared no expense when establishing their brand. I only know, when we visit our home countries we are amazed how affordable good European wines are – and how very, very drinkable. My latest brush with the Indian wine industry inspired me to introduce one of my favourite German cakes to you: Red wine cake. I can only describe the combination of red wine with chocolate and cinnamon as heavenly. I never attempted to recreate this recipe, courtesy of my mother, because my guys were quite happy with the chocolate cakes I usually make. However, my son’s response to this recipe was quite enthusiastic. The alcohol of the red wine evaporates completely during baking, so this recipe is child safe. Wishing you happy cooking, always! Kornelia Santoro with family Red Wine Cake Ingredients (for a round cake mould with 26 cm diameter): 300 ml red wine 200 grams dark chocolate 200 grams butter 2 cups sugar 2 cups whole wheat flour 6 eggs 2 tablespoons baking powder 1 tablespoon Vanilla extract 2 tablespoons cacao 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon 300 grams white chocolate for covering the cake  Method: Grate the chocolate. This is easiest done with a hand grater and chocolate at room temperature. I would not recommend using a kitchen machine for this job because you would lose quite a bit of chocolate in the equipment. If you use a machine, take some more chocolate to make up for the loss. I am all for gadgets, but 200 grams of chocolate is not that much and easy to grate. Prepare the cake mould by buttering it generously. I use a silicone cake mould that could do without this step, but I find it easier to release the cake from it when I have spread a bit of butter over it. When I make cakes, I don’t cream the butter with sugar and then add the eggs one by one, the traditional method. I find it easier and faster to melt the butter. Two minutes in the microwave do the trick. I start by placing the eggs, the sugar and the Vanilla extract into a mixing bowl and whipping them with a hand mixer to a light yellow cream. Then I add the grated chocolate, the melted butter and the wine and stir everything well. Finally I sieve the flour, the cacao, the cinnamon and the baking powder into the bowl, stir everything quickly and fill it into my prepared mould. The batter is quite runny but that is fine. It delivers a deliciously moist cake. Bake it in the oven at 190 degrees for about 50 minutes. Check it with a toothpick towards the end of the baking time. The toothpick should come out clean when you insert it in the middle of the cake. Let the cake cool down. While it is cooling down, prepare the icing. Cut the white chocolate at room temperature into cubes. Place the chocolate into a mixing bowl and melt it. After dealing for years with a double boiler, I have converted to the microwave for this job. You just have to be careful not to burn your chocolate. I microwave the chocolate at medium for one minute, and then add another minute. Sometimes it needs an extra minute or even more. Here in India the voltage keeps changing, affecting how fast the microwave works. I have tried to add some red wine to the white chocolate in the hope to achieve a pink hue. However, the result was more brownish. That’s why I recommend not adding anything to the white chocolate. Just spread the melted chocolate over the cake with the help of a spatula and let it set. The chocolate cover keeps the cake moist for at least a week in the fridge, should the cake last that long. In my home, it doesn’t.