[Inez] Hazelnut chocolate cake

After I busted out the nutella cupcakes for my housemates last week, and because I've been so enjoying myself baking, I made a proposition. "How about," I said, "rather than cooking dinner for the house, I just do dessert?" "How often?" they asked me. "Every week" was clearly the only acceptable answer. 

Last week was also my housemate Rebecca's birthday. Happy birthday, Rebecca! Now, I don't like to play favorites, but I do love Rebecca. She claims to not have celebrated her birthday since she was 16, and she said she didn't want a cake! Preposterous! I know Rebecca loves Nutella (I was reminded of this when I made the cupcakes) so I wanted to make something with hazelnut. I'm sorry to say I didn't photograph the processing of the hazelnuts, because it was pretty cool. I bought some uncooked hazelnuts, and on internet advice, toasted them on a cookie sheet at 350F for 10 minutes. The oven smelled heavenly. Then I put them in a towel and rubbed them around a bunch to get the skins to (mostly) come off.

I had seen some recipes for different types of hazelnut cakes that had big ole chunks of hazelnut in the cake, but I didn't like that idea. So I cleaned off my housemate's coffee grinder and ground most of the hazelnuts into a meal. I recommend doing this in short bursts-- if you leave the grinder going for more than about a second at a time, the oils in the hazelnuts cause them to stick to the sides a lot. 

Now, I have to tell you that I used my family's favorite chocolate cake recipe (Chocolate Compost Cake), which I'm not ready to put out on the internet for just anyone to find. So I won't be including a recipe in this post. But that's okay, I can still tell you what I did.

I ended up with about 1 cup of hazelnut meal. I didn't put in quite all of the cocoa the cake recipe called for, because I didn't want the chocolate to overwhelm the hazelnut flavor. The double recipe called for 1 cup of cocoa; I put in 3/4 cup of cocoa and the 1 cup of hazelnut meal.

That's the only modification I made for the chocolate cake; then I just baked it as normal. I wanted the frosting to be simple and not at all overwhelming, so I just went with a simple whipped cream frosting. By which I mean to say, I whipped a pint of whipping cream with some powdered sugar and (very approximately) 1/4 cup Frangelico. Just enough to give the whipped cream a slightly nutty aroma, without being either overwhelmingly hazelnutty or overwhelmingly alcoholic.

As I mentioned, I only ground most of the hazelnuts. I chopped some pretty finely, and these I put between 2 layers of whipped cream on top of the first layer of cake.


Then I plopped (gently) the second cake on top, and frosted the whole thing.

I topped the whole thing off with some more chopped hazelnuts and some whole hazelnuts, which do, it's true, look suspiciously like chick peas. I'm sorry to say I don't have any pictures of a slice because the lighting was poor and the cake just looked black (also on account of it's so damn rich and chocolatey and delicious). The result was a rich moist chocolate cake with a very strong hazelnut flavor. I would say you could get away with using 3/4 cup or even 1/2 cup hazelnut meal, but I certainly don't regret using the full cup!