A while back, I mentioned the chocolate ginger cake I made for Quercus’s birthday. Oh, the chocolateyness of it. Oh, the gingerification of it. Folks, it was, put simply, such stuff as dreams are made on. Anyway, in the absence of anything remotely interesting to say about anything else, I thought I’d offer it up here, on a virtual plate, for your cooking – and scarfing – enjoyment. Of course, anything ginger gets a get-out-of-accusations-of-piggery-free card, courtesy of it being the time of year when one catches all sorts of nasty cough-related bugs, and ginger being a most lovely way to attempt to ward such nasties off. Of course the second, it’s also a very good way to worm your way into your loved ones’ affections – providing cake is always a winner, no?

In other news, well, still coughing. Today I caved and started to take the antibiotics. I’ve been coughing for ten days; enough is enough, I suppose. It’s all very tedious. Never mind. There is tea; there is ginger; there is, then, hope.

Chocolate Ginger Loveliness

Get mits on:
200g dark chocolate;
200g brown sugar;
200g butter;
A tbsp self-raising wholemeal flour;
Three large eggs;
Four of those knobbly bits of ginger you get in a jar of preserved ginger, together with a good ol’ slurp of the liquid too.

Then…
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a manner which doesn’t involve the woodburner, a lot of spitting butter, and the too-late realisation that washing is within spitting range. Stick the ginger into a small bowl and – assuming you’ve got one – blitz the hell out of it with one of those natty little hand-held blitzy things which are probably officially meant only for blending soup. Warning: ginger really travels in this situation. Sling the resulting goop in with the sugar, then stick in in the melted chocolate and butter mixture, before beating in the eggs and the flour. Select a tin of your choice – ours was a slightly battered square number – about eight inches across, and stick it in t’oven for about, well, the timing is probably highly oven-specific, to be honest; our oven being the shite pile of crapness that it is, it took about forty minutes, but a decent version might manage to cook this to perfection in half that. The idea is that the top looks slightly cracked, but the inside remains a sticky gooey loveliness. You get the idea. Anyway. Retrieve from oven. Poke suspiciously with soon-to-be-burnt finger, and indulge in any loose bits (purely for research, you understand), before scoffing as much as you think you can remove without being detected in your gluttony.