Many thanks to Ronald of Love Sicily for picking such a delightful theme for this month's Sugar High Friday. The theme this month is Coffee.
I drink a lot of coffee. I spend a lot of time thinking about coffee. I have toured coffee plantations and roasted my own coffee. I do not, however, often cook with coffee. Thus, this month's SHF gave me the perfect opportunity to bake a heavily coffee laden cake. There is one shot of espresso for each slice of this cake, and slightly more if you like large slices.
This cake is a Black Chocolate Espresso Cake with Bittersweet Glaze from In the Sweet Kitchen. The batter is weird and very liquid, but the recipe is reassuring, so I was not too apprehensive. It uses 2 cups of espresso. Technically the recipe calls for dissolving instant espresso in hot water, but I used the real stuff. 16 shots (one ounce each) of the real stuff from my friendly, local baristas in exchange for a few pieces of cake. You can see the logo of the coffee shop on the plate in the photo if you look in the lower right land corner, since I had a little photo shoot in the cafe. You can also see my cappuccino.
The cake is very dense, but incredibly tender. It seems as though it will melt right into your mouth as you eat it. The coffee flavor is apparent and, despite the large amount of sugar, the cake is extremely chocolately without being very sweet. Serve a cake like this to chocolate lovers and there is a good chance that they will just about die after their first bite. It's that good.
Make it. You won't regret it.