OK, this is a weird one. I don't really like chocolate cake but I'd heard prunes were great in choc cake and even though I also hate prunes (AKA Torture Fruit), I thought I would try a pruney choc cake for Mr Vegan's birthday. I've been obsessing about this for weeks and I'm not sure why?! I thought I'd soften the blow by adding orange to the recipe, seeing that choc and orange are such a match. Anyhoo, I cobbled together several recipes and this is the result. Successful? YES! It's an absolute treasure of a cake: dense, sweet, moist. Really yummy. 'A keeper,' Mr Vegan says.
You will need 2 round, 8 inch cake tins
Ingredients
100 grams of Green and Blacks cocoa
300 grams Self Raising Flour
200 grams brown sugar
60ml veg oil
2 portions of No Egg (or 2 beaten eggs for non-vegans)
2 tins of prunes (strained, pitted and halved)
Juice of 2 large oranges
100 ml prune juice (from tins of prunes)
Grated rind of 2 whole oranges
2 drops of vanilla essence
Topping:
1 large bar dark choc melted
1 tablespoon of icing sugar, to thicken
Method
Preheat oven to 190C
Grease the tins and line the bottoms with baking paper
Drain and stone the prunes
Sieve the dry ingredients
Add the wet ingredients, rind and prunes, except the orange juice and PJ
Mix OJ and PJ in gradually - the mix shouldn’t be too sloppy
Pour in to the two greased tins
Bake for about 50 mins or until firm
Cool on a wire rack
Icing
When the cakes are cool, melt the chocolate
Mix in the icing sugar
Palette the icing between the cakes and onto the top
