Quatre-quarts en un quart d’heure

Cold, wind, rain. It may be nearly Spring, but Edinburgh is still rather bleak this time of year. It’s no wonder I’ve been craving chocolate cake for a few days.

I follow a loose, self-imposed doctrine that means I rarely eat cakes that haven’t been home baked, preferably by me. Other people’s baked goods never taste quite right. Too much sugar. Not enough dairy fat. Oily crusts and suspiciously healthy recipes. A quarter of good quality butter is what I’ma fter.

I miss the convenience of French supermarket cakes. They may not have been home baked, but the quatre-quarts and other simple buttery loafs they have on offer always hit the spot, and always tasted right. I remember rushing home on Wednesday afternoons to catch Les Cités d’Or on Récré A2 (tum tum tum, les cités d’ooooor), while munching on a marbled slice of cake. Chocolate bit first, then the vanilla portions would get squidged between two fingers before being quickly gobbled down. These days, at the corner shop, the “Cuisine de France” stand displays ageing doughnuts and disgruntled yumyums. Scotmid ain’t no Intermarché.

Last Appetite’s post about 20 second immersion blender mayo reminded me that it only takes about 15 minutes to get a cake into the oven with minimal household disruption, even if you have a tiny and, like me, often messy kitchen.

For almost-instant chocolate gratification, you will need:

- 3 eggs

- 200 g of sugar

- 200 g of self-raising flour (or 200g of flour and a heaped teaspoon of baking powder)

- 200 g of butter

- about 200 g of melted chocolate (I used 6 heaped tablespoons of dark cocoa powder from Van Houten instead)

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees celsius (I set my electric fan oven to 165). Melt the butter in the microwave on a low setting. Crack the eggs into a big plastic bowl, add the sugar. Using your immersion blender, cream this mixture together until it is thick and pale yellow. Add the flour and chocolate, then continue to stir the mixture as you slowly poor the butter in. Grease a loaf tin and dust it with flour before pouring in the mixture. The cake will cook for about 30 minutes, or however long it takes for a knife to come out clean.

While the cake is cooking, get your child/boyfriend/cat/random stranger to lick the bowl clean. If you have a bit of whipping cream in the fridge, some ganache wouldn’t go amiss. Putting away the scales and washing up the two bowls and the immersion blender will only take a few minutes, which leaves you plenty of time, while your kitchen is filling with the scent of rich, dark, bitter, comforting cake, to settle down with Youtube to see if you can find a clip of that time when Esteban, Tao and Zia first discovered the golden condor.

Tum, tum tum, les cités d’oooooor.