Chocolate Crumb Cake

A community recipe by Bevis

Not tested or verified by Nigella.com

Introduction

One of the easiest and best chocolate cakes you can make. Involves no baking and minimal weighing of ingredients but leaves you with a fabulous (if slightly sickly) cake.

Ingredients

Serves: 1

8 ounces graham crackers
4 ounces unsalted butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup or light corn syrup
1 medium bittersweet chocolate
chocolate buttons (to decorate)

Method

Chocolate Crumb Cake is a community recipe submitted by Bevis and has not been tested by Nigella.com so we are not able to answer questions regarding this recipe.

Anyway, the way you make it is:

Put the biscuits into a plastic bag or similar and whack repeatedly with a rolling pin. You want some very fine crumbs and some bite sized pieces. Some will also break up a bit more with the stirring so don't bash them up too much.

Melt the butter and syrup together in a pan and break up the chocolate and put that straight into the butter/syrup. You don't need to worry about heating it over water or anything as long as you don't have the heat up too high because the butter and the syrup will prevent it burning.

Once it's all melted together into a smooth, silky sauce add the crushed digestives and stir them in until it's all well mixed. The little crumbs should soak up the chocolate sauce while the larger bits get coated with it. You may not need all the biscuits but you want it so that there is hardly any obvious chocolate sauce, but the biscuits are still glistening and coated with the sauce.

Finally pour the biscuit mixture into a greased or lined spring form cake tin and use a potato masher to squash it all down. The aim isn't to crush the biscuits but to pack it all together so that the chocolate sauce bonds the whole lot together. Then put it into the fridge to cool.

Once it's mostly cool, but not completely, decorate with chocolate buttons (it needs to be just warm enough for them to melt slightly and stick but not so warm they just lose their shape). Return it to the fridge until it's completely cold.

Additional Information

Actually I usually do at least three times those quantities, but it depends how large a cake you need and how many you're feeding. It's very rich you don't want a thick cake so it depends on the size of your cake tin.

For a larger cake you just need to remember you need half as much butter as biscuits and about half the same again of syrup. The amount of chocolate you need depends on how much the biscuits absorb, but if you have some left then you'll just have to eat it on it's own.

Once it is cold it will keep perfectly and refuse to fall to bits even with the most vigorous throwing around as it is carted to wherever you want it. In fact for that reason you do need quite a hefty knife to cut it with (also hence the desire not to make it too thick). It really is incredibly sickly and you can only manage a small piece. But.... once you've had one piece and stopped feeling sick and terribly indulgent you get the instant desire to have more.

I've also tried it with Maltesers crushed in it as well which is also very good but ever so slightly over-egging the cake a little. Oooh, speaking of it's probably be good with Cadbury mini-eggs on top instead of buttons for Easter.