Soaked Whole Grain Chocolate Cake (with photo)

[Chelsea (Thermie Groupie)]

Soaked Whole Grain Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:
260g organic spelt/khorasan (kamut) grain
350g non-homogenised milk or almond/rice milk
2 tsp organic apple cider vinegar
70g pecans or walnuts - roughly chopped
40g organic pure maple syrup
150g rapadura
90g chopped butter or solid coconut oil
2-3 tbsp organic cocoa
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch Himalayan salt

Method:

Mill grain in TMX for 1 minute at speed 9. Pour into a jug or bowl and sit on TMX lid. Weigh in 250g milk and measure in cider vinegar. Mix well and leave covered at cool room temperature for about 7 hours.

After the soaking period preheat oven to 180 degrees and grease an 8 x 8 inch cake tin (I also line the base).

Add chopped pecans and maple syrup to TMX bowl. Heat for 5 minutes at 60 degrees, reverse speed 1. Set aside (scraping all of the pecans out of the bowl).

Without washing the bowl place in the remaining ingredients (including the remaining 100g milk and excluding the glazed pecans). Mix the ingredients for 40 seconds on speed 5. The batter should be quite thick so that the pecans won't sink in.

Scrape the batter into the prepared cake tin and spoon the glazed pecans evenly over the batter (pressing in slightly). Bake for 40-45 minutes.

Tips:

The original recipe said to bake the cake for 30-35 minutes but I have found that it consistently needs longer.

This cake is lovely straight out of the oven, but even nicer the next day (it has a brownie-like texture the next day).

You can chop the pecans in the TMX, but I prefer to hand chop for this recipe.

The milk and vinegar can be replaced with 1 cup of cultured buttermilk, whey, yoghurt or kefir (you may still require the extra 100g of milk though). I have tried it with the buttermilk and it was delicious.

I have cut the butter down from 125g to 90g. If you would prefer a denser brownie-like cake then add more butter.

I have cut down the amount of cinnamon and nutmeg from the original recipe. I am considering leaving them out altogether next time as I'm not 100% sure they are a good match for a chocolate cake.

This recipe is also on my blog here and I converted it from a recipe on the passionate homemaking blog.

Photo:
This is a photo I took before I figured out the glazed pecan topping.  Still looked and tasted nice though. 

[cathy79]

I can highly recommend this cake as I made it for DD's 5th birthday over the weekend.  Delicious!  As Chelsea suggested, I left out the cinnamon and nutmeg as I wanted a straight chocolate cake.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think they'll be requests for future events.

[Thermomixer]

That certainly does look mighty good - just like a brownie texture.      yum