This Valentine’s Day cake is lush, decadent and delicious. It’s perfect for when you want to make a special dessert for your honey. Surprisingly it’s made from simple pantry ingredients and is dressed up with a ganache topping and strawberry cream. An easy recipe to make and eat!

Ingredients – Cake

120g (about 1/2 cup) butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 tbsp (heaped) cocoa, sifted
1 cup self-raising flour
1/2 cup milk

Ingredients – Filling

600ml thickened cream, reserve 1/3 cup for ganache
1 punnet strawberries

Ingredients – Ganache

Reserved thickened cream
200g dark cooking chocolate, chopped

Cake:

Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease and flour a heart shaped baking tin and set aside.

Place all cake ingredients in a bowl and using an electric mixer, beat for 4 minutes on high.

Pour mixture into cake tin and bake for 60 minutes or until a skewer placed into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

Filling:

Remove 1/3 cup of cream for the ganache and whip the remaining cream until stiff peaks appear.

Reserve 3 strawberries for garnish and hull and slice remaining strawberries. Fold though whipped cream and set aside.

Ganache:

Heat cream in a saucepan until warm (not boiling) and stir through chocolate until smooth and melted.

Slice cooled cake in half and fill with cream mixture. Place top on and spread ganache over the top. Garnish with reserved strawberries.

Notes:

• I love that this cake is made from simple pantry ingredients. It can be made in the traditional way, creaming the sugar, butter and eggs and then adding the rest of the ingredients. Baking it like this will give your cake a better rise but it still works if you throw all the ingredients in together too.
• I used a heart shaped tin that I bought in the supermarket that was a Wiltshire brand.
• You can replace the dark chocolate with white chocolate for something different.
• This recipe was created by Jennifer Cheung for Kidspot, New Zealand’s best recipe finder.

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