Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Loaf Cake

Elegant but easy to make

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Happy Friday!

Well, that really wasn’t a week designed for baking was it? It wasn’t really a week designed for anything if you ask me. All I wanted was to be in a swimming pool. Instead I was baking chocolate cakes and doing a photoshoot for my soon to be released merch (more on that very soon).

• I just received a copy of Tim Anderson’s upcoming book Ramen Forever which comes out at the end of the month and I am excited to spend the upcoming autumn making bowls and bowls of ramen. The book looks gorgeous and I cant wait to dig in.

• Next weekend I will be judging the annual Galvin Brothers Tarte Tatin competition

• We did a little photoshoot for my upcoming merch collection this week (wearing hoodies when its 30ºC? No thanks!) and I am so excited for you to see it, I love it so much and before the heatwave this week I was wearing it daily. The merch isn’t The Boy Who Bakes themed but it is very much in the baking world and I think we’ve done a brilliant job with it. Subscribers will be the first to hear about it so make sure you keep your eyes open for the email to drop in your inbox.

I thought summer was over, that I would be heading into my cosy autumnal era, spending my days baking pies and crumbles, cooking big bowls of stew and slowly cooked ragus. Instead, here we are trying to find ways to keep cool. Thankfully it seems like a blip and autumn is definitely on it way, and this weeks recipe is one you’ll want to keep in back pocket for when you want cosy vibes.

This cake recipe is for those who love cake; when I say cake I don’t mean layer cakes with lots of frosting or cupcakes pilled high with buttercream, I mean simply cake, pure and unadulterated. I love this style of recipe, the texture of the cake is velvety and dense, like a perfect pound cake; its the type of cake you find yourself nibbling on when you pass it in the kitchen, the perfect accompaniment to a mug of coffee, an ideal elevenses treat. The cake itself is incredibly easy to make but it looks sublime, an elegant affair that looks like it was bought in a fancy French patisserie. Thankfully, the decoration is as easy to achieve as the cake is to bake.

The cake is based on a favourite, almond paste based, cake but I wanted to adapt it so I could make it without having to track down expensive and high quality almond paste and actually change the nuts to more flavourful hazelnuts. The first test of the cake worked really well but it was on the wrong side of sweet, so this final version has a much more balanced sweetness. To get all of that wonderful hazelnut flavour into the cake there are a few things to thing about. Firstly you can make the cake starting either with whole hazelnuts or shop bought ground hazelnuts. With whole hazelnuts you will want to toast them well, so the flavour becomes more pronounced and you get a fully flavoured cake. Secondly, when you grind the nuts into a powder you do need to be careful; the nuts need to be fully cooled before using a food processor because hazelnuts, when ground, can turn into a nut butter very quickly and if they’re warm this happens even more quickly. To make a ground hazelnut meal I process the nuts briefly until roughly broken down and then, to stop them forming a paste, I add a tablespoon or so of the flour, from the recipe, to continue processing the nuts into a finer textured meal. If buying a commercially ground hazelnut meal (will be sold as either hazelnut flour, ground hazelnuts or hazelnut meal) you want to buy hazelnuts that are already toasted (like this one from Sous Chef); many ground hazelnuts on the market are untoasted and the flavour will be much flatter. Buying the hazelnuts and toasting, and then grinding them yourself, is cheaper but buying already ground hazelnuts can be more convenient. The choice is yours.

A note on extracts. You may have used almond extract, a wonderfully strong bitter almond flavour that when used lightly can add amazing flavour to your bakes. Unfortunately there is no similar hazelnut extract, just artificial flavourings. If you are very light handed you can add a teensy bit of almond extract to lift up the nuttiness when using hazelnuts. You want to use just enough to add a layer of flavour but not so much to overpower the natural flavour of the hazelnuts. Think of it similarly as to when coffee is used in chocolate recipes. In this cake I would add no more than 1/4 tsp of almond extract.

Quick note on the bakeware used. To make this cake I used a USA Pan square sided loaf pan, known as a pullman loaf pan, that measures 9 X 4 X 4 inch. This is bigger than a traditional loaf pan so if you don’t have a pan that sized and you’re not in the market for a new one, you can make a smaller version using a standard loaf pan and baking for a shorter period of time.

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