Blackstrap Molasses sweetened Chocolate Cake/ Gâteau au chocolat, à la mélasse

Today marks the 365th day of Curious Baking! 🙂

Let me dazzle you with some statistics!…

24,858 views,

421 comments

236 fans

and 45/6 posts later

and I’m still standing!

I’m happy to have survived, a little surprised if the truth be told. I don’t really know what finally got me round to creating this blog, I guess I just I felt my camera needed to be freed of all my baking photos!

Don’t worry I won’t drone on, and reminisce about the highs and lows while doing a round up of the year (I’ll save that for New Year’s Eve 😉 ). I wish I had something witty and profound to say or even inspirational…but I’ll leave the philosophising to well the philosophers and get on to the good stuff…

Chinese five spice molten chocolate cake/Moelleux au chocolat noir,cœur 5 épices

Feel sorry for me…

I’m sick…

The sun’s out and I’m in, for what seems like decades. ….Oh yes ladies and gents, this is the feel sorry for me post! While the rest of the U.K were out frolicking in the sun, I was indoors with only my aches and pains to keep me company.  I’ve managed to catch some kind of summer flu, which has also temporarily stolen my voice.  Talk to me now and you may be forgiven for thinking I was a male teenage frog going through puberty!

At times like this when all you can do is croak, you get to thinking…

Leave a girl alone with her thoughts and pretty soon dark chocolate’ll come out, in my case, it came out in the form of moelleux au chocolat, (my head’s so woolly I can’t even think of a suitable translation). I generally like to stagger my chocolate recipes and don’t tend to post them one after the other, unless of course there is an emergency and chocolate is needed pronto, which is obviously the case here.  I needed something that could slide down the throat with minimum effort and produce that warm comforting feeling and maximum satisfaction, and moelleux au chocolat fit the bill perfectly….

Chocarco Cake/Gâteau Chocarco

It took me a while to come up with a suitable acronym for this cake, my favourite was Cardoffee but then the chocolate isn’t in there and I thought you might take one look at the title and think I’d put card in a cake! Knowing me it’s not that far-fetched, but rest assured there’s no card in here, but what I like to call the magic three, Cardamom, Hot chocolate and freshly brewed coffee, three melodious ingredients that make sweet music when put together, if you haven’t tried this threesome,  your life may just be one cake away from true happiness.

Spiced Chocolate Chai Tea Cakes/Gâteau épicé au chocolat et au thé chai

How do you like your tea? Piping hot or iced cold? With a few sugars or a splash of milk? Well how about in a cake? Yep! You heard me right and I’m not talking about the light buttery kind that you eat with your tea, I mean hot brewed tea in a spiced chocolate cake.

Call me mad if you will but seriously, what could be more fitting in a blog about baking written by a Brit than a cake with tea inside?