6 minute chocolate cake with raspberrry chocolate ganache

We had visitors this weekend and I used it as an excuse to make this cake (sorry - no photos before we ate every last bit). Delicious and super easy.

This remains one of my favorite recipes ever, and there are versions of it in more than one of my Moosewood Cookbooks. The cake is great just plain, but it's downright decadent when topped with the raspberry chocolate ganache. It would, of course, also be good topped with whipped cream, ice cream or sliced fruit. The 6 minutes in the title are pretty close to what it takes to whip this together. It's vegan, too.

Serves 8

8-inch square cake pan

Cake Ingredients
1 ½ cups unbleached white flour
⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
1 cup cold water
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons cider vinegar

Raspberry Chocolate Glaze
½ pound 70% dark ghirardelli chocolate chips
about 1/2 cup seedless raspberry jam or preserves

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Spray an 8-in. square baking pan with cooking oil. Sift together the flour, cocoa, soda, salt, and sugar (it's mostly the cocoa and baking soda that need sifting). Pour in the oil, water, and vanilla and mix with a whisk until smooth. Add the vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls in the batter as the baking soda and vinegar react. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed throughout the batter. Pour into the baking pan. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes and set aside to cool. I serve it right out of the pan. If you wanted to serve it out of the pan, you'd need to use parchment paper to line the pan.

To make the glaze, I dump the chocolate chips and raspberry jam in a small glass bowl and microwave 30 seconds then stir, repeating until the chips have all melted. Sometimes I also put a layer of raspberry jam on the cake before I put on the ganache and sometimes I also decorate the top with fresh raspberries.

Food in Spain - day 2

We had reservations for 9:00 am at the Prado Museum in Madrid, but found that there is no place open for breakfast before 9 - not even the bread shops or grocery stores. We made our way to the Prado by metro, then dashed into a little coffee shop at 9 and grabbed some croissants, hot chocolate and fresh squeezed orange juice. Delicious, but rushed, since we knew if we didn't get there by 9:15, we might lose our chance. There was no line at the museum entrance for prepaid reservations, and we lost ourselves in the museum for hours. We grabbed another simple meal at the cafeteria there - as little food as possible because it was so expensive. A tortilla (egg and potato frittata), some salad greens, a couple of slices of bread and a bottle of water. Zoe and I abandoned Clay to his wanderings at about 2:00 and headed out to the botanical gardens and a walk through the edge of Retiro Park, then went to Mallorca, a high end food shop, to buy stuff for dinner. We got a selection of little sandwiches, some pastries, cheese, a small salad. Zoe and I had a lot of fun picking things out - it was all so lovely and appealing. Then we went to a grocery store and got some cheaper food to round it out - a bag of spring greens, a baguette, and drinks. We met Clay back at the hotel and ate the little sandwiches and drinks in the plaza in front of the hotel before heading out to the airport for our flight to Barcelona. We got there quite early and had a leisurely gourmet dinner - a big salad, a huge wedge of brie with baguette, and then the pastries (looking a little worse for the wear in this photo). We all had to have a taste of each one. My favorite was the millefiore. Lots of thin layers and pastry cream. The one on the lower right was chocolate orange, one of my favorite flavor combinations.

Food in Spain - day 1

It's really hard for me to remember to take a photo of a great dish before I dig into it. My first attempts at getting photos of our meals in Spain were of mostly eaten food. Zoe took a few good ones, though. These are from our first day in Madrid. After dropping our bags at the hotel, we went to Chocolateria San Gines, a little place for churros and hot chocolate. They've been selling the same thing there for over 100 years, and the place is full of character. 3 euros for fresh churros and the thickest, darkest chocolate you can imagine for dipping them in. Here we've already eaten most of the churros. Eating this too often I'm sure would kill you. We couldn't even finish it all. The churros come without any sugar, and we only sprinkled on a little of the powdered sugar on the table for the photo. They are hot and crunchy and greasy and contrast so beautifully with the dark chocolate.

After wandering around the main plazas and visiting the Palacio Real, we headed back to the Mercado de San Miguel (just off the Plaza Mayor, where they used to have bullfights and inquisition executions) for some pinxos (I think that was the word they used for these - little slices of bread with various "pinches" of toppings on them.) The market is full of gorgeous displays of foods, and in the afternoon it was packed with people buying bits and drinking. We had already eaten most of the cheeses before we started taking pictures of what we chose to eat, but there's a shot of the fish ones and the cheese shop. The fish: smoked salmon, some kind of tuna, white fish, a seasoned ricotta-type cheese spread with caviar, and I don't remember what the last one was. We got a plate of cheeses, too, with a couple of goat cheeses (fresh and aged), some really creamy brie type of cheese, and manchego (that was the only cheese name I could understand). We also got some bread, and finished with the tiniest ice-cream cones ever.