Spicy Chocolate Cake

Last week, I was in Italy and I bough a lot of chocolate from Torino after they told me that the city is famous for its chocolate and grissini. So to finish all the chocolates (about 400 grams (14 oz.)), I decided to use them for my mother’s birhday cake. However, some of these chocolates had red pepper in it, so I made a spicy cake.

The chocolate cake recipe was taken from a pstry chef, so I cannot give it, but it simply uses 6 eggs, some flour, corn starch, butter, and sugar, and it is very similar to a sponge cake. Anyway, you can use any chocolate cake you want. After layering the cake, I poured some milk to make it moist, and spreaded some special chocolate pastry cream.

For “crème patisserie”, I used this recipe, and I added 1 cup crushed spiced almonds. To make them, I simply mixed the almonds with red hot pepper, salt, cumin and black pepper.

Finally I decorated the cake with chocolate ganache I made from the Torino chocolates. To make the ganache, I heated 200 gr (7 oz.) heavy cream, and mixed it with 400 gr (14 oz.) mixed dark chocolate, and some of them had red pepper. To make the ganache lighter, I mixed it with some whipped cream, and decorated the cake with it.