Shop Boy's Journey of Culinary Expansion: Devil's Food Cake

After branching out and trying some recipes that aren’t featured in a Nigella cookbook, I thought it best to come home to the domestic goddess and the pure joy she gives me.

That and the Masterchef Nigella challenge last week made me all nostalgic…especially since it would have been filmed around the time I met her (I WILL write about that one day).

During the challenge the teams had to make five of Nigella’s recipes; one of the featured recipes was her Devil’s Food Cake from Kitchen. As soon as I saw the sleek icing sliding down the side of the cake, I was sold.

I went to my cookbook bookshelf and took out kitchen to peruse the ingredients I needed. It is a fairly standard cake recipe: flour, cocoa, chocolate, eggs, water. There was one ingredient however, that stood out. Muscovado sugar.

Immediately, I headed to Google (do you like the plug Michael?) to see if I could a) find stockists, or b) find out what I could potentially use as a substitution. I discovered that Muscovado Sugar was an unrefined brown sugar with a slight molasses taste. To me that read, if you can’t find it, you’re pretty screwed.

I spent most of Friday and Saturday searching Brisbane for Muscovado sugar and came to the conclusion that I’m either horrible at looking for things, or Brisbane has a very limited range of sugars. I decided to run with the second option to save my dignity.

Come Saturday afternoon I decided to get a start on the cake and after a brief moment of thinking of making a brown sugar and molasses paste, I decided it best to simply run with plain dark brown sugar and hope for the best.

This was a good decision.

What resulted was a deliciously fluffy chocolate cake that when coated with the dark chocolate ganache was pure ecstasy.

I’ll put this down as another win for Nigella.