It was Good Friday, I had a pre-race lurgy, Morgan was exhausted after a term of school, Anna was having a well-earned day off and we were all being lazy at home so I decided to try another recipe from our Volcanic Kitchens cookbook. This time it was Rotorua Mud Cake but there was no photo to give me an idea of how it should look, just a photo of a bubbling mud pool from the geothermal park at Rotorua.
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Rotorua Mud Cake
The recipe started off by saying “this cake has a very different texture”. Even so I was a little skeptical as I made it because the mixture was the runniest cake mixture I’ve ever seen. In went:
- 250g melted butter
- 250g melted chocolate
- 100g sugar
- 80g brown sugar
- 20g coffee
- 400ml of hot water
We didn’t quite have 20g of instant coffee so I used what we had and then made 400ml of coffee from our senseo coffee machine and used that as the hot water. The recipe said to mix well until smooth. Smooth isn’t quite what I’d call it as at this stage it was just liquid. Next into the mixture was:
- 2 eggs
- 1 tbsp of vanilla extract
The recipe said to beat until combined. Well, once again there was no beating necessary as it was still just a liquid. I hoped that the flour would thicken it up as the next stage was to fold in:
- 185g self-raising flour
- 23g cocoa
Trouble is it wasn’t really possible to fold the dry ingredients into such a liquid mixture as you would just end up with lumps of flour floating in the liquid so I ended up mixing it in well with an electric mixer. By now it was still the runniest cake mixture I’ve seen – probably the consistency of double cream – so I wasn’t really feeling too confident as I poured it into two lined loaf tins and put it in the oven at 150°C.
I was half expecting a gooey mess to emerge and probably one that had boiled over just like a geothermal mud pool and made a mess of the oven, but it smelt nice as it cooked so there was some hope. When I took them out after 50 minutes then to our surprise and delight they had indeed formed into cakes and looked as though they were cooked. We had a slice each straight away while it was still warm.
It was certainly very moist and dense, but I think that is how it is supposed to be and with the rich chocolate and coffee flavours it was quite a treat. I had some evaporated milk on mine and it should be delicious with custard or cream. It can be served hot or cold and won’t last long here!
I’ve just found a nice photo of a mud cake from a restaurant in Rotorua itself and ours looks pretty much the same as far as the texture of the cake is concerned – maybe I should have looked at this before I started baking! With a little icing sugar on top, some ice-cream and a berry coulis ours would look just the same. Here it is with the icing sugar, suppose I should make a berry coulis this afternoon!
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Rotorua Mud Cake
