Chocolate Black Bean Cake

Our friends Guy and Sarah came round with some of this cake the other day. Chocolate cake with a hint of orange flavour. How complicated is that, I wondered, and it turns out it isn't complicated at all.......not even finding the black beans (in Leclerc, next to the white beans and red beans of course)

So the ingredients are:

100g sugar
normal sized tin of black beans (drained)
3 eggs
3 heaped tablespoons of cocoa powder
1 teaspoon of instant coffee
half a vanilla pod, scraped
1 teaspoon of baking powder
juice & zest from half an orange
pinch of salt

You just stick them all in a blender, whizz it up til it's smooth, pour it into a cake tin then break up 50g of 70% dark chocolate and spread it across the top of the cake mixture. Bake at 175 degrees C for about 35 minutes. Easy peasy. And very delicious, and in this house it has disappeared rather rapidly, I wasn't even quick enough to get a photo of it in one piece!!

Microwave Chocolate Cake

This one comes from my fellow expat Jo who has lived in Alsace since we graduated too many years ago. And she's a vegetarian, I have no idea how she manages to have an interesting and varied diet in this land of murderous carnivores........

She writes:

Yeah, just the thing for lazy buggers or when you get a surprise visit and haven’t got anything to give them with their cuppas. Dom’s mum gave me these recipes, hard to believe as she’s anything but a lazy cook.
200g butter

200g dessert chocolate

200g sugar

200g flour (self-raising if you have it, otherwise add a sachet of “levure chimique” (baking powder))

4 soup spoons of rum

6 eggs

Melt chocolate and butter for 2 mins, leave to stand for 2 mins

Stir in the sugar

Add eggs one by one whilst whisking

Add the flour and baking powder if you’re using it

Put in a buttered microwavable recipient

Cook (uncovered) for 11 mins on full power

Wait for 5 mins then turn out onto a cooling rack

And voilà!

So, I thought,measuring out quantities, bit of a faff, but at least it's all the same amounts.........mixing stuff together, also faffy, but if you have your other half sitting around talking b*llocks, which mine seems to spend a lot of his time doing, you obviously put him to work:

Decided to put only 5 eggs in as one of our chooks lays eye- wateringly large eggs which always have double yolks, these things are huge, bigger than the duck eggs! Also may have slipped up a bit with the rum bottle, 4 soup spoons didn't sound like much.......

Anyway, chucked it in the micro ondes and.......voilà:

And no, that's not custard, it's home made eggnog from my OH's colleague in Brussels. More than slightly alcoholic........