January 22, 2014 - Written by: Ilona-Jade Errington

Chocolatey, Nutty, Avocado Cake

With Blue Monday behind us but pay day still in the oh-so-distant future, this week I fancied adding a little extra sugar to my diet. And of course by ‘fancied a little sugar’ I meant I WANTED A CHOCOLATE FIX. But having spent the last 3 weeks facing a nightly onslaught of January gym bunnies and flexy-yoga-queens I couldn’t help but feel riddled with guilt as I opened my baking cupboard. I needed something guilt-free. Something healthy. Something like a healthy, chocolatey, nutty, avocado cake. Well, ‘healthy’. But it is gluten and dairy free, and the fat in avocado is of the super-good-for-you variety, so you could do a lot worse on a January binge.

To top off this cake I’ve included a recipe for avocado icing, which I KNOW sounds very odd and looks a lovely shade of luminescent green. However, it’s wonderfully citrus-y and fresh so please do give it a go before you write it off as a momentary lapse of my sanity!

THE RECIPE

Useful Info

This recipe is:

Vegetarian

Gluten-Free

Dairy-Free

Ingredients

For the cake

200g Ground Almond
150g Demerara Sugar
60g Cocoa
1 tsp Baking Powder
30g Pistachio
1 Avocado
2 tsp Vanilla Extract
60ml Rapeseed/Almond Oil
2 Eggs
100g Dark/Vegan Chocolate
120ml Almond Milk

For the icing

2 Avocados
Half Lemon – juiced
50g Icing Sugar
2 tsp Vanilla Essence

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius / gas mark 4.
Grease your baking tin with a little oil.
Dry fry the pistachios on a medium heat, taking care to not to let them go brown, then crush.
Mix together all the dry ingredients.
Melt the chocolate on a low heat and whisk the eggs.
Mix together all the wet ingredients and fold them in to the dry ingredients.
Pour the mixture in to your baking tin and bake for 35 approx mins or until a knife/toothpick comes out clean.
Turn out on a wire rack until cool, then ice.

For the icing

Mash up the avocados, add the lemon juice and blend with a hand blender.
Blend in the icing sugar a little at a time and blend in the essence.
Refrigerate until the cake is ready to be iced. (This will keep it’s colour for a good few hours, after which it slowly starts to go brown, so make it fresh if you want to serve it the next day.)