Peanut Butter Chocolate Fudge Cake

Well as you all now know it was Melissa’s Birthday last week. I wanted to make her a special cake and saw this one in a cake cookbook included with a recent ‘New Zealand Woman’s Weekly’.

To make it you will need:

200g butter, cubed
100g dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
½ cup cream
¼ cup peanut butter
¾ cup caster sugar
1 ¼ cups self raising flour
⅓ cup cocoa
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Chocolate Ganache:

200g dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
⅓ cup cream
Chocolate covered peanuts to decorate

1. Pre-heat a fan bake oven to 160˚C. Grease a 20cm spring form tin (I use a cooking spray).

2. Place butter, chocolate, cream, peanut butter and sugar in a saucepan over a low heat until melted, stirring until sugar is dissolved.

3. Sift the flour and cocoa over the melted mixture and whisk gently to just combine. Next, whisk in the beaten eggs, but do not overbeat. Pour mixture into prepared tin. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer is inserted and comes out with a few moist crumbs attached.

4. Cool cake in baking tin before removing and decorating.

5. For ganache, melt chocolate and cream together (I did this in a double boiler so that the chocolate would not over heat). Set aside to cool a little and then pour over the cake (I recommend doing this while cake is on a baking rack as the ganache will drip). Decorate with chocolate-covered peanuts.

 
The finished product looked almost identical to the one in the book, which was very exciting! The peanut taste was very subtle so you could probably play around with the amount and trade off with some of the butter if you would prefer it to be stronger.

* The first cake I made (pictured) was a little drier than I had anticipated on the inside, when I made the second cake for my husband, I combined everything on a very low heat (on my stove it was on 4), and only very gently whisked the eggs through. The second cake was much more moist inside.