"Any Nut" Milk Chocolate Cake with Thick Chocolate Glaze

Yesterday I was invited to a housewarming for my friend Apoorva and her husband. They had just moved into their brand new and extremely charming town house; I couldn't wait to get a peek inside. To honor the occasion I bought her a glass cake plate with a matching lid and offered to make her any cake she wanted. She, of course, requested something chocolate.

The great thing about this cake, besides how easy it is to prepare, is that you can either use any nut-based chocolate bar you'd like or just use plain milk chocolate. I decided to use a combination of Ghirardelli Hazelnut milk chocolate and believe it or not, milk chocolate from Ikea. It's really rather good and melts very evenly.

This cake does have a lot of chocolate, it's true. For the cake there was a total of 10oz of chocolate. It was actually two 3.5 ounce milk chocolate hazelnut bars, plus one additional 3.5oz milk chocolate bar. I modeled this recipe after the popular Hershey Bar Cake (If you do a search in Google for "Hershey Bar Cake", you'll see several) There are several versions but in most of the recipes that I read, it includes anywhere from 1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cups of chocolate syrup, in addition to 6 to 12 oz of milk chocolate! So I substituted 3 oz of melted milk chocolate for those two ingredients, even though they don't really add up to 3 oz. It still came out okay in the end!

The frosting is melted milk chocolate with a little shortening to help with pour-ability. You can cut back on the amount of chocolate here if you want to, its really your preference. I ended up with extra chocolate frosting pooled in the center of the cake but that was due to the fact that the cake was still piping hot when I frosted it. You could start out with 3oz, frost the cake and if it's not enough, go back and frost it with a little more. The layering of chocolate would look kinda cool, actually (maybe a little white chocolate, dark chocolate, etc?)

This cake could even be made with chocolate candy from Halloween. I realize that's a long shot, but it could happen!

"Any Nut" Milk Chocolate Cake
Yield: About 12-16 pieces

Cake
1 box of yellow cake mix, WITH pudding in the mix
1 1/3 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
7 oz of your favorite milk chocolate bar with chopped nuts of your choice (or no nuts, up to you!)
3 oz of your favorite plain milk chocolate
1/2 cup of milk chocolate chips (optional)

Chocolate Glaze
7 oz of milk chocolate (I choose no nuts but if you want nuts go for it)
2 tablespoons of solid vegetable shortening

Preheat the oven to 350F. Prepare a Bundt pan with butter and flour or just spray with Pam with Flour (my fav). Set aside.

Combine cake mix, water, oil, and eggs in a bowl and mix for 1-2 minutes until well combined, being sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl as needed. Set aside.

In a medium sized glass or microwave proof bowl, break up the chocolate into small squares. Melt in the microwave for 1 minute on 50% power. Stir to mix (it won't be all the way melted yet) and continue microwaving at 30 second intervals on 50% power until the chocolate is smooth and melty. You can also use a double boiler for this step if you wanted to.

Remove about a cup of batter and slowly add it to the melted chocolate to temper it. Then add the chocolate/cake batter mixture to the rest of the cake batter and mix on medium high for about a minute. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for 35-40 minutes until a long wooden skewer comes out of the center of the cake clean. Be careful not to over bake! The edges of the cake will be browned but the center will spring back when you touch it, but might look slightly under done when compared to edges. That's okay! This cake will continue to bake for a while after it comes out of the oven.

Take the cake out of the oven and let rest for 5 minutes before inverting onto a wire rack to cool. Note:When I made this cake, the cake cooled about all of 10 minutes and everything turned out fine. However, I think it's probably best to let the cake cool completely (about 40 minutes).

To prepare the frosting, melt the chocolate and shortening in a bowl until smooth and pour over the cake. Decorate with chocolate chips, coconut, chocolate shavings, sprinkles, or just leave plain.

Would I Make This Again? Yes! Everyone loved it and raved about how moist it was. I want to make it again with a different type of chocolate bar. Maybe Theo's 3400 Phinney Chocolate in Fig, Fennel & Almond Dark Chocolate, Coconut Curry, or Chai Spice, yum!