Chocolate & Date Cake

Lots of the producers of the delicious products we stock here at Tastes develop recipes to give customers ideas for what to do with their products. We even have a selection of free recipe postcards available in the shop. I thought it was about time I blogged about some of the fine producer recipes. And with Tuesday night being Great British Bake Off night, I needed something baked to accompany yesterday evening's compulsive viewing.

I turned to a recipe for Chocolate and Date Pudding/Cake from The Mortimer Chocolate Company; Makers of fine chocolate powder, perfect for drinking and for baking.

The recipe does require a tiny bit of preparation – soaking of dates for 30 minutes. I did that whilst preparing dinner, then while dinner I cooked prepared the pudding, and put that in the oven whilst we ate dinner. It worked perfectly, and mine was ready 10 minutes ahead of schedule (30 minutes in the fan assisted oven at 160).

I served this as a warm pudding last night and will have it cold as a cake tonight. Can't wait!

If you haven't baked with chocolate powder before you should give it a try. Mortimer Chocolate Powder is rich and high in cocoa solids. It melts very easily. The powder is also dairy, gluten and soya free so much easier to substitute into a free-from recipe than some bars of chocolate.

Mortimer Chocolate Powder

This week I have eventually gotten around to re-displaying the Mortimer Chocolate Powder. Rather than buying cocoa from multinational processors who have blended beans from many different origins to create a uniform taste, the Mortimer Chocolate Company find the best single origin cocoa beans. Like wine and coffee, the flavour of cocoa is influenced by the soil and region it is grown in. And so the Mortimer Chocolate Powders all taste different. It has taken me a while to find enough space in the shop to display the four different origin powders next to each other. Now I have done so I think the product will make much more sense to potential buyers. And with the descriptive card Adrian supplied, choosing a powder is much easier. The hope is that more people will notice and try the powders, though I very much doubt we’ll ever sell as much powder as we do brownies made from the chocolate powder!

Celebrity Visit

Yesterday I had a surprise visit from Adrian Smith, of the Mortimer Chocolate Company, and Steve Wallace who founded the co-operative in Ghana that produces the cocoa beans used in Mortimer’s Ghanaian chocolate powder. Rather than creating a blend of cocoa of different origins, to produce a consistent chocolate, each of the Mortimer Chocolate Company’s powders has a different origin and different taste. I currently stock some from Venezuela and some from Ghana so it was great to meet the man who set up the co-operative in Ghana. And he seemed to get a buzz from seeing his product in sale. In fact, he took so many photographs; my neighbours came in afterwards to ask if I’d had the press in!