Chocolate is the answer...

...to everything, at least to me. I've battle with weight as long i can remember, trying out too many diets. But here's the scoop guys: there is no miracle diet! There's only learning to eat right and in a balanced way. And that's how i managed to loose 10 BMI points in a couple of years.

I don't think we should forbid any ingredient in our diet, even if we have to be carefull with some. My personal sin is chocolate, i'm a proud cocoa-addicted, so when years ago a nutritionist told me i shouldn't eat any, it was even more tempting (remember Eve and the apple...).

Frustration can't do you any good, eat everything with measure and measure everything you eat, or at least compensate it in an other way, like going for a run or a swim.
So here's a first recipe, a pretty and tasty cake, with a moist sponge cake. To enjoy chocolate, to enjoy food, to enjoy life, that's the whole point!

Chocolate battenburg cake

(based on the recipe from « best-kept secrets of the women's institute CHOCOLATE » by Sîan Cook) Serve 8-10

115gr soft butter
115gr sugar
2 eggs, beaten
100gr ground almonds
110gr flour
1 teaspoon of yeast
2 tablespoons of unsweet cocoa powder
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
45ml soya milk
3 tablespoons of tangerine marmelade (could be apricot too)
225gr of marzipan
powder sugar for dusting

Preheat your oven at 160°C, and grease  and line two, if possible identical, loaf tins.

Mix the butter, sugar, eggs, almond, flour, yeast and vanilla together, preferably with a stand mixer to make it smooth.

Separate in two, incorporate the cocoa and 30ml of milk to one, and the other 15ml of milk to the other and mix well.

Each mixture goes into one loaf tin, try to spread it and make a cut in the middle so it rises evenly.

This should go in the oven for 30 minutes, check with a knife, it needs to come out clean.

Now starts the complicated part, i would advice you to leave the cakes in the fridge for a while, so they won't break as easily.

You need to cut each cake in two in it's length, and then try to trim them and make them even. I've cut one, and than used it as a « pattern » for the other.
Roll out your marzipan in a rectangle, big enough to go around your cake completly.

Heat the marmelade until it gets to be liquid, and using a brush put a layer on the marzipan, add the a first layer of cake, one white, one black, pour some more marmelade on it (like a glue) and add the second layer of cake, opposite to the first one, to give it that « chequerboard » look. Finally a little more marmelade and it's time to wrapp it, like a blancket around.

Let it cool a little and trim the edges with a sharp knife.

There you have, your pretty and delicious cake! Dig in: