Walnut cake
A simple, yet super delicious, walnut cake with a delectable coffee fudge icing.
Equipment
- 15cm square, loose bottom, tin
Ingredients
Cake
- 170 g butter
- 170 g caster sugar
- 150 g egg
- 230 g plain flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 115 g chopped walnuts
- 2 tablespoons milk
Coffee Fudge Icing
- 85 g butter
- 340 g icing sugar
- 1 tablespoon milk
- 1½ tablespoons very strong coffee
Decoration
- 70 g chopped walnuts, toasted
Instructions
- First line a 15cm (6 inch) square loose bottomed cake tin with baking parchment.
- Preheat the oven to 150C.
- Sieve the flour and baking powder a couple of times to ensure the baking powder is evenly mixed with the flour.
- Take about a tablespoon of the flour and mix it in with the walnuts (this helps prevent them sinking). Set aside.
- Cream the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs a little at a time beating well before adding the next inclusion.
- Fold in the flour and baking powder adding the milk in two inclusions.
- Finally fold in the nuts.
- Pour the mixture into the prepared baking tin.
- Bake at 150C for approximately 1- 1¼ hours until golden and a skewer comes out clean.
- Remove from the oven, place on a cooling rack and demould the cake from the tin. Allow to cool completely before decorating.
- Now make the coffee fudge icing. Heat the milk, butter and coffee until the butter is just melted. Do not boil.
- Sieve the icing sugar into the melted ingredients. Add a little extra milk if required to make it a thick, smooth paste.
- Beat until smooth and leave to cool and set a little before icing the cake.
- Ice all sides of the cake. If you find it gets a little hard, wet your palette knife with a little boiling water from the kettle and this will help to smooth the icing.
- Decorate with the toasted walnut pieces.
Notes
Larger round cake
For a larger cake, I have simply doubled the quantity of the cake mixture (you don’t need to double the icing as I think you will have sufficient for the larger cake) and used a 20cm round cake tin baked at 160C for approximately 2 hours.
Icing the cake
Don’t let the icing get too cold otherwise it will be difficult to ice the cake. If you find it gets too hard, you can reheat it a little or dip your palette knife into boiling water from the kettle and this will help to smooth the icing.
If you don't like coffee you can simply choose a different flavoured icing to the coffee one, such as chocolate, or not ice it at all!
Freezing
The cake will freeze perfectly with or without the frosting.