Chocolate Hazelnut Cake

How we love the good old traditional cakes! This is a classic German “Hazelnut Torte”, but a really simple and straight forward recipe! It is delicious and my family loves it.

easy chocolate hazelnut cake

The basic cake is easy. And then you can “jazz” it up with some toppings and fillings!

I decide to go for a chocolate butter cream filling AND a ganache topping. Yes a bit OTT, after all the traditional cake is “just” the hazelnut cake with a simple chocolate coating. But this IS Daddy’s Birthday. So we HAD to make it special.

It has taken me about five cakes to finally get the ganache right and there are some tips below to help you succeed too!

Take the bits that appeal to you!

Ingerdients

  • 250g room temp butter
  • 1 pinch of salt
  • 2 packets of avnilla-sugar or a tea spoon of vanilla essence
  • 300g sugar
  • 5 eggs
  • 200g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 140g ground hazelnuts
  • 140g chopped hazelnuts
  • 12 whole nuts for garnish (optional)
Filling – Buttercream icing
  • 110g room temp unsalted butter
  • 170g icing sugar
  • 55g cocoa powder
  • 2 tbls spoons of milk

Ganache

  • 100ml single cream
  • 200g 70% Cocoa Chocolate
It is VERY important that you use 70% cocoa solids for your ganache. Lower quality chocolates contain more fats, which in turn will result in runnier toppings and a huge mess.
To Make the Cake
  1. Mix your butter, sugars, and salt until creamy
  2. Slowly add each of your 5 eggs
  3. Using a spoon, add the flour, hazelnuts and baking powder gradually and mix with your spoon
  4. Divide into two cake tins
  5. Bake in the oven at 180C for approx 30 minutes. You can also bake it one larger cake tin for 40-45minutes. Keep an eye on it, in case it is browning in which case add some tin foil to the top!
  6. Remove and let cool
Butter cream
  1. Make sure the butter is nice and soft. Add have the icing sugar and mix with hand mixer. Add the rest of the icing sugar and gradually the cocoa (if you add it all at once you will have powder everywhere).
  2. Place your first layer of cake on your serving plate. Slice off any uneveness.
  3. Carefully spread your cream.
  4. Add your second layer and place in the fridge, whilst you start on the ganache.
Ganache
  1. As mentioned above, for the ganache you need good quality chocolate
  2. Melt the chocolate with the cream on low heat in a pan
  3. Pour some over the top of the cake
  4. Then let the ganach a cool A LITTLE and with a knife the spread it around the sides of the cake. Letting it cool a little helps prevent the ganache running everywhere. I poured some on the top of the cake straight away, in order to get that clean neat shine at on the top which is best achieved with hot ganache.

Enjoy! I think the Chocolate butter cream filling worked particularly well with the fluffy and light hazelnut cake. Giving it that “hint of nutella taste”.

Yum.

 

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