Hazelnut Chocolate Cake

Choco nutty goodness

Tried out this chocolate hazelnut cake from this recipe book that I bought sometime back. Cake is chock full of hazelnut bits and dark chocolate bits. There's also a filling in the middle that was supposed to be whipped cream but I changed it to Nutella instead. As Nutella is pretty hard when chilled, I whipped some cream and mixed it together with the Nutella to make it more spreadable and not so hard when chilled.

The outer choclate layer is just dark chocolate with cream and vanilla extract. Followed the recipe but the frosting turned out pretty thick. Spreading it on the cake was like spreading cement on bricks. I'll probably up the amount of cream next time to make it thinner and easier to spread.

The top is just coarsely chopped hazelnuts that have been toasted prior to being chopped.

However, one thing I didn't quite like about it was the end result. The cake became pretty sloped at one end, quite hard to compensate for the slope. Think it's probably because one of my oven racks became sloped after 13+ years of use hence the sloped cake. It didn't help that the cake was cut in half to accomodate the filling. Will probably split the cake into 2 portions to bake seperately the next round, it's easier to handle a whole cake rather than a cake that has been halved even though they are of the same thickness.