Chocolate Pistachio Cake

Staying on the pistachio theme, I decided to make Nigella's Chocolate Pistachio Cake this afternoon while waiting for the painter to finish painting our feature wall (we chose a darkish pistachio coloured dulux paint this morning from the store. Coincidence!?) I don't think I can quite ever get sick of pistachios. It has such glorious taste and smell, and luckily there are at least a handful of recipes from 'How to be a domestic goddess' which use this type of nut.

For this recipe, I used d'Or 86% Cacao chocolate (with the elephant logo) instead of Lindt Excellence. I thought I'd use something different this time and d'Or seemed to be pretty popular in Belgium when I was there (the Belgians should know their chocolates right?) However I was not impressed. When the chocolate was starting to melt in the water bath, a layer of yellowish oil floated to the top...uggghhhh. I tried to spoon them out bit by bit and was glad that they were not going inside into my stomache and eventually onto my thighs.

There are no pictures for this recipe in the book so I was quite clueless as to what this cake should look like - round or square, thick or thin, crushed or flaky pistachios on top? I'm still a newbie when it comes to baking these type of cakes - anything other than banana or carrot cakes still puzzles me. Like I halved all the ingredients in the recipe so the serving size would be smaller (just enough for my family) so does that mean the baking time should also be halved? This may be plain common sense to some people, but obviously not for me. I think I may have underbaked my cake a bit.

All in all, the cake turned out alright. It wasn't that great, I probably wouldn't want to bake this again because I couldn't really taste the pistachio in the cake. This seems to me like a plain choc cake - and incredibly rich as well with the glazing on the top. I had two slices and couldn't handle it anymore and had to make myself some tea.

Oh, our feature wall probably turned out better than my cake though. The colour was a bit off at the beginning, but when the whole wall was completed, it made our living room look a whole lot more warm and inviting - and not like a hospital as before with the cold white wall. My next recipe is likely to be something savoury. No more chocolate - at least for the next month or so.