Mary Berry is renowned for her baking creations – one of them being her chocolate and walnut cake recipe.
A coffee and walnut cake is a classic bake. It’s two layers of fluffy coffee sponge dotted with chopped walnuts inside and onto.
Baking can be complex at times, so after spotting that this recipe can be made in “less than 30 minutes”, I wanted to give it a try.
What’s more, there a very few steps for this recipe compared to others I’ve found.
Having all but one of the ingredients listed already in my kitchen, there wasn’t a better time to make the cake.
Ingredients
For the sponge
100g unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
100g caster sugar
Two eggs
100g self-raising flour
Half a level teaspoon baking powder
One tablespoon coffee granules, dissolved in one tablespoon of boiling water
50g chopped walnuts
For the filling and topping
125g unsalted butter, softened
225g icing sugar, sifter
One tablespoon coffee granules, dissolved in one tablespoon of boiling water
Eight walnut halves, to decorate
Method
I started by weighing out all of the ingredients for both the sponge and the icing before chopping the walnuts.
Next, I preheated the oven to 160C Fan before preparing the cake tins. To do so, I lightly buttered two seven-inch sandwich tins and lined the bases with baking paper.
I then grabbed a large bowl and added the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder and coffee and used an electric hand whisk to beat the ingredients together. You can use a regular whisk, it’ll just make the step a little longer.
Once whisked, I added in the walnuts and used a spatula to fold them into the mixture.
When it came to the step of dividing the mixture evenly between the two tins, I found that there wasn’t a lot of mixture. If I had known this to be the case I would’ve used smaller cake tins or simply used just one bigger cake tin.
With the mixture in the tins, I levelled out the surface with a spatula and put them into the oven to bake for 15 to 20 minutes. I found that they were ready after 20 minutes.
After taking the cakes out, I left them to cool in the tin for five minutes before running a small palette knife around the edge of the tins and carefully turning the cakes out onto a wire rack. I also peeled off the paper before leaving them to cool completely.
While the cakes were cooling it was time to make the buttercream for the filling and topping. To do so, I whisked the butter and gradually added the icing sugar. Once all the icing sugar was mixed in, I added the coffee and gave it one last whisk to make sure it was super smooth.
The final step was to assemble the cake. I chose the cake with the best top and placed it at the bottom, then added half of the icing to it. Afterwards, I took the other cake, placed it on top and iced it before using the palette knife to add lines it the icing and decorated it with the walnut pieces to serve.
Slicing into the cake, I could immediately tell that the sponge was moist and not dry at all, despite the two cake layers being so thin. This cake is worth making, but I’d suggest either using smaller cake tins or doubling the ingredients listed for the sponge.
