From the "Ricettario" - Moka cake.

Let me introduce my Ricettario - which means nothing else than "recipe book".

It's a notebook I wrote when I was 16 (which means 20 years ago!), where I copied recipes found here and there.


Today's cake is Torta Moka (Moka Cake). In Italian, the word moka is usually referred to something containing coffee, since at home coffee is made with a so- called moka machine.

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients*:
250 g flour
100 g unsalted butter
200 g sugar
2 eggs
1 small cup of strong coffee
1 small bag of baking powder

First, I made coffee with my small moka:

Then, I mixed the eggs with the sugar:

Added melted butter, coffee:

Flour and baking powder. I usually substitute part of the flour with maizena (potato starch) which makes the cake softer. So I used 150 g flour and 100 g maizena.

Beat it well, until all the lumps are gone, then pour the batter in a cake spring:

I make my cakes this shape because I find when I use the standard springform the center doesn't cook very well, or the edges come out too cooked.



My variation: since I think coffee and dark chocolate are a match made in heaven, I sprinkle some dark chocolate drops on top:

Put it in the oven at 180 °C (360 °F) for 40 minutes.

And at this point... my oven screwed up big time. And I was busy doing other stuff, so I didn't check the cake while it was baking.
It came out more like a giant cookie than a nice and soft cake. The result was not pretty enough for the world to see. But it was delicious nonetheless - besides, these are "experiments", and not all experiments give good results.
I promised myself to make a new one and check the oven very often as I cook it - and of course take pictures of that one.

*Note on measurements: I'll try to put up a conversion page soon. In the meantime I am sure you can find conversions between grams and cups on the web.
Italian eggs are usually  smaller than the american counterparts, so consider my eggs to be medium sized.
In Italy they sell small bags of prepared backing powder - that's what I use. It corresponds to 1 tsp baking powder + 1 tbsp baking soda.