If I felt that this cake could have handled one more adjectives in the title, I would have called it: Non Traditional Rustic Christmas Spiced Chocolate Beer Cake with a Chai Tea Glaze…! Its non traditional in the sense that it is chocolate instead of fruit, its quick with simple ingredients and rustic in its nature. Sometimes its just nice to not make a big fuss, but know that your cake will turn out great none the less.

I served this cake up for our annual Christmas party last weekend, and its no fuss rustic good looks seemed to go down a treat.

This recipe features Christmas beer, which seems very fitting, as we have just returned home from Copenhagen where we attempted to sample as many Christmas beers as possible. If Christmas beer isn’t on hand, any dark ale will suffice.

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Batter:

470 ml Christmas Beer or Dark Ale
180g unsalted butter, plus more for the tin
85g organic pure cocoa powder
3 cloves
3 cardamoms
1 tsp cinnamon
65g whole wheat flour
200g all-purpose flour
130g muscovado sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp  sea salt
3 large organic eggs
350 ml greek yoghurt

Glaze:

80g icing sugar
a couple of tbsp boiling water
1 chai tea bag

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Preheat oven to 180 C, and grease a large bunt tin.

In a saucepan simmer the beer with the spices and reduce the volume to roughly 250 ml. Remove from heat, add the butter and cocoa, stir until combined. Fish out the cloves and cardamom pods, set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the flours, sugar, salt and baking soda, then add the eggs and yoghurt. Lightly mix, before adding the beer mixture, mix well, but don’t over mix the batter or it will become tough.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from the oven, leave to cook slightly, then turn out onto a wire rack.

In the meantime, make the icing by steeping a chai tea bag in boiling water for 5 min. Gradually add enough of the liquid to the icing sugar to make a smooth icing. When the cake is cool, spread the icing around the top allowing some to run down the sides.