Marmite chocolate cake

This – honestly – is less desperate than it sounds.

Delia (and others) have a recipe for chocolate and stout cake. As a fan of both cocoa-based indulgence and dark beers, it’s one I’ve made a few times. Among its many virtues is that you get a decent-sized cake for 6oz of precious self-raising flour. Hurrah!

But you do, technically, need 200ml of stout, too (oh, and a vast quantity of butter for icing, but I’m ignoring that), and I’m honestly not up for squandering perfectly good beer in cake right now. Beer has better places to be.

So…

Well…

I looked round the kitchen and my eyes lit upon the used-up jar of Marmite waiting for a final fling as an unami addition to stew.

So I’ve made it using 200ml of instant coffee made up with hot water that had first been sloshed round the inside of an old yeast spread jar. I did not, more fool me, taste the resulting liquid before I put it in the cake. I don’t imagine it was much like stout, but it was around the right colour, so that has to be a start.

The cake would have worked fine, no doubt, with milk, or just coffee, or even water. But I feel virtuous for having got every last drop of love-it-or-hate-it used up, and I can imagine it does add a savoury depth to what I understand is sometimes called the ‘flavour profile’.

And I added some ‘whacked’ mini eggs, too. The bottom of a Marmite jar makes a great mini-egg-whacker, but a rolling pin would be fine, too. They mix up the texture. Not in a very top-marks-in-bake-off way, but I find it rather cheering.

It’s filled with blackcurrant jam, and dusted with cocoa. And makes excellent breakfast.