What I love about this time of year is the wonderful (and delicious) gifts that my yoga students share with me.
Every year, one of my yoga students brings me a couple of kilos of cherries, fresh from his tree! They are the best cherries I have ever eaten. He tells me he gets 40-50kg from the tree each summer! That's a lot of cherries.
So, being the festive season and all, I decided to make a chocolate cherry cake, and I'm sharing the recipe with you here. It's super easy to make. The only tricky thing is pitting the cherries. Use a cherry pitter if you have one or, alternatively, just cut them in half and remove the seeds.
Ingredients: 1¾ cups spelt flour 1/3 cup raw cacao powder 1 tsp baking powder ¾ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp sea salt 1 cup cold coffee, or coffee substitute, or water or milk ¼ cup rice syrup ¼ cup maple syrup ½ cup coconut oil, melted 2 tsp vanilla essence 2 tsp apple cider vinegar 1¾ cups pitted cherries
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and prepare your cake tin. In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cacao powder and sea salt. Stir to combine. In a separate bowl, add the melted coconut oil, rice syrup, maple syrup, vanilla essence, cold coffee and apple cider vinegar. Whisk together until combined. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir through gently. Then add the cherries and gently mix through. Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and smooth the top. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Allow the cake to cool on a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar and serve with fresh cream, ice cream or yoghurt.
Enjoy!
