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Hello everyone!

Today is a special day for the Boy and I. Coinciding with Easter Sunday, is our actual Bloganniversary.

It’s been 6 years since I decided to start a personal blog. 3 years since I decided to share more of myself and my love of food and travel into something bigger. 3 years since the Boy decided to spend countless hours migrating all my old blog posts from my blogspot domain and editing all my photos and posts before hitting the “publish” button.

The blog has grown at an incredible rate and I couldn’t have done it without all of you lovely readers, friends and family. Indeed all of you loyal followers are like my friends and family now.

You’ve been through the low-lows with us and the ups on our roller coaster journey in life. Deaths, births and marriages, we should start dedicating some of the more poignant posts to the government agency that handles it *wink*.

As our dedication to you grows, we would like to announce a change to the blog name (it should have been done years ago) to “The Chronicles of Ms I-Hua and the Boy”!!!

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It’s fitting and apt considering the hours that we both put into this blog. I’ve had to beat the idea into the Boy as he didn’t want any spotlight cast his way, but I believe in sharing the limelight with my soul mate (we wouldn’t have amazing photos of #yolkporn if it weren’t for him!).

I would like to thank the beautiful Iron Chef Shellie for designing our new blog header (it’s so beautiful and lifelike!)

As part of this celebration, I would like to share with you my amazing rendition of Nigella Lawson’s Nutella Cake!

Cheers and enjoy the merry feasting. Here’s to another wonderful eventful year ahead!

Nigella’s Nutella Cake Recipe
(Adapted from Nigella.com “Nutella Cake)

Ingredients:
For the cake
6 large Eggs
1 pinch of Salt
125 g Unsalted Butter (soften)
400 g Nutella (1 large jar)
1 Tbsp of Frangelico liqueur
100 g ground Hazelnuts (I bought a packet of hazelnuts, peeled them and grinded them in my coffee grinder 🙂 )
100 g Dark Chocolate (melted)

For the icing
100 g Hazelnut (peeled weight)
125 ml Double Cream
1 Tbsp Frangelico liqueur or Water
125 g Dark Chocolate (chopped)

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Procedure:

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (degrees Celsius).

In a large bowl, beat the butter and Nutella together, and then add the Frangelico, egg yolks and ground hazelnuts and set aside.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites and salt until stiff but not dry. I found this to be the most difficult part of the process as it took much longer than usual to whip up.

As with most chocolate cakes, fold in the cooled, melted chocolate to the Nutella mixture, then lighten the mixture with a large dollop of whisked egg white, which you can beat in as roughly as you want, before gently folding the rest of them, bit by bit.

Pour into a greased 23cm/ 9 inch round and lined springform tin and cook for 40 minutes or until the cake’s beginning to come away at the sides, then let cool on a rack.

Toast the hazelnuts in a dry frying pan until the aroma wafts upwards and the nuts are golden-brown in parts: keep shaking the pan so that they don’t burn on one side and stay too pallid on others.

If you are using hazelnuts with their skin on, there’s a handy trick of transferring the heated nuts onto a tea towel and rubbing them together. Their skins will naturally fall off. I left some of them half peeled (for aesthetic reasons).

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Make sure you transfer the hazelnuts to a plate and let cool, if you don’t do this and place them straight onto the ganache, it’ll turn oily.

To make the ganache, simply put a heavy-bottomed saucepan onto the stove and add the cream, Frangelico (or water) and chopped chocolate, making sure that you stir continuously until the chocolate has melted.

Take it off the heat and whisk until it reaches the right consistency (should be a smooth cream like texture).

Release the cooled cake from the mould carefully, leaving it on the base (as it is wet and heavy and will break). Slowly glaze the top of the cake with the chocolate ganache, taking care to run the chocolate cream to the edges so it dribbles dramatically down the sides 🙂

Finish it all off by placing the toasted (and cooled) hazelnuts onto the cake.

Voila! A chocolate masterpiece 🙂

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So what do you think? Are you keen to attempt it? There wasn’t a single piece of the cake left when I took it into work by lunchtime.