Polish one-pot cocoa cake with a glaze from the same saucepan
A cocoa cake made in one saucepan: butter, sugar, cocoa and milk warmed together, some poured off for the glaze, the rest mixed with eggs and flour. Moist, dense, chocolatey, ready in a quarter of an hour plus baking. The recipe many Polish households keep on a page torn from a notebook.
Your own work in that: 20 min.
- Saucepan 20 min
- Baking 40 min
- Cooling and glaze 15 min
Step by step
0 / 5 doneWarm the butter, sugar, cocoa and milk
Heat the oven to 175 °C and line the tin with paper. In a saucepan melt the butter with the sugar, cocoa, vanilla sugar, salt and milk, stirring, until the sugar has fully dissolved and the mixture is smooth and glossy. Don't boil it for long — bring it just to the first bubbles and take it off the heat.
Ingredients: 250 g butter · 250 g sugar · 4 tbsp cocoa powder · 130 ml milk · 4 pcs eggs · 250 g plain flour · 2 tsp baking powder · 1 tbsp vanilla sugar · 1 pinch salt · 50 g walnuts
Smooth, glossy cocoa mixturePour off the glaze
Pour half a cup (about 120 ml) of the mixture into a glass and set aside: that is the glaze. Cool the rest 10 minutes to lukewarm, or the eggs will scramble.
TipA glaze from the same pan is the whole trick of this cake: not one extra ingredient, and the cake looks finished.
Half a cup poured off for the glazeAdd the eggs and flour
Crack the eggs into the lukewarm mixture and whisk. Add the flour with the baking powder and mix into a smooth, fairly loose batter.
Eggs, flour, smooth batterBake
Pour into the tin. 175 °C, conventional, middle shelf, 35–40 minutes. A skewer should come out with moist crumbs, not wet and not fully clean: this cake should be moist; dried out it loses everything.
In the tin; skewer with moist crumbsGlaze while warm
Cool the cake 15 minutes in the tin. Warm the reserved glaze if it has thickened and pour over the still-warm cake, spreading it. Sprinkle with walnuts. Cut once the glaze has set.
Glaze on the warm cake, walnuts
Before you start
With plum butter
A thin layer of plum butter under the glaze: a tart contrast to the sweet cake.
More chocolatey
50 g dark chocolate into the saucepan mixture and as much again into the glaze. Darker, more intense.
Next day
Better than the first: the moisture spreads. Covered, 4 days; freezes in squares.
