AI photoPeach, Amaretti and Chocolate Cake
A soft cake with syrup-soaked peaches, crushed amaretti biscuits and dark chocolate folded through the batter.
Labels are worked out automatically from the ingredients and can be wrong. Check the packaging if it matters to you.
Ingredients
- 900 g Peaches in syrup
- 250 g Butter
- 200 g Amaretti biscuits
- 5 pcs Eggs
- 200 g Dark chocolate
- 300 g Plain flour
- 300 g Caster sugar
- 475 ml Milk
- 1 tbsp Dark rum in place of rum extract
- 1 tsp Baking powder
- 1 tsp Vanilla extract
- 1 pinch Salt
- Icing sugar to taste
Steps
Drain the peaches in a colander so the liquid runs off, and leave them there.
5 minSeparate the eggs into yolks and whites. Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and fluffy.
10 minMelt the butter in the microwave and let it cool. Melt the chocolate with 240ml of the milk.
10 minAdd the melted chocolate and butter to the yolk mixture, mix with a whisk, and pour in the dark rum.
5 minAdd the crushed amaretti biscuits and mix with a whisk.
3 minSift the flour with the baking powder, stir in the vanilla extract, and mix into the batter until smooth.
5 minBeat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until very stiff, and gently fold into the batter with a wooden spoon.
5 minCut the peaches into pieces and fold into the batter, mixing gently.
5 minGrease the tin with butter, dust with flour, and pour in the batter.
5 minPreheat the oven to 180°C and bake the cake for 50-60 minutes.
60 minRemove from the oven, let it cool completely, and dust with icing sugar.
What was changed
Replaced Dark rum with ordinary dark rum and Baking powder with plain baking powder, adding Vanilla extract for vanilla flavour, as these sachets are rarely sold in UK shops.
This is a wet, dense cake, closer to a pudding than a sponge, and it stays that way on purpose. The amaretti aren't a garnish here, they're the flour's understudy — crushed almond biscuit soaks up egg and chocolate and gives you crumb without the lightness a real sponge needs. That's why there's no creaming of butter and sugar, no long beating for air: the structure comes from whipped egg white alone, folded in at the end, and from the biscuit crumbs binding everything else into something that holds a slice without crumbling into dust.
What decides whether it works is two things: how dry you get those peaches, and how gently you fold the egg whites. Tinned peaches in syrup carry a lot of water. Leave them in the colander a token minute and you're baking a cake with a swimming pool in the middle — it'll sink, it'll be gummy at the core, and no amount of extra oven time fixes that, because by the time the centre sets the edges are already dry and grey. Drain them properly, let gravity do its slow work while you get on with the eggs.
The whites are the only thing giving you lift in a batter this heavy with butter, chocolate and crushed biscuit. Beat them to a stiff, glossy peak — tip the bowl, they shouldn't move — and fold them in with a wooden spoon in big lazy strokes, not a whisk, not vigour. A whisk or heavy hand knocks the air straight back out, and then you've got a dense cake with no lift at all instead of a dense cake with just enough.
On ingredients, start with the amaretti. They're doing the job plain almonds or breadcrumbs can't: they're already sugared, already dried, already fragrant with bitter almond (that's amaretto — "bitter" — not rum, confusingly), so when you crush them they bring sweetness, structure and scent in one go. If you can't get them, crushed digestives mixed with a few drops of almond extract gets you the texture, not the flavour, so don't expect a twin.
The dark rum is listed as standing in for rum extract, and that tells you what it's really there for — a background warmth, not a rum flavour you're meant to taste. A tablespoon in this volume of batter is aroma, not alcohol content. Dark rum, brandy, even a splash of strong black tea with a drop of vanilla will all do the same quiet job: carry a little depth under the chocolate, nothing more.
Dark chocolate melted with milk, not water or cream, matters because the milk carries fat and protein that keep the chocolate from seizing into a grainy mess as it cools — and it also thins the chocolate into something you can actually whisk into egg yolks without fighting it. Use chocolate you'd eat on its own; the cheap stuff with more sugar than cocoa solids won't set the same way and leaves the cake sweeter and softer than it should be. The remaining milk, unmelted, loosens the final batter.
Butter here is melted, not creamed — that's deliberate, not a shortcut. Creamed butter and sugar is how you trap air for a sponge; melted butter is how you get moisture and richness without air, which is exactly what a dense, almost pudding-like cake wants. Any neutral butter works; margarine will bake it but you lose the flavour the whole cake is quietly built around.
Peaches in syrup rather than fresh is an economics-and-season choice as much as a texture one — tinned peaches are available year-round, pre-softened, and consistent, where fresh peaches vary wildly in ripeness and in how much water they'll shed into your batter. If you only have fresh, poach and drain them properly first; don't just dice raw fruit in, it won't have given up its water yet and will do it in the oven instead, where you can't control it.
On the practical end, in an ordinary flat kitchen: you don't have a stand mixer running cool and steady, so beat the egg whites last, right before folding, because they'll deflate sitting around waiting for you to finish other steps. Check your oven actually sits at 180°C — most domestic ovens drift by 10-15 degrees either way, and a cake this moist is unforgiving of running hot, which dries the outside before the inside sets. A skewer coming out with a few moist crumbs, not wet batter, is your real finish line, not the timer. And let it cool fully before the icing sugar — dust it warm and the sugar just melts into a wet patch, which is a cosmetic failure, not a structural one, but there's no reason to rush the last five minutes of something that took an hour of patience already.