Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake

So, my friend Michelle came around again yesterday and we're on a mission to bake and eat our way through Nigella's Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame from Feast. Even though I have baked some recipes from this list before, such as the delightful Chocolate Guinness Cake, Chocolate Orange Cake and Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Cake (no links as I didn't have a blog at the time), I don't mind baking and eating them all over again because they're so delicious. And the best thing about having Michelle around is, she'll do all the washing up. Fantastic.

So, after the Chocolate Cheesecake a couple of weeks ago, the recipe that really got Michelle's attention is this Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake. Altogether: Yum! The meringue base, rather than being airy and crunchy, it's more like a thin layer of chocolate marshmallow and how bad can that be? The dark chocolate truffle filling is rich and silky smooth. And instead of using rum as the flavouring, we used brandy; and the sole reason for that is because I'm running out of rum. The Brandy worked just fine. More than fine actually. To me, chocolate and brandy together is one of the tastes of Christmas and it's utterly heavenly. And just like other chocolate truffles, it needs a good coating of cocoa powder.

We demolished the cake at the office earlier and someone described the taste of the cake and I quote, "it's like I just died and gone to heaven"...

Note from Nigella: If you don't want to bother with the meringue fandango, you could crumble some bought meringue in a bowl, sprinkle with cocoa, mix well and then press into the base of the cake tin (much as you do with digestive crumbs when making a cheesecake). Pour the chocolate truffle mixture on top and refrigerate.

But to be honest, making the meringue base is not difficult at all, but I'll leave that to you...

hmm... which cake is next...

Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake
Recipe by Nigella Lawson
For list of ingredients and instructions, click here.