Red Wine Chocolate Cake

Chocolate cake. Two words that delight the senses and make the mouth water. What's better than chocolate cake? Chocolate cake with wine in it!

Unless, of course, you don't like chocolate. Or wine. But that's too crazy to contemplate.

A friend recommended this recipe from Smitten Kitchen saying it was pretty easy. I'm not a baker, at all. But I had a delicious bottle of Cabernet Franc. So very tasty, this wine. And you know what they say about cooking with wine...

If you don't know how difficult it was to leave a 2005 Domaine de Château Gaillard Saumur Cab Franc untouched, your life is semi-charmed. First of all, I was stuck in bed with alcohol-unfriendly sickies. Then I somehow convinced myself that I needed to make the cake with this particular wine, so even once I was better, I still couldn't savor it. Because somehow I'd had the inhuman willpower when I first opened the bottle to save the exact 3/4 cup needed for this recipe. Who am I?

This wine is truly fantastic. I have had many red wines and this was quite near the top of all the delectable red-hued intoxicants that have passed through these lips. I'm fantasizing about it right now as I write this.

That said, I shouldn't have wasted it on a cake. Remember how I'm not a baker? Why I tested a recipe with a bottle of wine that costs more than two dollars is beyond me. I blame the codeine-induced haze I was living in. Deb suggests that the cake comes out of the oven "shiny and smooth, like a puddle of chocolate." It sounds pretty. Mine didn't look like that. It looked like the exact opposite of that.

Don't get me wrong, it tastes good. I ate a piece for breakfast. Then another. Then I put whipped cream and powdered sugar on it and took pictures for you. Then I ate that piece too. And also the other piece you won't see pictures of, but that has cranberry sauce all over it. Yeah, 4 pieces. Then I called some friends and asked them to come eat the rest before I ended up drunk for breakfast.

You shouldn't drink alone, right? You also shouldn't stuff your face with alcohol-infused chocolate cake alone either.

Because sharing is caring. Especially when it's a Cab Franc.