Chocolate apricot upside down cake

Once again, I am entering We Should Cocoa by the seat of my pants. Today's the last day for entries, but I really wanted to enter this time as the extra ingredient was apricots. I love baking with apricots - an apricot and almond tart is one of the great pleasures of the world. But I thought that the addition of chocolate might work better with another fine fruity pud - the upside down cake.

And this is one of those cakes where everything went wrong. I (or, if we're being totally honest, Mr 'Splorer) had to go to the shops about 3 times to pick up things I thought we had but we didn't. My attempt at caramel split the moment it hit the cake tin. (Not caramelized enough? Any hints most welcome!) I made half the chocolate cake recipe, spread it on the apricots, decided it wasn't enough so had to make another half the recipe as fast as I could. (Luckily it was a 'just weigh it and mix it' type recipe.) And it took bloody ages to cook. 

When it was done, it wasn't quite what I expected. The chocolate cake was denser than I imagined, and the apricots were rather subsumed within the cake mixture, rather than being a beautiful topping. And I think actually half the recipe would have been enough cake. But it was one of those recipes where your thought process goes along these lines: 'oh dear, this is a bit of a disaster ... doesn't taste too bad though ... must have another go at it soon ... I think I'll just have another slice ... hmm, that's quite nice actually ... now where's it all gone?'

I took some of it to work and received this in depth review: 'It was interesting cake. Tastier than it sounded, but I think this is due to your excellent sponge-making and good sticky apricot mush on top, which was zingy as well as sweet. Yumski!' Not too bad a write up, really. 


So I don't think this is a polished and ready recipe but basically what I did was use the topping from this Bill Granger apricot upside down cake recipe and covered it in this old fashioned chocolate cake by Nigella. Might have to give both those recipes a try by themselves actually.