Birthday bake: Dark Chocolate Raspberry Coffee cake

It was my cousin-in-law's birthday a few weeks ago and so wanted to bake a cake for her! I knew that she'd probably get a lot of chocolates and cakes so wanted to go for something a little lighter! Then I remembered this AWESOME BRIGHT COLOURFUL cake I saw on .. (yes that's right!) Sally's Baking Addiction blog! Actually everything she makes is quite colourful but this cake really did stand out with her bright almost-hot-pink raspberries ^_^ The recipe seemed easy and I had all the ingredients in my pantry (don't you love those kind of recipes!) so here it is!

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Coffee Cake
Recipe adapted from Sally's Baking Addiction

Ingredients
Streusel
3 Tbs (45g) unsalted butter, cold
1/4 cup (50g) caster sugar
1/4 cup (31g) plain flour
1/2 cup (64g) slivered almonds

Cake
2 cups (250g) plain flour
3/4 cup (150g) caster sugar
1/4 cup (60g) unsalted butter, softened at room temp
1 cup (240ml) buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg
1 cup (180g) dark chocolate chips (I used milk chocolate)
1 1/2 cups raspberries (fresh/frozen)

1. Preheat oven to 180oC. Grease and line 8 inch square baking pan/dish.
2. Make streusel by gently mashing cold butter in small bowl. Add flour, sugar and mix with fork. Add almonds and set aside.
3. In a large bowl, add flour, sugar, butter, milk, vanilla, baking powder, salt and egg. Beat on low until everything combined, remembering to scrape down the bowl if using stand mixer. Do not over mix.
4. Spread half of batter into baking pan/dish. Layer with half of the streusel, then most of the raspberries and chocolate chips. Repeat with rest of batter and streusel. Top with remaining raspberries and chocolate chips.

Layer 1

5. Bake for 45-50 minutes until skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Loosely over with foil after 20 minutes to prevent sides from over browning.   

Big slices!

Slice for you!

The colours of the cake were really vibrant! However, the cake was a little bit too dense and I think it was due to over mixing... ideally I wanted the texture to be more crumbly and cakey... but the flavours were still there :) Hope she liked it ^^and if she didn't... it's the thought that counts right? XD