I have great colleagues but I’m about to leave them for a new opportunity. I’m going to miss them, so to show my appreciation I’m baking them four cakes – one for each week of my notice period. For more details about why they are so awesome, check out my post from week 1 of The Month of Cake.

Week 2 of The Month of Cake was Chocolate Buckwheat Cake served with a (slightly controversial) cinnamon-scented labneh. One of my colleagues needs to eat a gluten-free diet, so it was only right that one of the four cakes was a gluten-free version that she could eat. She has also recently discovered that she is not allergic to chocolate, so when I came across this recipe from Deb at Smitten Kitchen, it seemed like the perfect way to help her make up for years of lost chocolate. This cake is built on a dense, fudgy base of well-beaten eggs, butter, sugar and dark chocolate, with a small amount of almond and buckwheat flours added for structure and nuttiness. The only change I made to the recipe was to substitute a little of the white sugar for brown in order to introduce a note of caramel.

Despite its excellent flavour and soft crumb, this cake is quite plain in appearance. A dusting of icing sugar livened it up, but it was still a flat, brown disc that couldn’t compare to the vibrancy of the Orange & Yoghurt Cake that I had made the previous week. It needed an accompaniment and since I had some homemade labneh in the fridge (see here for instructions on how to make labneh) I decided to work with that. Chocolate and cinnamon go well together so I simply mixed 1 cup soft labneh (i.e. 6 hour straining time) with 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 2 tsp runny honey. A large dollop of this mixture complemented the cake well, adding moisture and further complexity to the flavours. It wasn’t universally loved, however, and a couple of my colleagues with fairly unsophisticated palates (ha!) expressed a preference for whipped cream instead. Whatever floats your boat, labneh, yoghurt, cream or plain, this is a cake that I’ll definitely be making again. Next week, Pear & Pistachio Cake!