Happy New Year chocolate cake

A friend of mine gave me a beautiful Christmas present: a cookbook called "Jam and Honey" by Hannah Queen. Here's her blog. The pictures are gorgeous and the recipes look enticing. I thought it would be fun to welcome the New Year by inviting chocolate cake into my home, so I made the dark chocolate flourless cake with pomegranate ganashe from my new book. I love a rich flourless chocolate cake. They are so decadent and seem so fancy even though they are fairly simple to make. In fact, the part of this recipe that took the longest time was the harvesting of the pomegranate seeds and making the juice. Otherwise, it was a piece of cake, so to speak. 

Little jewels. I decided the most effective way to squeeze juice out of these jewels would be to use my food mill. It worked quite well. I squeezed the pulp with my hands too which yielded a bit more juice. 

 Here is the cake fresh out of the oven.

The pomegranates burst as you chew, which is fun and delicious. 

On a knitting note, I finished a baby blanket. I love knitting blankets in the round. You can use the blanket as a pouch to hold the yarn! 

It's fun when the stitches are all smooshed up on the needles and when you cast off they are freed to be the blanket they were meant to be. 

Fresh off the needles and blocking. 

I used Bernat "softee baby cotton" yarn and the pattern I made up as I went along. 

Happy New Year!