350g Shipton Mill Soft Cake and Pastry Organic Flour
150g Unsalted Butter
1tsp baking powder
20 dates, chopped. If Medjool reduce this to 15 as they are larger.
180g Demerera Sugar
100g Bramley Apple sauce (reduce fresh apples in a pan with some water and sugar to taste or use apple sauce from the shop)
1 Dryish-textured eating apple e.g. Adams Pearmain
3 large eggs
200g (can be less – will still work) Fairtrade Organic Dark Chocolate (e.g. Divine)
Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
30g cocoa or drinking chocolate
3 Tablespoons of strawberry jam (Apricot if you have substituted for dates)

In a non-stick pan, melt the butter and chocolate (stirring) with a couple of tablespoons of milk. Put aside to cool a little – the milk should loosen it so it is easy to scrape out later.
Now mix all of the other ingredients except the eating apple and strawberry jam in a bowl with a wooden spoon – then add the somewhat-cooled chocolate mixture to the bowl and mix it all up together.

Decant this mixture into a spring-form cake tin lined with greaseproof paper.
Slice thinly the eating apple and arrange it on the top of the cake, and bake at Gas Mark 4 for an hour. You are not looking for a dry consistency – it should be a gooey cake and may well yield some moisture to a knife or cake tester.
Remove from oven and slather the surface with strawberry jam.