Chocolate Chip Welsh Cakes With MayHawk Chocolate

Chocolate Chip Welsh Cakes. An Updated & Modern Recipe.

Coarse-Chopped Dark-Milk Chocolate Folded Through The Dough, Baked On A Traditional Bakestone (Planc)

This is a Welsh cake recipe I learned from my grandmother, you can see her recipe here, but the version below is a deliberate step away from the traditional bake — 200g of coarsely chopped MayHawk Darksome Milk chocolate folded straight through the dough, so every Welsh cake comes off the bakestone with pockets of chocolate still holding their shape.

Chocolate chip cookies and chocolate chip Welsh cakes share a starting theme — chunks of chocolate suspended in a plain, buttery dough — but they diverge almost entirely in the eating. A cookie is baked in a static oven, spreads as it bakes, and finishes crisp at the edge with a softer centre; it’s built to hold its shape once cooled and eaten as a biscuit, dry-handed, often with nothing else. A Welsh cake is cooked on a hot bakestone or griddle rather than baked, which changes the texture at a structural level — the direct, dry heat sears the outside quickly while the inside stays soft and slightly dense, closer to a griddled scone than a biscuit.

Welsh cakes tend to be eaten warm, straight off the stone, which cookies rarely are (they tend to be cooled out of the oven and stored away)— and that warmth in the Welsh cake is what lets the chocolate chunks stay part-soft rather than set hard, so the texture contrast between the crisp exterior, the soft crumb, and the still-yielding chocolate is really the point of doing this to a Welsh cake at all, rather than just making a cookie.

I chose MayHawk’s Darksome Milk chocolate specifically because most milk chocolate is too sweet for this — it flattens the currants and turns the whole thing into a different dessert. MayHawk make craft chocolate by ethically sourcing ingredients for their bean-to-bar chocolate, and their Darksome Milk sits at 60% cacao, which is unusually high for anything called “milk chocolate,” and the sugar is deliberately reduced against it. The chocolate bar itself is incredibly moreish, creamy without being overly sweet, and inside the Welsh cake it turns a traditional Welsh dessert into something special, particularly when eaten warm.

The MayHawk bar is also single-origin Colombian cacao, so it has a bit of intense cacao depth to it, and they use a slow-caramelisation process during production, so what comes through in the bake is a darker caramel depth — it sits alongside the currants instead of competing with them, and there’s none of the bitterness you’d risk if you swapped in a dark chocolate instead. This is the chocolate we recommend.

Chocolate Chip Welsh Cakes Recipe

This makes about 14 or so Welsh Cakes.

Recipe Ingredients:

• 225g plain flour
  1 tsp baking powder
  50g butter (diced)
  50g lard (diced)
  75g sugar (plus more for dusting)
  50g currants
  70g MayHawk Darksome Milk chocolate coarsely chopped into chunks
  1 egg beaten
  3 tablespoons milk
• –

Optional – serve as they come with a little sugar or:

• Sprinkle over a little cinnamon
• Spread with some home-made jam
• Drizzle over some runny honey

–

---

–

Recipe Method:

Sift the flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl. Cut the lard and butter into small pieces, add into the flour and rub into a breadcrumb consistency between your fingers and thumbs.

Then mix in the sugar and currants with a wooden spoon before mixing in the beaten egg and sufficient milk to make a stiff dough. Note: the dough needs to be stiff enough to roll out, so if it is a little wet add in some extra flour. Flour your hands and pick up the dough and gently knead it in your hands so that it is fully mixed and silky.

Once the dough is silky, fold through the chopped chocolate chunks — a light hand here keeps the chunks whole rather than smearing them through the dough.

On a floured surface roll out the Welsh Cake dough to 5mm (1/4 inch) thick. Using a pastry cutter (straight edged or the traditional fluted one) cut the dough into 8cm (3 inch) rounds. Either store these rounds in an air-tight plastic container to bake the next day or bake straight away.

Bake on a hot greased bakestone (use a little butter) or in a large non-stick frying pan, until golden brown, about four minutes on each side. Keep an eye on the heat once the chocolate is in — the chunks near the surface will catch and scorch faster than plain dough, so a slightly lower, steadier heat than usual serves these better. Place onto a plate and scatter over some extra sugar and eat the Welsh Cakes warm.

On adding in chocolate chips: Welsh cakes take well to this kind of change because the dough itself is plain and unfussy — a clean canvas for the chocolate to actually be tasted, rather than a flavour it has to fight through. Bake them on a traditional Welsh bakestone or ‘planc’ if you have one — it gives an even, continuous heat that a domestic hob can’t quite match — but a large non-stick frying pan or flat griddle does the job well.