A Recipe For Love by Amelia Berry

This week I’m joined by Amelia Berry. Her new romcom A Recipe for Love was published on 13 March 2025. This is the start of a new series – The Highland Cookery School Book 1 – described as an uplifting rags-to-riches romcom set in the Scottish Highlands. Amelia is sharing a yummy recipe with my blog readers that had me licking my lips as I was preparing this post.

A Recipe for Love is a romance set around a cookery school in the Scottish Highlands. Our heroine, Bella, starts the cookery school in a bid to turn around the fortunes of her fiance’s failing Highland estate. This is the recipe she uses as her showstopper ending to her very first cookery class. And this is how Bella describes it…

***

Bella had saved what she knew would be everyone’s favourite activity of the day for the next session. The idea was that they’d do something really fun before lunch so everyone would be hyped up and enthusiastic about coming back after the break. It was time for chocolate cake.

As she’d anticipated, mixing together the rich chocolate batter seemed to be balm for every soul in the room. She’d toyed with the idea of using a basic sponge mix, but decided in the end to go for something a little more elevated, so this batter included cocoa but also melted chocolate and generous spoons full of soured cream which gave an unctuous moisture to the finished cake and cut through the richness enough to allow you to go back for a second slice. The final little fancy addition to the mix was to separate the eggs, incorporate the yolks first and then whip up the whites before folding in the soft fluffy clouds to create the perfect balance of richness and lightness in the final cake.

Bella loved this recipe. She’d created this final version herself as an amalgam of different recipes she’d found over the years. It was, in her eyes, the ultimate chocolate cake, and sharing it with her little group was actually making her feel quite emotional. It took her back to cooking with her grandma and seeing her nan’s pride when Bella completed a task. She realised now that pride had come not only from Bella’s achievement, but from the joy of sharing her own knowledge and love of food with someone eager to learn.

***

In actual fact I came up with this recipe in much the way Bella describes, tweaking the amount and type of sugar and playing with icing options until I found what is, in my mind perfection. You can thank me later.

The Ultimate Chocolate Cake

There are lots of steps and lots of ingredients in this cake so I strongly recommend making like a TV chef and weighing everything out into cute little bowls in advance. It will massively reduce the chances of you forgetting something crucial.

For the cake

140g dark chocolate

100ml milk

2tbsp cocoa powder

140g butter

140g light brown sugar

3 eggs

4 tbsp soured cream

200g plain flour

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

For the ganache icing

250g dark chocolate (or for a lighter ganache mix 50:50 dark and milk chocolate)

250ml double cream

Method

1. Grease two 20cm baking tins.(If you only have one you can either bake the batter in two goes, or make a single deeper cake and slice it after it’s cooled. For that you’ll just need to bake it a bit longer).

2. Melt the chocolate together with the milk and the cocoa powder. You can do this over a pan of hot water or in short bursts on low heat in a microwave, stirring between each round of heating.

3. In a whole other bowl beat the sugar and butter together. If the butter’s rock hard a quick burst on low heat in the microwave might be helpful first.

4. Then separate your eggs and put the whites to one side for now.

5. Add the egg yolks to your butter and sugar and mix in, then the soured cream (the soured cream is a the magic ingredient in this recipe – it makes the finished cake really rich and moist), and then the melted chocolate mixture. Mix all of that together.

6. Now mix in the flour and bicarb. I’ve been told you don’t really need to sieve modern flour but I still always do. Your cake, your rules though.

7. Now beat your egg whites as if you were aiming for meringue – we’re looking for the whole ‘stiff peak’ stage. And then fold the egg white carefully into the cake batter. You want to keep as much of the air as you can in there. That’s what’s going to stop the cake feeling too dense and stodgy.

8. Split the batter evenly between your two tins and bake! About 35 minutes at 160 fan should do the job.

9. Once the cakes are fully cooled it’s time to stick them together with ganache. Melt the chocolate into the cream – low heat, nobody wants boiled chocolate – and stir until it’s smooth. Ganache is runny when warm but more fudgy when cool, so wait for it to cool a little and you should get a consistency that you can spread over your cake.If it still feels too runny melt in more chocolate and then cool again. If it’s too solid warm the mixture again and stir in a little more cream.

10. Whack half the ganache on your bottom layer, stick the second cake on top, and whack the rest of the ganache on top. If you’re feeling fancy you can spread the ganache down the sides or you can decorate the top with sweeties or raspberries or anything else that sounds yummy. Ta-da!

About Amelia Berry

Amelia grew up on the North Yorkshire coast and now lives in Worcestershire. She has been writing professionally since 2013, and is also published as Ally Sinclair, Alison May and, in collaboration, as Juliet Bell. She is also a freelance editor and writing mentor, and, when she’s not writing, is a volunteer tour guide for the National Trust and acts as Programme Co-ordinator for the Romance Writing Festival in Bournemouth.

You can find out more about Amelia (and Alison) by signing up for her newsletter at www.alison.may.co.uk or following her on

Instagram www.instagram.com/msalisonmay/ or

Facebook www.facebook.com/AlisonMayAuthor

About A Recipe for Love

Cinderella meets Bake-Off in this contemporary rags-to-riches romcom

From the moment they meet, Bella and Adam know this is no ordinary holiday romance.

This is the real deal.

But when they find out Adam’s father has died and he has inherited the penniless Lowbridge Loch estate, their lives are changed in an instant.

Bella suddenly finds herself dealing with crumbling castles, battling baronesses and a tiny community of eccentric characters. Rising to the challenge, Bella has an idea to save Lowbridge Loch. She will create The Highland Cookery School.

But will her plans sink like a souffle when her skills are put to the test?

And can Bella and Adam’s love survive the pressure of saving the estate?

An irresistible, feel-good romance perfect for fans of Jessica Redland, Holly Martin and Heidi Swain

Buying Link:

You can order A Recipe for Love in paperback and ebook here :

https://www.herabooks.com/books/a-recipe-for-love-amelia-berry/