quadruple chocolate loaf cake

last night i was in a pissy mood, and i did my mise en place wrongly. nigella's original method is to bung everything together in the food processor, but she also noted down a method by hand which required the sugar to be separate from everything else. i was going to do it by hand, but i (accidentally) put all the dry ingredients together, so i was stuck, and had to go back to the processor method.

the problem was, my processor was very small.
so i roughly divided the ingredients in two and made two batches of batter, and stirred them together in another bowl with the chocolate chips.
any rational person can understand why the spatula in the scraped-out bowl appears to have been licked. i'm beginning to have a theory that any chocolate cake batter can be cooked over heat, stirring all the while, into a thick chocolate fudge/sauce/soup to be drunk straight away.
the chocolatey batter was completely watery; absolutely no feeling of creamed butter and sugar, which would have been the case if the cake was done by hand. so, it amazed me how the cake still rose and appeared to have a crumbly inside. anyway, the split down the middle was beautiful, think fissure eruption and basalt plateaus.
when the cake was almost done, i started boiling the chocolate-sugar-water mixture to get the chocolate syrup. oh yes, the 'quadruple' in the name of this cake refers to the four choc-factors that make it so decadent: cocoa in the batter, chocolate chips, chocolate syrup drizzled over, chocolate shavings sprinkled on top.
drizzling the thick chocolate syrup over the cake. i should have pierced the cake more; a lot of the syrup just flooded to the sides, and upon cooling, formed a crackly sugary crust. the idea is to get the cake to absorb the syrup as much as possible.
shaving a block of chocolate for, well, shavings. i think i'll keep just a small block like this in the refrigerator for future use, if i ever do need to garnish with chocolate shavings again. but these melt at the slightest touch.
not as impressive-looking as the one in nigella's book, but maybe that's just the outside. i can't wait to get it cut into slices, but there'll be no photos for that, because it'll be in camp by the time it's sliced.

i realised i could cry in my sleep too.