Chocolate Chip Cake with Mascarpone Cream

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Chocolate Chip Cake with Mascarpone Cream; a simple and easy chocolate chip cake laced with vanilla and topped with a fluffy cloud of whipped mascarpone cream.

Nothing humbles you quite as much as cooking or baking in a different country. Even if you think you’re pretty experienced in the kitchen, you’ll soon realise you’re really not.

Finding ingredients in a country that uses another language. Never really being that they are similar ingredients to the ones you’re used to at home. Hoping they create a somewhat familiar scientific reaction when combined and baked. Only imagining whether or not your concoction will actually taste good once it’s finished.

Being back in Italy after an extended Christmas break in Scotland, I finally had a chance to bake my first cake on foreign soil. Italy has wonderful ingredients, and a wide range of them, but some things took some studying. Cream, for example, is something that seems to change wildly when you cross borders. In the UK I’m used to a choice between single cream and double cream, for sweet or savoury dishes. In Italy, you can have panna fresca, panna cucina, panna montata and more. Some come in different flavours, some are sold specifically for cooking and others for dessert dishes. It’s all a bit confusing, to the point that I found myself deeply examining the fat content of each variety to figure out their whipping capacity.

It seemed sensible to keep things simple for this first proper bake (as you can tell, I had to keep things simple with the photography too…). With access to the world’s finest flour, and some of the world’s most adorably tiny chocolate chips, it only made sense that this should be an easy chocolate chip cake with mascarpone cream!

A simple, buttery, fluffy vanilla cake studded with chocolate chips. A cloud of airy and refreshing mascarpone cream piled atop.

When eaten as freshly as possible, it offers just the slightest hint of crispness at its edges before giving in to delicious vanilla-scented fluff. A generous handful of bold dark chocolate pieces makes each mouthful as exciting as it is comforting. Mouthfuls of pillowy cream don’t add strong flavour, but rather marry everything together and balance out the tastes and textures wonderfully.

Love a chocolate chip snack? Try out the classic Maverick Baking chocolate chip cookies here!

To make this chocolate chip cake, you won’t have to faff around with multiple tins and layers of cake. Just bung all the mixture into one tin, bake low and slow, then allow to cool. No mountain of sugar-powered buttercream to beat, fluff, and artfully arrange. A simple dose of cream and mascarpone is all you’ll need to whisk up to make this cake as much a centrepiece dessert as it is a teatime snack.

If you like a sweeter bake, feel free to add some vanilla and sugar to the cream mixture. Also, feel free to swap out these miniature dark chocolate chips for larger chips of creamy milk chocolate. You could even add some orange zest or some coffee to the cake mixture before baking for extra flavour!

However you bake and enjoy it, I hope you love it as much as we do!

Want to save this chocolate chip cake with mascarpone cream for later? You can pin the image below!

To make this chocolate chip cake with mascarpone cream, simply follow the recipe below:

BE A MAVERICK: why not brush the top of the cake with some espresso or coffee liqueur once baked to inject extra flavour?

This chocolate chip cake with mascarpone cream will keep well in the fridge (covered or in an airtight container) for 2-3 days but is best eaten fresh!