Chelsea Winter gave us the 'lockdown loaf', now she shares her easy chocolate cake recipe

First, she brought us the "lockdown loaf", now Kiwi chef Chelsea Winter has shared another simple recipe for Kiwis unable to rush to the supermarket.

With yeast disappearing off shelves up and down the country as people stocked up for the coronavirus lockdown, many are turning to alternative baking recipes that don't require that precious ingredient.

One recipe, in particular, got a lot of shares on social media - Winter's beer bread, which she renamed "lockdown loaf".

• READ MORE: Kiwi celeb chef Chelsea Winter's delicious 'Lockdown Loaf' has gone viral and it's super easy to make 

She had another recipe up her sleeve.

Her chocolate cake recipe requires no eggs or milk.

Bakers need just flour, cocoa, sugar, salt, water and oil.

"It defies belief how that is possible," she said.

"You stir it up, put it in a tin. It comes out fudgy and really dark and it's so, so delicious. I've literally been making it every two or three days at the moment."

She encouraged Kiwis with more time on their hands to go online and try something they haven't cooked before, especially if they were getting bored of their own cooking and the fact Kiwis couldn't order takeaways.

Curries were easy as people generally already had everything in the pantry like coconut cream, garlic, oinion and spices.

"Just have fun, you've got all this time. You might as just be cooking and experimenting, and trying delicious new things."

The cookbook author told the Herald yesterday that hundreds of thousands of people visited the lockdown loaf recipe on her website over the last few days, "from all over the world, not just New Zealand".

Click here to view Chelsea Winter's lockdown chocolate cake recipe

"I'm just so stoked because I've always been about empowering people in the kitchen - that's why I write recipes in the first place and why people enjoy cooking them. And it just feels like there's never been as much need for that as right now, in a general sense it's a time where most people are feeling so completely disempowered.

"The fact that suddenly they can suddenly make their own bloody good bread using just a few ingredients, it's like 'hey, stick that in your pipe and smoke it, virus. We're okay, and you can't take our fresh bread away from us'.

"I have received so many hundreds of photos of people's bread I haven't a hope of replying to them all, and usually I try to! But I absolutely love seeing them all.

"It's a very simple thing and you know, bread is the cornerstone of our diets - it's a feeling of comfort and home."

In an ironic twist, there is one particular beer that doesn't seem to work for the recipe - Corona beer.

"For a reason, I cannot understand, some people using Corona beer have produced a doughy, undercooked loaf. Go figure? In any case, don't get too fancy here," Winter wrote on her website.

Click here to view Chelsea Winter's 'Lockdown Loaf' recipe

"Use the crappiest beer you have on hand – that awkward, long-forgotten bottle lurking forlornly the back of the fridge, probably left over from some BYO you had 18 months ago, the one that could be expired and certainly no one will touch, not even your teenage son's half-cut mates. That's the beer you want."

Winter says she will share "quite a few more recipes" over the lockdown period to ensure people can continue to create comfort food with what they have in the pantry.

These were recipes that were going to wait until the release of her new book next year but she feels the time is right to release them now.

"I know people need them now, so I won't make them wait. I'm so excited about it! The next one is going to be a doozy, keep an eye on Facebook and Insta for it."

This article was first published on the NZ Herald and is republished here with permission.