Trying to bake a chocolate cake

As I have said before, I am not a baker. But with two guests who love chocolate cake, when I found what looked like a me-proof recipe, I thought I'd have a go.
       The recipe came via a friend's food blog, Capital Living, and she got it via Annabelle White, who calls it "Lady Glenorchy's Super Simple Chocolate Cake". It really did look easy. You just put all the ingredients into the food processor in the order given, whizz for one minute, then pour into the prepared tin and bake.
        Now that's my kind of cake recipe. But I should have paid attention to the "Cook's Tip" at the bottom:
"Slice this un-iced cake in half and freeze one part and keep the other for immediate use." Because (as I should have known from the list of ingredients) this makes a pretty big cake. So big, in fact, that it only just fitted into my reasonably large processor. And when I poured it into my carefully prepared tin, it came almost up to the top. Oh dear, I thought. Not good.

By then it was too late to do anything but bake it. I knew the oven would work best for a big cake like this on "bake", no fan, but I think I should have also set the temperature slightly lower - I'm pretty sure this oven tends to be a little hotter than the dial says. When I checked, the cake was looming up alarmingly in the tin and starting to plop gently over the edge on one side and down onto the bottom of the oven. Not a pretty sight. 
          I turned the temperature down 5 degrees and left it in until it was cooked through. Once it was cool, I eased it gently out of the tin. It looked rather splendid, a great high domed creation,  a bit of a crest on top but beautifully smooth all round - except for the crumbly bit where it had plopped over and hadn't come out quite cleanly.
          Icing covers a multitude of baking sins. I was determined to do this properly, so I found a good ganache recipe I'd cut out of the paper years ago, from Clark's Cafe in Wellington's wonderful central library. I'd never actually made it before, but it looked very simple too. The recipe says "chocolate buttons", but I used Whittaker's Dark Ghana 72%, so I microwaved it first to make up for it melting less easily than the buttons would.          

          It was the best chocolate icing I've ever made. There was just one problem: after I'd covered my very tall cake thickly in a casual rustic way, filling in the little crater on one side, I had quite a bit left over. Whipping it with extra cream produced a very nice filling. I needed this, given the impressive height of the cake. It was just a pity I hadn't thought to cut the cake in half through the middle and fill it before I iced it...Still, serving the filling alongside the slice meant you got more. My guests didn't complain. 

          While the cake was good, it seemed to settle and taste even better next day. Next time, I'll get it right. I reckon that for most purposes the recipe would be better halved, and the icing would work neatly with 250ml cream (from a 300ml bottle) and 250g chocolate (the weight of one large Whittaker's block). You might still have some left over, but I'm sure you could cope creatively with that.

Lady Glenorchy's Super Simple Smaller Chocolate Cake
1 cup white sugar

1 egg

1/2 cup plain yoghurt

1/4 cup cocoa and 1/8 cup cocoa (halving 3/4 is a bit tricky, but this will work)

100g melted butter

1 tsp baking soda

just under 1 tsp vanilla (well, 3/4 tsp, but I don't think the tiny bit more would matter)

1/8 tsp salt

1 and 1/2 cups self-raising flour

1/2 cup boiling strong coffee

Set oven to 160C.

Grease sides of a 23cm round loose-bottomed cake tin and line base with baking paper [Capital Living's useful instruction]. 

Place all the ingredients, in the order given, into food processor bowl.  Process for 1 minute.

Bake at 160C for approximately 45 minutes (it might take a little longer, depending on your oven). 

Cake is cooked when a skewer in the middle comes out clean.

Cool in tin before removing and ice with your favourite chocolate icing.

Clark's Even Better Chocolate Ganache
250 ml cream
250 ml Whittaker's Dark Ghana 72% chocolate

Break chocolate into pieces, put in large glass jug, and microwave on low until just starting to soften. 
In a small saucepan, bring the cream just to the point of boiling.
Pour it over the chocolate and stir until smooth. 
[You need to keep stirring for quite a while - at first the mixture looks pale and unappetising, but the longer you stir, the more it darkens.] 

The advice that came with this recipe was excellent. Of course if I'd read it earlier, I would have made the icing before I made the cake.
"If you serve this while it is warm, it is the best chocolate sauce. If you leave it for a few hours [2 hours seemed to be enough], it becomes spreadable and this is when you ice the cake.  When it is at the spreadable stage, if you whisk it, it becomes an airy chocolate filling. If you leave it overnight it will become hard. To soften it again, chop into pieces, slightly warm and stir to combine." 

Back to the beginning

I've been busy lately writing up recipes to go in the back of my e-book food memoir (cover and title coming very soon). One of the first recipes I put in dates back to when I first started learning to cook - I was about to get married, so I had to learn fast. Luckily I was able to turn to my married friend Frances for help (her mother had been a home science teacher). Here's a tiny advance taste of that chapter:

I had been married barely a month when I asked my favourite English professor, Tom Crawford, to dinner. It all seemed simple enough. The meat would be seventeenth-century pork chops (a recipe from Frances), spread well ahead of time with a mixture of parsley, chopped onion, oil, salt and lemon juice, and then grilled. With them we would have rice (because potatoes were boring and bourgeois and I often got them wrong) and green beans (frozen, so no problems there).

... The chops weren’t raw but they were rock hard. The rice was gluggy and the beans were grey. Tom bravely chewed his way through it all, keeping up a flow of urbane literary chat.

I did get it right eventually - the secret is to bake the chops instead of grilling them. The other night I made this for my neighbour, who is also called Frances. Here's the recipe.

Seventeenth century pork chops

1 small onion

2 Tbsp parsley

2 tsp lemon juice

3 Tbsp olive oil

salt and ground black pepper

2 large pork chops

- Peel onion and grate it into a small bowl. Finely chop parsley and add it to onion. Add lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and mix well
- At least 1 hour and up to 10 hours before cooking, brush one side of chops with the remaining 1 Tbsp olive oil and place them in a shallow ceramic baking dish, oiled side down. (You can also use a metal dish – this speeds up cooking, but it can also dry the chops out, so keep an eye on them.) Spread onion mixture over their upper sides. Leave in refrigerator until 30 minutes before cooking.

- Preheat oven to 180°C. Place baking dish on rack in middle of oven. Bake chops for approximately 1 hour, until topping is browned a little and a thin knife slides easily into the meat. Lift out and rest on kitchen paper for 10 minutes before serving.

Baked Agria potatoes are good with this. I had two large oval ones, so I scrubbed them well and halved them horizontally, brushed them with oil, sprinkled them with salt, then put them into the oven at the same time as the pork chops, to bake on a lower shelf.

     We had a rare treat with our chops: beautiful fresh runner beans from Ali's garden (I haven't got room to  grow them here). I have a neat little bean slicer that works perfectly for them, peeling away the stringy sides. Harvey preferred his beans cut into traditional angled chunks, but I love the thin green ribbons my slicer produces, with slivers of pink dotted along them. A brief steaming is all they need.

150 posts!

I've just realised: that last post was my 150th since I started this blog in March 2010. Not bad, eh! To celebrate, here's a photo of the very first cape gooseberries I picked from the plant Ali gave me.

Hot cross buns: the recipe!

Here's Ali's recipe for those gorgeous hot cross buns. One secret, she says, is baking them in roasting tins or cake tins. It keeps them close together and means they rise beautifully. I'll post a reminder ahead of Easter next year.

Hot cross buns

(makes 20-24 buns)

 This is based on Alison Holst's recipe in Recipes to Remember (1990). Since then Alison has published several other versions, using slightly different proportions and spice mixes.

1 cup milk
½ cup hot water
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp active dried yeast (or 2 Tbsp Surebake yeast)
2 cups high grade flour
100g soft butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla essence

1 ½ Tbsp mixed spice
1 tsp grated nutmeg
1 cup mixed dried fruit
2-3 cups high grade flour
Glaze:

2 Tbsp golden syrup

1 Tbsp water

• Place the milk and water in a large bowl – the resulting liquid should be lukewarm. Add the sugar and yeast, and whisk to combine. Whisk in the first two cups of flour, cover the bowl, and leave in a warm place to rise. 
• Meanwhile, in a separate bowl or a food processor, cream the butter and sugar, then mix in the egg, salt, vanilla and spices.
• When the yeast mixture has doubled in volume, stir in the butter/sugar/egg mixture, the dried fruit, and the second two cups of flour. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough forms a satiny, springy ball, adding more flour as necessary. (I use my old Kenwood food mixer with the dough hook.)
• Divide the dough into 20-24 pieces, and form each into a ball. Place the balls in a buttered roasting dish and/or buttered cake tins, flattening them slightly and leaving 1 cm spaces between them. (I use a standard roasting dish, which holds 12 buns, and a 22 cm square cake tin, which holds 9 buns).
• Place in a warm place to rise. (I use the oven, turned to ‘low’ for a few minutes till just warm, then turned off before the tins go in. If the oven’s too hot at this stage the yeast will die and the buns won’t rise.) The rising could take anything from 15 to 45 minutes, depending on the freshness of the yeast.
• While the buns are rising, make the pastry for the crosses: Rub 30 g butter into ½ cup of flour, and add enough water to form a stiff dough. Roll out thinly and cut into strips about 4-5 mm wide.
• When the buns are well risen (they should have at least doubled in height, and be touching each other), remove the tins from the oven. Turn the oven up to 200°C using fan-bake (or 225°C without the fan).
• Brush the pastry strips with beaten egg to make them stick, and lay them cross-wise, very gently, on top of the buns.
• Bake the buns for 10-12 minutes, until evenly browned.
• Meanwhile, prepare the glaze: Warm 2 Tbsp golden syrup with 1 Tbsp water, and stir to combine. (You can use soft brown sugar instead, dissolved in the water.)
• Brush the buns with glaze as soon as they come out of the oven. After 3-5 minutes, gently remove the buns from the tins and place on a wire rack. Serve warm with butter. 

High on hot cross buns

Ali has promised to give me the recipe for her superb hot cross buns, the best I've ever had. This morning I arrived just in time to see all 21 of them come out of the oven, ready for glazing.

The Easter Collection

I love good hot cross buns, but I don't make my own - I did try once, and it was a total disaster. This year I've struck it lucky. First my neighbour came over with a sample of the ones she'd just made with her grand-daughter. Then Ali phoned to invite me round tomorrow morning to try hers - I'll post photos later.
         Like most non-religious people, I'm a stickler for tradition, and Good Friday is the only proper day to eat hot cross buns. But Easter traditions are a complex mix of Christian and pagan, male and female.
         The word Easter comes from Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. "Bun" comes from "boun", meaning the sacred ox sacrificed to mark the spring equinox. The little cakes eaten for this festival were stamped with the sign of ox horns. The hot cross bun is linked both with those cakes and with moon goddess worship - a round bun with the four quarters of the moon marked on it. The early Christian church built on these customs, keeping the bun and turning the symbol into a cross.

And of course there has to be chocolate. Easter eggs are another pagan symbol of rebirth cleverly adapted by Christians, but the chocolate kind were invented by smart nineteenth century French and German entrepreneurs, using a new blend of chocolate that could be shaped.
       This photo comes courtesy of Makana Chocolates in Blenheim. I was down there this week to give my first talk about my food memoir, hosted by the Friends of the Library for New Zealand Book Month. Next morning I had an hour to spare before my flight, and the library's lovely Glenn Webster took me to a couple of vineyards and also to Makana. We watched them making macadamia butter toffee crunch, and got free samples.

But I was after the Real Thing, which to me means either plain dark chocolate or chocolate truffles. For Easter I thought I should "buy local". So with great restraint, I bought two boxes, one for my sister and one for me (and a lucky friend or two who happen to be around before I've eaten them all), of their Marlborough pinot noir truffles, not to be opened until Sunday.
           I won't be leaving it all up to the professionals. On Monday I'll be experimenting with the classic Kiwi chocolate fudge cake, trying to produce something that looks and tastes exactly like the one my two mothers used to make, so that I can include the recipe in the collection appearing at the end of my forthcoming food memoir. More next week.

Orange and almond dessert cake

I didn't want to think up a clever title for this post - this cake can speak for itself. I've written about it in my forthcoming food memoir. It's now steadily progressing through the publishing process at Awa Press -
I'll be talking about it in Blenheim on 26 March, for New Zealand Book Month.
      I made this last weekend for a special visitor and as always, it turned out perfectly, a rare record in my erratic baking career. I split the mixture into two so I could take a small one to a pot-luck lunch later, so the main cake was only about 2 cm high. But that worked out very well, giving lovely slices of exactly the right size for our dessert.
       It comes from my beloved Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Food. It's a Sephardic cake, a traditional recipe from the Jewish communities in Spain and Portugal. They had lived there for a thousand years, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Spanish Inquisition drove them to flee to the Middle East. In fact it's a Passover cake, using ground almonds instead of flour (of course you wouldn't use flour for the tin if you were making it for that purpose). There;s no extra fat in it - the almonds provide enough oil. It's extremely easy to make, and Roden says it never fails. In my experience, she's right - but it's so moist that if you want to keep it for more than a day or two, it needs to go in the fridge.

Orange and almond cake
(Adapted from A Book of Middle Eastern Food, by Claudia Roden)

2 large oranges
6 eggs
250g ground almonds
250g white sugar
1 tsp baking powder
butter and flour for tin

Wash the oranges and boil them gently in a little water in a lidded saucepan for nearly 2 hours, until they are soft. Check them every so often to see if they need a little more water.
[You need to remember that this long lead time is required - but you can do it the day or the morning before you make the cake.]
Let them cool, then cut them open and remove the pips. [I forgot to do this, but no one noticed!]
Turn them into a pulp, either by rubbing them through a sieve or putting them in an electric blender or food processor.
Butter and flour a loose-bottomed cake tin. Heat oven to 190C. [Don't use fan bake, just bake.]
Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Add all the other ingredients in the order given, and mix thoroughly.
[I pour the beaten eggs into the orange pulp in the food processor bowl and add the other ingredients one at a time, whizzing enough to mix well after each one and scraping down the bowl carefully between each addition. The baking powder should be added last, using a small sieve, to make sure it's evenly distributed.]
Pour carefully into the cake tin and bake for about an hour. If it is still very wet, leave in the oven for a little longer. [I cooked one shallow cake and one smaller one side by side - because they were both so shallow, they took only about 40 minutes to cook through.] A thin skewer poked into the middle should come out almost clean when the cake is done.

This is absolutely heavenly. If you like, you can put a little orange liqueur or orange blossom water into the accompanying cream when you whip it. But creamy Greek-style plain yoghurt is very good with it too. Or nothing at all, just the cake...