A VOLCANIC CHOCO-DISASTER

Yesterday at work, whilst complaining that we have no cake in the office (or biscuits or chocolate for that matter), I stepped up to to the proverbial tea-plate and made a quadruple chocolate loaf cake (from Nigella Lawson’s Feast). I say quadruple, however it’s more like your bog-standard double because I couldn’t be bothered to make the chocolate syrup or shave the chocolate on the top (and to be honest, I think that the shavings barely count as a fourth choco-element anyway, artistic licence I assume). The batter was incredibly easy, everything in to the KitchenAid (one of the most useful Anniversary gifts – ever!), give a good mix round then slowly pour in some boiling water, pour into loaf tin and in the oven for an hour at 180c. Incidentally, the chocolate batter was the most delicious raw cake product I have ever tasted. Sort of like the icing on a Sara Lee double chocolate gateau but without the chemicals and moussy texture. So, in the oven it went, and I pottered around finishing off the egg and bacon (and sausage and fried onion) pie that was to be our supper.
After forty minutes, temptation, as usual, got the better of me and I peeked at the cake. I was expecting to see the cake, risen but not yet completely cooked. Unfortunately, instead of the wafting aroma of chocolate, I was greeted with cocoa-scented smoke, billowing out and making my eyes water, albeit in a most pleasurable manner. Pushing the sensory overload aside, I quickly retrieved the cake from the oven, peered remorsefully at the blackened, billowy edges, and broke a charred morsel off to sample. Actually, burnt chocolate cake is not unpleasant tasting. It becomes smokily resonant; you can see where the affinity between chillis and chocolate begins.
A skewer in the cake reveals the middle to be runny, not Brownie squidgy-runny but this-cake-doesn’t-have-a-hope-in-hell-of-being-cooked runny. The crack running through the middle of the cake, described in the recipe, was present but once removed from the oven it had gone past the crack stage and into the crater stage – an oozy runny crater. So, back in the oven t’was the cake banished but covered this time with some greaseproof paper to avoid the onset of further charring. After another 15 minutes the cake seemed more cooked than previously so I took it out, speared it, and was content with it’s Brownie Squidgy-Runny Centre. Left overnight to cool, by morning it had set into a not hugely attractive looking loaf cake (the central ‘crack’ still insisted on crater-dom) but which tasted darkly, hugely rich, leaving the consumer with a caffeine kick that makes your jaw tighten and your body jitter. Perhaps if I had poured over the chocolate syrup, in accordance with the recipe, on removal from the oven, the cake would have improved in texture. Perhaps, like the old and wrinkly women who use Collagen, the chocolate syrup would have filled in the gaping crater. Perhaps it was because I used enormous whole chunks of chocolate in the mixture instead of morsels or chips. Who knows? All that matters in the end is that in the end it tasted great (just when you think that you can’t eat anything more chocolately, along comes another recipe) and let’s be honest, a loaf cake is not made for looks but for the family cake tin, for you to cut a huge, comforting chunk of and eat in front of telly. Just beware of the serious sugar comedown that follows.
The point is that mistakes happen in the kitchen. It is inevitable. Last night, both my loaf cake and my bacon and egg pie were partial disasters (the egg wasn’t cooked properly in the pie so liquid egg white oozed out when I cut it open. Not entirely conducive to piquing one’s appetite – back in the oven that went too). Some cookbooks give you cosy reassurances that your cake may stick a little, your pastry may be a little bit short but they can’t hold your hand every step of the way. Ovens vary widely (and I put the blame of last night’s mistakes wholly at the mechanical feet of mine), as do quality of ingredients and myriad of other factoring elements. As I demonstrated last night, albeit wearily, mistakes can be rectified, disasters salvaged. This is also the reason why I save my experimental recipes for my husband and work colleagues.
And as I write, my head is still spinning, woozily, from the sugar and caffeine in the chocolate cake. I think I need to lie down.

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Cupcakes and Muffins!

OK, so a first for me. I’m writing a review of the production of the various sweetmeats that I am cooking today – as I cook them! Aye caramba! I hear you all cry. Yes, it really is that exciting!
Now, onto the cooking. As you will remember from the last posting, I am baking Baklava Muffins, Carrot Cupcakes and Pistachio Macaroons. And in that order too. Easiest first. Now I have to find the walnuts for Baklava mix. Easier said than done.
Joy of joys! They are in the fourth place I look! This must be a record!! Now to chop them finely.
OK, add some melted butter, cinnamon, Demarara (the most outgoing sounding of all the sugars) Sugar, stir and stand to one side. The bowl that is, not you. This is to be our Baklava filling and topping.
Then mix up the muffin mix, which is fairly plain, buttermilk, flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda, egg, melted butter, sugar.

Suffice to say, the limitations of typing a review of a recipe whilst simultaneously cooking said recipe are great. Therefore, some four days later, I am now writing about it. Incidentally, these recipes are from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess.
The Baklava muffins emerged from the oven, the tops encrusted with the chopped walnut/brown sugar buttery mixture and smelling aromatically of Cinnamon. Whilst still hot the eight bronzed muffins were to be drizzle with 150ml honey. This seems like an awful lot and I thought to myself that they would taste even sweeter than traditional Baklava, in all its honeyed/filo glory. The muffins absorb most of the honey, leaving the nutty tops looking glossy and tempting. It is advisable to leave them for a little while or run the risk of bee-inducing honey fingers – not such a bad proposition if you’re sharing them with your husband. Unfortunately I wasn’t and I still couldn’t wait for them to cool off: they are not as tooth-achingly sweet as you might think, the plain buttermilk muffin batter and the slightly bitter crunch of the walnuts counter the sweetness perfectly. Perhaps not as enduringly desirable as true Baklava but then again, we don’t always want to consume so much sugar that we get a migraine. It dawned on me, as I looked at the cooling rack of 11 glistening cakes that perhaps making another dozen or so that day would seem a crazy bored woman’s notion: who would eat them all??
So, the next morning, alone once again, I prepared to make Carrot Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing. The Baklava muffins had been devoured by my husband, I had delivered two to my mother and another three to my grandparents. Families are always welcome recipients of cakes it would seem, Easter traditions or not.
I have always loved Carrot Cake, even in the days when it belonged, somewhat erroneously, to the realm of tie-dye kaftan wearing Vegan hippies. I even made a carrot cake for my end of year Domestic Science exam, way back in 1980something. There is a certain perfect, perverse alchemy in turning a vegetable into a cake. Kids love the idea of eating gross sounding food (and another quick dessert springs to mind: from Italy, sea salt and good quality olive oil poured over proper vanilla ice cream, very unusual, but good in the same way that French Fries dipped into Chocolate Shakes is good). And not just any old cake. I first tasted green tomato chutney turned into a gloriously sweet and moist loaf cake (more of a pudding really but they don’t have pudding as per know it in America), served with the heavenly 100% pure chemical Cool-Whip (relatively similar to Dream Topping but even lighter and less granular in texture), when my mother-in-law served it to us one Thanksgiving. It was reminiscent of an apple cake but with an ethereal taste, difficult to pinpoint – almost impossible to imagine it starting life as an unripe tomato. Courgettes are another savoury delicacy used in cakes, as are potatoes, beetroot and I can only imagine that swede and squash and parsnip might work too. Including the tomato, which is technically a fruit anyway, the reason that certain vegetables work so well is due in part to the sweetness of their flavour, their relatively high moisture/starch content and the fact that when grated, they break down, almost imperceptibly into the cake batter as it cooks. Carrot is very sweet and very juicy, hence it works so successfully.
Like fruit-cake, a vegetable cake has many variants: sultanas, walnuts, brown sugar or white, cream cheese icing or butter icing or no icing at all. It is a cake that either demands an age-old family recipe or constant tweaking, depending on how obsessive you are about baking (or carrot cake). The cupcakes are a modern-day twist on the carrot cake, utilising all the traditional elements but in a dinky size. Like most cupcakes and muffins they are also incredibly easy to prepare, no more than 30 minutes from start to finish. The only problem, as always with cupcakes, is waiting for them to cool off sufficiently to be iced and then consumed voraciously.
The flavour is delicately spiced, with a wholemeal taste (although I used plain white flour, I think you could use wholemeal flour for an extra nutty taste, but you would probably need to adjust the carrot), the crunch of the chopped walnuts and the slightly sweet, slightly sour cream cheese topping that has been balanced perfectly with a spritz of fresh lime juice. They are delicious but I have a feeling that a large carrot cake is slightly moister, more carroty, more satisfactory. But these would be perfect for a healthy kid’s lunchbox (if such a thing exists these days).
The point about making cupcakes and muffins is that they are almost foolproof. They are easy and quick. There are so many variations of muffins that you could have one for every day of the week for the next 5 years, and probably more.

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CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE

Ok, so there's no cheese in this entry (well, that's probably a matter of opinion), I'm just dropping a mention of my favourite Ween CD.

Whilst there’s not much left unsaid about chocolate, without a doubt it is not just the best friend of the Bridget Jones’ of the world. However, chocolate, if only temporarily, does makes you feel better, whatever incarnation you consume it in: hot chocolate, cookies, brownies, cake, liqueur or a kilo bar. As an example of this, whilst eating half a Snickers Bar (and, most cynical sales ploy of the week goes to Mars for producing the Duo Bar, a replacement for the banned King Size Bar), I was reading a recipe for giant chocolate chip cookies (which I plan to make tonight) and writing a shopping list down that noted, yes, chocolate. I was also thinking that tonight I might share the Aero Bar I have hidden away with my husband. Chocolate is time consuming - once you start to crave it nothing will shift it from your desire and certainly not a punnet of Blueberries - healthy though they may be. Food fascism is a real prison of the mind and, like smokers food fascists insist that there is nothing wrong or unhealthy with their lifestyle choices. This may or may not be true, but let’s face it, life is stressful enough these days and to deny yourself the pleasure of eating food is to deny yourself oxygen. Food and eating is the one thing that ties people, families, together. It is difficult to imagine any joy in sharing a Quinoa Stir-Fry or Broccoli smoothie (although my husband, the crazy American, would probably love a Broccoli smoothie!) whereas sharing a homemade chocolate cake or fresh batch of cookies is another matter altogether.

Like the capacian in chillies which lifts your emotion, chocolate contains Seratonin AND Phenylethylamine, mood enhancers that occur naturally in the human brain. In fact, the very idea of combining chilli and chocolate seems like a natural and delicious alternative to other mood enhancers, i.e. drugs, alcohol etc. and whilst the effects fade a lot quicker, it is certainly cheaper and not quite as bad for you (well, have you ever had a chocolate hangover?). Chocolate also gives you a real energy boost, the darker and more bitter the chocolate, the more caffeine it will contain too, although much less than a cup of Espresso. Ironically, a square or two of chocolate before bed helps me sleep. I say ironic, but really it’s just that the Seratonin helps you relax, one of the main factors behind a good nights sleep.

Incidentally, you can buy ‘herbal’ pills that replicate Seratonin, which you take just before bed. They are supposed to be a sleep-aid. I have tried these because I have a life-long love affair with sleep and dreams. For many years I have experimented with what you can take or eat to make your dreams more vivid. I have always considered that a bad dream is a good way to ‘restart’ the heart, an adrenalin rush akin to falling down the stairs but considering one of my hobbies is reading about true crime, it is amazing that none of decaying corpses that I read about on a regular basis come back to haunt me when I’m asleep. The Seratonin pills are really an expensive way to give yourself vivid dreams. They don’t increase your sleeping hours or help you fall asleep straight away, a nice cup of hot chocolate made with milk can though.

But to be honest, who really cares about what chocolate can do for your well-being? It tastes good and that’s what matters. Like watching a video nasty, you know that nothing good will come of it if you indulge too often really but it seems like a good idea at the time. More importantly, to a cook, it is a versatile ingredient and can be used in both savoury and sweet dishes. I use a chunk of Mexican chocolate in Chilli Con Carne. The Mexican chocolate comes in round, segmented tablets and has a grainy texture. It is flavoured with Cinnamon and tastes quite unlike regular eating chocolate. It is perfect however for making hot chocolate as it has excellent melting qualities and a unique redolent warming taste, quite unlike that of British hot chocolates. In the Chilli however, a couple of chunks thrown in at the end and these qualities add a complex back-note to the spiciness of the other ingredients, a hidden depth that rounds the dish off perfectly, in the same way that prunes add a mysterious hint to less spicy (but no less tasty!) meat dishes.

Of course, the area where chocolate really shines is baked desserts: puddings, cakes, biscuits, muffins, soufflés etc. And because it is versatile, you can combine it with fruits for summer desserts or liqueurs for dinner parties and it has a wonderful affinity with garden herbs such as Rosemary or Lavender.

One evening some organic chocolate cocoa powder saved, if not my life, then my cooking reputation. My husband had a work colleague over for supper and I, not really knowing the correct protocol for such events, hadn’t prepared a dessert although I had spent a good hour preparing a chocolate bread and butter pudding (more on that later) which needed 48 hours chilling in the fridge before baking. Later on that evening, I mentioned to our guest if he liked desserts – the question was really meant innocently enough as I was flipping through a cookbook of puddings at the time – to which he replied ‘well, if you’re offering I’m not going to say no, seeing as you’re kind enough...’ I cast my husband an aghast look and quickly scanned a Meals in Under Thirty Minutes cookbook. Only one recipe could be used in accordance with our pantry status (pretty scant at the time) and that was Self-Saucing Chocolate Puddings. Great! I gave my husband a triumphant wink and headed, cookbook in hand, towards the kitchen, wondering why on earth I hadn’t just said to our guest that ‘well, we don’t actually have any dessert, I was just making conversation...’ I guess I must enjoy a challenge. The recipe is painfully easy. Grease four ramekin dishes. In a mixing bowl combine some melted unsalted butter, good quality (I used Green and Blacks) cocoa powder, baking powder, self-raising flour, pinch of salt and a couple of eggs. Oh and some caster sugar. Divide this mixture into the ramekins. Boil a kettle at this point. Now, sprinkle a dessertspoon each of Demerara sugar and cocoa powder onto the top of each pudding, followed by a quarter of a cup of boiling water. This seems like a lot of water but melts with the sugar to make your sauce. Place ramekins (actually before you add the ‘sauce’ mixture) into a roasting tin and bake in a hot oven, about 180c for 15 minutes or so. The puddings puff up over the top of the ramekins, soufflé-like but an inserted skewer will not come out clean as the sauce that was poured on the top, will have sunk to the bottom of the pudding. Dust with some icing sugar and serve as is. The sponge has a delicate chocolate flavour, not cloying at all, which is fortunate when you consider that the sticky sauce is incredibly rich. You could easily gussy up this dessert with some fresh raspberries or other soft fruit of your choice or a ball of good vanilla ice cream. And best of all, it was, literally, thrown together in less than 10 minutes, ready to eat in less than 30. I don’t see that there would be a problem with preparing the pudding mixture in advance and then adding the ‘sauce’ mixture when you’re ready to cook them.
On the other end of the scale we have the altogether more luxurious and (initially) time consuming chocolate bread and butter pudding from Delia Smith's Winter Collection. If you use the best quality dark chocolate you can afford (I tend to use either Green and Blacks or Lindt 75%. Vahlrona Italian chocolate is the one to aspire to but to be honest, unless it’s a particularly special occasion, at £4.00 a bar, it is really, really expensive), it is the most decadent chocolate dessert you could possibly imagine, and all under the homely, unsophisticated title of bread and butter pudding.
It is simple to make but a bit fiddly. Use a loaf of good quality stale white broad, sliced thinly (1/2”), crusts removed and then cut into four triangles. Break some good quality chocolate up into pieces, put in a bain-marie (or if like me, you’re not as posh, a small mixing bowl over the top of a pan of barely simmering water), with some single cream, a tablespoon or so of rum (although I used Brandy), cinnamon, butter, caster sugar, warm slowly until the chocolate has melted into the cream. Pour chocolate mixture over some beaten eggs (basically you’re making a custard here but without the tears that come with making proper custard. A cautionary tale: I once made my own custard to serve with a homemade Jam Roly Poly, and because I’m horribly impatient, instead of slowly stirring the egg and cream mixture over an incredibly low heat, I whumped the heat up a bit (well, quite a lot) until it started to boil, the custard thickened up a treat – that is until I came to pour it over the Jam Roly Poly and the custard had split into a sort of watery scrambled egg mess – let that be a lesson to us all), stir until combined. Pour some of the custard into the buttered baking dish so it coats the bottom quite thickly, then add a layer of the bread, then cover the layer thickly with the custard, then another layer, then finish up the custard. Cling film, leave to cool then retire pudding to the fridge for at least the next 24 hours. When you are ready to cook said dish, heat oven to 180c, remove cling-film, bung it in the oven for maybe 30 minutes, or until the top is deliciously crisp and you can feel the tremor of bubbling custard beneath that top layer. Serve with some single cream. My granddad said this was the best chocolate dessert he ever tasted and believe me when I say that he is my most fervent critic. He relishes in critiquing my food. For example, I once prepared an old fashioned Scottish dessert, the name of which escapes me, but it involves soaking oatmeal in cream and whiskey and sugar then serving with some raspberries. It’s extremely yummy I think but his words to me, as he churned the oatmeal mix over in his mouth with all the enthusiasm of a cow chewing the same old cud: “well Miss P, I don’t think much to this!” and then proceeded to finish the dessert off! Furthermore, we have the time when I made the aforementioned sausage and lentil dish, made extra especially for my grandparents, grandly displayed to my grandmother who will try anything once, left them to it, and half an hour later got a phone call from my grandmother telling me that my granddad has said “I came racing down from my bath, thinking I had something nice for my tea and I get this....this muck!” referring to the ‘hippy’ lentils. Ah well. He said the bread and butter pud tasted like Death by Chocolate. This may be the case if I should be on the receiving end of anymore non-constructive criticisms!
Anyway, one is growing weary of all this chocolate speak. I shall post this today with the promise that with the four day Easter weekend ahead, I have a cooking marathon ahead of me: Chick Pie Filo Pie, Baklava Muffins, Pistachio Macaroons, Carrot Cupcakes and Easy Almond Cake. Yes, I’m turning the whole family diabetic!

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A New Addition

Spring is supposedly in the air and now seemed a good time to add a new addition of the four-legged kind to the household. Since our much-missed Jack Russell, Benji, passed away in December, we have felt that our new home was lacking something. We had always planned on homing a retired Greyhound, particularly since we visited a Greyhound ‘museum’ in Kansas a couple of years ago. Greyhounds are one of the most regal breeds, and rightly so, given their ancient heritage, however our adopted dog, Coney doesn’t seem to realise this.
When we visited our local Greyhound Rescue Centre, Clarks Farm (http://www.clarksfarmgreyhounds.org.uk/), we were extremely impressed with the professionalism and devotion of the staff, the kennels are amazingly clean and, most importantly of all, the dogs are happy. We walked several Greyhounds but found an affinity with one beautiful girl called Magic. We passed our home visit (I would like to say with flying colours AND I held back on the homemade chocolate chip cookies until after we had been told we were successful!) and collected her the following afternoon. She seemed happy but confused to be leaving her home of the last three months and laid on the back seat of our car with nary a whimper or a whine.
We had decided to rename her Coney as a tribute to my husband’s brother who passed away in February. One of his favourite places to eat was a fast food restaurant called Coney Island Hot Dogs. Not my own personal choice of fast foods, but I have observed my husband and his brother consume four or five of these scrawny, chilli-gunge covered dogs in one sitting – each! As we wanted Magic’s name to be special, my husband thought Coney had all the right connotations, he remembered many fun times eating Coney Island Dogs with his brother.
Of course, she is exactly as we expected and much more besides. She has many human traits and without wanting to anthropomorphise her too much, she is in many ways like her mistress: she growls when she gets woken up in the middle of the night, she comfort eats and she likes to preserve her energy as much as possible. She is a very picky eater though and has unusual tastes. Of course, being a Greyhound, one has to watch one’s figure but it is so hard to say no to custard creams or a decaying mouse down the lane. She is a dog though and dogs will eat when they get hungry so after a couple of days of being fed scraps of chicken and ham and turning her regal ant-eater’s nose up at her ‘delicious’ maintenance mix, she eventually relented and, when our backs were turned (for a lady doesn’t like to be seen scoffing in public), she daintily picked at her bowl.
Unfortunately, the food that is produced for dogs doesn’t seem to be as appetising as a Bean Burrito. Perhaps someone should design a range of dog food that has all sorts of gee-whizz flavours, Crème Brule, Taco Soup, Carrot Cake, Barbeque Beef Crisps...
Anyway, my preoccupation with Coney is the reason for my tardiness with posting over the last week or so, but I am currently writing an article about chocolate desserts and I have lots of new supper dishes to add, including a cornmeal, mushroom and Chorizo bake.

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