Chocolate raspberry trifle – and a dessert wardrobe
January 5th, 2012 § 2 Comments
Sometimes a dessert comes together that you know is a keeper. If you’re lucky, you know it will be good beforehand, and get all the benefit of the anticipation as well. And sometimes, just the name is enough.
I needed a dessert for lunch on New Year’s Day. It had to suit both adults and kids, and be prepared ahead, to make it easy on the day. Browsing through Nigella for ideas, I hit on trifle. Trifle is a very Christmassy dish – all that custard and cream fits with the excesses of late December. And because it’s best served in a single bowl, it really needs a decent sized group before it’s worth making. It is indeed something to feast upon.
The original plan was to make Nigella’s Chocolate cherry trifle, but this version really started with the arrival of a bottle of Chambord (black raspberry liqueur) as a Christmas present. I had never tasted it before (and, like all fruit liqueurs, it does have a hint of Benilyn cough syrup about it), but it sparked the idea of a chocolate raspberry trifle, instead of a chocolate cherry one. And I love the combination of chocolate and raspberries – the sharpness of the raspberries is a great match for chocolate.
I had frozen raspberries, and also some shreds of flourless chocolate cake bagged up in the freezer. It did not carry good karma with it – it crumbled as I tried to unroll it as a roulade on one of those days when a bad work day, and a dropped carton of double cream make that the final straw. But I knew it tasted good.
All that was needed to make was the chocolate custard. Although Nigella suggested you make sandwiches of chocolate cake and jam, that wasn’t going to be an option with the delicate flourless cake I had (not least because it was in so many fragments). So instead I thinned the jam with a splash of water into a syrup that could be used to douse the cake.
This was an example of the ’capsule wardrobe’ approach to dessert making: if you have great components, then you can assemble them in many combinations, and be confident about the result. This is the exception to the rule that you shouldn’t make something for the first time for guests. If you’ve made all the component recipes before, then you can be much more confident that the final result will work.
I’ve stolen this idea from Alice Medrich, who has a section in her book ‘Bittersweet‘ called ‘Basic Wardrobe for Designing Desserts’. This includes recipes for basic cake layers, mouses, fillings, frostings, glazes and decorations that can be put together in different combinations.
In making this trifle, I did what I so seldom do, and tasted everything, every component. When I am following someone else’s recipe, I sometimes assume that if I follow everything to the letter, I don’t need to taste as I go. And if it doesn’t work out, I can just shrug and blame the recipe writer. But recipes don’t work like that, and we can’t help ourselves get it right unless we taste things.
Some of this dish’s success was serendipity, but there was also a set of learned and ingrained thoughts at work. I knew that the flourless cake was light and moussy, so would match the density of the custard and whipped cream well. Having tasted the custard and syrup, they were both sweet, so I knew I needed the raspberries to be quite densely packed to provide contrast.
I’m really pleased with the result, and I’ll even go to the trouble of crumbling that cake deliberately now I know how good it can be in a new incarnation.
Recipe: Chocolate raspberry trifle
Serves 6-8
For the cake (this is Smitten Kitchen’s Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll):
- 170g dark chocolate, chopped
- 3 tablespoons strong coffee
- 6 large eggs, at room temperature
- 150g caster sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons cocoa
For the chocolate custard (adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Cherry Trifle recipe in ‘Feast‘):
- 50g dark chocolate (64% Chocolate by Trish buttons)
- 175ml semi-skimmed milk
- 175ml double cream
- 4 egg yolks
- 65g caster sugar
- 20g cocoa
- 300 ml double cream
- 350g frozen or fresh raspberries
- approximately 100g seedless raspberry jam
- 3 tablespoons Chambord raspberry liqueur (optional)
- Silver balls, stars, chocolate curls or other decorations
Make the Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll as directed on Smitten Kitchen. You can use another sort of chocolate cake, although this one proved perfect for trifle – partly because I was unable to make it roll up (I left it to cool for too long), and so it crumbled to shreds and ended up in the freezer. But the soft, light texture made a good base for the trifle, without being heavy.
For the custard:
Melt the chocolate gently over a pan of hot water or in the microwave. Set aside. Whisk the yolks, sugar and cocoa together in a large bowl with a pinch of salt.
Heat the milk and cream together until little bubbles appear at the edge of the saucepan. Pour the hot milk and cream over the egg yolk mixture while whisking. Once everything is mixed together, scrape it all back into the saucepan. Heat gently to thicken the custard, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom with a wooden spoon. You need to take it until a thick, shiny layer appears on the back of the spoon. Once it has thickened, scrape into a bowl, cover with clingfilm in touch with the surface and chill for several hours.
Make the syrup: Warm the raspberry jam with a splash of water and about 8 frozen raspberries until the jam melts and the raspberries collapse. Remove from the heat and stir in about 3 tablespoons of Chambord (black raspberry liqueur).
Finally, assemble the trifle:
Line a dish with the chocolate roll cake, pushing the pieces together to make a single layer. Soak with the raspberry syrup. Cover the surface with the remaining raspberries, partially pressing them into the cake. Cover with the chilled chocolate custard and smooth into a single layer. Cover with clingfilm and chill for several hours or overnight.
An hour or two before serving, whip the rest of the double cream (about 300ml) to very soft peaks, and spread over the custard (whipped cream thickens more and more every time you spread it, so whip it very softly, and spread it out with as few movements as possible). Decorate with silver balls, gold stars or chocolate shavings. I used edible gold stars from here.
We Should Cocoa: Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf
February 25th, 2011 § 6 Comments
As a fan of Katie’s chocolates at Matcha Chocolat, and especially her masala chai caramels, I knew I should enter this month’s We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate challenge co-ordinated by Choclette. This month’s challenge was tea with chocolate, a great combination. Unfortunately, I was on holiday for most of this month (I was in Mexico – so not *that* unfortunate), so I needed something I could do at short notice to get in before the deadline.
I would have loved to spend some time on different tea infusions for this, but with limited time, and the need to do this after work, I needed something more straightforward. This tea loaf is a recipe I had bookmarked some time back when going through Paul A Young’s stunning book ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘. It sounded like a potentially overwhelming set of flavours, but also one that really appealed. The recipe calls for a huge amount of crystallised ginger, no fat and lots of ground cardamom. The tea is there to moisten the loaf, and also provide a malted, caramel background to these other flavours.
[Update: Choclette also made this recipe as part of the challenge - read about hers here.]
The recipe is unusual for a cake, as it includes just the tea-soaked fruit, sugar, eggs and flour – no butter or oil is used. However, this is the traditional tea loaf recipe. Tea loaves are an old traditional recipe, and can be called Tea Brack in Ireland, and similar to the Welsh Bara Brith. Irish Tea Brack recipes date from the 1800s, and would seem to be somewhat similar to soda bread, with the leavening from baking powder.
I made very few changes to the original recipe, even though the amount of ginger – 250g – seemed potentially overwhelming. Given the strong flavours, I wanted to try the recipe on its own terms before making changes. I baked this in two small loaf tins rather than one large one, so I could freeze one. I also swapped wholemeal self-raising for white self-raising, as that’s what I had in the cupboard, and I thought it would fit well with the rustic idea of a tea loaf. As this calls for Assam tea, which is a major component of English Breakfast blends, you could probably substitute with your everyday teabag. I used loose leaf Assam to make sure I got the strong and malted flavours Paul described.
I used two different brands of crystallised ginger, because I already had a packet open, and needed to get more to make up the large amount. Both come in large chunks, and I decided to slice the chunks into fairly thin pieces, so that the final cake wouldn’t be overwhelming with chewy lumps of ginger. The softer of the two was Humdinger Traditional Stem Ginger, that came with large sugar crystals on. The Waitrose Cooks Ingredients ginger comes in a cute plastic jar, and is firmer and drier, and cut into more even cubes. That made it easier to slice into pieces, so might be worth bearing in mind if you need to chop ginger finely for another recipe.
The smell of the ginger and raisins soaking was incredibly aromatic, with both the orange and cardamom coming through clearly. Even when baking, you could smell this amazing perfume, along with the chocolate. I was right about the flavours – it’s a really intensely flavoured cake, which sets your mouth buzzing with the ginger. Having said that, I think it works really well – the chocolate comes through, the orange holds its own with the ginger, and the cardamom is just about there in the background. My teaspoons of cardamom were a bit scant, so I probably could have used the full measure. It reminds me a lot of Divine’s orange and ginger dark chocolate – that also has quite a bit of crystallised ginger embedded in the chocolate. So I’d definitely recommend making this, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!
Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf
barely adapted from Paul A Young’s ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘.
- 250g crystallised stem ginger
- 100g raisins
- 75g light brown muscovado sugar
- 2 tsp ground cardamom (about 1 tbsp green cardamom pods)
- zest of 1 orange
- 200ml strong assam tea
- 1 large egg
- 200ml wholemeal self-raising flour
- 100g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Divine 70%)
Slice the ginger chunks into slices, and combine with the raisins and sugar in a heatproof bowl.
Warm the cardamom pods until fragrant in a dry pan, then cool. Pop the black and brown seeds out of the shells and grind into a powder in a pestle and mortar. (This step is optional – you can buy ready-ground cardamom, or grind the pods without toasting them, but this method will get you the most aromatic powder).
Brew 200ml strong assam tea (1tbsp of loose tea leaves, 200ml boiling water) for 4-5 minutes, and strain over the raisins and ginger. Cover and leave overnight or for about 8 hours. (I prepared the ingredients one evening, poured the tea over the following morning, then made the cake the second evening).
After soaking, the tea should almost all be absorbed, with some syrup where the sugar has dissolved. Don’t remove any liquid, but add 1 beaten egg directly to the fruit and mix in. Mix in the flour, then fold in the chocolate to combine. The texture is very similar to a traditional fruit cake at this stage, fairly stiff but still moist.
Put the mixture into two lined 1lb loaf tins (or one large loaf tin).
Bake for an hour at 160C. Check with a skewer that it is cooked through. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then remove and cool completely. Wrap in fresh paper and store in a tin for a day before cutting and eating, on its own or buttered slices.
Raspberry Truffles
January 17th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Every year I make elaborate plans for all the biscuits, cakes and other food presents I will make for friends and family at Christmas. And every year, my ambition exceeds the time available, after I’ve accounted for time to buy presents, go to parties and travel to see family. I usually end up with some sort of cooking marathon or a couple of evenings where I’m in the kitchen until midnight, wrapping caramels or dipping orangettes or whatever I decided was a good idea this year.
For 2010, I made brownies (obviously), chocolate balsamic vinegar (which not everyone was wild about, but was worth it just for me), mini chocolate walnut cookies and … homemade chocolates. I made raspberry truffles, described below, but I also made Azelia’s caramel truffles, which were amazing and easier to work with (I increased the proportion of chocolate to make the centres a little easier to dip). I definitely recommend trying that recipe, and as a great side effect, you get to make Dulce de Leche.
As I noted in my 2010 review, this was something of a year of chocolate. I went to demos, tried tempering again, and generally immersed myself in the world of UK fine chocolate.
Probably the most surprising chocolate recipe I came across was the raspberry ganache recipe I made at Divertimenti with William Curley. It is made only of raspberry puree and melted chocolate, but tastes creamy, and yet with such pure fruit flavour. It’s also so easy and impressive to make for other people.
About ganache
Ganache is usually described as an emulsion of chocolate and cream. This is used to make chocolate truffles, but also often used as a simple, sophisticated chocolate icing for cakes, a filling for a chocolate tart or a starting point for chocolate caramels.
However, a ganache can also be made with water or something water-based like a fruit puree (after all, cream is mostly water, even if the rest is fat).
Truffles
The simplest way to make a truffle that I know is to heat cream, pour it over finely chopped chocolate, stir until you get a smooth ganache, and then pour into a foil-lined square tin. Leave until set, preferably overnight, refrigerate (or freeze if it’s a very soft mixture) and then cut into 1 inch squares.
I saw this simple method demonstrated by Alice Medrich, and it was a revelation. She made mint chocolates, by infusing the cold cream overnight in the fridge with a bunch of chopped fresh mint, straining it out, then heating the cream. It avoids the need to scoop or roll little balls, and if you’re eating them fairly quickly, you can just set out the squares on a plate and hand them around.
I made some of the raspberry ganache this way in the summer, and just coated the squares lightly in cocoa, and then kept them in an airtight container in the fridge.
But for sending gifts, I needed something more robust and more long lasting – and that means a chocolate coating for the truffles.
Tempering
Tempering chocolate is a tricky enterprise and always, always ends up with you, the kitchen, and a range of utensils coated in a layer of chocolate. But it is what gives you that lovely shiny, snap on chocolate, that crisp crack as you bite into it.
Chocolate is a really complicated material. It consists of cocoa butter, cocoa solids (the cocoa powder) and sugar (or at least the good stuff does). But cocoa butter is a very complicated fat, having seven different types of crystals it can form. I’m not going to go into huge detail about the mechanism for tempering here, as Katie has done a much better job over on her blog, so go look there. She also has a great primer on truffles. And you can buy her lovely tea-flavoured chocolates here.
The short version of tempering is to heat the chocolate to melt all the fat crystals thoroughly, melting it quite hot, then cool it in a controlled way to the temperature where the ‘good’ fat crystals form, which is below body temperature, and when the chocolate is quite thick. FInally you heat it very slightly again, so it’s thin enough to work with, but not so hot that the crystals all melt out again.
Recipe: Raspberry truffles
- 320g raspberry puree
- 320g chocolate
- 50g softened butter
- 1 tbsp vodka
This makes a huge amount, enough to pour into an 8 inch square pan or even larger. You can certainly make half this quantity or even less. And this also gives you less work to do when dipping them.
I made the raspberry puree at the end of the summer, with fresh raspberries that were on special offer at the supermarket, close to their expiration date. It doesn’t matter if they are a bit soft and bruised, but they shouldn’t be mouldy. I heaped them in a pan with a tablespoon or two of water, and heated it with a lid on to break down the berries and release the juice a little bit, but didn’t bring it quite to the boil. I then pureed with a hand blender and passed it through a fine sieve to remove the seeds. I then froze the puree until Christmas.
To make the ganache, heat the raspberry puree until warm but not boiling. Taste it, and if it is very acidic, sweeten it a little with some icing sugar. You want the bright, fresh fruit flavour, but too much acid combined with the bitter of the chocolate may be too astringent. It’s up to you how much you sweeten it.
Melt the chocolate in the microwave, in short bursts, until it’s barely melted. Stir to melt the remaining pieces until it’s just smooth. Add the raspberry puree and stir until it is completely smooth.
Stir in the softened butter, and the vodka if using, until completely combined. The vodka is optional, but helps to preserve the ganache a little longer.
Pour and scrape the ganache into a 7 inch or so square tin, lined with foil or baking parchment. Tap on the kitchen counter quite firmly to make sure that any air bubbles are expelled. Leave at room temperature to set, then put into the freezer. This is a very soft ganache, so you will need to freeze it in order to cut it easily. Alternatively, you can add more chocolate to the recipe to make it firmer and easier to handle.
Once you have cut the ganache into one inch squares, it is a good idea to leave them to cure for a while in the fridge. This seems to set the outside of the truffles, making them firmer and easier to dip.
You then need to take them one by one, dip them quickly in the tempered chocolate, and then tap to remove excess chocolate before putting onto parchment. As this is a very soft ganache, you need to do this fast, so that the ganache doesn’t start to melt into the chocolate or stick to your fingers too much.
Once the truffles are set, you should store them in a cool place in a sealed container. Storing them in the fridge will make them last longer, but you need to make sure they don’t get wet from the condensation, and allow them to come to room temperature before eating them. You can also wrap them in individual squares of foil, to make them look like Quality Street (as my sister described them)! I ordered mine from the Cakes Cookies & Crafts Shop.
Making chocolate caramels
October 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Buying a sugar thermometer seems like the sort of thing only crazy people do. It seems to sit along deep fat fryers and foam-generating siphons as the sort of equipment only professionals and obsessives really need.
The crucial thing about a sugar thermometer is that it allows you to measure a very simple property – the concentration of sugar in a syrup. That’s it.
Water boils at 100°C (at sea level), and adding sugar to the water raises the boiling point up and up. Caramel is just very hot sugar, that has started to develop complex flavours, a little like browning meat. So a sugar thermometer makes caramel as well as jam a much more predictable affair, and removes much of the guesswork. I have both a glass thermometer, and a new and shiny digital thermopen. If using a glass one, be careful that you have enough liquid to immerse to the line it indicates, or the temperature won’t be accurate. You also need to make sure you put the thermometer in the pan early on – adding a cold thermometer to boiling caramel is a recipe for broken glass in your caramel. A good idea would be to warm the thermometer in the cream, then put into the caramel mixture once the cream is mixed in.
I like making caramel, because the ingredients are so simple and cheap: sugar, butter, cream – but the results are so complex in flavour. Depending on how long you cook this, and to what temperature, you can have a caramel sauce, soft, chewy caramels or hard toffee. I prefer a fairly soft caramel, that is still firm enough to slice and wrap.
These chocolate caramels are a beautiful combination of the buttery flavour of caramel with dark chocolate to balance the sweetness. I was surprised that the recipe asks you to cook the caramel with the chocolate in to a high temperature – I expected the chocolate to burn. I stirred fairly frequently to make sure it didn’t catch on the bottom of the pan, and there was no trace of burnt flavour in the caramel, so I guess it worked.
For more on regular caramels (without the chocolate), Dan Lepard has a great all-purpose caramel recipe he wrote for the Guardian a while back.
Salted chocolate caramels
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who in turn, adapted from Gourmet
Usually I would list the ingredients as I go, but it’s especially important to have everything prepared in advance for caramel making, so I have separated the preparation and cooking stages.
Preparation:
Line an 8 inch square pan with foil or two strips of baking parchment at right angles. If using foil, brush with a thin coating of vegetable oil. Set aside.
Chop:
150g dark chocolate
into small pieces and put into a heatproof bowl.
Place
240ml double cream
into a small pan.
200g granulated sugar
Put into a thick-bottomed pan, something quite tall as it will bubble up later (use your best pan for the sugar, and second best for the cream)
Measure out:
60g golden syrup
and
30g butter
and
1/2 tsp coarse sea salt, crushed into fairly small crystals
(this is optional, but very good. Maldon salt or fleur de sel is good. Table salt is not – it will be far too salty).
and put aside, near the stove.
Cooking:
Heat the cream until tiny bubbles start to form at the edge of the pan
Pour immediately over the chocolate, and stir gently until the chocolate is completely melted and the whole thing is smooth.
Add a tablespoon of water to the sugar in the pan, just enough to make it a little damp, and put over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Keeping a lid on will help it heat faster, and make sure that the sugar gets dissolved properly. Once it is all clear and liquid, remove the lid, turn the heat up to high and boil furiously to make caramel. You want to bring it to a fairly dark amber, without burning it. When it starts to become golden, turn the heat down a little so you can control the process a little better.
Remove from the heat and add the golden syrup, and then, gradually, the chocolate and cream ganache. Stir after each addition. It will bubble up furiously as the water in the cream is liberated to steam all at once – the caramel will be much hotter than the boiling point of water.
Once everything is combined, return to the heat with a sugar thermometer and bring to the boil again. Heat until the temperature reaches 255F/124C. Any lower, and you risk a pourable, liquid caramel (although if you want caramel sauce, that’s fine). You can take it higher, and get a firmer caramel, until it starts to become toffee.
Immediately remove from the heat, stir in the butter and the salt if using. Stir to incorporate the butter thoroughly, then pour into the prepared tin, and leave to cool and set.
Once completely cold, lift the caramel out of the pan with the paper or foil, and turn upside-down onto a cutting board. Use a large knife to slice into strips and then squares. Wrap each piece in a square of baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Or just eat quickly 
Store in a sealed container – exposure to the air will allow the caramel to absorb water from the air, and it will start to become too sticky.
Mini chocolate walnut cookies
October 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
There’s something in the air about miniature desserts. Dan Lepard profiled mini-cakes in Sainsbury’s magazine last month. Yotam Ottolenghi wrote a piece for the Guardian‘s weekend food column on miniature financiers, mini cheesecakes, mini cookies. Could the mini-dessert become (gasp) the New Cupcake? (or the new whoopie pie, by now). But foolish food trends aside, there is something quite compelling about demolishing a little cookie or a baby cake, in its entirety.
Although this might look large, this is an espresso cup and saucer.
It was this that attracted me to Heidi’s Itsy Bitsy chocolate chip cookies when they appeared on her blog. I returned to the recipe recently when I wanted to make some cookies, and only then remembered that I had adapted it to be almost a one-bowl recipe, if you have a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can head over to 101 Cookbooks, and Heidi has great instructions for making this by hand. But I love the simplicity of this method, combined with the cute-factor of the tiny cookies, and the amazing toasted flavour that comes from the walnuts and the crisp edges. These are not chewy chocolate chip cookies – they are crisp little discs, with a nubbly quality from the nuts and chocolate rubble – perhaps invoking a souped-up hobnob? They are flavourful, but not cloying; crisp but not too crumbly or greasy – ideal cookie jar-cookies in other words.
Mini chocolate walnut cookies:
(adapted from 101 Cookbooks’ Itsy Bitsy Chocolate Chip Cookies)
Preheat the oven to 180°C /160°C fan / 350°F.
- 140g dark chocolate (I used Green & Blacks cooking chocolate, 72%, but something sweeter would also work)
- 70g walnuts
–> Break the chocolate into pieces, add the walnuts and process to rubble in a food processor.
- 140g wholewheat self-raising flour
- 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
–> Add to processor with the nuts and process again to mix everything together, and grind the chocolate and nuts a little finer.
–> Empty the processor contents into a separate bowl (you’ll add them back later). Add to this bowl:
- 110g rolled oats
–> Add to the empty processor:
- 110g butter, softened
- 120g dark brown muscovado sugar
- 120g caster sugar
–> Process together until fairly smooth and creamy. Add
- 1 large egg
- 1.5 tsp vanilla
–> and process again until smooth, scraping down the sides to make sure it is combined fairly evenly.
–> Return the chocolate, nuts and flour to the processor.
–> Process fairly briefly to mix everything together – you don’t want to overmix, or the gluten will start to develop and the cookies will get tough. Scrape down with a spatula to make sure there are no more floury patches.
Either refrigerate (for up to two days) or use immediately. Scoop off teaspoons of mixture, roll into a small ball, less than an inch across, flatten a little with a fork and bake at 180C/160C fan for 10-12 minutes, until slightly cracked around the edge and crisp. They will crisp up further as they cool.
[Refrigerating chocolate chip cookie dough is a NY Times recipe trick, attributed to Maury Rubin of City Bakery, and it does seem to develop a bit of extra flavour, but these are fine without it as well.]
The Great Brownie Bake-off
October 11th, 2010 § 5 Comments
Saturday was a momentous day for me. My first piece of competitive baking – and my first win! Yes, my brownies were voted the best of 25 entries on Saturday at The Great Brownie Bake-off. I was amazed when I found out. Firstly, I was convinced I had underbaked them, so when my back started to give out on the day, I headed home a mere 20 minutes before the results were announced. And secondly because the judging panel included the amazing Paul A Young, as well as a host of other professional cake and chocolate experts.
If you’ve been here before, you’ll know that brownies have appeared before. I make them pretty regularly because they can be mixed quickly in one bowl, but the results still feel special enough for a celebration. So when Louise Thomas, The Chocolate Consultant announced that she was organising a brownie bake-off, I thought I would give it a go.
I started with my old recipe, which is a hybrid of a couple of versions in Alice Medrich’s book ‘Bittersweet
I baked more for the Macmillan Coffee morning a couple of weeks later. These were tougher and overbaked, so I knew I had to do something different for the final version.
I went back to the drawing board to make the result softer and less dense. I toasted hazelnuts to give a subtle flavour compared to the more aggressive Frangelico or alcohol. Leon’s brownies include ground almonds which make them very gooey, so I ground some of the nuts to create the same effect. Finally, I replaced the caster sugar with some soft brown sugar and golden syrup for extra stickiness, and I hoped a little extra caramel flavour.
The bake-off was a great day, with demonstrations going on throughout the day. It was pretty packed though, so hard to get to the samples, and I wish I had muscled in a bit more firmly and introduced myself to more people.
Thanks so much to Louise for organising the day, all the judges: Paul A Young, Abigail Phillips, James Hoffmann, Tom Kevill-Davies, Lee McCoy and Jennifer Earle, Jane Manson, Kavita Favelle and Mathilde Delville and Fred Ponnavoy from Gu Chocolate Puds.
Also lots of thanks to the demonstrators: Fred Ponnavoy, Caroline Aherne from Sugargrain Bakery, Edd Kimber, winner of the Great British Bake-off (and doing his first live demo!) Sasha Jenner from Hobbs House Bakery, and Stacie Stuart from Masterchef.
The Winning Recipe:
Ingredients
- 100g unsalted butter
- 100g dark chocolate(Valrhona Manjari 64%)
- 30g Green & Blacks cocoa
- 30g/2 tbsp Hazelnut chocolate spread (Nutella)
- 100g light muscovado sugar
- 85g caster sugar
- 15g golden syrup
- 2 large eggs, cold
- 70g plain flour
- pinch of salt
- 150g whole hazelnuts
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180ºC / 160ºC fan.
- Toast the hazelnuts, by putting into the oven for 8 minutes. Rub off the skins.
- Line an 18cm square tin with foil or baking parchment.
- Put 35g of the toasted hazelnuts into a food processor and grind to a powder. Use some of the flour to prevent the mixture becoming too oily. Combine with the rest of the flour and set aside.
- Combine the butter, cocoa, chocolate and chocolate spread. Melt in a microwave or in a pan on the stove until the butter and chocolate are completely melted and the whole thing is combined.
- Stir in the sugars and golden syrup, then beat in the cold eggs one at a time until the mixture is glossy.
- Add the flour and nut mixture and salt, and beat the mixture 40 times with a wooden spoon, until the mixture thickens slightly. Fold in the remaining whole hazelnuts.
- Pour into the pan and bake at 180C/160C fan for 20-25 minutes, until it is cracked very slightly at the edges, but still soft in the centre.
- To cut cleanly, put the cooled pan into the fridge, covered in cling film until thoroughly chilled or overnight. Remove the cold pan, invert over a board and peel off the foil or baking parchment. Cut into squares with a sharp knife.
Chocolate and Courgettes (Zucchini)
July 11th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Courgettes are innocent enough looking when they first arrive
- but soon they expand and take over your life like triffids. Beware the courgette.
Mini courgettes, waiting to strike
Little did I know when I took delivery of my spiffing Rocket Garden of baby veg plants in April that it would be the courgettes that were the real trouble makers. They were so innocent, with just one or two oval leaves – looking no larger than any of the other plants, and much smaller than the strawberries, for instance. The directions recommended a distance of 45cm between plantings, which is more or less what they now have, but they now seem so large that they tower over the long since bolted lettuces and shriveled brown pea plants.
The full size courgette plant, on Flickr
Courgette gluts are a gardening cliché, but with good reason – once they start producing, they don’t stop, and if you leave them for more than two days without checking, you will turn around to find a marrow has appeared.
So far the production has been a pleasant trickle – two or three courgettes every 4 or 5 days is very manageable, and can easily be converted into pasta – linguine, lemon juice, parmesan, oiive oil – or substitute for aubergine in a parmigiana.
However, we are now well into production on all four of my plants, so it’s more like 4 courgettes every other day. Serious help is clearly needed.
So when my mother-in-law asked me yesterday if I had any good courgette cake recipes, it occured to me that in fact I had the perfect one, but hadn’t tried it yet. I am referring, of course, to Chocolate and Zucchini cake from Clotilde’s Chocolate and Zucchini
Having once made a Jamie Oliver beetroot cake that was a disaster, I am wary of baked goods with vegetables in, but I have complete faith in Clotilde and I knew she would not lead me astray. And so it proved: as she notes in the book, if you didn’t tell anyone this had courgettes in, they would never tell. It’s just a really soft, moist chocolate cake, not too sweet. In fact, it could probably bear icing with something like buttercream and still be good. Even the olive oil I used in place of butter (as she suggests) is all but undetectable. So if you have courgette problems this summer, simply make endless batches of this and freeze where necessary.
Chocolate and Zucchini cake
Adapted, just barely, from Clotilde Dusoulier’s ‘Chocolate & Zucchini’
Ingredients
- 240g plain flour
- 60g cocoa
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 180g light brown sugar
- 120ml extra virgin olive oil
- 3 large eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp instant coffee granules or instant espresso powder
- 350g courgettes (zucchini), grated – about 2 medium courgettes
- 150g chocolate chips or chunks
Method
Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan/350°F.
Put the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl and use a whisk to mix everything together thoroughly and distribute the baking powder and bicarbonate.
Put the olive oil and sugar into a mixer bowl or food processor and combine for 3 or 4 minutes until thoroughly mixed together. It won’t cream as butter and sugar would, and may form clumps – don’t worry. Add the eggs one at a time, and mix thoroughly after each one, until the mixture is smooth again.
Add the vanilla and coffee granules or powder to the egg mixture.
Meanwhile grate the courgettes fairly finely – I used the grating disc on my food processor, but it wouldn’t take too long with a hand grater.
Add just over half of the flour mixture to the eggs and very gently mix until the flour hasn’t quite disappeared.
Toss the remaining flour with the grated courgettes and chocolate chips to coat them.
Add this on top of the rest of the batter, and fold together gently with a large spoon or spatula.
Pour into a greased or lined tin.
I used a 2lb (large) loaf tin and 6 muffin cases. Clotilde recommended a 25cm springform tin. You could also do them all as cupcakes, which I’m guessing would make around 18.
Bake at 180°C (160°C fan)/350°F for about 20 minutes for the cupcakes, and 45 minutes for the loaf cake.
Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes before removing from the tin. If you use a springform tin, unclip the outside at 10 minutes, but leave in the tin to cool completely.
The cupcakes are especially good when they’re still a little warm.
Learning (more) about chocolate
March 17th, 2010 § 4 Comments
I’ve been on an uncharacteristic splurge in the last couple of weeks, and been to two different chocolate evenings. Although I consider myself a keen chocolate consumer, some would even say a chocolate snob, I surprised myself by how much I learnt on these two evenings.
The first was a demonstration session at Divertimenti, given by Paul A Young. I know him only by reputation, and because I got his beautiful book, Adventures with Chocolate
Inspired by this evening, I started browsing around seventypercent.com and came across their Chocolate Tasting Workshop. This was at the Scotch Whisky Society (who knew that existed?) and was really a series of tools to equip you for tasting chocolate. We looked at the way chocolate’s flavour changes over time, the many different notes you can distinguish, particular qualities that make chocolate ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – things like over roasting, a coarse texture, lack of length (the persistant chocolate aftertaste in the mouth), or a bad aftertaste. It covered quite a few things I knew, but also some new things. Most of all, it was good to put aside some time just to sit down and contemplate nothing more than the flavour and smell and texture of the chocolate you’re tasting. It might have been good to taste a wider range of chocolates, including some rubbish ones, but I can see how your palate would start to get overwhelmed very quickly.
Here are some things i’ve learnt from these two sessions:
- I really like fruity chocolate – and I’m most likely to get that hit from Madagascan beans, hence my preferences for Valrhona Manjari and Malagasy Mora Mora.
- I am pretty tolerant of all sorts of chocolate, equally happy to eat caramelly, biscuity (probably cheap ones) as the dark and bitter sort (although we’re still talking fine chocolate here: Galaxy is scum, and Dairy Milk is fine but gives me an unpleasant sugar-comedown).
- Chocolate is ground down into very varied granule sizes, and some are much smoother than others. Brands like Amedei feel especially smooth and liquid. Green & Blacks is much coarser.
- Water ganache is a revelation. I’d read about it before, but never made it, and tasting Paul A Young’s fresh mint ganache, made with just water, mint, sugar and chocolate has totally converted me. I’m now really keen to try this with tea – guinea pigs wanted!
- The thing I most want to learn about next is tempering. I’ve done it a couple of times at home, but I would really love to be able to do it without having to clear the whole day – to make it something that I can contemplate doing in smaller quantities.
Some useful chocolate links that I’ve been collecting:
- Seventypercent – a chocolate blog and (very comprehensive) review site for fine chocolate.
- Paul A Young – lovely man, and great chocolates: the salted butter caramel I tried was indescribable, and has won 2 Gold medals. In Islington and the City.
- Rococo – chocolate shops in Marylebone and Chelsea and also a chocolate school offering tempering and truffle-making classes.
- William Curley – shops in Richmond and Belgravia.
- Melt chocolates – little white boutique shop in Notting Hill and also available in Whole Foods
- Matcha chocolates – recommended by Shuna aka eggbeater, so must be good
My chocolate books:
Birthday cake
February 12th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Chocolate - from iStockphoto
Birthday cakes need to be so many things: celebratory; they need to fulfill the wishes of the birthday boy or girl rather than the baker; and demonstrate an appropriate level of effort. It’s this last one that can give me trouble. While I love to make a cake, and will use any excuse to do so, it sometimes feels odd to create something really elaborate for a work colleague or boss. And besides, I don’t often have the time to go overboard. This is where the chocolate torte comes in.
Chocolate torte is one name for a soft chocolate cake made with ground almonds. Other names are Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba cake, or it can simply be referred to as a flourless chocolate cake.
To give some idea of the amount of variation possible, I compiled this table from books I own (oh stop: you didn’t already know I was a geek?):
| Author | Nigella Lawson | Sybil Kapoor | Gordon Ramsay | Alice Medrich | Elizabeth David | Julia Child |
| Book | How to Eat | Taste | Just Desserts | Bittersweet | French Provincial Cooking | Mastering the Art of French Cookery |
| Recipe | Torta alla Gianduja | Catherine’s Chocolate Cake | Dark and Delicious Torte | Queen of Sheba | Reine de Saba | Reine de Saba |
| Butter | 125g | 60g | 100g | 140g | 85g | 110g |
| Chocolate | 100g | 1 cup | 350g | 170g | 110g | 110g |
| Eggs | 6 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Sugar | 0 | 85g | 200g | 170g | 85g | 150g |
| Flour | 0 | 2 tbsp | 0 | 2 tbsp | 0 | 50g |
| Ground nuts | 100g | 0 | 0 | 70g | 85g | 55g |
| Others | 400g Nutella | Water, brandy, coffee | Brandy, almond essence | Brandy, coffee | Rum, coffee |
As with so many of my chocolate experiments, it began with Alice Medrich’s ‘Bittersweet’. She devotes a chapter to a number of variations on this recipe, and reassures the reader that this is a recipe that will accommodate, even welcome changes. She provides us with that elusive license to create almost infinite experimental variations, and still produce an edible result. There can be few experienced home cooks who don’t read through a recipe and mentally edit it. However, we are often admonished that one really ought to follow a recipe to the letter the first time, so you can understand the starting point. While that remains good advice, the freedom to add your own stamp right away is a great inducement to try this recipe. So here at last is a recipe that you can rearrange and make your own, and still produce something that everyone will be happy to eat – and provides a suitable celebration cake at the same time.
Chocolate torte:
Prepare a 20cm/8 inch springform or loose-bottomed tin, by lining the base with baking parchment.
150g dark chocolate (I used 64% Valrhona Manjari)
150g butter
–> melt together, and stir until smooth
1 cup espresso (I used about 1/2 tbsp instant espresso powder in enough water to just dissolve it)
2 tbsp brandy
–> mix into melted chocolate, and set aside
100g ground almonds
45g flour
–> measure and mix together
4 large eggs
–> separate into yolks and whites. If you have a stand mixer, use that bowl for the whites.
110g sugar
–> combine with the yolks and beat until well blended (you can do this by hand, or briefly with a machine)
–> stir in the melted chocolate to combine.
–> separately, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks
50g sugar
–> whisk in 50g sugar to make a meringue, and continue whisking until you have stiff peaks.
–> Fold the whites into the chocolate mixture, by first adding one-quarter, and thoroughly beating it in, then folding in the remainder.
–> Bake for around 30 minutes at 190C/375F, or until a skewer inserted about 4cm from the edge comes out clean, but one inserted in the centre is still gooey.
