'Against all the odds' chocolate cake

One of the reasons I would dearly love to be Felicity Cloake is that I'd get the opportunity - people would even PAY me - to spend hours dithering around in the kitchen perfecting what I want to share with anyone who cares to read.

I do occasionally toy with the idea of making the same thing a few times over the course of a few weeks so that the family get variations on a theme and I hit perfection, but you and I both know that I'd have a mutiny on my hands pretty quickly, and I'd lose patience, so what actually happens is that I have to get on with whatever great idea I've had, and hope that it turns out allright, otherwise I won't have anything to blog about that week. Not for me (or, I guess, plenty of other food bloggers) the luxury of tweaking the ingredients, re-making with just a touch more ground almond, substituting syrup for honey before deciding that honey was better after all...

So it is partly as the result of having nothing else to blog about, and partly because I think it's worth sharing things that don't quite work out as you expect them to or hope they will, that I am calling this'Against All the Odds' chocolate cake 

Against all the odds, this chocolate cake turned out not only rather attractive (albeit in a rather funereal way), but actually tastes ok.

Against the odds stacked heavily against me in terms of time and ingredients - or, I should say, lack of, I managed to produce a chocolate cake to take along to my 'Valentine's themed' Clandestine Cake Club on Sunday afternoon, just returned from a weekend celebrating the Husband's father's 70th birthday and retirement, with the week to prepare for and some utterly exhausted children to cook dinner for.

Feeling experimental, and with some roasted beetroot in the fridge that needed using up, I turned to Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache (which incidentally offers a master class in vivid, recipe-development prose - it's one of the things I love about the book, but it makes me deeply envious of the opportunities she has to tinker in the kitchen), and optimistically threw myself into adapting the eponymous Chocolate Heartache Cake. 

I sound upbeat don't I? I was. For a moment. 

Then I discovered I didn't have enough chocolate or honey.  My beetroot was cold (from being in the fridge, natch) so instead of the chocolate melting into it (as per the recipe which calls for a warm aubergine puree to receive the shards of chocolate and melt them), I melted the chocolate in a double boiler and poured it onto the beetroot in a blender, causing the whole lot to seize...

I used a blender that was too small, so I had to scrape the solidified beetrooty, chocolatey mess into my food processor and attempt to loosen and puree the whole lot with the prudent addition of a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil.... (Just as an aside, coconut oil is my new favourite ingredient. Try it. It's fabulous.)

My honey was limited to 3 mostly finished jars in varying stages of crystallisation. Nothing a spell in some hot water couldn't fix - and some pomegranate molasses to make up the difference. By this stage, I was really hoping against hope...

I managed to lose the sugar violets I'd bought for decoration (more than a nod here to Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake) then retrieved them from the bottom of my handbag, and the icing I made was too runny requiring the addition of icing sugar, thus killing off my attempt to produce a refined sugar free offering. But against all those odds, I had a cake. More of a dinner party pudding cake, and definitely complemented with some kind of additional dairy product (we had sour cream in the fridge, I'm thinking a sweetened mascarpone would be good), my cake was velvety, pleasingly crimson (thank you beetroot), and densely chocolatey. Against all the odds.

And then, the odds ran out. The weather and disrupted after school arrangements conspired so I couldn't make cake club after all. Some you win...

Against All the Odds Chocolate Cake

400g peeled roasted beetroot
250g dark chocolate, in smallish pieces
2 tbsp coconut oil, warmed and melted (if necessary for the cake) plus a little for brushing the tin
50g cocoa powder
60g ground almonds
3 large eggs
170g clear honey
30g pomegranate molasses 
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp cherry brandy

For the icing
80 g runny honey (I had to buy some more)
40g warmed coconut oil (warmed so that it's a clear liquid rather than white solid)
25g cocoa
2 tbsp icing sugar

Line a 23 cm loose bottomed tin and brush lightly with warmed coconut oil and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Chop up the beetroot into pieces. If it's cold, warm it up - may be zap it in a microwave. If I had time, I'd fiddle with this bit and work out the best way to do it. Over to you Felicity... Put the warm beetroot into a food processor, add the chocolate and let the chocolate melt, then whizz it all up till its smooth.

Alternatively, chop the beetroot quite small and pop it into a food processor. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, pour into the food processor and whizz up as quickly as possible. If the whole lot seizes, add the coconut oil a little at a time.

Put the rest of the cake ingredients into a stand mixer and whisk till frothy. Add the chocolatey beetroot mixture, whisk together till it's all combined, then scrape into the prepared tin, pop in the oven for 30 minutes and pray.

When the cake is cooked, remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin for 15 minutes before unmoulding and leaving to cool completely.

To make the icing, seive the cocoa into a bowl, combine with the honey and coconut oil and, if necessary add the icing sugar to taste and for spreading consistency. Smooth over the top of the cake and adorn with sugar paste violets.

Smother with cream and devour. Gingerly at first, then with more confidence and decide whether to make it again at a later date...

Pear & Ginger Loaf Cake

It's been an Autumn showers kind of day.

A "back from a week away with a ton of washing and no hope of it getting dry" type of day.

A "failing to get on top of the chaos" type of day.

A "dog with conjunctivitis and separation anxiety" day.

A day where I was frantically searching for the Wunderweb at 7.37 a.m. when Blue declared that his new school trousers were definitely too long and the look on his face suggested tears were in the offing.

A day where my work 'to do' list looked scary and intimidating and I  felt a little overwhelmed.

It was also cake club day - Clandestine Cake, and as you've guessed, being the kind of day it was, the planned cake was never going to happen.

So I made a loaf cake - a humble, no nonsense kind of cake. The theme of 'Fireworks' which suggested much in the way of fancy icing has had to be satisfied with flavours of the season - ginger and cinammon, pears and walnuts. Fancy icing can wait. But as it was a "wait around for an hour in town while Pink has orchestra" type of day, after school, I did manage to get my hands on one little trick...

Pear & Ginger Loaf Cake

200g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cinammon
200g unsalted butter, diced and at room temperature
150g tinned caramel
50g caster sugar
2 large eggs, beaten together
1 tbsp milk
2 balls of stem ginger, quite finely chopped
2 large pears, peeled and roughly chopped
walnut halves to decorate (optional)

3 tbsp syrup from the stem ginger jar
3 tbsp granulated sugar

Grease and line a 2lb loaf tin and pre-heat the oven to 160C/140C fan

Combine the flour, baking powder and cinnammon

Beat together the butter and caramel, then add in the sugar and continue to beat till light coloured and smooth.

Slowly add the egg, beating well after each addition - of it looks like it's going to split, add a little of the flour mixture in.

Beat in the rest of the flour, then quickly stir through the pears and ginger.

Scrape into the prepared tin and bake for at least an hour until a skewer comes out clean - mine took 1 hr 15 mins but it will depend on your oven.

Leave to cool in the tin, then mix together the ginger syrup and sugar with a tablespoon of water, poke holes all over the cake with a skewer, then drizzle over the gingery sugary drizzle.

Sparklers optional

But lots of fun...

Cardamom Blackberry Chai Cake

We had a month off from the Clandestine Cake Club in August, and so September's meeting crept round rather quickly (a bit like the start of term), with the theme of 'Indian Summer'.

I used up some of the first of the blackberries I picked a couple of weeks in a Signe Johansen Blackberry & Almond Cardamom cake that I found on the Guild of Food Writers website. The original is gluten free but I didn't have enough ground almonds, or baking powder, or even ground cardamom for that matter, but it was still delicious. However, what it also inspired was the cake I took along to cake club, combined with the Seldom Seen Chai Cake that I made ages and ages ago. 

I made the chai up first thing, and the Husband complained that it made the house smell horrible, but I think it was because it was combined with the smell of vinegar soaking chutney ingredients. Not a great odour to greet the day with, I'll accept.

Anyway, I was pleased with the resulting cake: less gingery than the original, more cardamom and run through with blackberries, covering the theme 'Indian Summer' both meteorologically and geographically to provide a gently spiced cake bursting with the best the British (well, in the case, the Welsh) hedgerow has to offer at this time of year.

Cardamom Blackberry Cake with Lemon Icing

For the Chai
350ml semi-skimmed milk
12 cardamom pods, bashed in a pestle and mortar
2 cloves
1 cinammon stick
2 regular tea bags

For the Cake
170g unsalted butter
200g golden syrup
50g dark soft brown sugar
30 cardamom pods
300g wholemeal self raising flour
1 tsp ground ginger
pinch of salt
2 large eggs
200ml chai (made as above)
200g blackberries

For the Icing
200g unsalted butter (at room temperature)
200g icing sugar
lemon juice - about 3/4 of a lemon's worth

You'll also need a lined 20cm cake tin

Method

Make the chai first by pouring the milk into a small pan, adding the rest of the ingredients and simmering gently for 10-15 minutes.

Remove from the heat and leave to cool, then strain in to a jug. You need 200ml for the cake so add a little more milk if necessary.

Pre-heat the oven to 170C.

Put the butter, syrup and sugar into a pan and melt gently, then remove from the heat and leave to cool.

Bash up the cardamom pods, scrape out the seeds, discard the husks, then grind the seeds up in a pestle and mortar.

Add the ground up seeds, the flour, ground ginger and salt  into a bowl and stir together. Pour in the melted butter and syrup mixture, stir in the eggs and finally the chai, then fold in the blackberries.

Bake for around an hour till a cake tester comes out with a few crumbs on it, then leave to cool before icing.

Make the icing by creaming together the butter and icing sugar then slowly adding the lemon juice till you have a delightfully spreadable icing that also zings with lemon. This will lift the cake to new heights that are well worth reaching, believe me!

Canadian Ketchup Cake

Ketchup has long been a source of some debate in our household.

Not in the 'won't allow it to darken my door' type of debate - I gave up on that ages ago - when I realised that Blue would eat salmon fish cakes aged 18 months if they were liberally smothered in the stuff...

There's the ongoing red vs brown saga that rumbles on every time bacon appears - the boys prefer brown, Pink, red, and I sit on the fence.

Since we've moved to Wales there's been a more specific issue too. Pink declared that her favourite type of ketchup comes from a specific supermarket - the one that likes to help you live well for less. This store's own brand is apparently infinitely superior to Heinz's version. I have no problem with this, except there is no Sainsburys anywhere near us, so the Husband has had to divert on at least one of his business trips to include Bridgend. Large bottle procured she then announced that she didn't actually mind what type of ketchup she had. Grrr.

When I was researching possible cakes to take along to yesterday's Clandestone Cake Club meeting, I sparked even more ketchup controversy in the house. The theme was Commonwealth Cakes - in anticipation of the Commonwealth Games - and while I was tempted by various Carribean delights (one in particular involving the creation of pineapple marmalade, another involving significant amounts of condensed milk) I couldn't resist the lure of a Canadian cake, created to mark the 100th anniversary of Heinz in Canada, including - you've guessed it - Ketchup.

"Please don't" implored the Husband.

I did.

Canadian Ketchup Cake

250 g  self raising flour

1.5 tsp baking powder

 0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda

 1 tsp cinnamon

0.5 tsp ground nutmeg 

good pinch of ground ginger

120 ml Heinz Tomato Ketchup (I did use Heinz - I find it much thicker and psychologically was more prepared to put Heinz in a cake than Pink's preferred)
125 ml water

10 g red food colouring*

170 g unsalted butter, softened

300 g packed dark brown sugar

2 large eggs  

Frosting

170g cream cheese at room temperature 

170 g butter, at room temperature 

1tsp vanilla extract

500g icing sugar 

 To make the cake, first, grease and line the base of 2 23cm spring form cake tins and pre-heat the oven to 180C

Sift together flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and the ground spices into a bowl.

Mix together the ketchup, water and food colouring*

Beat together the butter and sugar till soft and fluffy, then beat in the eggs one at a time, making sure each is well combined.

Stir in the flour and then the liquid ketchup mixture, then beat gently to combine, then increase the speed and beat vigrously for a minute or so (at times like these, I am so pleased I have a Kenwood).

Divide the mixture between the prepared tins, smooth gently, then bake for around 30 minutes till a skewer comes out clean. 

Leave to cool completely.

Make the frosting by beating together the cream cheese, butter and vanilla until smooth and completely combined, then sift in the icing sugar (you may want to do this a bit at a time), and keep beating till fluffy, then fill and cover the cake with the frosting. 

 
It was quite warm when I made this, so I popped it in the fridge to settle down for a couple of hours.

So - does it taste like ketchup? Most emphatically no - and not in the least tomatoey either. Instead, it's a bit like a carrot cake - the spices obviously add those flavours, the frosting, and also the texture - it's just a moist cake - and pretty tasty.

I was pleased to report back to the Husband that the cake had gone down very well with my fellow cake clubbers. "That's excellent news" he replied, in a voice that suggested that neither hell nor high water would entice him to try it. 

Some you win.

In case you were wondering, at the same time, for the Husband, I made a much more conventional maple syrup & walnut cake that I found on another blog. It is delicious, and I commend it to you with the brown sugar maple frosting suggested in the footnotes to that blog post. But you should try the ketchup cake too, at least once!


* The original recipe suggested 30 ml of red food colouring. In the same way that I have never made a red velvet cake because all that colouring just can't be right, I couldn't face putting so much in this cake. It's not as red as it might have been, but I think red enough. Plus. I hadn't clocked how much I needed before I did the shopping and didn't buy enough...

Clandestine Cake

I've been fascinated by the idea of the Clandestine Cake Club for a few years now. Pretty much ever since I started blogging and doing the whole social media thing. I joined up and found a club near where I used to live, but never went along to a meeting.

As part of my rather disorganised 'plan to make sure I meet some new people once we move' I had investigated whether there was a Clandestine Cake Club here in the Cardigan area, and discovered that there wasn't. Initially, I was disappointed, then I was encouraged.


Perhaps I could START a Clandestine Cake Club...

Another of my 'plan to make sure I meet some new people once we move' involved a little bit of Twitter stalking networking, which resulted in me getting to know a couple of lovely people, all be it virtually, before we'd even crossed the Severn, and I was having coffee with one of them once we'd landed, and mentioned this idea. Well, what do you know? She had been talking to another friend of hers who had been wondering about the same thing.  A coffee date was hatched and the next thing you know, well here we are, and the first meeting of the Cardigan Cake Club took place on Monday 7th April, not 3 weeks later.

If you don't know about the Clandestine Cake Club (where have you been??) the idea is that a meeting is arranged, and knowing the date and time and roughly the area where it will take  place, you book a place. The exact location is then revealed to those who have booked a place a couple of days before the event. Well, we need some excitement in our lives, don't we.

Each event is themed, and you take along your cake, share it with the others and generally have a good old natter.

That's pretty much exactly what happened on Monday. My co-organiser, the fabulous Vicky North, micro-baker, workshop provider and bread club owner, had already found a venue for us, and when the time came, a select but not insignificant group arrived, with cake. You can read our write up of the event if you're interested, thinking of setting your own CCC up etc, but the purpose of this post is to share the cake that I made for the evening.

The theme was 'My Cake, My Story' which we hoped would get people talking about themselves, their baking stories, and just act as a bit of an ice breaker. It was interesting how people approached the theme. Some people baked a cake that included ingredients representing parts of their lives, for others, the cake itself represented something. For me, it was an easy choice.

As you will know, my life was thrown upside down when my 2 year old son was diagnosed with leukaemia. No more high flying legal career. No more structure to my life other than that imposed by his hospital regime. Chaos reigned, and when, 3 months later my daughter arrived by emergency caesarean, chaos doubled. It wasn't a happy time, although there were plenty of happy moments, and much of it has merged into a kind of fug. One thing that did come out of it, indirectly, was this blog. I wasn't writing at that point, but I seized on a self-imposed challenge to cook everything in How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson in an attempt to gain control over something in my life. And from there, eventually, came this blog.

I still haven't cooked everything from Domestic Goddess - I reckon I've cracked about 1/3 of it, but the easy almond cake represented everything I love about Nigella Lawson and about baking, and the escape that it gave me during that period of my life when everything else was so difficult. The alchemy of throwing together some simple ingredients and creating something of utter loveliness will never leave me.

In honour of the Cake Club, I added my own lemon and poppy seed drizzle icing, and very pleased I was with the result, too.

Easy Almond Cake with Lemon Drizzle Icing & Poppy Seeds

250g unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
250g mazipan, cubed, at room temperature, 150g caster sugar
1/4 tsp each almond essence and vanilla bean paste
6 large eggs
150g self raising flour
75g sifted icing sugar
juice of about 3/4 lemon
1-2 tbsp poppy seeds

You'll also need a 23-25cm loose bottomed/springform 'ring' cake tin, well greased and floured.

Heat the oven to 170C

Use a food processor and process the butter, marzipan and sugar together.

Add in the almond and vanilla, and process again, then break in the eggs one at a time while the food processor is running.

A top tip is to break the eggs into a little bowl first. I once made this and accidentally dropped a whole egg into the whizzing mixture. The cake was very crunchy...

Once the eggs are all incorporated, add the flour, process, then scrape the batter into the tin and bake for around 50 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.

Leave to cool in the tin.

Turn the cake out, and mix up the icing - you may not need all the lemon juice - to quite a runny consistency. I used a clever trick I learned to put the cake on 4 strips of greaseproof paper so you can ice then whip the paper away easily. Get me.

Drizzle over the cake from a height (helps get more even drizzles) then sprinkle over the poppy seeds.

This is delicious with a cup of tea. In fact, at the CCC, we discussed that this was almost a contender for a 'cake for breakfast' type of cake...