Chocolate cake

I wasn't going to blog this - on the one hand, it's just another chocolate cake, and I did no more than increase the quantities from Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake which features in the chocolate section of Feast, but it worked wonderfully. And there's always room in your life for another chocolate cake, especially easy and lush ones like this.

Hot on the heels of Blue's birthday, the Husband actually turned 40 (as opposed to officially turning 40 in September when we had his party) at the weekend. I made this mindful (as was when I made the Victoria Sponge for Blue) that sometimes, sponge cakes can seem a little on the thin side (may be it's just me) so I increased all the ingredients for the cake (but not the icing) by half, and I was not disappointed. It made a fabulous, generous chocolate cake, which even Pink, who isn't a lover of chocolate cakes, went mad for.

And it went down very well with a glass of champagne before we went out on Saturday night...

For the cake, you will need

2 20cm loose bottomed cake tins, greased and lined
300g plain flour
300g caster sugar
11/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
60g cocoa
260g unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
225 ml sour cream

For the icing
75g unsalted butter
175g dark chocolate broken into small pieces
300g sifted icing sugar
1 tbsp golden syrup
125ml sour cream 

Pre-heat the oven to 180C

Put all the cake ingredients into a food processor and process to a thick, smooth batter.

Divide between the tins and bake for 25-35 minutes till a skewer comes out clean. if you remember, swap the tins round in the oven half way through.

Cool the cakes in their tins for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack.

When the cakes are cold, make the icing. Melt together the butter & chocolate in quite a large bowl (large enough to take the rest of the ingredients and mix the icing up) and set aside to cool a little, then stir in the golden syrup, followed by the sour cream, then stir in the seived icing sugar. to make a reasonably thick spreadable icing. If you need to thin it out, use a tiny bit of boiling water.

Smear the icing over one of the halves of cake, then sandwich the second half on top, then slap and smear the rest of the icing over the outside of the cake.

Easy apple & almond cake - or what to do with a rogue can of apple compote

The scoutwives hate to waste food.

At the end of every camp we go through the left overs that have come back and divvy it up - what can be saved for the following year (or for other scout activities through the year) and perishable stuff that needs to get used up.

This year, when we got back from camp, we decided
 we had to do something with some tins

of apple compote that had come back from the Netherlands with us in 2011 from a jamboree we took the scouts to. The tins are very much still in date (good till 2016 no less), but somehow we've never got round to feeding the contents to the scouts. Having taken the tins on 2 camps since Holland, on our return from Derbyshire, we decided enough was enough, and each of us took possession of a tin.

Nigella has a recipe in Feast for a damp apple & almond cake, one of her fantastically easy, whizz it all up cakes, which has no butter, and no flour in it, so possibly a good one for those with gluten issues. The amount of ground almonds, eggs and sugar probably negates any benefit the lack of butter might otherwise have had for any one, so don't try and kid yourself otherwise.

It does have fruit in, though, so not all bad -  the puree of 3 tart eating apples. Bingo. I consulted Google and Lo! there is a website which gives an equivalent apples to puree quantity. But of course there is. 

It was American, so in cups, but I have cup measures, and all was well.

Of course, it didn't use up the whole tin of apple compote, but made a good inroad into it, and I gave the rest of it to the kids. They loved it.

The cake came with us as our contribution to a dinner party last night. I sifted some icing sugar over it and served it with some double cream which I whipped up with a couple of teaspoons of cointreau in it.

Apple & Almond Cake

11/3 (one and a third) cups apple puree/compote
1 tbsp lemon juice
375g ground almonds
250g caster sugar
8 large eggs
50g flaked almonds

Grease a 23cm springform cake tin with vegetable oil and line the base.

Whizz up all the ingredients apart from the flaked almonds, in a food processor.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake. Nigella says 45 mins but check after 35. Mine needed about 50 mins.

A chocolate cake for people who don't like chocolate cake

I may have lamented here before that Pink doesn't like chocolate cake.

That doesn't stop me trying.

On Saturday, my father in law came for the day. He took us out for lunch (woo hoo!) so I thought I'd better have the wherewithal in to provide 'tea'.

Tea as it is in the Husband's family is something I never came across growing up. Sure, if we'd had a huge Sunday lunch, we would have a light meal - boiled eggs or something, but the Husband's family does this thing where you have a huge meal in the middle of the day and then, perhaps no more than 3 hours (if you are lucky) later, the table is once again filled to groaning point with ham, cheese, bread, butter, jam, sliced tomatoes, salad, pickles and the like, plus at least one kind of cake and may be some biscuits, and you are expected to eat. And eat. And drink tea. It can be quite hard going.

The worst time this happened was the day after the Princess of Wales died. I will never ever forget that day, not because I had any particular love of Diana, but that was the day the Husband and I were due to pay a visit to 'Nan' - his grandmother - a formidable lady probably in her late 80s (she is now 102 and still going, although not quite so strongly), and I woke up feeling not very well. Ordinarily, we would have cried off, but Nan was and is a huge Royalist and we knew she would have been upset by the news, so we carried on as intended. By the time I'd womanfully worked my way through an enormous roast lunch, I was feeling really poorly, and kept having to excuse myself to be sick, but we didn't want to worry her - or lead her to believe that I was pregnant (I wasn't telling her that I wasn't feeling well, and we weren't married at the time, so pregnancy would not have been good). Nan, you'll understand, is also not one to hold with diets or any of that sort of thing, so there was no option but to plough on through for tea. That I managed to keep a grip and put up a good enough show of eating that Nan didn't ask me if I was anorexic is a testament to my otherwise non-existent acting skills. It was not a good day. In fact, it turns out that I had viral meningitis, but that's a whole other story.

But back to the purpose of this post. Chocolate cake. I was determined not to produce some enormous feast for tea, but I did want to have a cake available. I was musing out loud about this to the Husband, when he interrupted. "Can it just be like a NORMAL cake. Nothing healthy. Just cake. Actually, can it be chocolate - but proper chocolate cake.". Poor man is obviously feeling the strain of living with woman on a diet, where cake made with pureed dates just isn't cutting it.

Well, Saturday wasn't one of my fast days, so I set to. Chocolate, he wanted, and chocolate he got. This started off as Nigella's old fashioned chocolate cake, with icing from the Chocolate Malteser cake, both of which are in Feast. However, once I got started, I did fiddle about a bit (with apologies to both Nigella and the Husband) based on what I had available and to try and accomodate Pink, and I did (ssh) put fat-free Greek yoghurt in it rather than sour cream. But otherwise, a perfectly acceptable, made with proper butter and chocolate cake. And the best thing about it was that Pink liked it. She liked it so much that she wants it for her birthday cake. Praise indeed.

 200g plain flour
100g caster sugar
50g drinking chocolate
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
175g soft unsalted butter
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
170ml 0% fat Greek yoghurt

20cm round springform cake tin, buttered and 'floured' with cocoa powder (Note: I started off thinking I'd make 2 sandwich tins, then decided I wanted one fat cake, topped with icing. Then once I'd baked it, I decided to split and fill it anyway. So may be it would be better to have done it in 2 tins to start with...)

Make sure everything is at room temperature, then pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Put all the ingredients in a food processor and whizz them up to a smooth thick batter. Scrape this in to the tin, then bake for around 35 - 45 minutes till a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool for 10 minutes, then remove from the tin and leave to cool on a rack.

For the icing, you will need:

250g icing sugar
2 dessert spoons of cocoa
125g very soft unsalted butter
2 tablespoons of boiling water

Sift the icing sugar and cocoa into a mixer, then add the butter in cubes and start to mix together, slowly at first then as it starts to get combined, turn the speed up. Add the boiling water and continue to beat till you get a smooth buttercream.

I split the cake and iced the middle and the top.

Mmmmmmm.

Forever Nigella - Easter: Lemon - no, Passionfruit - Meringue Cake

Feast is probably my favourite Nigella tome. I love How to be a Domestic Goddess (for the cinammon bun recipe alone), but there's something about Feast that really gets me. It's all about spending a little time creating really special food, and it has never disappointed. The curry feast has stood me in good stead on a couple of raucous dinner party occasions - particularly good for the cook ahead nature of the whole thing, but on its own, the Mughlai chicken recipe is one that the kids are very keen on. True, I have never been tempted to cook the sweet potato with marshmallow topping, but there's a whole section on chocolate cakes from the bog standard old fashioned chocolate cake to the more sophisticated Rococoa Cake - and of course a Chocolate Malteser cake long before later pretenders to the  Domestic Goddess throne.


I love that the book covers different food cultures and meals for different occasions in those cultures. If I refer to a book during Christmas preparations it is almost always to Feast that I turn, and she has revolutionised my Yorkshire pudding. 

And if I haven't convinced you enough that this would be the one Nigella volume to take to your desert island and torture yourself with while you survived on all that fish you would spear (just think sashimi, Dahling), and coconuts, let me tell you that you must have the sake steak at least once before you die. Honestly - it is divine.

So naturally, as the theme for the Forever Nigella challenge this month is Easter, Feast was the volume I turned to. We were going to a  lunch party on Palm Sunday, and I offered pudding (of course I did - Palm Sunday wasn't a fast day!). I dithered over what to make, but in the end, it had to be the Lemon Meringue Cake. Happily for everyone concerned, it's on her website, so you can find the recipe here if you want to have a go yourself.

It's classic Nigella, with lots of little asides and comment littered about the recipe. This is why I love Nigella so much: "Divide the mixture between the prepared tins. You will think you don't even have enough to cover the bottom of the tins but don't panic. Spread calmly with a rubber spatula until smooth."

calmly spread...

 

There was also a suggestion about swapping the lemon curd filling for passion fruit. Given that it was Palm Sunday and all that, I decided to go with it.

So the day before Palm Sunday we had friends for dinner which turned into a rather more riotous session than anticipated and our guests left at just after 2 in the morning. I can't remember the last time I was voluntarily up at 2 a.m. It was great fun but faced with operation clear up and then cake baking before lunch, I almost cracked. I think if I hadn't already made the curd, I might have done. In the end,  I managed to pull myself together, and actually it's a fairly straightforward recipe. You make a lemon sponge and smooth that into 2 tins (see above), then cover the sponge batter with meringue (one smoothed, one 'peaked' with the back of a spoon) before baking.

smoothed....                                peaked

I wasn't concentrating completely, and I slightly overcooked them so that the top of the peaked meringue caught slightly, but sandwiched together (flat meringue down, peaked meringue on top) with the passion fruit curd and some whipped cream, it was a reasonable offering to take along to our lunch,

Jen at Blue Kitchen Bakes is hosting Forever Nigella this month for Sarah at Maison Cupcake .

Passion Fruit Curd

It's getting close to Easter and close to the end of the deadline for this month's Forever Nigella.

Although I have my 'main event' in mind for this, I'm getting twitchy that I won't get it blogged in time (let's face it, I haven't even baked it yet at the time when I'm writing this post), but never fear. As a teaser, a sneaky peak, I can bring you one of the component parts, made on Friday evening, in readiness for said main event. I'm not going to give the game away entirely, but I'm sure you can guess what I might end up doing with this gorgeous jar of passion fruit curd.

Now before I go any further, given that it's Palm Sunday when the final product of my labours are to be eaten, and it's for this reason that I made passion fruit curd rather than lemon curd for the purpose for which it is intended, I thought I would explain that the passion fruit comes from the passion flower (no really!) and is so called because it was used by Spanish missionaries when they were trying to explain the crucifixion of Jesus - also known as the passion of Christ - to the indigenous population. The success of this is not so well documented, but in case you were interested, the missionaries likened the stigmas of the passion flower to the nails in Jesus' hands and feet, the threads of the passion flower were like the Crown of Thorns, the vine's tendrils were likened to the whips used to beat Jesus, the five anthers represented the wounds he sufferes and the ten petals and sepals resemble the Apostles (excluding Judas and Peter). Whether you subscribe to that or not, it's a beautiful flower

But I'm digressing. So Passion Fruit Curd from How to be a Domestic Goddess and also in Feast can also be found on Nigella.com so if you are so inspired you can find the recipe there. It uses 11 passion fruit and I suppose you could extend the metaphor to suggest that Nigella was thinking of the 11 faithful apostles when she dreamed this up, although I suspect she was more likely thinking about cake...

There's a very fiddly bit which is sort of glossed over which is the bit where you have to sieve the pulp and juice from 10 passion fruit to separate it away from the seeds, but if you whizz it all in a food processor briefly, this can help.

Once you've done that, it's pretty straightforward as far as making curd is concerned. You just need the time to stir it all constantly over a very low heat and it can take a bit of time. believe me, I have been that person with a pan of lemon flavoured scrambled egg before (obviously, when I was making lemon curd that time). Don't be tempted to put the heat up or stop stirring, even for a second - it will come good in the end. Fortunately, Nigella doesn't promise that it will all be done and dusted in 10 minutes (unlike others I could mention, and naming no names, Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall). I was a little concerned that she made no indication whatsoever of how long it might take, but in the end it was about 35 minutes to get the orangey curd thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. 

After that, it was but a moment to whisk in the contents of an 11th passion fruit before putting into a jar (unless you have an immediate use for it...)

This month's Forever Nigella is hosted by Jen at Blue Kitchen Bake on behalf of Sarah at Maison Cupcake