'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...

Mary Berry Cooks... Rich Chocolate Traybake with swirly icing

Yes, I know, you've got the book or seen the recipe online, and it's not swirly icing, is it, it's feather icing. Piped lines of white chocolate artfully smudged with a cocktail stick to make pretty, Mr Kipling-esque 'feathers' across the top of the milk chocolate ganache.

Yeah, right. Like that's ever going to happen for me.

Off for a final hoorah of the summer holidays this weekend (camping for a good friend's 40th birthday, on the campsite that she and her husband and kids have just bought. How cool is that? Our friends - our camping buddies - own a campsite. How COOL is that??) though, cake was called for and traybake was going to fit the bill.

But first, I must digress.

I haven't written much about camping this summer. Truth is that a couple of things have conspired. 

Firstly, I feel strangely coy about our decision, subsequently executed at the beginning of the year, to sell our beloved Daisy and upgrade to Sadie (or Wussie as she seems to be referred to mostly, based on an unfortunate number plate). We all loved Daisy, our 1989 T25, and selling her wasn't an easy decision but she was viciously uneconomical in the petrol department and we weren't content with pottering down to Dorset every couple of weekends. Already planning trips into Europe, and knowing in our hearts that she wouldn't be up to it (or, rather, our holiday fund wasn't up to funding her guzzling petrol all the way through France), the move to Wales was the final nail in the coffin - her paintwork would never have survived the salty atmosphere living by the sea. So Daisy went to a good home (I won't go into details, but I felt like she was continuing the good work she started with us) and we searched for our next van. We have upgraded massively, and on every level Wussie is superior. I miss Daisy. But not enough to feel too sad.

Secondly, we haven't actually done that much camping. Plenty of day trips, and having the van has meant we can stay out longer, take food with us, but as I may have mentioned before, living in such a coastal and rural area, well, the need, the desperate desire to escape to the sea that certainly I used to feel, is just not there. We did have a fantastic weekend camping down in Newport, a mere 20 minute drive away, and of course, the holiday in France, all made possible by Wussie, but, really, that's it.

But this weekend, the last of the summer holidays, we're off camping on our friends' campsite for Liz's 40th. Liz is awesome, and she's going to be such a fantastic campsite owner. At the moment, the site they've bought isn't licensed for tents, but they are working on it. And if you have a caravan or camper and need somewhere near Chippenham/Bath to stay, let me know...

In the tradition of several awesome camping birthdays we've been to, there's an element of everyone mucking in together to bring tonnes of booze salads, puddings and cakes. 

Incidentally, does anyone get the feeling that as you get older, there's a formula that should be applied to ensure you don't bring too much booze to events like this? I haven't quite worked it out - I bet I'm not the only person to have experienced these weekends where everyone forgets that they have kids and responsible jobs (either in or outside the home) and enthusiastically brings the same amount as they would have aged 23...

Anyway, digression over, and cake is where I was. I made 2 Mary Berry traybakes in preparation for the festivities. I'm not a huge fan of Mary Berry, and my views on the whole GBBO caravan have already been documented -  I wouldn't know exactly what happened in recent episodes, because I'm not watching the latest series, but I'd just like to say that the suggestion of 'naughty editing' by the BBC to make more out of the Baked Alaska issue than was there, painting a darker picture of the actions of one of the contestants, only goes to convince me that I'm right, and this show is not really much better than Jeremy Kyle...

But my mother in law gave me a Mary Berry cookbook for my birthday, and I'll concede that conniver in carcrash TV or not, Mary Berry does make a good tray bake. Her lemon drizzle traybake is pretty hard to beat for quick and easy, and I've made it a number of times, and, for this weekend, I also made her rich chocolate tray bake with feathered icing. Very straightforward, chocolate sponge, chocolate ganache, and then white chocolate.

The white chocolate should have been piped in straight lines (ha!), evenly spaced across the cake, and then I should have dragged a cocktail stick through to produce the 'feathers'.

Well there was no chance. I'm not great at decorative icing, and while I did toy with attempting a white chocolate "Happy Birthday Liz", I thought better of it and decided swirls would be a good option. And so they were. Melted white chocolate spooned into a piping bag, I snipped the end off as close to the end as I could and simply swirled.

Chocolate Yorkshire Pudding - a Random Recipe

Well, of course I didn’t intend to make chocolate Yorkshire pudding,and pretty stodgy at that, but that’s how it turned out.

What I meant to make was a chocolate cake, in honour of the children’s first day at their new school. 

We packed up on Sunday, and arrived in our new house around 9 that night, ready for our worldly goods to arrive on Monday, which they duly did, despite a small detour around Newcastle Emlyn. We spent the day directing the removals men and unpacking furiously, so that on Tuesday, there was the opportunity to go for a play on the beach in the morning, and on Wednesday, having delivered the children to their new educational establishment, the Husband and I walked some of the coastal path with the dog, before coming back to the new house to sort out the shed and make homemade butternut soup for lunch. The very picture of domestic bliss.

I was feeling so confident that I thought I’d try out the oven and make a cake to welcome the kids home after their first day at the new school. In the interests of entering Random Recipes, with a chocolate theme this month, I first had to find my recipe books – easier said than done, but I located them then spent some time re-ordering them in the absence of a shelf. All set, then the dog was sick … Time ticked on – I don’t expect I’m the only one to think that the school day is shockingly short – I mean, you’ve hardly dropped them off than it’s time to go and collect them – so rather than a leisurely baking session, I was running out of time. Rather than a totally random selection, I ended up with one of my Great Aunt’s notebooks, and a recipe entitled “Chocolate Cake (Jessie’s)”,  copied out in copper plate handwriting. The 'Jessie' in question is my maternal grandmother, and it felt right to be making one of her cakes.

As the lack of time necessitated a dead easy one, this fitted the bill: butter, sugar, hot chocolate powder, flour all mixed together with some boiling water and baked. Except the dog was sick again, and my temperamental scales had definitely run out of battery. I guessed the butter, without being able to verify that I’d got it right, then used a helpful conversion table that I found in my Prue Leith Cookery Bible that told me that a heaped tablespoon of flour was equal to an ounce. As the recipe was (of course) in imperial, I thought I’d got away with it, and banged it all into the new oven.

 Well, I think I’ll blame the new oven rather than the rather random approach to the measurements, or the distraction of a vomiting dog, for the fact that the cake came out of the oven with 5 minutes to go before we needed to leave to collect the kids, looking for all the world like a square and rather stodgy piece of chocolate Yorkshire pudding. 

Still, covered in chocolate buttercream, it had a certain attraction, and the kids loved it, so mission accomplished but not something I’ll be hoping to repeat.

As I am wirelessly-challenged for a couple more weeks, you’ll have to wait for the photographs, until such time as my SD card, my laptop and an internet connection converge.

This is an entry into Random Recipes 37 AND the 'we should cocoa' linky - with a chocolate theme.

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.