Let them eat cake

I received some bad news today. When everything is going wrong, chocolate cake is surely the answer.

This is very simple and I have made it at least 50 times and never screwed it up (apart from the time I almost forgot to include any sugar - an opportune taste test alerted me to the issue, thankfully). In fact this is actually my number one most baked recipe. Perfect for a time when you really don't know what to do with yourself. It comes from a book my mum has had for years called "Destitute Gourmet"(website here).

Dana's Chocolate Cake

I never even really measure everything exactly, it just seems to work.

Everything goes in one bowl in no particular order (sometimes if I feel like it I sift the dry ingredients first but it's not necessary) -

1 2/3 cups flour

1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 cups sugar

2/3 cup cocoa powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups milk

100g butter (entirely melted in the microwave)

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Mix either by hand with a big wooden spoon or in an electric mixer until everything is smooth. The mixture is usually a bit runny. Pour into a lined tin (for some reason I have always found that a ring tin works best) and bake for 50 mins at 180 degrees, but check at 45!

Put an ocean and a river between everything, yourself, and home

Today is a day to to feel grumpy, and feeling grumpy means chocolate self-saucing pudding. However, I will not be able to make it tonight as I have "prior engagements" i.e. volunteer work and study.

So, in the spirit of chocolate self saucing pudding, here is the recipe most commonly devoured after dinner in my flat, which I made last week:

Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding

(from here, by way of it being the first result in google and now permanently affixed to our fridge)

For the "cake":

100g melted butter (approximately, we don't have a scale...)

1 cup white sugar, nothing fancy

2 Tbsp cocoa powder (organic dutch is really the best but standard stuff will do the trick)

1 1/3 cup plain flour

4 tsp baking powder 

sprinkle of salt

2/3 cup milk

slurp of vanilla essence

For the sauce:

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

4 Tbsp cocoa powder (however I have used 2 in the past when we were low and it seemed to come out fine regardless)

1 1/2 cup boiling water (the original recipe calls for 2 cups but I have found it is too saucy)

Mix the melted butter, sugar and cocoa powder in a large oven proof bowl. You will end up with a dark chocolatey grainy looking mess. Mix in the flour, baking powder and salt until just combined. At this point it will look pretty lumpy and not very well incorporated. Add the milk and vanilla and mix until you get something that looks more like a batter. Don't worry about lumps, the recipe is very forgiving. Until yesterday we didn't have a wooden spoon so I used a dessert spoon for all my mixing, which did the job fine for something like this.

In a jug, mix together the brown sugar, white sugar and cocoa powder. Sprinkle over the top of the batter mix. Pour the boiled water over the back of a large spoon into the bowl. 

Place bowl in the oven and bake at 180 degrees C for about 40 minutes. I find when the 40 minutes is up if I remove it from the oven and stick a spoon into it as if I was going to start spooning it out, although the top looks perfectly cooked, it's pretty clear that the cake part is still sticky, so I put it back in the oven for a few more minutes. It's easy to tell the difference between what is undercooked batter and what is just runny sauce, because the batter is much thicker at this point and a lighter brown. My theory is that by making a hole in the top as if you were going to slice a piece of cake, the uncooked mixture underneath gets exposed to the heat more instead of just the top getting more and more cooked with the under section remaining gooey. If you let it stand for a few minutes out of the oven the sauce itself will start to thicken up.

Deceptive appearance of being cooked, but just under that "crust" is gooey batter

I turn on the oven to heat up when I start making the mixture, and from doing that I know that it takes me exactly 12 minutes to get the mix together and by that time the oven has just come to temperature so it's pretty perfect, and there is minimal clean up with only one bowl being used.

Final result, served with apricot yoghurt

Date Steak Sauce

Just a quick, slightly hungover update: Nigella's "Date Steak" sauce from Kitchen is awesome and so easy to make. All you have to do is mix quantities of vinegar, mustard, soy sauce, sugar, ginger and some kind of berry jelly (I used the cranberry sauce I made for Christmas) in a pan until everything gets bubbly and then remove from the heat to cool. We ate this with steak, mashed potatoes and salad leaves and the sauce went just as well with the mash and lettuce as the steak, to my surprise.

 Date Steak Sauce

Indian Roast Potatoes

Indian Roast Potatoes

I received Nigella Kitchen as a gift in a round-about kind of way and have been trying to make some recipes I have marked off in it during the last few weeks. A few days ago I made Indian Roast Potatoes from Kitchen. I'm not normally a huge fan of roast potatoes but these were something I would happily make again and try different spice combinations. My Dad found them too spicy, but he doesn't have much tolerance for spicy food.

INDIAN ROAST POTATOES
from Nigella Kitchen (slightly adapted)

5-7 potatoes, depending on size and number of people who will share the dish
2 tablespoons of oil (I used Prenzel Garlic Oil)
2 teaspoons turmeric powder
1 teaspoon fennel seeds (these give a licorice flavour)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon poppy seeds
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder
1 bulb of garlic

1 red onion chopped finely
juice of 1 lime
fresh parsley

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius. Cut potatoes into cubes (approximately the size of an O you can make with your thumb and first finger) and put them into a clean plastic bag (I used the bag the carrots came in from the supermarket). Dump all the spices and oil in to the bag too and shake everything around until the potatoes are thoroughly coated. They will be a yellow colour because of the turmeric and studded with black dots from the poppy seeds. Place the potatoes into a roasting dish, trying to spread them so they make one layer of cubes without sitting on top of each other. Place unpeeled garlic cloves randomly amongst the potatoes. Cook for one hour.

While the potatoes are in the oven, finely dice the onion. The recipe called for only 1/2 an onion but I used a whole one and I'm glad I did because I liked the sweetness of the onion contrasted with the potatoes. Put the diced onion in a small bowl and squeeze the juice of a lime into the bowl. Leave the onion to sit while the potatoes cook and it will "macerate", a term I hadn't heard before but apparently just means to soften in liquid. I found the lime juice made the onion taste sweeter.

macerated onion

When the potatoes are out of the oven, spread the sweet onion dice through the potatoes along with some chopped fresh parsley.