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Cakes 6, 7, and 8, or I Have Been Baking But Not Blogging

7 October 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
1 Comment

So, at the start of October, I am behind on cakes. I just did number 9 on Friday, and number 10 is coming today. Those should have been done by the end of September if I wanted to be halfway through at the half time mark. But that’s ok. I can probably catch up. What I’m VERY behind on, obviously, is the writing about it part.

I’m kind of ok with this since the point is more the cakes than the writing. There has also been a lot of work going on in my kitchen and bombarding of my wallet in other ways, so I’m fairly impressed that I’ve managed to keep up the baking through it, which obviously requires the kitchen space, and perhaps less obviously, a fair amount of money. I guess the thing that suffers here is my commentary on the beers and even the flavour of the cakes, because it’s hard to write about that kind of thing weeks after the fact without notes.

In any case, I will give a brief rundown of cakes 6-8 so that I get something up here rather than never doing it at all, and hopefully I can then get back into normal cake writing starting with number 9. So: onwards!

6: Chocolate Ginger Beer Cake with *gasp* NO BEER!

I found a recipe for Chocolate Root Beer Cake on The Kitchn in the midst of the craziest part of kitchen work. It was a super easy recipe, which I needed if I was going to pull of any baking at that point. But I’m not a huge fan of root beer, so I swapped it for ginger beer and I did not frost the cake because there was so much sugar going into it that I guessed it probably wasn’t necessary. I was right. The cake surprisingly ended up not too sweet, but It was fine without frosting. It had a nice gingery flavour and was pretty light. However, it was also full of hard bits of flour, because I was slightly lazy about getting it all mixed in properly. So, slight disaster and not something I would bring in to work or serve to other people. But it was a nice thing to keep in the cabinet and snack on all week.

The plan had been to go find a beer with a hit of ginger in it to go with this, but I never made it to the beer store that week, and I was so busy I just ended up drinking wine or milk with it. I was a little annoyed with myself for not making the extra effort, but there you have it. I also don’t have a picture of this cake so you’ll have to trust I made and devoured it without proof. No one is perfect, especially me.

7: Chocolate Zucchini Cake with Cromarty Brewing Co. Red Rocker

Lovely cake, lovely beer, just not good together.

This cake was awesome! I think it may be my favourite so far, at least of the ones I haven’t made before. I had a bunch of zucchini in my veg box and I love zucchini bread and muffins, but I’d never done a chocolate version before so I googled it and got to work. I thought it would be appropriate to try the recipe from the blog actually CALLED Chocolate and Zucchini. I used olive oil rather than butter, mostly because I was almost out of butter. I didn’t have any coffee so I didn’t use that, and I had just under the right amount of chocolate, but it was fine, and it also had dried cranberries in it which was quite a nice touch for the cake in the end. It was an extremely easy cake to make and I will absolutely be adding it to my repertoire.

I made it to Cornelius this time and I grabbed Cromarty Brewing Co‘s Red Rocker, which they call a ‘red rye hop extravaganza’ on the label. It’s 5%, hoppy as promised, and on it’s own, quite a lovely beer. Unfortunately, it did not match the cake. This may be the first real match fail. It’s hard to remember specifics from a few weeks ago, but I remember thinking it was bringing out all the wrong parts of the zucchini flavour in the cake and just not playing nicely with the rest. I put it down until I finished the cake and then happily drank the rest afterwards.

8: Black Bottom Cupcakes with Williams Bros. 80/-

Good all ’round.

I have made these many times, and I’ve even written about them here before, so the recipe already exists on this blog. They’re so easy and I happened to have everything in the house to make them when Kristina, who loves these cakes, was coming for dinner around the time of her birthday, so what better excuse, really!

We were drinking wine that night but for the beer match a few nights later, I went and grabbed some Williams Bros. 80/-, mostly because it’s just really good beer and I wanted some (I love Williams’, easily one of the best breweries in Scotland). These cakes have a bit of cheesecake in the top so I was wondering how it would go, because I keep thinking cheesecake is going to be the hardest to match. But here, it didn’t seem to be any kind of interference. The lovely dark beer went well with the richness of the chocolate cake bit of the cupcakes, and the tang of the cheese seemed to work ok with all of it. So this was a happy, easy match, which is great because now I know what to drink with black bottom cupcakes.

5: Hershey Chocolate Cake with Knops California Common AND Beer Ice Cream!

2 September 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
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I made this cake about 3 weeks ago now, but it’s been chaos around here. There was some re-doing of the kitchen, so I had no sink for about a week, and things were dusty and discombobulated. Great for drinking beer, but not for making lots of cake. I’ll soon get back into the swing of things, but first I have to write about cake number 5 and its accompaniments, because YUM.

SO MANY TASTY THINGS IN THIS PICTURE. I can’t even handle it.

The Cake

This cake is the cake on the back of the Hershey Cocoa container. This cake is the cake my Mom made for birthdays and frosted with all sorts of different things. This cake is so incredibly easy it should probably be illegal, and no one ever believes it’s easy when they taste it. Everyone who tries this cake loves it and I can throw it together in about 10 minutes with my eyes closed. Whether you’re a baker or not, you can make this cake. This is THE ONLY CHOCOLATE CAKE YOU WILL EVER NEED.

Ok. It’s good cake. Got it. But seriously, I tell people this is like a homemade boxed cake, because it sort of is. You do it all in one bowl and there’s no fancy business going on. You literally just throw all the ingredients together and beat them, then add the boiling water at the end. It’s moist and dense and adaptable if you want to try new things with it. It’s not super fancy and it doesn’t require expensive ingredients. It just works, and it’s good, and I was so excited about it this time that I even forgot to put the dinosaur sprinkles on that I planned. But that’s because there was ice cream. More on that later.

You can frost this cake with anything, and my favourite is mint flavoured homemade whipped cream. My Dad used to make this into a multi-layer Christmas tree cake for my Mom’s birthday with mint whipped cream dyed green. I think my Grandma used to make it for her. It’s even what I requested for my high school graduation party minus the Christmas tree shape (aaaages ago, yeesh). But this time I frosted it with the chocolate frosting that goes with the cake recipe. It’s also super easy because you just melt the butter rather than beating it with the sugar from solid.

So without further ado:

Hershey’s ‘Perfectly Chocolate’ Chocolate Cake

2 cups sugar
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water

Heat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and flour two 9-inch round baking pans.

Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin). Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes; remove from pans to wire racks. Cool completely before frosting.

THAT’S ALL. Can you believe it? Everyone can make this cake. I promise. Oh, and the frosting:

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine
2/3 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa
3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt butter. Stir in cocoa. Alternately add powdered sugar and milk, beating to spreading consistency.
Add small amount additional milk, if needed. Stir in vanilla. About 2 cups frosting.

(Obviously you don’t need to use Hershey cocoa for this. You don’t even get it in the UK so I just use whatever.)

MAKE IT. LOVE IT.

The Beer AND The Beer Ice Cream

So I’d been planning on making this as one of my cakes from the start, but since it’s such an easy one, I wanted to do something fun with it. I really wanted to try making beer ice cream, and I thought this cake would be perfect for a kind of cake and ice cream and party beer type thing.

The original plan was to use Cooper’s, because it’s the sort of thing I could see bringing a six-pack of (‘merican style) to a party. But Cornelius was out when I went to find some, and there were whole lovely cases of Knops beer sitting there waiting to be loved. As I mentioned in the intro post, I’ve been planning to use Knops at some point anyway, because my friend’s brother makes it and it’s fantastic. So I picked up a few bottles of California Common (which I can also imagine bringing a six-pack of to a party, if only there was such packaging here) and brought it home to meet its party partners.

This match wasn’t so much about the taste as the theme, but regardless of that, the beer worked well with the cake. The cake doesn’t have a complicated or sophisticated chocolate flavour, so it would probably go fairly well with anything that doesn’t have some sort of insane flavouring or hoppiness going on, but party cake and beer match was achieved! And California Common is a great drinkable party-time type beer in the best of ways. It’s not terribly strong at 4.6% so you can drink it all night (or all day at a barbeque) and it’s got a lovely flavour that complements a lot of different things.

Now, the ice cream. I’ve never made beer ice cream before of course, but the California Common worked so incredibly well, and beer ice cream might just be the best thing ever to have with Hershey chocolate cake. OH MY GOD. People. Try it. I got the ice cream recipe on the Awl.

It’s super simple. I don’t even have a proper ice cream maker, I just put it in a stainless steel bowl in the freezer and took it out every 30 minutes to mix the hell out of for about 3 hours. Then I put it in containers to freeze solid. Then I ate it with chocolate cake and beer. And man, was it good. I’m actually just thinking now I should have tried a beer float. THE POSSIBILITIES!

But anyway: Beer ice cream! Do it! When you first taste it, it’s kind of weird because it’s not what you expect. Then you have another taste and you’re like, DAMN! Why did I not do this before? Every day of my life?! I now have a reason to get a proper ice cream maker. Many different varieties of beer ice cream!

Also, everyone go get some Knops! Drink it with the only chocolate cake you’ll ever need, then make ice cream with it, then drink some more.

4: Smitten Kitchen’s Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll with Kaiserdom Dark Lager

19 August 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
2 Comments

The Cake

Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll from Smitten Kitchen

Cake! So very, very nice.

I’m not going to paste the recipe here, because you should really go look at Smitten Kitchen and get hooked. Deb’s photography is WAY better than the crap I’ve got going on here, and you will find many, many lovely things to make. I will simply discuss my adjustments here.

This cake made up for the failings of the German Chocolate cake and then some. First of all, I love Smitten Kitchen. Everything I’ve ever made from there has been nothing short of amazing, and it’s even the source of my now-default brownie recipe. I will also take this moment to praise the slightly healthier carrot salad with harissa, feta and mint, because I’ve been craving it lately. As far as cooking guidance goes, I rate it right up there with anything by Jamie Oliver, because it never fails me. That’s about the highest praise I can give.

In any case, I chose this one because it was fairly simple, especially compared to the hell I’d just been through, and it looked like a good opportunity to tweak a bit without fear of disaster. Also: home-made whipped cream. Always a good thing. And a good excuse to try another one of Deb’s recipes.

Willie’s Cacao comes in satisfying, if slightly difficult to work with, round hunks.

The first thing I proved here was that using good chocolate really does pay off. I decided to go all out on the ‘good chocolate’ front and used Willie’s Cacao. Super damn expensive (£5.99 for 180g, which I needed all of for this recipe) but really worth it, and great for a simple cake like this one where the chocolate is one of few ingredients. Also, all of it is 100%, so no chance this cake was going to be too sweet like the sugar bomb I just made.

I chose the Madagascan Black 100% Sambriano Cacao, because the tasting notes said it had ‘juicy summer fruit notes’ and I was planning on getting some raspberry action in on this cake. And I’d say it worked perfectly.

The thing with this cacao stuff is that it doesn’t melt like something that is less than 100%, so I had to add a bit more coffee than the recipe stated to get to slightly more workable, and then I had to beat it into the egg mixture a bit at a time because it was too thick to stir in. But a little perseverance on that front paid off, so it was no bother. I was more paranoid about burning my fancy chocolate than anything, but I avoided it.

Also, I didn’t have the right pan for this cake, and because I’d spent so much on the cacao, I decided I couldn’t justify buying another new pan this time around. So I used a normal Pyrex dish and that meant the cake was thicker than I think it’s supposed to be. So despite rolling it up to cool, it still cracked in a few places. But no matter! I glued it together with raspberry puree and whipped cream and it tasted fantastic.

Speaking of raspberry puree, all I did was whizz up some frozen raspberries with a drop of water and a bit of sugar in a big mug. I slathered that all over the cake (and, er. in the cracks as glue) and then topped it with the whipped cream before rolling everything together and hiding the big crack along the top with more raspberry puree.

The final texture of the cake was almost like mousse. It was very, very dark, and the whipped cream ended up sweeter than I’d normally make it due to a slip of the sugar spoon, but it was ok because the cake was so rich it stood up to it.

Anyway. Make this cake. It makes bad days better. And it’s also gluten free, if you need that kind of thing, so bonus!

The Beer

Clearly this blog has shown that I cannot pour beer properly when it’s about to be photographed. But hey, cake!

I didn’t have a particular beer in mind for this one, so I asked Scott to pick something since he was going to Cornelius and I was feeling lazy. He presented me with Kaiserdom Dark Lager, which is 4.7% abv. Doesn’t have a super strong flavour, but has a bit of a chocolate note and I think it worked well with the cake, mostly because it complemented the raspberries very well. Also it makes me happy because it reminds me of staying at the Kaiserdom inn in Bamberg, and that would make any beer lover happy, really.

I guess I don’t have a ton to say about the beer in particular because I was so excited about this cake, but it matched well and did the job, so that’s all I can ask for.

3: German Chocolate Cake with Maui Brewing Co Coconut Porter

6 August 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
1 Comment

The Cake

Very big, very full of sugar.

I’m not falling behind on my cake making, just my cake writing. Cake 4 is actually cooling on the counter as I write this, so I’m feeling good about my pacing. But this bloody German Chocolate Cake was so exhausting it took me 24 hours to get around to eating it, and about 2 more days to try it with the beer. I didn’t want to write about it because I had to recover.

I’d say this was my first cake fail. Not because it was inedible or anything, but because I was pretty unhappy with it as a cake in general. It was super expensive to make, and I had been kind of excited about it because I haven’t had German chocolate cake in ages. And I usually like it when I have a good one! But I’d never made it so when I saw the coconut porter on the shelf, I thought it would be a good excuse to try.

I’m not going to copy the recipe here because it’s LONG, but the one I decided to go with was David Lebovitz’s German Chocolate Cake. Go have a gander at it. It’s really quite intimidating. I had a long talk with myself about taking things one step at a time and just chugging on through, much like difficult work projects and life in general.

And that was fine, but this really is fairly advanced baking. Not because any one thing is super hard, but there are SO MANY THINGS and so many different parts to put together. And cutting cake layers in half horizontally is never really my idea of fun. But I knew I could do it, so, I kept on and took my time.

OVER THREE HOURS OF IT.

For real. At least there wasn’t a scary Anglerfish at the end trying to eat me. But the cake I ended up with wasn’t something I particularly wanted to eat myself, which may be just as bad.

The cake itself wasn’t too bad, but it was also a fussy one to make for something not all that magical at the end. I knew this right away because my tins were too small, so I had to cut off the overflowed edges of the cakes and eat them right away (problem solving!). At that point I still had three other components to make and a whole assembly to take care of ahead of me, so I needed encouragement.

Finally about to come together. Look at all the stuff!

The coconut pecan filling was very sweet, and there was a lot of it, plus there’s this sugar rum syrup business, and that’s before you get to the chocolate ganache icing. The recipe says to brush every layer of the cake with syrup before spreading some of the filling on, and I think this ended up making it too stodgy. Add the weight of all that filling and the whole thing really condensed itself, which makes the lightness of the original cake seem sort of pointless.

I used liquid glucose in the ganache instead of corn syrup, because you don’t really get corn syrup here nor do I have the urge to have any in my house. I feel like I should have just left it out altogether, because between that and the so-so chocolate I used, the mixture kept splitting weirdly, and it only stuck to the sides of the cake with a lot of perseverance. Lesson: always use awesome chocolate even if it’s going to cost you twice as much, and skip the weird additives that are only there for shine.

After this marathon evening of baking, I could barely look at the thing I’d just finished. Instead I made some nachos, drank a glass of wine, and went to bed. The next day, when I hoisted the very heavy thing out of the fridge and cut myself a veeeeery thin slice, it was just too much. Too sweet, too thick, too many things going on. I couldn’t finish it, even with a big glass of milk. So now I had an enormous cake that could probably feed at least 20 people, and I didn’t really want it. But I’d have to eat at least a little more, because the beer! I was excited about the beer! More on which in a minute.

If I had known this cake would be so insane, I would have maybe tried to make it as a two layer cake with the filling only between the two layers, no syrup, and a thin layer of ganache over the whole thing (using better chocolate). But even then, I’m not sure I would have loved it.

The Beer

Hooray for good beer! And I told you I had tiny, tiny pieces of cake. It doesn’t even look very nice once it’s cut. Pfft.

This cake was made because I chose a beer I wanted to try to match, and happily that beer was great! Maui Brewing Co‘s Coconut Porter (in a can!) was something I’d been eying for a while. It’s 6% abv and brewed in Hawaii, so it came a long way to sort out this piece of cake. And it was a great match in that it actually made the cake slightly easier to eat. I still only had a teeny piece, but the flavour and richness of the beer balanced the cake’s insanity out enough to enjoy it a little. And the beer itself had just a hint of coconut under a lovely, dark, malty yumminess. I had some with spicy sweet potato fries as well, and that was heavenly. I will be trying their other beers. Plus their logo is a turtle, which makes everything better.

So anyway, cake fail, beer win! I’m ok with that. Especially as the next cake is way, way less crazy, so I’m looking forward to having a whole cake I actually want to eat again.

2: Rich Chocolate Stout Cake with The Kernel Brewery London Imperial Brown Stout

21 July 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
2 Comments

The Cake

I love this cake. It’s from the Green & Black’s Chocolate Cookbook (which is like a guide to true happiness) and it’s one of my favourites ever. I recently realised that I somehow have not made it in over two years. How is that even possible?! It does involve a lot of bowls and some finicky mixing of cocoa powder and beer (gets very frothy and fizzy at random intervals, can make a huge mess, often does), plus grating chocolate (chocolate wants to melt, not be grated. But this time I used my food processor. Win!), but all the trouble is so worth it that it doesn’t matter.

I’d been planning to make this my second cake forever, but regardless of that, I was so not prepared.

First of all, my springform tin is at my friends Kristina and Yann’s house, where it has been since Thanksgiving when they made a tasty, tasty meal and I contributed a pumpkin cheesecake to the mammoth dessert table. Since then I have found many excuses to not take it away with me when I go over. I realised on cake-making day that it was still there when I was thinking about how awesome it was that by nightfall I would have some of my favourite chocolate cake to munch. Normally I’d just go pick it up, but they were both away, so after a bit of googling, the situation turned into an excuse to buy a new tin on the way home.

The springform tin that is currently vacationing in another cabinet was from IKEA, and it came with a normal flat insert and a bundt insert. I have used both and I’m a fan of transformer-like bakeware (or anything), especially as I’ve got a small space. But the IKEA tin is leaky, and I always have to wrap the bottom in foil so butter and stuff doesn’t get all over the bottom of the oven. So I bought a pushpan from Lakeland, which I was assured by the online description and commenters alike WOULD NEVER LEAK EVER and is also like the messiah of bakeware, apparently. It’s a round tin with a loose bottom, but the bottom has a silicone seal around the edge to prevent leaking. I was skeptical as I am with all claims of miraculous kitchenware, but I wasn’t going to go buy basically the same tin I already had, and I figured if it worked, it would be a major score. So I bought it. (Along with a pair of magnetic toast tongs! More on that some other time.)

Next stop was Cornelius for beer. I got one type of stout to go in the cake, one type to go with it, and two Cooper’s sparkling ales to drink while eating dinner and baking.

Then it was on to the co-op to pick up the ingredients I didn’t have. Usually I have all kinds of basic baking stuff, but my supplies are a little depleted lately and I stupidly left this bit of shopping til about five minutes before I wanted to make the cake. Folly, clearly. The co-op I normally go to has a healthy selection of baking stuff, but the one on the way back from Cornelius, not so much. Still, I decided they MUST have dark brown sugar, so I just went with it. But they did not have dark brown sugar.

I stood there in the tiny area of the aisle reserved for baking stuff staring intently at the 4 other types of sugar they did have, thinking maybe if I just looked hard enough, what I needed would appear (this has actually worked before, as it’s a function of me not being able to recognise what’s right in front of me, which I often try to battle). It didn’t work. I started to get a bit huffy with myself, thinking I’d need to go to another shop, and I didn’t WANT to, I just wanted to go home and make cake and UGHHHH. But then I thought of these manatees.

Calming manatees

Seriously, I did. And I was like, hell yes you got this! You have like, 5 OTHER kinds of sugar in various amounts in the cabinet, in addition to the not enough brown sugar. You have baked a lot of cakes. You can make that shit work. And I answered myself, hell yes you can! Let’s go make some cake! So I paid for my other stuff and left.

Then I got home, cracked open a Cooper’s, and made this:

Green & Black’s Rich Chocolate Stout Cake

225g unsalted butter, softened
350g soft dark brown sugar
4 eggs, beaten
225g plain flour
half a teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
400ml Guinness or stout (allow the head to settle)
100g cocoa powder
150g dark chocolate, minimum 60% cocoa solids, grated (I used 85%)

Preheat oven to 180C / 350F / gas mark 4

Butter and line a DEEP 9″ cake tin with greaseproof paper, or butter and flour it like I did. (My new miracle pan says it’s so nonstick this is never necessary, but claims like that are never true.)

Making a tasty mess.

Cream butter and sugar and gradually add beaten eggs. Sift together the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Mix together the stout and cocoa in a jug. (You will have to persevere with mixing.) Add the grated chocolate. Do this bit in a bowl larger than you think you’ll need for it. I’m telling you, fizziness!

Add the flour and the stout mixture alternately to the cake mixture, stirring between each addition until completely mixed. The consistency will be soft.

Spoon into the cake tin and bake for 1hr – 1hr 15min until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. You may need to cover the cake with foil or greaseproof paper after about 1 hour to prevent the top from browning. (You should actually probably do this at about 50 minutes in. I forgot to and had a bit of burny-ness on top. Oh well.)
Remove from the oven and leave to stand for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.

This cake is ENORMOUS. The benefit of this is that you can pick at it and pick at it and it barely decreases in size. And you can feed your whole office on it if you so choose. They will love you forever.

A note about the sugar substitutions – I used a combination of dark brown sugar, light brown sugar, and demerara sugar with a few tablespoons of treacle to get the sticky moistness back. It worked perfectly fine. I think people are so worried about making substitutions in baking because we’re always told you must follow the recipe because the recipe is the law and you will screw up EVERYTHING EVER if you don’t. And I get caught up in this too, because to an extent, it’s true. But if you bake enough cakes, you’re going to have a sense of what you can swap for what if you’re in a jam. A different kind of sugar might make the cake turn out slightly different, but it won’t destroy the whole thing.

I did not do well pouring the beer. No head. Shame on me. But it didn’t change the fact that it was tasty as hell.

The Beer

I used Bristol Beer Factory‘s Milk Stout in the cake. It’s 4.5% abv, bottle-conditioned, and CAMRA’s National Champion Stout for 2009. I didn’t get to taste too much of it because there’s 500ml in a bottle and the recipe needs 400ml. Also it was completely room temp when I drank the rest, which is actually ok for picking up flavours, but not ideal for drinking beer. I left the hardcore stuff to pair with the cake and went with this one for mixing in because it’s not too crazy or strong, and it did a good job I’d say. I’ve made this cake with lots of different stouts before, and I think the best was Brooklyn Brewery’s Chocolate Stout, for obvious reasons. That’s also a lot stronger and only available seasonally though.

For drinking, I treated myself to a bottle of Imperial Brown Stout from The Kernel Brewery London. It’s 10% abv and also bottle-conditioned. And it was fantaaaaaastic! I didn’t anticipate matching this cake to be difficult because: stout with stout cake, duh. But that was an excuse to get something a bit nice, and this WAS. It cost £4 for a 330ml bottle, but it was worth it. It was dark and rich and had a lot of coffee and chocolate flavour in it, but it also had a bit of a really mellow single-malt whisky taste to it. It stood up to the cake perfectly and got me pleasantly buzzed as it was so strong. I highly recommend it! I just wish I had more, because I still have a ton of cake left, but no beer.

The Tin

In case you’re wondering, the miraculous Lakeland pushpan actually IS pretty good. No leaks, and works the way it says it will. Satisfied customer! I’m looking forward to making this in it and not getting butter all over my oven.

1: Duck Egg Chocolate Sponge with St Andrews Brewing Co Crail Ale

8 July 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
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The first match is done, and it’s not a complete disaster!

The Cake

To avoid confusion, the duck is on the label.

I found this three-ingredient recipe for a duck egg sponge cake a while ago on The Kitchn. I like ducks! And duck eggs are amazing, particularly for baking, so I’ve been wanting to try it. I decided to try to make it chocolate so I could kick this project off with an experiment. It also meant my breakfast included a soft-boiled duck egg, and that is reason enough.

I’m tempted to bake all of my 20 cakes with duck eggs, because they make such a nice cake. Their yolks have more fat and their whites have more protein than chicken eggs, so everything turns out fluffier and richer. They aren’t too much more expensive than normal free-range eggs, and they even stick a duck on the label. Just so you know. Also it means having an excuse to go to the butcher all the time, and when you go on Saturdays, you get to try all sorts of sausages from the sample trays. Bonus!

I wanted to convert the measurements of this recipe to weights, especially since I was altering it slightly, but when I pulled out my scales to weigh the flour, I pushed the tare button and it tersely flashed ‘Lo’ at me and shut itself off. I tried swapping the batteries around to get a minute of extra life out of it, but to no avail, so I’ll have to stick with cups and spoons on this one. (I went to get batteries for it later on and found out that those flat coin-shaped batteries are friggin’ expensive, and this thing needs two. Hidden costs of baking. Urgh.)

Duck-Egg Chocolate Sponge Cake

3⁄4 cup minus 5 tsp plain flour
6 tsp cocoa powder
3 organic duck eggs
6 tablespoons caster sugar

Double cream and a bit of sugar

2 x 8in round cake tins, lined. The original recipe calls for 7in tins, but I only have 8in. The cakes turn out very thin, so I wouldn’t recommend using 9in tins if that’s all you’ve got. Maybe just go for one layer in that case.

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Butter the tin, line the bottom with parchment paper, and flour the sides.

Separate the egg whites from the yolks. Whites into a large bowl, yolks set aside in a small one. I managed to make a mess doing this. Duck eggs have thick shells and are hard to crack cleanly unless you give them a properly good whack the first time. I ended up draining the whites through my fingers, and they’re very thick, so they don’t like to part with their yolks easily.

Shiny!

Add the sugar to the egg whites and whisk until stiff. (You can hold the bowl upside down over your head to check for good measure.) Whisk the yolks in one by one, then sift in the flour and cocoa and carefully fold it in so the mixture doesn’t deflate.

Divide the mixture between the prepared pans. I baked the cakes for only 15 minutes, and that was plenty. They probably could have gone even less. It’s a delicate cake and you don’t want to dry it out.

Turn the cakes out to cool on a rack and make some whipped cream. I used one small pot of double cream (300ml I think?) and added a little bit of sugar and about a tablespoon of Grand Marnier. I wanted a little hint of orange, so I would have used some orange zest instead if I had it instead actually. I managed to overwhip the cream by about a second and a half, so it turned out more like thick frosting than soft cream, but oh well.

Sandwich the cake together with the whipped cream and put the rest on top. You’re done!

The Beer

I was aiming for something pale and summery for this because it’s basically a Victoria sponge with a chocolate hint – not strongly flavoured at all. I went to Cornelius on Friday and picked out 3 things I thought might work. Goose Island Summertime, Redchurch Brewery Bethnal Pale Ale, and St Andrews Brewing Co Crail Ale.

Finished cake (not terribly photogenic) with all the beers.

St Andrews Brewing Co Crail Ale

When the cake was done I lined them all up and decided to go with the Crail Ale. It had the lowest alcohol content (4.5%) and the tasting notes promised citrus and floral flavours, which is what I was looking for. It’s a decent match. I think the flavour was still a bit too strong for the cake, but the cake is so mild that it’s difficult not to overpower it a little. Maybe if I would have added some fruit in between the layers along with the whipped cream, it would have worked even better. But for a first try, I think I actually did all right.

I’m not sure I’d make this cake as a chocolate one again, although maybe with added fruit it would be more interesting. I do think the original recipe would make a damn good Victoria sponge though. As for the beers, I tried the Bethnal Pale Ale with the cake later on and it also worked fairly well. It’s a brilliant beer on its own though. I intend to drink the Goose Island Summertime later today. They’re all things you could happily drink all day in the sun. We don’t have sun just now, but at least I can pretend with a summery cake and beer to go with it.

Chocolate Cake and Beer!

5 July 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
3 Comments

So I’ve mentioned that I’m planning a project involving a lot of cake. I decided I needed something to work on that would be slightly challenging since I had to give up printing for a while (unfortunately, it’s a very expensive hobby). It took me a while to figure out what exactly to do, but then I found it was staring me in the face the whole time. This blog is called Chocolate Cake and Beer, so why not do THAT?

The plan is to make 20 different chocolate cakes by the end of 2012 and match them with 20 different beers. That’s it! Simple.

The thing is, I don’t know a whole lot about food and beer pairing. I have a basic dark-with-dark, light-with-light, pick-complementary-flavours thing to start from, but that’s about it. I’m much better at making cake then matching beer with it, or anything. But it will be an awesome experiment, and even when I fail to find the right match, I’ll still have a bunch of chocolate cake and beer around, so there’s no losing in this game. I’m pretty good at identifying when something does work, but I only expect to manage a winning match 30-40% of the time, so I’m not putting pressure on myself. I’m hoping I’ll learn as I go and get better at it though. Sometimes I might even do some research! I’d also take a class if the opportunity presents itself.

Anyway, here’s how it will work, along with some rough rules I’ve imposed on myself:

I will make 20 different chocolate cakes by the 31st of December. I’m only allowed to use up to 5 recipes I’ve already used before, and I will chose those wisely to represent the best of what I know. The majority of recipes will have to be things I’ve never made. I want to cover the biggest variety of types of chocolate cake that I can, but it has to be chocolate cake. Chocolate cheesecake is allowed. Chocolate chip cake is not allowed because the cake itself is not chocolate. White chocolate cake? Meh. Allowed, but I’d have to find a really good sounding recipe for it, because I’m not big on white chocolate, but it could lend itself well to a certain type of beer, so I won’t rule it out. Red velvet cake, I’m on the fence about. It’s pretty much chocolate cake, so maybe.

Sometimes I will pick a recipe and try to figure out a beer match from there. Sometimes I’ll go buy a beer and try to find a recipe to go with it. I haven’t planned out what I’m doing in advance, but I do have a few things I know I want to try, and I know what my first cake will be, and possibly my second.

Beer rules are vaguely the same as cake rules, although it’s hard to put an only-5-beers-I’ve-tried-before limit on it, because I’ve tried A LOT of beers. But I’d like to involve as many new things as I can, because I like trying new things! Once I get up and running, I’ll probably tell the guys at Cornelius (the best beer shop in the land!) about what I’m doing so I can get their expertise when I need it (and I would obviously bring them cake for their trouble). I also want to do something with a BrewDog beer since I’m a shareholder, and something with Knops since my friend Cat’s brother brews it and it’s awesome.

So that’s the plan. And I’m not the only one who will benefit from this! I’d like to gain a little weight, but not 20 chocolate cakes’-worth, so I will be sharing the love with everyone I know and anyone who helps out. I plan to have at least one cake and beer party so I can knock 2 or 3 cakes out at once and have everyone try to match things with their favourite beers. I plan on making crazy things like beer ice cream and fruity beer glaze and beer granita to go with the cakes. I’m sure there will be a few disasters, but that doesn’t matter, because I’ll learn what works.

In general, it’s going to be awesome! And it starts this weekend. Look for the first cake and beer match here on Sunday.

The Cookie Limit

23 June 2012
Baking, Food
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My Mom succeeded in influencing the way I handle many things. One of the most noticeable of those to me on a daily basis is my attitude towards food. Someone recently pointed out they noticed I always left my chips til last when eating a burger or something, and I was like, yes! That’s what you’re supposed to do! Meat and vegetables first! That’s my Mom.

I also don’t like soda very much at this point. I wasn’t allowed to drink soda unless we were out to dinner (rarely) or at parties or special occasions. It was milk or water, occasionally juice. So I never really developed a taste for fizzy stuff. I will occasionally have something like nice ginger beer or a coke, but more often than not, it involves rum. I can’t even really drink a lot of fizzy beer without feeling like someone is inflating my stomach (I can drink cask ale all day long though).

But something that I’m aware of pretty much every day is the cookie limit. We always got dessert when I was a kid, because clearly my parents understood that some things are important. But it was always just enough to be a treat. If we had cookies, it was two. No more. (Okay, if it was Girl Scout Thin Mints, we may have been allowed three, because those things are SMALL.)

No Cookie Limits here.

I love cookies. And cakes and brownies and all of that. I prefer baked goods to candy and chocolate, so I eat a LOT of baked goods. But I impose this limit on myself without fail ALL THE TIME. Without even thinking about it. I can’t eat a third cookie without feeling a bit naughty. Of course I do it sometimes, I’m an adult, and what’s that for if not being able to eat another damn cookie. But mostly I find that I don’t really WANT another cookie.

There is an exception to this, and that’s homemade cookies. I tend to go way over the limit on homemade cookies because they’re just a billion times better than store-bought and you know exactly what’s gone into them. And even if that includes a ridiculous amount of butter and sugar and whathaveyou, it still seems more ok than whatever you buy in a packet. And they’re fresh! And so often WARM! And you made them, so eating more is your reward. Limits need not apply.

But luckily for my health, I don’t always have homemade cookies around. So I get plain chocolate digestives, or oreos, or hobnobs, or something else that’s tasty and complements my milk or tea. and they last for ages because I just can’t sit there and demolish a packet in one or two goes. Most store-bought cookies are a lot sweeter than homemade ones, so this is probably part of it, because I can’t do a lot of sweetness. But I’m convinced that it’s mainly because my mother has lived inside a part of my brain for so long that she controls some vital involuntary actions. And I’m ok with that.

Egg successes, egg failures

21 December 2011
Food, TV
2 Comments

I’ve been making scrambled eggs for myself for years with varying levels of quality. None of the tips I’ve read or seen really did the trick for ensuring consistent success in the perfection department. Until I watched the Scotland episode of Jamie’s Great Britain on 4od. I’ve been watching Jamie Oliver on TV pretty much since he was on TV to start with, so at this point, I never really expect to learn something new and practical from him, but I always do. It’s crazy.

Anyway, he was doing potato scones then using the same pan for the eggs, and he was like, the pan’s already well hot enough, just take it off the heat and make your eggs in it that way. And goddammit, it WORKS. I’ve always just turned the heat way down, but never thought to take the pan off altogether. So the next morning, I heated up my pan, took it off the heat, melted the butter, and proceeded to make the most perfect scrambled eggs I’ve ever made. And I’ve repeated the process 2 more times since then with the same results. Not too dry, not too mushy, perfectly cooked all the way through. Try it. It seems to be foolproof.

So that was my egg success. The failure was simply a lesson in ‘always have more eggs than you need for a recipe involving separating them’. Luckily, I did, because earlier in the day,  I made the decision to buy extra eggs since that would mean more scrambled egg breakfasts if I didn’t need them for my cookies.

So I was having to separate a bunch of eggs for making cinnamon star cookies. And as usual when trying to separate eggs, I was trying to get clean, straight cracks by doing it on the counter. And on what was supposed to be the last one, I cracked it with normal force and the whole thing just opened up all over the counter.

In all my years of cracking eggs, this has NEVER happened. And I have been cracking eggs for at least 15 years. It was just straight up full egg on the counter. How on earth do you go about cleaning that up in a logical way? You can’t pick it up, and you can’t really sweep it off the edge of the counter without egg dripping in all sorts of weird places. Luckily I was sort of next to the sink, so I tried to squeegie it in there with my hand as best I could.

But seriously, how are you meant to pick up a full raw egg off a flat surface? Anyone? Jamie?

Dinner at last!

2 December 2011
Food
1 Comment

November was an insane month. In every sense of the word. Work was crazy (but luckily the outcome has been amazing), personal emotional issues continued, and I had a lot of extra stuff going on at fairly inopportune times. And the result of all that was a month of really, really horrible eating. Especially in the past two weeks. I started becoming one of the people I swore I would never become. Someone who eats takeaway or mediocre ready meals more than once or twice a week. Because I either didn’t have time to cook, or when I did, I was far too exhausted to consider doing anything requiring thought or even minimal talent.

This has been a huge problem. I already felt like crap to begin with, but eating stuff that was either crap itself or else just not good enough to be happy about eating has been making me feel worse. Food is a big deal for me, obviously, and when it starts repulsing me instead of exciting me, there’s something seriously wrong. And the whole situation is self-perpetuating, because when I get depressed about what I’m eating, my success rate with experimental throw-shit-together cooking goes way down, and I lose all of my creative culinary mojo.

I know that the answer to this is good food. So I’ve decided over the past few days that December is get-your-ass-cooking-again month, because I need some enticing leftovers in my freezer so I won’t buy another sad excuse for a meal from Tesco or something on the way home. Aside from being less than appealing, it’s also expensive, and December is not the month to haemmorhage even more money than one normally does at the holidays.

I have allowed myself to plan all of the comfort food I like, because I’m going for health, but I’m also going for gaining some weight back. This doesn’t mean all meat and fat and potatoes, it just means cheese and pork fat are encouraged alongside the pile of proper vegetables I have been so desperately craving.

Tonight, I had big plans for a pot of risotto-type barley with the cavolo nero I bought at the veg shop last week on impulse. I had no particular plan for it at the time, but it was just so green and healthy-tasty looking that my nutrient-starved self had to buy it. Then my boss let me out early today after the hectic craziness of this week, because she is the most awesome boss on the planet, and I decided to swing by Crombie’s on the way home for some sausages to add to my dinner. (And I needed beef anyway, because tomorrow I’m making stew. YAY.) And then I bought wine. Because I needed it.

Happy leftovers. Look at how GREEN that cabbage is. I imagine it contains double its mass in vitamins and good stuff. (Excuse the shitty iPod-taken picture. I don't have the energy for proper photography.)

After a tea and a spot of trashy, pointless 4od watching, I fired up the experimental cooking engine and came out with a big bowl of barley, cavolo nero, and Italian Piccante sausage meatballs in the time it takes to listen to Paul Simon’s Graceland. And it was GOOD. I was so craving the cabbage actually, that I ended up pushing aside a bunch of the meat to leave for leftovers and eating mostly barley and greens. I probably could have just eaten a whole bowl of the cavolo nero and left it at that, but the goal here is full meals. This is the first proper meal I’ve had in so long, and I have two whole pots of leftovers. I’m still disgustingly exhausted from this week, but at least I don’t feel as gross as I did after two nights of oven pizza. Uck.

Next up: movie, popcorn, and maybe even a mince pie, because now that it’s December, that’s allowed.

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