The Silver Spoon

Ottolenghi's Chocolate Fudge Cake

If only the lack of blogging this summer would be the direct result of lack of eating.  Alas, it is not.  I not only ate my way through the summer but I have nothing to show for it except half a dozen pairs of jeans that don’t fit. I have therefore embarked upon no less than five attempts at dieting only to find myself in the South of France or other such environs where dieting is, indeed, impossible.  I welcomed the first of September, with its ever so slightly cooler breeze, as a new start, fresh beginning, or back to school if you will:  I have sworn off carbs!  And I haven’t been so bad, one French fry here and there but I have been pretty good.  So what to do when lovely brother and sister-in-law invite themselves over for dinner (I wish more people would do this by the way)?  Well there isn’t much else to do than whip out the Ottolenghi cookbook and start flipping through the pages of what can only be categorized as food porn. It’s not too difficult to put together a starter and a main course and avoid the dreaded carbohydrate but dessert is a different matter altogether.  Enter the flourless chocolate cake: pure genius.  As soon as I laid eyes upon this recipe I knew that it was meant to be.  Isn’t that cheating you say?  Yes, of course it is.  But were my guests to suffer because of my personal battle of the bulge.  I think not!  Does that mean I have full license to have chocolate cake for every meal until I finally gave away the rest to my housekeeper? No! But did I?  Yes! And with pleasure. 

Ingredients:

240g Unsalted butter, cut into small cubes

360g Dark Chocolate (70% cocoa solids)

290g Light muscovado sugar   

4 tbsp water

5 large eggs (separated)

A pinch of salt

Cocoa for dusting

Pre-heat the oven to 170˚C and prepare your baking tin. 

Step 1: In a large bowl combine your chocolate and butter.  Both should be sufficiently cut up into small pieces. At the same time mix the sugar and water into a sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium heat.   Once boiling pour over the chocolate and butter until it is all melted together. (If you ignored the “cut it up into small pieces” directive, insert step 2a, melt mixture further over a double boiler until smooth.)

Step 2: Stir the egg yolks into the chocolate one at a time and reserve the whites in another bowl.  Then whisk the whites and the salt until firm.  Let the chocolate cool room temperature before folding in the whites. 

Step 3: Pour 2/3 of the mixture into your cake tin and cook for 40 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.  Then set aside until completely cool.  Then pour the remaining mixture over and cook for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick shows a moist crumb.  Set aside to cool and dust with cocoa and/or icing sugar. (Tip: To best dust a cake, use a tea ball.  You get the right amount of dusting material with little mess and no lumps)

Notes:  Make this cake and you will make yourself and anyone around you happy.  It will keep for a couple of days. 

Carrot and Walnut Cake

 

I am not sure why, maybe it’s some sort of masochism, but I have been going all out on the dessert front recently.  I am still on a food lock-down and can’t even try the recipe as I go along but I have been committed to making cakes, tarts and desserts of any kind.  And, in turn, I am sharing them with you.  This is, of course, completely out of character as I don’t even have a sweet tooth and I have embraced a healthy lifestyle of reduced sugar consumption.  But still the urge to bake haunts me.  Perhaps it’s that I never really had the time to whip up a cake on a Wednesday afternoon and that this freedom has encouraged me into creating a dinner menu from start to finish.  I do cheat on hors d’oeuvres and buy cheese and crackers and the like but I have even entertained the idea making my own crackers. 

Another logical conclusion is that I recently bought the Ottolenghi cookbook and have become obsessed.  I am blessed to be within 5 minutes walking distance to my nearest Ottolenghi and my most frequent lunch companion, Gaby, has one in spitting distance (no kidding, and you don’t even have to be a master spitter) from her house.  Thus we walk in and survey what’s on offer quite regularly, carefully choosing among the delicacies and blocking out the beautiful pastries and cakes that loom in the corner of your eye.  You have to; otherwise a trip to Ottolenghi would not just be detrimental to your waistline but also your wallet.  I am, however, a devotee as you might have noticed.  I had heard raves about this book, particularly from a vegetarian friend with a non-vegetarian husband (Skye and Paul) who plan weekends around cooking from this cookbook, “a versatile book with so many options, they say.” I had to have it. 

So when planning out my menu for a recent dinner party I was going to cook from the Ottolenghi cookbook alone and it was wonderful.  One of the highlights of my musings was when I asked Pascal whether I should bake a chocolate or carrot cake for dessert, “EVERYONE bakes chocolate cake, you should do carrot,” he replied.  Now I think that the young man might be getting a little bit spoiled because certainly not EVERYONE is baking chocolate cakes for a Wednesday night dinner, either way I got the point. 

As usual, I subbed out the refined sugar and flour with unrefined brown sugar and whole wheat flour, but the result (or so I am told) was great. Doesn’t it just kill you that I can’t even try one bite! I was unable to find an unrefined version of icing sugar so if you know of a good one please pass it on. 

Ingredients

Cake

160g whole wheat flour (sifted twice)

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp ground cloves

1 egg

1 egg yolk

200g sunflower oil

270g brown caster sugar

50g walnuts (chopped)

50g desiccated coconut

135g carrots (peeled and grated)

2 egg whites

Pinch of salt

 

Icing

175g cream cheese

70g unsalted butter

35g icing sugar

25g honey

30g walnuts (chopped and toasted)

 

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 170˚C and grease a 24 cm springform cake tin and line with parchment paper.  The best way to do this is take the tin apart and use the side of the tin to draw a circle on the parchment to cut out so it fits the base, then put it back together with the base lined and then line the sides.

 

Step 2: Sift together the flour (twice for the flour), baking powder, baking soda and spices and put aside.  In a small bowl whisk together 1 egg and an egg yolk.  With an electric mixer, cream together the oil and sugar until smooth and slowly add in the egg mixture.  Mix in the walnuts coconut and carrot.  Then incorporate the dry mixture.  Use a light hand and don’t over mix.

 

Step 3: In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until they form peaks and gently fold into the carrot mixture in 3 steps.  Do not over mix. Some white streaks are ok.

 

Step 4:  Pour into the cake tin and bake for about 40 minutes (poke with a toothpick to check for doneness, if it’s clean it’s done).  If you use a smaller tin, say 20 cm, then cook for about 1 hour. Let the cake cook for an hour before removing from the tin.

 

Step 5: For the icing, beat the cream cheese until creamy and light.  I used light cream cheese, mostly because that is all I could find, but it is also spreadable from the get go. Then cream the sugar, butter and honey together.  Fold the two together and ice the cake, then sprinkle the walnuts.  For the walnuts, it’s easier to toast then chop than the other way around.   

 

Note:  When combining the oil and sugar in step 2 make sure the cookbook (if you buy it, which you should) is far away from the bowl and the oil has a tendency to spit.  

Lemon Tart

 

 

Considering I have devoted considerable time and effort to writing about food and then going so far as to post it on the internet for all to see, it might seem logical that I am comfortable in the kitchen and like throwing dinner parties.  Yes, for all intents and purposes, this is true.  That also means that the pressure to perform and put together something special is that much greater.  So last week, I found myself looking down the barrel of another dinner party and I went into a bit of a panic.  Not only was I feeling uninspired but my guests were to be my brother and sister-in-law, Lopo and Sandrine, and my father, Bruce, flown in especially from New York (not really but he does live in NY).  Family can and should be easy dinner guests but it was also the inaugural visit to the new flat and sometimes they can be the harshest critics (or so it seems but in my case it’s mostly self-inflicted, they are nothing but supportive). But I also felt tapped out.   I had exhausted all the really wowing dishes at previous dinner parties and I have avowed to not eat anything that is remotely tasty (see Detox days 2 – 7, I am sticking with it for a little while longer). 

So in the end, I chose to make a simple and healthy dinner followed by a kick-ass dessert.  This is where I pigeon-holed myself.  I had just bought a brand new tart tin and I had to use it.  I am the type of person who can hardly wait to get home before wearing newly bought clothes. I have even been known to wear them out of the store which is usually awkward for everyone as the sales clerk gingerly tries to remove the tag without cutting off all my hair or stabbing me in the neck. 

Have I mentioned that I am really good at the internet?  To solve the problem of what tart to bake in my new tart tin, I attacked the internet with reckless abandon and came up with a lemon tart from Delicious Magazine by Raymond Blanc.  I have swapped out some ingredients for their less processed cousins but the result is still greedy and delicious and as my brother said as he was finishing up his piece, “it makes me feel better knowing that the pastry crust is whole wheat.”

Ingredients

Pastry Crust

120g unsalted butter

80g icing sugar, sifted

250g whole wheat flour, sifted

2 egg yokes      

1 additional egg

Filling

5 Medium eggs

150g caster sugar (brown)

140ml double cream

Zest of 3 lemons

Juice of 4 lemons

Step 1:  For the pastry crust, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth, then beat in the egg yolks. For best results, the butter can be slightly softened. Add the sifted flour and incorporate it into the mixture until crumbly.  Use you fingers to do this so as to get all the flour and butter mashed together.  (Tip: Buy a 20-pack of disposable rubber gloves makes this task and a lot of others much easier and less messy).  Mix in 1 or 2 tsps of ice water and press to form a ball.

Step 2:  Spread some plastic wrap on the counter and flatten the dough out onto it to form a disk.  Chill for 30 minutes.  When chilled, roll out with a rolling pin on a flour-dusted surface until it’s about 3mm thick.  My pan was 24 cm diameter and 2.5cm deep.   Since whole wheat crusts have a tendency to fall apart more easily than their white flour counterparts there is not really easy way to get the dough into the tin besides “try your best!”  My technique involved two spatulas and some cursing. Either way, the crust will end up in the tin.  Smooth it around the bottom with a baggie full of extra dough, patch up the necessary holes and trim the top.  Chill for a further 30 minutes.

Step 3:  Put a baking sheet in the oven and preheat the oven to 180˚C.  Line the pastry case with parchment paper and fill it with something heavy that will keep the pastry from puffing up.  (I used untoasted muesli, it worked just fine and in the end I had toasted muesli, bonus. But you can use rice or beans or something that won’t burn or cook.)  Bake on the sheet for 10-15 minutes.  Remove the paper and weight and bake for a further 5 minutes.  (At this point it is supposed to start looking golden but given its already brown colour that might be difficult to determine.) Brush the pastry with 1 beaten egg and return to the oven for one more minute.  Let to cool. 

Step 4: Turn the oven up to 190˚C and make the filling.  Whisk the eggs and sugar together (remember how to make castor sugar from normal sugar, if not click here).  Whisk in the cream, lemon juice and zest until just combined and pour into the case.  Cook for 20-25 minutes, allow to cool for an hour. Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Note:   This looks like a lot of long steps but it’s not that daunting once you get started.  You can also make twice the amount of pastry dough and freeze it so that you can skip those steps next time. Also, the filling is really soupy so getting it into the oven without spilling is tricky.  I pulled out the rack so that it was flat and ladled the filling into the case.  You might be of surer hand than I, so do whatever works for you.  Also the original recipes calls for you to remove the case from tin before the final bake, given the fragility of the whole wheat crust I would keep it on and remove once cooled.