Flourless chocolate cake

So I made a birthday cake for my mum over the weekend, and decided to try a recipe I'd not used before. It turned out pretty damned well if I do say so myself!

I don't have any proper photos of it because I was busy making the recipe into a vlog for VEDA at the time, but I DO have a photo of the finished product, which is probably about all you really need. It's a really simple recipe and it turned out surprisingly well, so I figured (in light of the fact that it's been incredibly quiet around these parts recently) that I'd share it with you guys.

Ingredients
4 oz (115g) dark chocolate
125g unsalted butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 cup cocoa

Chop chocolate and butter into small chunks. Melt together in a double boiler. Remove from heat, stir in caster sugar and vanilla. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in eggs one at a time. Add cocoa and mix until just combined. Pour into a greased and lined 8" cake tin and bake at 190 degrees C (375 degrees F) for 20-25 minutes or until a thin crust forms on the top. Cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

I'll be perfectly honest, the hardest part about this cake? Was getting it out of the tin. In the future, I think I'll be doing what several people said they do in the comments and making 1.5 times the recipe in a 9" springform tin!!

Does this sound like something you'd make?

K xx

The carrots make it healthy, right??

I've never really been a big fan of carrot cake. It's always seemed like something healthy in disguise as a dessert. Plus, it usually has sultanas in it, and I hate dried fruit. Anyway, one of my colleagues in Canberra used to make this totally amazing carrot cake with mountains of cream cheese frosting, which instantly made the carrot cake worth eating.

Stupidly, I neglected to get the recipe from her, and I've been looking for a decent, dried fruit free carrot cake recipe ever since. I found this one while flipping through one of the cookbooks at work last week and figured I'd give it a go over the long weekend.

Here's what you need for the cake:

1 cup vegetable oil (I used canola)
1 1/3 cups firmly packed brown sugar
3 eggs
3 cups firmly packed coarsely grated carrot
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
2 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons mixed spice

Start by putting the oil, sugar, and eggs into a large mixing bowl. The recipe actually says to mix them in a small bowl, then transfer them to a large bowl, but...WHY?!

Beat them together until thick and creamy:

Then add ALL THE CARROT OMG. Seriously, it was all three of those carrots from the ingredients photo:

Stir it through, then add the walnuts:

Then add the baking soda, mixed spice, and self-raising flour.

Mix it all together, and pour the mixture into a greased and lined deep 22cm cake tin. The recipe specifies a round tin, but I used a square one because the only round one we have that's big enough is springform, and pff. And yes, it NEEDS to be deep. This is a monster of a cake.

Bake at 180 degrees C (350F) for about 1 1/4 hours. Mine was gluten free so it took a little longer, as always. Leave the cake in the tin for like 10 minutes, then cool on a wire rack.

Then go out to a 30th birthday party for like five hours, get home at 11.30pm and decide to frost the cake. Obviously, you will forget to take photos of the frosting-making process... (This part is optional)

Here's what you'll need for the frosting:
30g butter, softened
80g cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1 1/2 cups icing sugar

Beat the butter and cream cheese together in a small bowl until light and fluffy, then gradually beat in the icing sugar. Mix through the lemon zest with a knife so that it doesn't just all get stuck in the beaters.

We decided to cut the cake in half, given that there's only three of us to eat it. So half of the cake got wrapped up un-frosted and put in the freezer. I was going to halve the quantity of frosting, but Mum was all "PFF, WHY?!?!?!" So feel free to double the frosting. There's no judgement here...

The verdict? It's pretty freaking good, y'all. The icing wasn't QUITE as cream cheese-y tasting as I would have liked, but I feel like doubling the quantity was definitely a good idea. The cake is pretty dense but it's got a lot of texture to it that stops it from feeling like you're eating a doorstop. Or something.

Basically, it's delicious. And really, you can't go wrong with cream cheese frosting, now can you?

Where do you fall in the great carrot cake debate? Dried fruit? Or no dried fruit?

K xx

Choc orange cake

It's been a while since I've done any baking, so when I got an incredible chocolate/doughnut dessert instead of cake for my birthday and then received this book from Ness, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to make a cake!

Here's what you'll need:

Pretty simple, huh?!

Here's the full list of ingredients:
200g butter, softened
200g + 75g golden/raw caster sugar
4 eggs
Juice and zest of 3 oranges
200g self raising flour
100mL double cream
150g dark chocolate
Edible gold leaf, if you have money and stuff

Start by chopping up your butter. It should be softer than mine was...

Add in the 200g of raw caster sugar (which looks a little like sand) and cream it together:

Beat the eggs and zest two of the oranges:

Add the eggs and the zest into the butter and sugar mixture and mix to combine. It will look lumpy and gross and kind of reminiscent of vomit. DON'T PANIC, EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE:

Add in the flour - mine was gluten free - and fold it in. It will continue to look lumpy and gross. Then add the juice of one orange and fold that through too:

Pour it all into a greased ring pan (the recipe specified a 24cm savarin tin, but all I had was a 20cm ring pan. It worked perfectly) and shove it in the oven at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes (mine, because it was gluten free, was more like 35 minutes):

While the cake is in the oven, make your orange syrup. Put the remaining 75g of raw caster sugar into a small saucepan:

Add the juice of 2 oranges (zest the third one before you juice it!), and stir over low heat until all the sugar has dissolved. Set aside to cool.

When the cake is done (i.e. when a toothpick/kebab skewer comes out clean), take it out of the oven and spoon the orange syrup over the top.

Leave it to stand for five minutes (mine was more like ten, because gluten free tends to be a little slower to absorb things), then turn it onto a cooling rack.

Once it's cool, make the ganache topping. Chop the chocolate into small, even pieces. Heat the double cream over a double boiler, then add the chocolate and stir until smooth:

Leave it to cool until the mixture coats the back of a spoon, then cover the cake. Top with the remaining orange worth of zest or some edible gold leaf if your budget stretches to that:

Leave it to set, then try not to shove your entire face into the cake because it's so pretty.

The verdict? This cake is AMAZING. Orange cake has a tendency to be a little on the dry side in my experience, even if it's got a crapton of butter in it. But the orange syrup gets rid of that completely. It's moist and light, and the raw caster sugar stops it from being overly sweet. But it's also rich thanks to the ganache. You could probably make it without the ganache if you wanted, but the chocolate factor really adds an extra level of amazing to the equation!

Yum.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!

K xx

Dessert Day - the "that's not what we planned on making" edition

So a few days before Christmas, Deidre sent me a text message that included a picture of a recipe she thought we should make for Dessert Day - a red velvet cake star in the middle of a white chocolate cheesecake. We established that we should Dessert Day on the 30th of December, and then the festive season took over and we promptly forgot all about our plans until the night of the 29th of December. Obviously, this led to us vaguely wandering around my local supermarket on Monday morning searching for ingredients for the aforementioned fancy cake, and largely unable to find them (for example, vegetarian gelatine).

So we ultimately abandoned that plan and turned instead to something we've been meaning to make for ages and have never quite gotten around to - Tim Tam cake. We used this recipe with a few alterations:

1. Beat the eggs, then gradually add in the sugar.
2. If you are using a Kitchenaid to beat the eggs, transfer them into a different bowl before adding the dry ingredients, otherwise you'll end up with clumps of flour everywhere thanks to the weird bottom of the Kitchenaid bowl.
3. Make two separate lots of cake batter. We had to throw out the second cake and start from scratch because a) it ended up smaller than the first one, b) it had a giant clump of unmixed flour in it, and c) sitting around while the first one baked didn't do the batter any favours, and it was basically a really sad puddle of grossness. So we started over, and the second (third?!) cake was a dramatic improvement on either of its predecessors.

We also left out the Tim Tams because GLUTEN (and gluten free ones are a) kind of gross, and b) not available at my supermarket), and I'm not convinced that we missed out. Oh, and we added raspberry extract to the frosting for the middle, and it was quite possibly the best decision I've ever made. It was so delicious that it was a struggle to get the frosting into the cake!

Oh, and you could probably cut back the ganache recipe by at least a quarter, because there was way too much. Anyway, enough of my wibbling, let's get to the pictures, which is what you really care about, right?

Sad looking bottom layer of cake

Delicious frosting of epic proportions

Sad cake is less sad once frosting is involved

Second cake added and smothered in ganache

Now with added bite so that it really looks like a Tim Tam

Om nom nom nom nom

We also made lemon sorbet from the Commonsense Cookery Book, a stalwart of Australian kitchens. The recipe is as follows:

4 cups water
2 cups caster sugar
1 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons lemon zest

Bring water and sugar to the boil, stirring to dissolve sugar, and boil for five minutes. Cool syrup, then add lemon juice and rind. Pour into refrigerated trays, freeze until syrup becomes mushy. Beat well and freeze again until solid.

Now we, obviously, did the first two steps and then used the ice cream maker to speed things along. Still, when we came to dish it up and take photos, it was baaaaaaaaaasically in a state not much more solid than a Slurpee, and plopped into the parfait glass in a very splashy way. Still, it was delicious. Although I would recommend not using a Microplane to zest the lemons, as it led to little strings of lemon zest all the way through...

Unlike the cake, the sorbet did not photograph particularly well:

Still, it was delicious, and that's what really matters!

What should we make at our next Dessert Day?

K xx

Dessert Day - the ANZUS edition

That's right, yesterday was Dessert Day. And this time, Deidre and I had an extra special guest - my BFF Kat, who's in Melbourne for a week! And FINE, she's still Australian. But she's been living in New Zealand for like a millionty years now, and I really wanted an excuse to refer to us as the ANZUS trio...

ANYWAY.

The day started with me determined to get to the meeting point before the others. I left home 15 minutes before we were due to meet - said meeting point is about two minutes walk from my house - and arrived to find both Deidre and Kat already there. Obviously, my reaction was "DAMMIT!!!", because I was so determined to not do my usual "leave the house when Deidre texts me to say she's already there" routine. Womp womp.

We were typically vague about what we were actually going to make, and did the usual stand-around-in-the-supermarket-Googling-recipes-on-our-phones routine. We ended up deciding on cinnamon rolls and a chocolate swiss roll. After some Googling, we decided on Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls and Smitten Kitchen's naturally gluten free chocolate roll cake.

There was also an awkward moment in which I was totally in the way and a voice behind me said "Excuse me, ladies", and I turned around to see two police officers with a shopping trolley, and my immediate reaction was "OH GOD, WHAT DID I DO???" rather than "Oh, they can't get past me". Awkwardness followed, because OBVIOUSLY.

ANYWAY.

We started by making the roll dough (we only made a half quantity because 50 cinnamon rolls = TOO MANY CINNAMON ROLLS), except we didn't have the necessary enormous saucepan, so we tipped the liquid into the many cups of flour rather than the other way around. This may explain why it didn't rise as much as expected. Or it could be because my yeast is a bit shit and needs replacing... Either that or gluten free stuff just doesn't rise the way it should...

So we left the dough to think about what it had done, and got on with making the swiss roll. It was surprisingly easy, right up until the point where we had to take it out of the tin and roll it up in a wet tea towel to cool. Then there was much "Oh God"-ing and "WHAT IF IT BREAKS??"-ing, but luckily Kat's argument that it would be delicious even in crumb form was a convincing one and we pressed on successfully.

Then it was time to assemble the cinnamon rolls. We cut back quite dramatically on the quantity of butter we used, because REASONS, and mixed the sugar and cinnamon together before sprinkling it on:

Then it was time to roll! It was less stressful than anticipated, possibly because we'd rolled the dough out on baking paper, so we were able to use that to get us started:

Then it was into the pan! I think we were all a little hesitant about whether or not they'd work, because they still weren't doing the whole rising thing very well despite the presence of both yeast AND baking powder. But we ploughed on regardless:

While they were in the oven, we whipped up something that vaguely resembled the glaze that Pioneer Woman's recipe called for. We skimped on the butter again, used milk instead of coffee, and used maple syrup instead of maple flavouring. Once they were out of the oven, we drizzled the glaze over the top:

Then it was time for the most terrifying part of the day - unrolling, filling, and rerolling the swiss roll. It was pretty much as scary as anticipated, especially when a couple of cracks developed. But we managed get it assembled without the entire thing falling apart - WIN! (The tea towel seemed appropriate, given Kat's presence)

And so to the verdicts:
- The cinnamon rolls are pretty damned tasty, but had a slight gluten free aftertaste. They were definitely better warm - the cooler they are, the more they taste like a big greasy gluten free mess.
- The chocolate swiss roll? AMAZING. I might reduce the amount of cream next time because there was more cream than cake involved. But it was fabulous - light and fluffy and completely and utterly delicious. My mum rated it 25 out of 10, which gives you some indication of how tasty it was. Basically, y'all should go make one immediately.

Which one would you go for?

K xx