Death-deflecting chocolate
Oh BLERG. When (still) feeling like death and mildew and old socks . . . clearly chocolate is called for.* Besides, I need a night off.
Sometimes what you want is whatever you can do really fast.
(Almost) Instant Chocolate Gratification
4 T butter
8 oz dark chocolate
2 T golden syrup, dark Karo, or light molasses (warning: molasses has much more flavour than the other two. You need to like the taste of molasses if you use it here)
Cinnamon or vanilla, possibly
8 oz plain digestive biscuits, rich tea biscuits, wheatmeal biscuits, vanilla wafers, graham crackers, or whatever of that kind of thing either takes your fancy or you can grab in a hurry because the necessary moment is NOW
Melt butter, chocolate and liquid sugar together gently in a small pan. Stir till thoroughly mixed. If you want to use cinnamon or vanilla, use a half-tsp here. I use cinnamon not vanilla when I use molasses, other than that it’s whatever.
Rolling-pin your biscuits to fine crumbs. Stir the chocolate stuff in.
Pour into a greased or carefully parchment-papered (this includes up the sides) 8” square pan and refrigerator for several hours till set. Don’t cheat: it’s messy and annoying if you do.
So I guess I should say making this is dead fast (and easy). Waiting around for it to finish turning into itself you need a sofa, some hellhounds, and a few trashy novels.
Less (Almost) Instant Chocolate Gratification, But Still Pretty Fast
10 oz dark chocolate
6 T butter
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla
1 c granulated sugar
1 ¼ c plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
Reserve about 2T of the sugar.
Melt chocolate and butter together and cool. Beat the egg, then beat in the sugar till light and pale. Add the chocolate mixture when it’s cool enough not to cook the egg** and the vanilla. Then add the flour. If it gets too stiff to stir easily, knead the rest in.
Break off bits of the dough and roll cookies into big round pebbles the size of walnuts. (I do this between my palms. Some people prefer a table.) Roll in the reserved sugar. Then space out on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. I squish them very lightly with a finger so they don’t roll around. They will not be pretty if they turn themselves from free electrons into molecule clumps. Ahem. You can get the lot on a single baking sheet, but use all the space, they do spread.
400° for 8-10 minutes. They crack all over.
They don’t take nearly as long to cool as the refrigerator bars do to set.
And may we all sleep better tonight than I did last night.
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* At least Chaos is feeling better.
** Generally speaking this is less of a disaster than you might think. In ordinary daily the-queen-is-not-coming-to-tea baking infinitesimal flakes of cooked egg disappear. Fortunately.
Geography and Chocolate
THANK YOU EVERYONE WHO HAS MADE THE AUCTION/SALE A HELLGODDESS-ASTONISHING SUCCESS. THANK YOU. The rough results are up on the auction site. When Blogmom and I have caught up on our sleep a little, one or the other of us will tell you more about final results and future whatevers. But chiefly . . . THANK YOU. Ding dong bell, you might say.
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There’s been a conversation on the forum about geographic perception. Or lack of perception.
blondviolinist wrote:
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Black Bear wrote on Sat, 08 October 2011 10:28 |
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Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas–those are all “great plains states.” |
I had a friend (who had grown up in Seattle) once inform me that those states were Eastern states. I just about died laughing. Honey, do you know where the Mississippi is? Do you know how many hours you have to drive from those states to get anywhere near the Eastern United States?
Everyone knows this iconic New Yorker cover, don’t they? Or are my own East Coast roots showing? http://bigthink.com/ideas/21121
The New Yorker shop [sic*] sells prints of it and if it cost about one-fifth of what it does cost I’d buy a copy.** http://www.newyorkerstore.com/steinberg-collection/new-yorker-cover-3291976/invt/124544/
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Meanwhile . . . I promised a friend about three weeks ago a red velvet cake recipe.*** I knew I had a red velvet cake recipe, but I also knew that I hadn’t made it in a while because if I’m going to deal with all those calories I want them really, really worthwhile. Here’s my biased take on the red velvet cake question: there isn’t enough chocolate because some deranged person has decreed it’s more about the colour.† I got rid of a lot of my cookbooks when we moved out of the old house—aside from the bookshelf space problem, menopause zero-metabolism was already creeping up on me—so even after trolling through the cookbook shelves of three houses†† there are at least two other red velvet recipes I can’t seem to find. But here’s one that I know I’ve made, both because I kind of remember it and because the annotations are clearly in my handwriting. And the pages kind of stick together. This is a good sign. I may have to make this one again some time.
Note that the original called for one tablespoon of cocoa powder and a two ounce bottle of red food colouring. Ewww.
½ c soft butter
1 ½ c golden sugar: the raw, low-refined kind that isn’t the pure white of standard granulated. It doesn’t have as much flavour as brown, but more than white, and it’s mellower than dark brown (and more interesting than light brown. Say I).
2 large eggs
1 tsp REAL vanilla
2 c flour, or maybe a little more
¼ c unsweetened non-Dutch-process ‘natural’ cocoa powder
pinch salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 c buttermilk, or 1 c milk minus 1T, plus 1T vinegar to sour it. I’ve been told many times this is cheating, but it’s a lot easier than finding buttermilk and then figuring out something to do with the rest of it. Theoretically, I think, if you’re using vinegar, it should be skim or low-fat milk—‘butter’ milk is a misnomer—but I always used to use whole/full fat because that’s what I drank, and it worked fine.††† Most of that soured-milk stuff works semi-interchangeably in baking—I always thought—you get a slightly different taste and texture if it’s sour cream or yogurt, say, but if your ingredients, especially your chocolate, are good quality it’ll all be silky—or velvety—and damnably excellent.
Standard cake deal: cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs. Sift dry and add alternately with sour milk. Beat hard, but don’t hang about either: as soon as the vinegar hits the baking soda your batter starts expanding. Turn into 2 8” or 9” round pans with removable bottoms which have first been buttered and floured with great enthusiasm and thoroughness. (A greased and floured cut-out of parchment paper works just as well if you don’t have push-out-bottom pans.) 350°F about half an hour: the layers should rise in the middle, and the edges start to pull away from the pan walls. Let cool at least ten or fifteen minutes before you try and get them out of the pans. I tend to think soured-milk cakes are more fragile than others, but that may just be my karma.
Frost when cool. I recommend vanilla buttercream, myself, but as you like.
I still haven’t given you my favourite chocolate cake recipe, have I? Or have I? The Red Devil AKA McKinley’s Famous Exploding Chocolate Cake? Which is another of these sour milk + baking soda + chocolate = red. My Red Devil cake, despite its distressing incendiary habits, is the reason I pretty much don’t make any other chocolate cake any more. I don’t dare have cake very often‡ and I only really pine and yearn for that one.
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* I grew up in the hard-copy only era, certainly, but I also grew up at a time or anyway on the fringes of a society that believed The New Yorker was cool^. I am still having a hard time getting my head around the on line presence of a New Yorker shop. It’s like finding out that Hillary Clinton moonlights selling pencils on a street corner. I even follow the NYer on Twitter. It’s just not the same, reading the cartoons off a computer screen.^^
^ Although I don’t think I’ve actually read the thing since Janet Malcolm on Sylvia Plath, which seems to have been 1993. How time flies. Eeep. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/janet_malcolm/search?contributorName=janet%20malcolm
^^ Which is not to say that some comics were not totally made to be read off computer screens. http://xkcd.com/730/
** Maybe this is the modern on line version of cool.
*** I believe she needed it by last week.
† Also, chocolate has changed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_velvet_cake I’ve been trying to remember, but I seem to be unduly tired yet again today,^ my progress through the erratically charted geography^^ of chocolate. http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/02/cocoa-powder-faq-dutch-process-v/ I stopped using Dutch process when I stopped drinking cocoa, but that was a long time ago; I may have cluelessly used Dutch process in the pre-annotation version of this recipe, which would help explain why I thought it was boring. (It still needed more chocolate.)
^ Go away, you Mutant Virus, and take the ME with you! You have seriously outstayed your welcome!, as Holofernes might have said to Judith if he’d had the chance.
^^ I perceive a theme. Also, speaking of themes, anyone who doesn’t follow me on Twitter may need to know this: http://www.chocolateweek.co.uk/
†† I never said there weren’t drawbacks. . . .
††† I’d use low-fat now because the rest of the carton would be easier to give away, because that’s what everyone I know now uses. And yes, I assume I could still escape major punishment for ingesting the amount of (cooked) milk that was in a few pieces of cake, despite the ‘no dairy’ billboards lining my alimentary canal. I’d be worrying more about getting the waistband of my jeans closed.
‡ See: getting waistband of jeans closed
ANNOUNCEMENT
Okay, we’re on. The New Arcadia Bell Restoration Fund sale/auction that you were beginning to think I had forgotten about GOES LIVE THIS FRIDAY. MAKE A NOTE.
And, perhaps, to get you (back) in the mood . . .
Inspired by the clock that hangs on the wall opposite where I sit, hunched over my computer, at the kitchen table at the mews.
No, not champagne. British cider. Which is to say hard cider. And my favourite teapot, which got broken some years back, had polka dots on it.
OF COURSE THEY’RE CHOCOLATE CHIP. Don’t be daft.
I’m trying to remember the last time I made this recipe. The fine old American tradition of chocolate and peanut butter tends to make the British giggle and look superior.*
Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies
¼ c soft butter. I did once make these with all peanut butter and mysteriously it wasn’t as successful. The straight butter brings out the peanut flavour somehow—as well as producing a better crumb—or again it may have been that particular jar/batch of peanut butter. Peanut butter isn’t as variable as honey, but it’s surprisingly variable nonetheless, especially, I suspect, if you decant it from giant vats at your health food shop, which I used to do, when I had a health food shop with giant peanut-butter vats. The original recipe called for equal amounts of butter and peanut butter, however, which I don’t approve of either. This is about the peanut butter. Well, and the chocolate.**
½ c chunky peanut butter. This may need adjusting depending on how squidgy your peanut butter is. But stand by to add more flour if the dough is very soft and goopy.***
1 c well tamped down dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (NOT FLAVOURING. That hellgoddess obsession: use REAL VANILLA.)
2 c flour. I recommend half standard white and half spelt. They make white spelt now, if you can get hold of it. When I was still making these you could only get wholemeal spelt, and you could push up the percentage to about ¾ spelt, but you need a little plain white to lighten the texture. I’d try it with wholemeal and white spelt. The spelt flavour goes really well with the peanut butter.
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 c chopped dark chocolate or semisweet chocolate chips
I’ve been known to add ½c chopped hazelnuts. No, not peanuts. Hazelnuts are more interesting, and to my taste they go with peanut butter better than most of the other standard nuts—almonds, walnuts, cashews. I bet Macadamias would be good too.
Cream butter and peanut butter together thoroughly, then brown sugar. Then beat in egg, finally vanilla. Beat AND BEAT till fluffy. Mix the baking powder and soda into the flour(s), stir till all the same colour, then add to the creamed stuff. Beat till blended but no more. Stir in chocolate chips last.
Drop on greased or parchment-paper-lined cookie sheets. 350°F, probably about 12 minutes, till they’re just going brown around the edges. They’ll be fragile when they come out, so leave them alone till they’re at least half cool. This is why I use parchment paper: you can just pull it, cookies still in place, off the sheets. Of course then you run out of counter space†, but hey.
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* Feh.
** It’s always about the chocolate.
*** The worst thing that happens if you guess wrong and your cookies are too goopy, is that they run together while they’re baking and you have to cut them up and then eat them carefully because they’ll stay fragile even when they’re cool. But they’ll taste fine. That’s the worst thing that happens if your cookie sheets have edges all round. Let me tell you about how having cookie/baking sheets with edges all the way around is a very good thing.
† Unexpected Uses of Hellhound Crate Top.
Summer fruit and squishiness
Before I forget: here’s the definitive photo record of the signing at Forbidden Planet last week from our forum’s CathyR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marmitelover/sets/72157627054561095/
She’s also @CambridgeMinor on Twitter, so if anyone wants to ask her for a copy of any of the photos, please tweet or DM.
Shattered again. How boring. Today’s excuse is that I took Peter and me to see Tabitha, my Bowen massage lady, and I always come out of one of these sessions feeling like overcooked oatmeal.* Happy, peaceful overcooked oatmeal, but still, speaking/blogging in complete sentences and walking upright and all that is a strain, and I keep wanting to subside gently into a nice bowl-shaped piece of furniture. A hot bath, say. An American friend said to me dubiously, presumably you feel like a million dollars** the next day or something? There has to be a reason you keep going back? No, I just like pain . . . It’s nothing as spectacular as being able to leap tall buildings with a single bound or drive the horses of the sun across the sky***. It’s more like having fewer pebbles in your shoes or fewer unmitigated morons giving you blood-pressure headaches. Over the course of the next few days you realise that your shoes are comfy again and most of the morons are only morons and you can ignore them. It’s subtle enough that I periodically fall out of the habit of going, and it’s not till I rack myself up again and have to go back so she can tease my spine out of its granny knots and level my pelvis till my legs start behaving like they’re more or less the same length again—or the ME starts shoving me back on the sofa—that I remember why I go even when I’m not crippled.
I’ve off and on tried to persuade Peter to go to Tabitha too but he belongs to the Stoic No Fuss category of British male—but I got him while his defenses were down a few months ago after that bad fall he had. For a while I took him along oftener than I needed to go, and lately we’ve settled into a nice monthly double act. The last two appointments I’ve brought hellhounds too and we are exploring a fresh new piece of Hampshire countryside I’ve previously only driven through while Peter is on Tabitha’s table. And then if she’s running late I knit. Mmm. What a pity this only happens once a month.
Meanwhile it’s high summer, and the fabulous, paradisal, dizzying glut of high-summer fruit is upon us. I’m eating handfuls of cherries, nectarines and peaches for breakfast every day and it makes getting out of bed WORTH it. Which is saying a lot. I mean, caffeine is crucial, but the joy it occasions is a rather grim, real-world variety. Summer sweet cherries . . . convince me that the Elysian Fields and Valhalla and so on do exist. Nothing to do with swords and willing virgins though—but it’s a lot about food. Some of you may or may not remember that when I first started posting recipes I said that this was going to be a good opportunity to dust off old once-loved recipes of things I can no longer eat . . . but in fact I almost never do post any of these because as I’m leafing through my books and notebooks I get all cranky and resentful about my limitations. Also, summer fruit is so amazing fresh off the tree or the bush or the wings of the angel that it’s mostly criminal or at least superfluous to mess with it. But I did use occasionally to make cherry ice cream and I’m feeling so mellow after a dose of Tabitha that I thought I’d post the recipe.†
Cherry (Almond) Ice Cream
2/3 c milk
1 egg plus one extra yolk
½ c granulated sugar
¼ tsp vanilla
1 lb sweet cherries
1 ounce slivered almonds
2/3 c whipping cream
Scald milk, set aside to cool. Mix the egg and the yolk in the top of a double boiler/bain marie with the sugar and beat like mad, till it turns pale and ribbons off the spoon. (Your electric mixer is your friend.) Pour on the slightly cooled milk; place over gently simmering water and stir till thick. Stir in the vanilla and leave to cool.
Stone your cherries. Ugh. This is the worst bit. You will need more than a pound, of course, because you’ll eat some of them to sustain morale. I’m not sure how to allow for this, since the original weight includes the stones, which you are discarding. Make your best guess. The original recipe tells you to put the stoned bits in a food processor and buzz them to puree, but I think this is unsporting. I just kind of rip them up some in the stoning process. You do want enough pulp to turn your ice cream red, but I don’t think you can avoid this with dark expoding-sweet high-summer cherries. Stir them, in whatever form, into the custard. Whip the cream till it forms soft peaks. Fold into the cherry mixture. Pour the lot into your ice cream maker and do what it tells you to do to produce ice cream.
While your custard is becoming ice cream, toast your almonds. The original recipe tells you to fold them into the finished ice cream, but unless you’re going to eat it all in one go, I wouldn’t; the almonds will go soft. I sprinkle them on per serving. This will, I admit, probably mean that you need more almonds, but hey.
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* She looked back in her big fat McKinley folder today and we realised I’ve been coming to see her for ten years. Intellectually I know this; someone had recommended her as a straightforward physical massage therapist when I was having repetitive-strain trouble with my hands as a result of the ME.^ But—ten years! I know there are people who live their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born, but I’m a Navy brat and my reincarnation as a middle-aged stay-at-home still regularly amazes me. And I’m coming up on my twenty year anniversary here—with Peter as of 26th of this month, with England the end of October—and our 20th wedding anniversary is the 3rd of January. I actually do love looking out at the same landscape year after year—groundedness, what a concept, I like it—but it’s one more thing that makes me feel that my life before the age of 38 happened to someone else.
^ Not only am I extremely relieved that my ME has turned out to be the negotiable-with variety but I’m very glad not to have to go through that early learning-to-negotiate phase again. A lot of you, unfortunately, will know what I’m talking about: that first really harsh running-into-a-wall experience. I went from being someone who ran 25-30 miles a week, rode horses, hurtled hounds, rang bells, and dug up old tree stumps in order to put more rose-beds in, to someone who couldn’t get off the godsblasted sofa. Dear heavens. The shock and bewilderment are almost as bad as the fact. And with the zero energy comes a whole lorryload of other nonsense, which in my case included aching hands.
** That would be £631,592.12, which doesn’t quite have the ring to it. But then a million dollars doesn’t really have the ring to it any more either. A trillion dollars. £631,592,128.80: Feel like six hundred thirty-one million, five hundred ninety-two thousand, one hundred twenty-eight pounds and eighty pence. . . . No, it’ll never catch on.
*** I have hellhounds. I’d do a better job than that vainglorious wuss Phaethon.
† I have a chocolate cherry ice cream recipe somewhere. Although it may not be suitable for a family blog.
Happy New Year*
Roll on 2011. I like the look of ‘2011’. A very nice collection of numbers nicely arranged. May it be a Year of Multifaceted Wonderfulness.**
I think we need a sticky celebratory pudding. A little late for tonight, but it’ll be excellent tomorrow too. If you’re not too the-day-after-the-night-before-ish for getting your eyes to focus on a recipe.
Spicy cranberry gingerbread pudding
The original recipe wants you to make eight individual puddings. You must be frelling joking. You’re already going to have to make the sauce as well as the pudding. Life is way too short to spend that much time buttering pudding basins, not to mention cleaning the suckers afterward, since in my experience putting them through the dishwasher is pretty futile. I don’t know, are there Miniature Pudding Basin Liners like there are paper muffin cups? The latter entirely revolutionised my baking half a million years ago when I discovered them, or someone started making them, which I think is what happened—some muffin-eating industrialist’s wife told him that paper muffin cup liners would not only mean he could have fresh muffins every day but that they would thereby be made wealthy***.
Anyway. In the absence of miniature pudding basin liners, you can make it in an 8” square pan, although a 6-cup Bundt is ideal because it looks pretty without being nearly so much work.†
1 ¾ c all-purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp (ground) ginger
¼ tsp allspice
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
2 medium/large eggs, room temp
5 T soft butter
¼ c blackstrap molasses
¼ c dark brown sugar. If you’re a wimp you can use white sugar
1 heaped teaspoon freshly grated ginger root
4 oz preserved ginger in syrup, finely chopped, with its syrup
about 1 c water
Sift the dry stuff together. Squash the butter and sugar together thoroughly, then add molasses, then eggs. Beat well. Then start adding flour alternately with water, and mixing each time, starting with flour: half the flour, then half the water, then half the flour . . . then stop. At this point add the two gingers (the ground went in with the spices in the dry), so you can judge how much water you’re going to need to make a good batter. I have found I need slightly less than the full 1c. Beat well again. If you are an electric-mixer person, use it. The batter should get very homogenous and very slightly paler.
Pour in your chosen WELL BUTTERED pan, and bake about half an hour at 350°F/moderate. It should look done like a cake looks done. Use a toothpick if you’re nervous. If it’s a Bundt, you’ll want to let it cool a bit and then turn it out; if it’s in a boring old brownie pan, you can just serve it from there.
Sweet Cranberry-Cider Sauce
1 lb cranberries
16 fluid oz British cider. Which is to say, alcoholic. If you can get British/hard cider, use whatever kind you like to drink, which is to say this is not the time to go cheap. If you can’t get hard cider, use about 1 ½ c ordinary cider and ½ c port, Madeira, sherry, or whatever of that kind of thing you have around. You ought to have something of this sort because it’s great for enlivening dull food. You could certainly use Calvados or some such but I think that’s getting on for apple overkill myself.
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp (ground) cloves
¼ tsp nutmeg
about ¼ c, somewhat depending on how dry your cider/etc is and how sweet you like your sauce, dark brown sugar
2 oz preserved ginger in syrup, finely chopped, with its syrup
Put the cider in a pan with everything else except the preserved ginger. Bring to boil, boil gently till cranberries pop. Take off the heat, add the ginger. Let cool. Reheat just to warm to serve. You can warm the pudding too. I generally don’t, but you don’t want it cold from the refrigerator.
It’s five minutes to midnight as I write this. Tick . . . tick . . . tick. . . . ††
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* We had ringing practise tonight. How sad is that? New Year’s Eve and we’re all in the bell tower making horrible crashing noises.^ There were even enough of us tonight to make a wide variety of horrible crashing noises. But I think possibly some of us had got a head start on celebrating.^^
^ Niall did suggest that if anyone wanted to ring in the New Year it could probably be arranged . . . but not by him.
^^ Which is to say that my Cambridge was perhaps more accurate than some others of those present.
** In the immediate future however . . . I have had a long detailed email from a professional photo geek, who says in essence:
(a) Yes, the Canons are too slow.
(b) Yes, the Panasonics’ jpeg handling isn’t good enough.
At present my choices seem to be:
(a) Learn photo editing after all and shoot in RAW mode.
(b) Give up on the compact idea and go for a full DSLR.
(c) Learn to draw.
How’s progress on cloning coming? I need two of me, whatever I decide. I need hours for photo editing and I need hours to write more books to pay for my renovated, upgraded and expanded camera habit. Or I need hours with my sketchbook. Hours and hours and hours and HOURS AND HOURS. And possibly a gene-splice from JMW Turner or James Whistler or John Everett Millais or Edward Burne-Jones.
*** And she could hire someone to make muffins while she got on with writing her great novel. He probably wanted a bigger car or a string of polo ponies or a castle in Spain. Men.^
^ Although I’ve always wanted my castle in Scotland which is manifestly insane. Winter? Darkness? Rising damp? Cold? I think the top ten most uncomfortable places on earth must include at least one paradigmatic Scottish castle.
† Although they don’t go too effectively through the dishwasher either. Butter it really well.
†† And I’m listening to Handel’s MESSIAH. Well, it’s festive. They’ve got the last night of the Proms running on Radio Three and I cannot take the blurky self-congratulation. It’s stickier than the above pudding, which is not appropriate on the radio. Get a grip, guys.