Flourless chocolate, buttermilk and raspberry cake

A week or so ago a friend of mine had a birthday. Here in Sydney, as in so many places around the world at the moment, anything but essential travel is banned so though it was possible for me to make him a cake, it wasn't possible for me to deliver it personally, even though he was just across the bridge. In any case, there suddenly wasn't any flour to be found seemingly in all of Australia so cake too seemed impossible. But then, in an effort to distract myself from the news, I strayed across this recipe for a chocolate, buttermilk and raspberry cake. Miraculously it was flourless. And all the ingredients were store cupboard staples, or could be crafted from them with a bit of ingenuity. The recipe was from (the ironically-named, given my dilemma)  Flour and Stone, a beautiful bakery in Woolloomooloo. Buoyed by this discovery, I made the cake and booked a courier... because if you have to be alone on your birthday in the apocalypse then there should at least be something sweet and celebratory you can stick a candle on. It turned out beautifully - luxuriously dark and fudgey, studded with soft, sour-sweet berries, the prettiest pops of red. It arrived a day late and smashed to smithereens, but I'm told still tasted good, and I guess was an even bigger surprise for all that. Best laid plans... If this interlude has taught us anything it's to throw them out the window... and adapt! See recipe head notes for useful hacks on the other key ingredients, should you need them.

Marble cake

When I was growing up, there were a limited number of cakes in the family repertoire. Basically, there were three: Devil's Food, orange and marble. Devil's Food was in high rotation, obviously - what kid doesn't agitate for chocolate? - orange was the adult's choice and marble got trotted out for company as its swirls of chocolate and vanilla were suitably showstopping. Alas I don't have Mum's original recipe, but this one, from American baking authority Martha Stewart, is exceptional. And easy. Made in a loaf tin, its golden exterior slashed with satiny chocolate exempts you from fiddly frosting. It's airy and light yet satisfying sturdy. Rich but not too sweet. And oh so pretty.

Chocolate caramel crack(ers)

Salty/sweet is a particularly satisfying combination. This toffee, which takes no time at all to make, hits that brief squarely. Consisting of a single layer of savoury crackers smothered in caramel, topped with dark chocolate and sprinkled with nuts (or not), it's made in one spectacular slab and then broken up into bite-size pieces. As the name suggests, it's insanely moreish and makes for great gifts - if only to save you from eating it all yourself.

Chocolate sour cherry cookies

My oldest friend came to visit last weekend. We've known each other since we were babies, both of us brought up by mothers who were not only good cooks but instilled in us the idea of food as something to be shared - something to welcome, something to celebrate, to comfort, to say thank you. To this end, I made a batch of my favourite cookies for her arrival and she turned up with a tin of her own. Hers were delicious but I don't have the recipe for those (yet!) so here's what I made - the Bourke St Bakery's chocolate sour cherry cookies.

Sour cherries are a little hard to find (if you live in Brisbane, I got mine at the amazing The Source Bulk Foods store in West End on a recent visit) and when you do, they're expensive, but you could easily substitute a good quality dried cranberry as the two are quite similar in texture and taste. Chewy and rich and studded with plump pockets of fruit, these are my regular indulgence if I'm passing the original Surry Hills bakery in Bourke St. But really, you can't beat homemade. We took our cookie smorgasbord to the park with the papers and ate them in the warm winter sun. They spoke volumes.

Chocolate and almond cake

I really didn't intend to post another chocolate recipe this week. I was hoping to share one for a rather lavish lemon meringue cake, which I set out to make for a friend's birthday on Saturday. But it was a disaster. Operator error I think, I can't blame the cake. Fearful of scorching the meringue, I took it out of the oven too early and when I came to assemble it, realised that the centre was gooey and not in a good way. In an uncooked batter, make you feel sick kind of way. I know because I ate a fair bit of it, as I assessed whether this was a salvagable situation. Could I cut out the middle and fill the centre with cream and lemon curd? In the end, I decided against it and at the eleventh hour, chose to start from scratch. I didn't have the nerve for another lemon meringue. I didn't have much time. I needed something fail safe. Something simple, but still special enough for a birthday. Stephanie (Alexander) was my salvation. Her recipe for chocolate almond cake to be precise. That my butter was fridge-hard wasn't a problem as it was melted down with chocolate. It didn't have layers, didn't need frosting. The cooking time wasn't too long. In about an hour, I had a cake. Derived from the French reine de Saba or Queen of Sheba's cake, essentially this is a flourless chocolate cake (and thus gluten free) but with lots less butter than the traditional sort which is far richer and more oozy in texture. This version is bolstered by ground almonds, which means it keeps nicely should there be leftovers and holds its shape packed in a lunchbox. Stephanie says it's easy to make on a whim, or in my case, in a blind panic about having only an hour to make a replacement birthday cake. Both are valid motivations, both result in a cake that's light, not too sweet yet satisfyingly chocolatey. Dust with icing sugar, dollop with cream. Done.

Chocolate raspberry brownie cakes

Chocolate and fruit is a matter of personal preference. I've never been fond of the chocolate-dipped strawberry, which is often upheld as the epitome of deliciousness (albeit by advertisements for shopping centres or luxury hotel chains). Chocolate and orange on the other hand, I've long been a fan of - so much so that once, on a trip to Europe, I visited York out of love not so much of the Brontes but of Terry's Chocolate Orange. I favour the milk variety, though I certainly won't knock back the dark if it's on offer. As a rule, dark chocolate is generally the one to pair with fruit: less sweet, more sophisticated. It works wonderfully with pear, as evidenced in the most crowd-pleasing cake in my repertoire: pear, pistachio and chocolate cake. Another winning combination is with raspberry, where the sour/sweet of the fruit marries beautifully with the deep, dark depths of the chocolate. 

In this hybrid of brownie and cake, a crisp, crackly crust gives way to a fudgey chocolate centre, its richness offset by the tart burst of the berries. It works just as well with frozen fruit as it does with fresh, so you can make them year round. One is the perfect amount to satisfy whatever chocolate cravings you have. If you don't trust yourself to stop there, they freeze well... but I'm sorry to say also taste pretty good frozen. You were warned.

Chocolate spice cookies

There's a lot to be said for simple. Margherita pizza. Good-quality vanilla ice-cream. A plain croissant, fresh out of the oven, with a cup of black coffee. Less is more. And then there's Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli-born, London-based chef du jour whose recipes read like an encyclopedia of ingredients. Crazy combinations in odd quantities that echo cultures but aren't conventional, layering tastes, traditions, techniques... More is more. It shouldn't work at all but it does. Case in point: these chocolate spice cookies. 

On my last visit to Hobart, one of my Tasmanian friends presented me with a jar of homemade cookies (is there any better gift?). She's a brilliant baker, and everything in that jar looked incredible but my eye immediately went to these - dark, mysterious, intriguing... They were plump, polka-dotted, glistening with glaze and garnished with gold. Like no other cookie I'd ever seen. I took my first bite and a million flavours exploded at once - bittersweet chocolate, bright citrus, warm spices... Together, they were spectacular. I immediately went home and researched the recipe because I knew they wouldn't last long. Last week, I made them as gifts for friends who'd cheered me up after a crappy day. There's something about these you feel compelled to share.

Wholemeal chocolate chip cookies

You'd think it would be impossible for someone like me, such a devoted devourer of baked goods, to discover anything new about the chocolate chip cookie. But you'd be wrong. For I've recently stumbled across not one but two game-changers. The first is evident in the title of this post: wholemeal flour. Now, I've got nothing against the plain white stuff, as the recipe index of this blog will attest. But wholemeal flour with butter, brown sugar and bittersweet dark chocolate chips is a total revelation, adding a layer of nutty, chewy complexity to a classic cookie combination. So the second revelation: you can freeze cookie dough. Not as one big lump - that would defeat the purpose - but as individually rolled balls, to be taken straight from the freezer, popped on a tray, sprinkled with sea salt and baked to order. 

This means you can have freshly made cookies any time you like. In just sixteen minutes. For unexpected guests. For totally expected cravings. For no reason at all other than to amaze your friends and distract them from the crossword puzzle they insist on enlisting your help in solving even though you are (despite being a writer) totally hopeless at them. A picture tells a thousand words. Say no more.

Old-fashioned chocolate cake

If you're a kid and it's your birthday, then there's only one cake you want. And because all of us have been kids (or perhaps have never really grown up), chocolate cake brings out our inner seven year old, and we too hoe into it with gusto. Anyone who likes to bake has a go-to recipe for chocolate cake and this is mine. I'm not a parent but the average person (baker or not) with a lot on their plate can appreciate a recipe where all you have to do is pile the ingredients into a food processor and press ON. Especially when the results would indicate it was a lot more work - the most delicate crumb, a perfect balance of tangy and sweet, and a sturdy structure which allows it to be comfortably held by fingers big and small.

It's so good in fact, it befits two choruses of happy birthday - one with candles, one with sparklers. The secret is sour cream, which enriches both icing and cake and cuts the sweetness of the sugar in each. It also makes it beautifully moist, which means the slice you get to take home will be just as delicious the next day.

Lamingtons

International travel is a funny thing. One day you're standing on a Californian cliff overlooking the Pacific, staring out at migrating grey whales, and the next you're on the other side of that same ocean, having migrated yourself on the Airbus A380. In a matter of hours. Well, thirteen or so. Give or take. But still, you get my point. It's disorienting. So I cooked. In my own kitchen. To help me get my bearings. It was Australia Day, so I made lamingtons. For those of you back on the other side the world, lamingtons are a particularly Australian childhood treat: squares of soft sponge, dipped in chocolate and rolled in coconut. You can find them at any country town bakery, right next to the vanilla slices, apple turnovers and Neenish tarts.

The cake is usually stale, the chocolate coating thin and teeth-jarringly sweet and more of the coconut - in its desiccated form - ends up on your clothes than in your mouth. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean they're a disappointment. In my book, there's no such thing as a bad lamington but this version kicks things up a notch, quality-wise. The sponge is light and fresh, the chocolate rich, thick and infused with orange, and the shredded coconut clinging to the outside is as shaggy and strange and spectacular as the Joshua trees I left behind in the American desert. It's a small world after all.

Chocolate pecan pie

This trip has been about people. And because of it, I’ve got to see some amazing places*. Last week I flew from the swamp to the high desert to see my friend Robin. Robin and I met a year ago in the woods in New Hampshire, at an artists’ colony, which is kind of like camp for grown-ups. But with better food. We bonded over lots of things, but mostly fiercely over our joint obsession with the chocolate pecan pie. Maryel, the chef at the colony, had prepared it for Thanksgiving, and, after going back for seconds (and maybe even thirds) we begged her for the recipe. Unfortunately I left that recipe back in Australia, not realising that it would be the perfect dessert to make for Christmas dinner with Robin and her boyfriend Don til I arrived in Santa Fe. So I winged it with help from the internet and my memory. And it worked out just fine - sweet, gooey, and all the shades of brown, which seemed appropriate in a place with that particular palette. Where that colour encompasses rust on a pick-up, the golden glow of farolitos lining the roads and rooftops at night, the warm cinnamon of the adobes, and the deep, dark brown of the Stetson I bought to keep the desert light at bay.

* And eat the most amazing things. In New Mexico: enchiladas with blue corn tortillas and green chile, Mexican hot cocoa with cinnamon, and the world’s largest, stickiest (and possibly most delicious) cinnamon roll.

Chocolate pecan pie
Adapted from this recipe, but inspired by memories and Maryel

As difficult as this is, you want to let this cool to room temperature before eating. 

3 tablespoons butter, melted

3 eggs, beaten

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup dark corn syrup

3 tablespoons strong coffee

1 1/2 cups pecan halves

1/2 cup chocolate chips

1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell (I used this recipe)  

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Melt butter in a small saucepan. While butter is melting, add beaten eggs to a medium sized bowl. Stir in brown sugar, flour, vanilla extract, corn syrup and coffee until combined. Add butter when just melted.

Mix in the pecans and chocolate morsels. Stir together and pour mixture into pie shell. 

Place on a sheet tray and bake for 50 to 60 minutes.

Chocolate sablés

Last weekend was kind of busy. I had an apartment to clean, a bag to pack, a scene breakdown to write and Christmas cookies to bake for my neighbours. Fortunately, the latter, at least, was no big deal. I'd made the dough weeks ago, rolled them into logs and stashed them in the freezer so all I had to do on the day was slice and bake. Which meant I had just enough time to test for quality control with a cup of tea (and take a photo). Intensely chocolatey from the double hit of Dutch cocoa and 70% chocolate, these are appropriately luxurious for the season of excess. Though I didn't have enough time to try it out, I reckon they'd be brilliant baked a little larger as the "bread" in an ice-cream sandwich with some softened, good-quality vanilla ice-cream. Another weekend. When I return to summer. And Sydney. See you soon.

Pantry-shelf chocolate orange cake

This weekend, I was in Brisbane celebrating Christmas with my family. It's still November, I'm aware, but this year I'm not going to be in Australia on the day itself so we needed to rearrange the schedule a bit. Though the date may not have been quite right, everything else felt like holidays in my hometown: heat, humidity and thunderstorms, check, watching cricket with my dad, check, unwrapping presents, check, nice dinner out with friends, check, amazing breakfast in with others, check, cooking in my parents' kitchen, check. The latter is probably one of my favourite parts of coming home. Though I dearly love my kitchen in Sydney, it's small verging on tiny, so it's somewhat novel for me to have space to spread out. Not that I needed it really for this cake, which I made on Saturday. You see, Australia was doing particularly well in the First Test, and I didn't want to divert my attention for too long from the screen. So this cake fit the bill. In more ways than one. Not only was it extremely straight-forward (you can make it in a saucepan!) but it has marmalade as a key ingredient. And my mum happens to make incredible marmalade (with cumquats from her tree) and always has a ready supply. So here it is, the non-Christmas cake I made over my non-Christmas Christmas. So easy to make, it's an excellent everyday cake but the sweet, tart citrus kick of the marmalade makes it just that little bit special. A tangy zing in a deep, dark, densely chocolatey loaf. I'd like to dedicate it to Mitchell Johnson, another ex-Queenslander who had a good weekend in his home state. Thanks to this cake, I didn't miss one of his wickets.

Marbled cheesecake brownies

There is nothing remotely sophisticated about cream cheese. It's kind of the sweet equivalent of mashed potato - white, soft, malleable... and oh so good. Though it comes in bricks, it's more like mortar. Bagels wouldn't be the same without it. The frosting made with it is the very reason carrot cake exists. And then there's cheesecake. Which is all very well on its own, but swirled into a brownie and strewn with chocolate chips to form a hybrid kind of sweet squidgy square is, well, definitely not sophisticated, but who cares? Sophisticated can't be tucked into the corner of a lunchbox, eaten straight from the freezer or carted to a picnic in its tin.   

Life's too short for sophisticated. But long enough that you can indulge in something this rich occasionally. You can serve these warm, or at room temperature, but for the cleanest slices, refridgerate the pan til nicely chilled then use a knife dipped in hot water to cut through. If making a whole tray of these worries you - know that they freeze well... but also know they taste good straight from the freezer. Consider this a warning.

Coco the burlesque wonder cake

It's been a year. 52 weeks, 52 recipes since I started a blog called Alice Bakes a Cake with a post on... apple pie. It seems appropriate then, for more than one reason, to mark the occasion with cake. And not just any cake but the most over the top in my repertoire, the fabulously-named Coco the burlesque wonder cake.

The name befits a more blousy floral adornment but I couldn't resist the bright yellow of the wattle that's all over Sydney at the moment and plucked a couple of branches from a neighbourhood tree to bring home, where it promptly shed little yellow polka dots all over my apartment. But I digress. This cake is, like all other recipes I've posted here over the last year, so easy to make - a pile-all-ingredients-in-the-food-processor kind of affair. It's basically a chocolate cake, with a rich, decadent chocolate frosting. But there's nothing basic about its taste. The magic ingredient is golden syrup, which gives Coco a lovely can't-quite-put-your-finger-on-it point of difference from your standard chocolate cake. Along with the sour cream - also a feature of both frosting and cake - it gives a nice tangy intensity to the sweetness. A complexity of flavour in a cake that couldn't be more simple.

Huge thanks to everyone who's eaten things I've cooked for the blog over this last year (I couldn't get through all those cakes and pies single-handedly), as well as to those who've read it, commented on it, and most of all, made things from it. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. The biggest pieces of cake go to my good friends Elizabeth, who inspired and encouraged me to start a blog, and to Tammy, whose IT help and photography favours have been so appreciated. Like any good speech, I'll keep this short. It's time to tuck in.

Nanaimo bars

Canada is responsible for so many of my favourite things - maple syrup, Neil Young, Alice Munro, Anne of Green Gables... it's got the best flag, wonderful place names (Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland...), two languages and these biscuity-cheesecakey-chocolatey squares, named after a town in British Columbia.

Traditionally, Nanaimo bars are a no-bake affair but this recipe, which I discovered on a Canadian food blog, calls for a tiny bit of oven time and takes a few liberties with ingredients. The end result is well worth it - a chewy, nutty biscuit-base wrapped in the aroma of toasted coconut, a robust, lightly sweet cheesecake filling and a rich, skating-rink-smooth layer of dark chocolate ganache to top it all off. What else is there to say? O Canada.

Chocolate orange cake

Last week it was my friend Joanna's birthday. So I made her a cake. When I'm cooking for Joanna, the stakes are high. She's an excellent cook...  and an adventurous one. She has a piping bag and a blow torch - for brûlée not welding - and the ability and patience (and need with two small daughters) to make cakes in the shape of barnyard animals and geometrically difficult numerals involving multiple tins and creative assembly. I can't compete with that. So I went the other way, with my limited craft skills and a fail-safe recipe.

This cake - a variation on the Middle-Eastern orange cake - couldn't be more simple... or delicious. Here, cocoa is added to the traditional mix of boiled orange, eggs, sugar and almond meal, resulting in a stunningly light chocolate cake - nutty, citrussy and incredibly moreish. It's brilliant as a light dessert at a dinner party (when you've probably already overfed your guests), as something decadent for those who don't eat gluten or dairy, a treat to take camping (it's so moist it keeps for days), or with a cup of tea on a sunny Saturday morning to celebrate a birthday of a friend... who liked it so much she asked for the recipe. Here it is!

Chocolate prune brownies

There are a lot of brownie recipes out there. So if I'm going to post about something gooey, and chocolatey and square, it ought to be worth your while. And let me tell you, this is. It's not just any old brownie recipe, but one from a favourite place of mine in Sydney, the Bourke Street Bakery. There are a number of them now, but the original bakery café, on leafy Bourke Street, Surry Hills, is on my route to the office I've been writing at lately. Sometimes I stop in for a coffee and exercise all my self-restraint to not order something else to go with it.

And then, after all that, I come home and bake something from their cookbook. This week it was somewhat justified as I was going to the Sydney Film Festival with friends. There's not much time in between sessions, and limited dining options in the immediate vicinity other than popcorn, so indoor picnic supplies are called for. A brought-from-home sandwich or thermos of soup are all very well and good, but afterwards, what you need to power you into the next film, is an intense hit of chocolate. One that's easy to pack in your bag and eat with your fingers in the darkness of a cinema. 

Brownies are the perfect portable dessert - at a festival or a friend's house, on a road trip or a picnic... or as far afield as your own kitchen, transported all the way from the tin to your hand (then your mouth). What sets these brownies apart from all others - other than the sour cream, which imparts a smooth richness - are the prunes. Shiny, sweet and silky, and impossibly soft and moist from three days of soaking, they're a perfect match with dark chocolate, adding an unexpected, exquisite, sophisticated texture to the familiar dense, squidgy square.

Chocolate puddle cookies

So I had some egg whites to use up.  The last few weeks I've been running down my supplies, eating my way through the contents of my freezer, the bulk of which is surplus stock of whatever meals I've made in the last week, or month or (more likely I suspect) months, plural.  In theory I should enjoy - not to mention find convenient - retrieving something delicious that's available to me instantaneously (or at least, in the time it takes to resurrect it in the microwave) but the truth is, I miss cooking.  Food somehow doesn't taste the same when it's prepared with a bing rather than a hiss or a chop or a bubble.  So imagine my excitement when I found, tucked away behind the catering company quantities of chicken soup (prepared for a monster cold that never eventuated) and solid blocks of Bolognese, a little ziplock bag labelled EGGWHITES X 2.  As it happened, just that week, in a bout of serious food blog procrastination to fill the cooking void, I'd come across a recipe for chocolate puddle cookies.  

The name alone was enough to make me look, the accompanying image further encouragement.  Having made them, I now know it was no false advertising.  These cookies are seriously good, their crisp, cracked exterior giving way to a moist, chewy centre.  Miraculously, they manage to have an intense chocolate flavour without the usual heaviness that accompanies such an indulgence because they're made without butter or flour.  Not that I'm averse to either but some people are, so it's good to have a recipe up my sleeve that satisfies their needs without compromising my own sense of identity (as an eater of all good things).    

My freezer is empty now, my little kitchen a hemisphere away.  I won't be cooking for a while but I've got lots of recipes stored up to share in the weeks ahead.  Hopefully it'll be as therapeutic as finding those eggwhites. 
 

Afghans

In the biscuit world, there are the elegant – the macacrons, the madeleines, the sablés… (the French have it all sewn up basically) and then... there are these.  Hailing from New Zealand via Bedrock, these delicious pebbles of chocolaty goodness are fabulously low-rent, containing as they do, a certain secret ingredient: cornflakes!  I can imagine Fred Flintstone throwing down a few on his coffee break at the quarry, but they’re equally appropriate to serve to friends who come over with their fancy cameras (and IT skills) to help you with your blog.  Ironically, the photographs that resulted make these biscuits look as chic as their more high-class relatives.  But so much more approachable.