This week I made two chocolate cakes. Both were oil (rather than butter) based. One was a triumph and the other... the less said about it the better. The big difference in the recipes was in the choice of chocolate. The flop used melted dark chocolate, the success story cocoa.
This cake - from former Chez Panisse chef Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat - is deliciously dark and amazingly, dairy-free (should you choose to serve without the cream). It's brilliant for birthdays and celebrations, and easy enough for weekday cooking. Because of the oil, it keeps beautifully so can always be made ahead of time. Not that it's at all labour intensive. Including cooking time, it takes about forty minutes. So simple. Spectacular. Sold.
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.
At times of high stress, sometimes the only solution is chocolate. The fastest way for a fix - other than buying a bar or a block - is the brownie. One bowl, no need for softening of butter or room temperature anything, just melt, stir, pour, bake, slice and serve. This Smitten Kitchen recipe doesn't even require you to have dark chocolate in the house - it uses cocoa instead - and so can be whipped up from pantry staples. My friend Joanna had recently made these with orange zest - to great acclaim - and I further freewheeled by substituting walnuts for cranberries. I used dried, but fresh or frozen would work just as well for that pop of sour among all the sweet. Serve warm, at room temperature, refrigerated or straight from the freezer. It all works.
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.
Food presents are my favourite. Among the best I've received in recent years: vanilla beans from Bali, a catering-size container of corn relish from Tasmania, biscotti baked in one hemisphere and mailed to another, home-roasted coffee beans, a dozen hot cross buns from my favourite Hobart bakery, a tin of homemade biscuits to last through Christmas and beyond, my mother's green pawpaw chutney (which I'm lucky enough to have a lifetime supply of thanks to her obsessive need to bottle everything she ever grew), and last week, a huge haul of premium grade cocoa from my American cousin Amy, transported across the Pacific Ocean and lugged halfway around Australia by her parents, who've been out here visiting. To thank them for being such good-natured cocoa-mules, I wanted to make them something with it to say thank you. I wanted to make something the gluten-free giver of the gift could eat, even if she wouldn't get to taste this particular batch (her folks are heading home on a three week cruise). Something to showcase the cocoa, in all its dark, bitter beauty. Happily I had just the recipe. It required only a handful of ingredients, all easily available: dates, orange, walnuts and cocoa. Blended together, rolled in extra cocoa to make an elegant truffle that just so happens to be gluten-free and dairy-free too. There's no refined sugar but the natural sweetness of the date and the orange in combination with the richness of the nuts and the cocoa create a taste not unlike the very best dark chocolate... which if you've recently OD'd on supermarket-grade milk chocolate Easter eggs, you will appreciate all the more. Just like a thoughtful gift*.
* special shout out to my friend George too, for the beautiful plate these truffles sit on, which may not be edible but makes anything that goes near it infinitely more so.
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.
When I travel these days I'm more drawn to supermarkets than musuems. I could spend hours wandering the aisles, entranced by unfamiliar packaging, exotic ingredients and produce from opposite seasons or different climates. My best souvenirs come from here. I brought back juniper berries from Denmark last year, apricots from Tasmania in January and a few days ago, in Portland, I picked up some cacao nibs. I couldn't wait til I got home to open the packet. An opportunity presented itself to make a cake and I jumped on it. Lately I've been
experimenting with different kinds of flours. The wholemeal chocolate chip cookies started it all, but then there was an apple, rye and ginger teacake that left me with extra rye flour for another project. And in
the January 2015 issue of Bon Appétit I found it.
It called for cacao nibs, something I'd looked for in Sydney without success. I'm sure they're somewhere to be
found in the city but with a deadline looming, a suitcase to pack and
little point in making a cake just before getting on a plane, I decided
to pick some up on my holiday.
Cacao nibs are cacao beans that have been roasted, separated from their husks and broken into little pieces. They taste chocolatey but not sweet. A little fruity, a little nutty, they're like the thinking man or woman's chocolate chip. Here, they add a bittersweet crunch to the crumb topping, a beautiful contrast to the rich, smooth, darkly sophisticated cake beneath. Made with both yoghurt and buttermilk, it's incredibly moist and keeps well for days if you store it in an airtight container. This is good news for anyone with people coming for dinner on a weeknight or a school bake sale to cook for. It was good news for me, just eating a piece outside in the cold with a cup of drip coffee and a view of a snow-covered mountain that came out from behind a screen of cloud as if just for me. And when I make this cake again back on the other side of the world sometime, I'll remember that moment.
Chocolate rye crumb cake
Adapted from a recipe in the January 2015 issue of Bon Appétit
As it contains more essential oils than other flours, rye flour is best stored in the fridge or freezer.
Crumble
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup rye flour
1/4 cup flour
3 tablespoons cacao nibs
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
1/4 teaspoon Kosher salt (or 1/8 teaspoon table salt)
1/4 cup unsalted butter, chilled and chopped into pieces
Cake
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup rye flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon Kosher salt (or 1/4 teaspoon table salt)
3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup Greek yoghurt
First, make the crumble: whisk sugar, both flours, cacao nibs, cocoa and salt in a medium bowl til blended. Work in butter with your fingers to form large clumps - there should be no dry spots. Cover and chill.
Preheat oven to 350 deg F. Grease a 9 inch springform tin and line the base with baking paper.
Now to the cake: whisk both flours, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. In another bowl, cream butter and both sugars til light and fluffy (about 5 minutes in a mixer). Mix in eggs, one at a time, then add vanilla and stir til blended (another 2 minutes). Fold in half the dry ingredients, then the buttermilk. Once combined, add the remaining dry ingredients, followed by the yoghurt to make a stiff batter. Scrape into prepared tin and scatter crumble over.
Bake, rotating once, til cake starts to pull away from sides of pan and a tester inserted in the centre comes out clean - about 60-70 minutes. Let cake cool in pan on a wire rack before turning out.
Some good friends of mine moved house on Monday. I, by contrast, have not moved very far from my computer in the last month with a seemingly neverending string of deadlines. So to make something for their move, that required me to move only as far as my kitchen, where all the ingredients were waiting for me, I turned to these brownies. The ones I usually make require a bit of forethought, as they contain prunes that need to be soaked for three days, but these cocoa hazelnut numbers take about as long to make as the decision to make them, which you'll see, after your eyes graze over these images (or these, from the original source) is not very long at all.
Most brownies are made by
melting butter and dark chocolate, but here, the chocolate is swapped for cocoa. I'd been
looking for a recipe to showcase the contents of the catering size bag of Italian Pernigotti cocoa I'd lugged back from Seattle (of all places) last
year and this proved perfect. Dense, dark, delicious. Worth moving for. Whatever the distance.
A year ago I had a birthday cake festooned with little Danish flags. This year, I find myself in Copenhagen for my birthday. Just. Fresh off the plane, I'm still grappling with jet lag. Waking up at 3.30am has its advantages though in that you are somewhat justified in eating two breakfasts. The first - toast made with bread from the tiny yet amazing bakery in the street in which I'm staying, smeared with butter and boysenberry jam - I ate illuminated by the glow of my laptop before the sun got up. The second I ate several hours later at Grød, a café more or less opposite the bakery, that serves only porridge... albeit porridge embellished with homemade dulche de leche, roasted almonds and chopped apple. Good food is not hard to find in Scandinavia. Not on my street. And not in my little apartment either, which has a beautiful kitchen overlooking trees in bud just about to blossom.
The best way to feel at home in a new place is to cook. There are so many things I've marvelled at in these first few days - the unfamiliar sounds of children's chatter in the stairwell, the shoals of fast-moving cyclists in the streets, the fact that everyone here is ridiculously tall and good-looking - but nothing's given me more pleasure than roaming the aisles of a supermarket, selecting groceries, and bringing them home to bake a cake. Though I'm in Denmark, Copenhagen is in spitting distance of Sweden, so this particular recipe seemed appropriate for the location and occasion. Besides, I couldn't resist the name. In original language or in translation. The cake itself lives up to it. Dark, gooey, magnificent. A lovely way to land.
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.
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!
