Forever Nigella: Chocolate Raspberry Heart

This is my first ever entry submitted to a blogging challenge, the Forever Nigella challenge started by Sarah of Maison Cupcake.

This month's theme was Seduced by Chocolate, and what could be more appropriate for the month when we celebrate Valentine's Day, than the Chocolate Raspberry Heart recipe from Nigella Lawson's Feast. The recipe can also be found in this Daily Mail Online article from 10/02/2005, called Nigella's Valentine feast, which is an extract from her book.

OK, so my main deviation from the recipe will be immediately obvious - it doesn't look like a heart. I didn't have a heart-shaped baking tin, so I had to make-do with two 9-inch round cake tins instead. Apart from that I followed the recipe faithfully.

I used Green and Black's cocoa powder for the cake, and Green and Black's 72% cooking chocolate for the ganache.



I didn't use a Kitchen Aid either, so I had a little bit of trouble folding the flour evenly into the mixture. I think I am more used to North American methods of mixing layer cake batters, and I often have problems with British instructions.

My sponges came out rather dry, but I blame that on my fan oven, which has been causing me a lot of baking problems recently.



The ganache was just right in consistency - it didn't set too quickly, before you have time to spread it on the cake, nor did it refuse to set after the cake had been iced.



The assembled cake looks very pretty, if I do say so myself, with a lovely glossy chocolate icing. Unlike Ms. Lawson, however, I don't have any young children, so I have to take full responsibility for the icing not being perfectly smooth!





See the Forever Nigella web page for all the other entries and this month's winners.

February

February. The first daffodils, Valentine's Day, usually Shrove Tuesday aka Pancake Day over here, and this year Chinese New Year - the year of the Tiger - as well.

Well, we actually saw the first daffodils on the 30th of January when we were out for a walk, but they don't really count because they were in containers. The daffodils in the ground are way behind this year compared to recent years, and they aren't anywhere near flowering yet.

Valentine's Day is usually associated with flowers and chocolate, so today I am giving you a link to a recipe for a very yummy but easy to make rich chocolate desert, called Truffle Torte.

The recipe is here, at Delia Online. The recipe is also in two of Delia's books - Delia Smith's Christmas and The Delia Collection, Chocolate.

I made this for Valentine's Day last year, using a 200g block of Valrhona's Manjari couverture chocolate that I had bought in John Lewis, so I scaled the quantities of the other ingredients accordingly.

As the recipe says, the torte was well behaved and remained in one piece when I turned it out of the tin onto a plate. I dusted the surface of the torte with Green and Black's cocoa powder.

We served the torte as suggested, with some single cream poured over it, but we didn't add any flavoring or liqueur to the single cream.

I apologise for the photos - the torte does look rather just like a chocolate blob, and when we poured the cream over the slices of torte, the cream and cocoa powder didn't mix, so the cream just sort of slid off the top of the slice and formed a pool around it. But the taste didn't disappoint, and there is a much nicer picture of the torte in Delia Smith's Christmas.

Chocolate and Cupcakes

Today a couple of links from the Olympic city of 2012 to the Olympic city of 1976 - Montreal.

There is a chocolate trade fair on in Montreal at the moment - Salon Passion Chocolat, at the Bonsecours Market in Old Montreal.

See the links here and here.

There is also a cupcake contest/charity fund-raising event on Sunday, Cupcake Camp Montreal. The chosen charity this year is Jeunesse J'ecoute/Kids Help Phone, a telephone helpline for children.

Mini Book Review - Adventures with Chocolate by Paul A. Young

The other day I came across chocolatier Paul A. Young's recent cookbook Adventures with Chocolate while browsing in Waterstone's. They had set up a table with a sign saying grEAT Britain, featuring a selection of British cookbooks.

This book is a must-have for any chocoholic's cookbook collection. As the cover says, the book contains 80 recipes. The book is divided into several sections, not based on courses or sweet versus savoury, but based on different ingredient/flavour combinations.

There is an introductory section on tempering chocolate, and a few savoury recipes like chocolate chili chicken. Not surprisingly, since it is a book on chocolate, the majority of recipes are for sweet dishes - puddings (i.e. desserts), chocolate ganache, and chocolate truffles. I think it would be an excellent book for anyone wanting to try making some chocolates at home, because there are many recipes for different flavors of ganache and truffles. One recipe that sticks in my mind because of the illustration is White chocolate truffles with wild strawberries and pink peppercorns. Another recipe I remember features the currently very trendy sea-salted caramel.

The list price for the book (hardcover) is £17.99. The book was printed and bound in China.

Cocoa Butter

Yaaay! I think Christmas came early this year!

I was browsing in Planet Organic yesterday afternoon, and was about to decide that it was time to call it quits as I had seen most of the shop, and I should really be getting on my way home as I was rather tired, when what did I see on a shelf in front of me but several tubs of pure cocoa butter!!!

I have been searching for cocoa butter for years. I thought it would be fun to try experimenting with a small amount of it to make some lotions and potions - skin cream, face cream, that kind of stuff. But I had no idea where to find it. These days we have the internet, and a couple of years ago I saw 3kg tubs of Valrhona cocoa butter for sale on a UK-based website that sells chocolate to the general public, but a) I only wanted something like 100g of the stuff in the first instance, to see what it's like, and b) the cocoa butter was only for sale to the trade, so not being a chocolatier, I wouldn't have been able to buy it from them anyway. A few days ago, while reading about the Chocolate Week that I had just missed, I came across a website - Choc Chick - that sells chocolate making kits (in small quantities!). I had never heard of them before, but they seemed to sell small amounts of cocoa butter as well. This was an interesting development, and I duly bookmarked the webpage so that I could go back and have a better look at it later. But with the strikes the postal system is having at the moment, I wasn't about to order anything over the internet just at this time.

But all of a sudden, here were these tubs of cocoa butter unexpectedly in front of me. They only had them in one size, 500g, which was admittedly more than I really wanted for an initial trial. On top of that, this was not just any old cocoa butter, but organic, raw, cold-pressed cocoa butter, so it was also very, very expensive (£20). What to do. I could go home and think about it, perhaps compare the price with the cocoa butter for sale on the internet, and come back a few days or weeks later. But I decided to carpe diem. I decided I could justify the purchase if I called it an early Christmas present, so I am now the happy owner of 500g of cocoa butter.

Although my initial interest in cocoa butter was to try using it as a moisturiser/skin cream, since I have ended up with organic cold-pressed cocoa butter, and there is quite a lot of it, I think in order to do it justice (and justify the expense) I will have to try cooking with it or making some chocolates. It's a hard life!

Chocolate Week

Aargh! I've just discovered that I missed Chocolate Week. Apparently it was a couple of weeks ago, October 12 - 18, 2009. I'm not sure that I would actually have managed to attend any events, but now I'll have to wait until next October. Still, I suppose that it wasn't very well publicised if I could have been completely oblivious to the fact that it was on.

Amalfitana Chocolate and Aubergine Pudding

I like to try weird and wonderful food combinations sometimes. Not ones that I've actually invented myself, but recipes that I come across that use ingredients in somewhat unusual ways. Sometimes I have a look at the recipe, and think, you know, that might just work. Most of the time it does. Earlier this summer I made Rhubarb Ice Cream, from a Rachel Allen recipe, and Orange Marmalade Ice Cream, from a Sophie Grigson recipe from her book Sophie's Table. I've had another unusual Sophie Grigson recipe filed away for a while now - Amalfitana Chocolate and Aubergine Pudding. I love aubergines, especially fried, when they are really gooey and slimy, and I have quite a few favorite aubergine recipes - Eggplant Parmigiana, Eggplant Szechuan Style, Hyderabadi Aubergines (from Madhur Jaffrey's Eastern Vegetarian Cooking), and Caponata are at the top of the list. This Amalfitana Chocolate and Aubergine Pudding is rather unusual, to say the least. It combines fried aubergine slices with layers of vanilla custard and chocolate custard. But when I got a couple of large aubergines from a market stall in central London last week, I thought I would give it a try.

The recipe is
here, in an article from The Independent, and here, on the UKTV website.

I used a mild olive oil to fry the aubergines, as I prefer not to use unsaturated oils for frying whenever possible. I made the UKTV version, which uses 60g of sugar in the chocolate custard, rather than 45g. I assembled the pudding in a 9x13-inch dish, making 3 layers of aubergines, vanilla custard and chocolate custard.