Monday 10 May 2010

What is this, a cooking blog?


Well, since my last entry I have baked two recipes from Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache, the weird cook book that uses vegetables instead of butter. The first attempts were really lovely – peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes. I could have eaten a ton. The frosting alone was genius – peanut butter, cocoa powder, icing sugar and boiling water. The recipe was for 12 cupcakes but really made 24! And there was leftover frosting! In the absence of my camera lead I cannot yet give you a visual, but here is the book. Yummers. And we sold some over the May Day weekend but still had some left by Saturday, when I attempted to eat one for breakfast. Turns out they don’t really last a week – they tasted faintly musty like old dishcloths.
The second recipe was for the heartache Chocolate cake, it is supposed to be a consolation cake for broken hearts, and actually is my second broken heart recipe of the week (blame Nigella – not for breaking hearts but for making me drool with her cookie batter). This cake took 300g of dark chocolate (I used Willie’s Cacao – fancy present from Nafisa and Mathew), 200g Honey and 2 Aubergines (thanks to Auntie Lynn and Uncle Richard for getting those from Tesco). It was Tortey in texture but so horribly dark and bitter. I like dark chocolate but this was like super intense, almost burnt-tasting dark chocolate. Ahhhh… perhaps it was because I used Willie’s Cacao which is 100% cocoa solids. It all makes sense now! Will definitely use more milk chocolate next time. Am determined to fix my broken heart after all!
The cookies were from Nigella Express, which I accidentally left on series record on the tv. They are called Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies and after watching her make them I couldn’t stop thinking about them. In particular, the sound of her mixing the chocolate chips into the cookie mixture has me drooling even now. And they certainly lived up to expectation. Huge quantities of chocolate went into them, and I used milk chocolate chips rather than dark as in the recipe. I snook one into Dad’s lunchbox the next day and he left me a lovely voicemail after eating it. Brave of him to try it as it sort of looked like a turd in clingfilm.
Yesterday I retrieved my Nigella Express from the house and saw that she actually got the recipe from a cookbook called Big Fat Cookies. Tony bought me that cookie book for my birthday years ago! So I had the recipe all along! It has inspired me to bake more from it. I might have to ask Dad to put up some shelves in my room to house all my cookbooks. I don’t like being parted from them like this. Everything else in the house I could quite happily never see again, apart from Boris of course. And Tony I suppose. I know he should be the first thing to go, but it just doesn’t work like that.

2 comments:

  1. ok, i might need the recipie for the peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes, they sound yummy. i'm going to make the chocolate frosted brownies from the hummingbird bakery book this weekend. broken hearts take quite a lot of baking to get over. who's boris?

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  2. Boris is my triangle-headed teddy bear. He was made for Mathew by Mrs Larouge-Tell but he rejected it. I then adopted Boris when I was born, and we slept in the same bed up until I moved in with Tony. He had to be put away when we got Otto after I found Boris had lost his nose in a chewing incident. When I moved out Tony searched the house to find him and finally did, but I don't need him so much anymore. Mmmm...brownies. That's a winner. Brownies may be my favourite baked good.

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