Lentil and Chestnut Soup, life updates and some thoughts on ‘Simply Nigella’

These past couple of weeks are turning out to be so weird. What a way to start today’s post, eh? In the spirit of Halloween I am still feeling like a zombie. Sleepy (strong anti-ear infection medication does that to you, trust me) and generally very light-headed. I meant to post a recipe yesterday, but my to-do list went out the window in the afternoon since I didn’t feel well at all. The situation hasn’t improved much. My ear still feels like someone’s lighting a lighter in it and to top it all off I get stabbing pains at intervals, as if someone is literally poking a needle into my eardrum. Not fun. Babies are prone to getting ear infections, I am constantly hearing right now. True. I’m not a baby but I still feel miserable. Poor things (little ones not me), no wonder they constantly cry in pain.

Let’s move on to the more cheerful things, shall we? I have two pieces of good news. I have my new desk! I am so pleased with it. I almost couldn’t believe it was here while watching J and his dad assembling it in the study. I am really enjoying working in this room even more. It’s my haven. Nearer completion we plan to purchase a comfortable reading chair to place next to the window. Can’t wait. The second piece of news is that I am waiting for a number of cookbooks to arrive, all of which are for review. I’ll be happy if they all make the cut, so we’ll see.

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Triple Chocolate Cake

I have to say that I am always looking for a good chocolate cake. The main reason is simple really: generally there aren’t many people who would object to chocolate and this makes chocolate cakes perfect for any celebration. Personally I think that any excuse is good to bake one of these, but surely would you *really* need an excuse, and my go-to person in a situation such as this, is of course Nigella.

As much as I love using my round baking tins (I recently bought another two), I prefer finding recipes for loaf cakes. Somehow I find loaf cakes easier to cut and make taking them around, say for a picnic or to a friend’s house for tea, easier. This recipe is one towards which I gravitate most and is definitely one of my favourites. It reminds me of a lemon drizzle cake…you will see why as you read on.

Before you start, take whatever you need out of the fridge. You will get a better cake if everything is at room temperature.

• 200g plain flour
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 50g cocoa powder
• 275g golden caster sugar
• 175g butter, soft and unsalted
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon good quality vanilla extract
• 80ml sour cream
• 125ml boiling water
• 175g dark chocolate, cut into small chunks

Syrup ingredients:

• 1 teaspoon cocoa powder
• 125ml water
• 100g golden caster sugar

Place a baking tray on the middle shelf of your oven and preheat to 170°C. Grease and line a loaf tin, making sure you have extra baking parchment at the sides. You could use a silicon tin but I prefer the conventional way. It takes a bit more work but the results will be better.

For the cake, place the flour, baking powder and the cocoa powder in a medium bowl and give them a good mix.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the softened butter and caster sugar together. Beat in the eggs one by one.

Now gently fold in the dry ingredients and add the sour cream and vanilla extract to the mixture. Slowly add the boiling water and mix everything until just combined. Add the chocolate chunks and distribute evenly in the cake batter.

As soon as you do this, scrape the batter into the prepared loaf tin and bake for around 50 minutes to an hour. (There will be a few cracks in the cake when it’s done. Check it by inserting a skewer in the middle. The cake shouldn’t be too dry.)

While the cake is baking away, prepare the syrup by putting the cocoa powder, water and sugar in a small saucepan. Swirl the pan around a few times and let the liquid boil for a few minutes, until it has reduced to a syrup-y consistency.

When the cake is done, let it stay in the tin on a wire rack and pierce it with a skewer (like you would do with a lemon drizzle cake). Slowly pour the syrup all over the cake. Don’t worry if the liquid runs on the sides.

Make sure the cake is completely cold before taking it out of the tin, with the help of the overhanging parchment paper. Remove the lining and place it on a serving dish.

Serve it alone or with strawberries and cream or crème fraîche. Enjoy!

Rob x

(Recipe adapted from Nigella Feast: Food that celebrates life, Chatto & Windus, 2004.)

Chocolate and Honey Cake.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post I didn’t bake much lately. Sometimes I lack inspiration and recipes. When I said that to J he gave me this I-can’t-believe-you’re-saying-this-and-what-about-all-those-recipe-books-you-have look! I can’t blame him. Recently a friend of mine, who wants to learn how to bake, asked me for a list of books (she said maybe a list of up to ten books will suffice for now) with a variety of easy recipes for her to try. Of course I sent her much more than that, even though I specified which ones I consider best. You see, recipe books come in various kinds, and they come and go, because some are just fads. And others are just repetitive – plain and simple. Some cooks who have published a gazillion books, copy and paste from their own books, so when you think about it, they could have just come up with a bumper book and leave it at that! Even my favourite people have done that. It’s inevitable and it happens not only in cooking.

I find that some ingredients don’t let you be creative. This could be because I’m no chef. I just love cooking and baking, and you could say that not being extra mega imaginative is ok for someone like me. I’ll tell you one thing: when you’re a food blogger this won’t do. The good thing with us is that we can blog about food in general, without necessarily giving recipes. My readers, who are extremely supportive, don’t seem to be bothered too much whenever I just rave or rant about something in particular, and I’m so thankful about that! They are really generous. But once in a while they do ask me for a pudding or two or some cake ideas.

So once again, what I am giving you here is a chocolate cake. I’m never tired of chocolate, or cake for that matter! It’s very moist and luscious, but not that rich which is what we need sometimes. It has honey in it so it’s not for everyone, but I love this cake especially after a light meal, where you think you’ll be good because you’ve just ate something healthy, but then just give in and say “oh well, I’ve been really good, but now I’ll be really bad!” I saw this in Nigella Feast, made the cake with a little tweaks but didn’t make the frosting as instructed, not because it wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t like the idea of a honey frosting. I love honey but too much makes my teeth squeak! So I made a simple icing out of chocolate, which you can find here. (You could also try her cola icing; believe me it doesn’t taste like cola at all so it will do for this cake too.) I did half the quantity though and it worked well. I am always stuck when I have extra, and making less means not having to bake something else. Here it is:

• 100g dark chocolate, broken into chunks
• 275g light brown sugar
• 225g unsalted butter, softened
• 125ml runny honey
• 2 large eggs
• 200g plain flour (all purpose)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 tablespoon good quality cocoa powder
• 250ml boiling water

1. Make sure that all your ingredients are at room temperature.
2. Place the chocolate chunks into a small bowl and melt by putting this over simmering water. Make sure that the water does not touch the bowl. When the chocolate is completely melted set it aside to cool. (Please note that this water has nothing to do with the boiling water listed in the ingredients. It is extra.)
3. Preheat the oven to 180ºC/Gas mark 4, and line and grease a springform cake tin (preferably a 23cm one).
4. Place the sugar and softened butter into a large bowl and whisk the ingredients well until they become white in colour and creamy in texture. Add the honey.
5. Tip in the first egg and a tablespoonful of flour and beat into the mixture, and do the same with the second egg. This will avoid any curdling in the batter. Fold in the melted chocolate, the remainder of the flour and two teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Sieve in the cocoa powder to remove any lumps. Then add the boiling water and beat the mixture once more. Your batter should be completely smooth.
6. Tip in the batter into the prepared cake tin and check it after 40 minutes. If the cake is browning too quickly from the top, cover this with a piece of kitchen foil. Check it again after 20 minutes. When the cake is ready remove from the oven and leave it to cool on a rack, still in the tin. Remove the springform and when it’s cool enough for you to handle, place a clean hand on the top of the cake, turn it over, remove the base and place it on a cake stand. Frost it if you like and how you like.

Don’t let the many steps frighten you. It’s easy I promise you. This is what I will bake during my birthday week. I love this and so will you! For my birthday, which is today, I’m off to Guildford for a special treat at Raymond Blanc’s bakery and get myself some lovely macaroons! I’m off….

Rob x

Chocolate Birthday Cake

I couldn’t quite choose what to write about today. However, just now a friend of mine tweeted about chocolate cake and birthdays. Don’t you just love Twitter? I do. It’s nice to be a child: you go to some friends’ birthday parties, and sometimes you get to invite them to yours. And the grown-ups do all the work for you. Smashing. I always say that children have the best social lives. The highlight of a birthday party is of course the cake, even though one might argue that it’s actually the presents! So let’s say that they are equally important. And let’s also say that every excuse is a good excuse for chocolate cake. I tried this recipe quite a while ago; I definitely didn’t wait for my birthday to bake it.

In my view, Nigella’s book Feast is one of the books to go for if you want something special for a party. As with many of her books, it’s like an encyclopaedia, and there’s a whole section on chocolate and chocolate cakes. The cakes here can also be quite rich, but is that really a bad thing? Let’s face it, you won’t make it or eat it that often, and what’s a birthday celebration without a smooth chocolate-melt-in-the-mouth cake?

You need sour cream for this. I had a tub of the stuff just sitting in the fridge doing nothing. Classic: you buy one ingredient for a particular recipe, then you almost always end up with extra which ultimately goes bad. What a waste. So I flipped frantically through the books till I came across Nigella’s Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cake. Don’t be fooled by the length of the method. It’s really easy to make. This is totally her recipe.

Some notes before you start: Firstly, this is a sandwich cake, so you need two sandwich tins (with or without a removable bases – mine aren’t). Secondly, I had a lot of leftover icing, a lot more than I really needed. Instead of scaling the amount down I chose to make some quick and easy cupcakes (which I will include very soon) and spooned whatever remained over them. In my experience you will have enough to top another cake if you like. Also Nigella suggests that all your ingredients should be at room temperature.

For the cake you will need:

• 200g plain flour
• 200g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 40g cocoa powder
• 175g soft unsalted butter
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 150ml sour cream

For the American-style icing (or frosting) you need:

• 75g unsalted butter
• 175g dark chocolate, broken into small cubes
• 300g icing sugar
• 1 tablespoon golden syrup
• 125ml sour cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat your oven to 180ºC/Gas Mark 4. Line and grease well two sandwich tins.
2. In a large bowl mix the the flour, sugar, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda and beat in the butter till you have a soft and creamy mixture. In another bowl whisk the cocoa, sour cream, vanilla extract and eggs together (you can do this by hand), and beat this with the other mixture in the large bowl.
3. Divide the cake batter into your two tins and bake for about 50 minutes. Every oven is different so start checking your cakes after around 30 minutes with a skewer or knife. When completely baked, remove the cakes from the oven and put them on a rack to cool for about 10 minutes in their tins. When they are cool enough for you to handle turn them out completely and onto the rack again. Any cracks will be covered by the icing later.
4. Now for the icing. Melt the chocolate together with the butter in a bowl over a pot of simmering water. (This way is better than melting in the microwave because it is much easier to control and there’s a lesser chance of burning.) When completely melted remove it from over the water and leave to cool. In the meantime, sieve the icing sugar into another bowl.
5. Add the golden syrup into your melted chocolate mixture which has now cooled. Then add the sour cream, vanilla and the sieved icing sugar. Whisk the lot. Depending on how you want the icing consistency to be, you can now add around a tablespoon of boiling water (for a thinner icing) or some more icing sugar (for a thicker cream). Your icing should be easily spreadable onto the cake so you don’t want it too runny.
6. Place a piece of baking paper to cover the base of a plate or cake stand (for any access icing that will surely drip) and start assembling your cake: first one cake, then a layer of icing in the middle, then the other cake on top and finally cover with some more icing.

You can either leave the icing as is, or top with some decorations, especially if it’s for a birthday party. Be as creative as you want. I topped mine with colourful decorative sprinkles. I have to remind myself to buy some white sugar daisies next time.

Enjoy!

Rob x