Monday 15 February 2010
Emily's famous chocolate biscuits
Thank you Ben!
Chocolate all-in-one cake
In the end I decided to make this for Dee’s birthday. I want to make some cupcakes soon, but they’re so difficult to transport without ruining, so I went for a normal sponge cake.
The ingredients and method are exactly the same as for the Victoria sponge. The only difference is that you replace 1-2 ounces of the flour with cocoa (and you don’t need vanilla extract). I also added about half teaspoon of baking powder to compensate for the fact that there would be less raising agent.
For the topping I used ganache, which is similar to making truffles. Break 200g chocolate (dark or milk, depending on your taste) into small pieces in a bowl. Heat 200ml of double cream in a saucepan, very gently, stirring occasionally, until it is just at boiling point. Then simply pour it over the chocolate and stir until mixed. You will need to completely cool this until it is the right sort of consistency to spread onto the cake. This time, I actually beat it with the electric whisk once it was cold, and this made it a really nice, more creamy texture (but it isn't essential). There should be enough to put in the middle and on the top, but if you want to be more restrained you could just do the middle and sieve a little bit of icing sugar on the top instead.
I also attempted some icing... My Tala icing syringe is brilliant, but I haven't used it much, so the results were rather dubious! I used some silver balls and little sugar flowers as well.
An alternative chocolate topping, which I also like, is from Delia's Complete Illustrated Cookery Course again. It has a nice fudgey consistency.Saturday 13 February 2010
No baking required (part 2)
When I was in Truro with Cheyanne last year I went into a cafĂ© that was selling Rocky Road. I hadn’t tried making it before and wasn’t sure what to use to soften the chocolate so I asked the guy behind the counter and he very kindly wrote out the recipe for me!
60g butter
125g dark eating chocolate*
150g digestive biscuits
85g marshmallows
55g raisins
No baking required (part 1)
I may have been too busy to write any posts recently, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been making sweet treats! A lot of things I bake don’t really take much time (see chocolate all-in-one recipe to follow), but I thought I would share a couple of things I’ve made recently which are REALLY quick and easy, and don’t actually involve any baking. The only time factor you need to consider is chilling in the fridge.
cream (whipped)
bit of milk chocolate for decoration
Crush the biscuits to a sandy texture with a food processer (or if you don’t have one you can put them in a freezer bag and hit with a wooden spoon/rolling pin). Melt the butter in microwave or in saucepan and mix it really well with the crushed biscuits. Then put this mixture into your dish and press it down until it’s nice and compact and a fairly even surface. This will need to chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Oh one last thing, the only thing I don’t like about this recipe is I have to break my usual Nestle boycott to buy condensed milk (see http://www.babymilkaction.org/index.html) If anyone knows if it’s possible to get hold of any other brand then do let me know.