Sadness cake

If, like me, you tend to answer questions about your hobbies with “not applicable” then you’ll know how nice it is to find someone with actual interests who you can spend time with and who gets you involved. Or at least makes you leave the house more than once a week. But sometimes you don’t get enough time with that person to even put them off you, which is annoying as that’s one of my key skills (some people would say I really don’t need that much time but I would say to them: “it’s my blog, shut up.”). Absence makes the heart grow fonder but that only really applies when there’s an end to the separation, and when there isn’t it’s sad. So I’ve decided to make chocolate mousse cake my Sadness Cake.
All together now: Ahhhhhh.

I originally made this as a test run for a birthday cake for Ben, but when you’ve filled up someone’s kitchen with Spurs cakes and shortbread you start to worry that they’re going to think you’re trying to give them diabetes or are, in fact, a creepy feeder.

I found the recipe on the BBC food website and as it seemed like a trained ape could do it I went out and bought the following:

300g of dark chocolate
6 medium eggs
55g of caster sugar
150g of unsalted butter (softened)

You’ll also need a cake tin with a removable bottom.

The best bit of this for me was cracking the chocolate in to lots of little pieces. If you’re making this as a sadness cake I suggest therapeutically smashing the bars on the kitchen counter repeatedly, primal screaming optional.

Actually there’s lots of smashing in this recipe, as you need to break the eggs and separate them. Though I’d probably stick to doing this gently to try and keep bits of shell in the mix to a minimum. Then again they’re pretty sharp so depending who you’re making it for maybe leave them in as a sort of organic powdered glass…

ANYWAY for anyone as dim as me when it comes to cooking you separate the yolks from the whites by pouring them both back and forth between the two halves of shell, the whites run off into a bowl and you’re left with the yolk which you need to dollop in another.

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a bowl big enough to fit over a pan of simmering water without taking a swim. I think if it’s in the water it’ll crack and being the ever-cautious person I am I used a casserole dish just in case. Give this a bit of a stir once in a while.


Now it’s time for the boring, or depending how rubbish your life is, fun part: whisking the egg whites. You absolutely have to do this with an electric whisk or you’ll end up like this guy. It takes an absolute age to get them into stiff peaks but as soon as you think it’s not working they suddenly magically happen and you realise you do have a reason to live.


A bit more whisking now, this time the egg yolks and the sugar. A hand-whisk is fine for this as it doesn’t take too long for the two to go the lovely pale yellow you’re after.


By now your chocolate and butter should be a delicious runny mix that would be perfect to do all that food-and-bedroom stuff with except that no one really does it as midnight machine washes and sleeping on a bare mattress is hardly the end to a perfect evening. And anyway if you had someone to do that with you wouldn’t be making a sadness cake, you’d just be rubbing it in for the rest of us.


Add the depressing chocolate mix to the yolks and sugar and stir it in before gently folding in the egg whites. I thought this had gone hideously wrong, as it looked revolting.


Soon though it looked like proper moussey cake mix and I patted myself on the back. Pour this into the (greased) cake tin and put in a pre-heated oven at 180°c/gas mark 4 for 20 minutes.

This picture should explain why I made two:


My big mistake was taking the cake out of the oven after 20 minutes, sticking a knife in it and panicking when it came out goopy. So I shoved it back in for another ten minutes. Then another. Then another. The cake rose so much it was in danger of escaping the cake tin when I gave up. I ended up with a slightly burnt chocolate moonscape.


This collapsed in on itself on one side while I left it to cool. I instantly bashed out another, which I whipped out after exactly 20 minutes, but my mum accidentally took the first go into the office to get a verdict before I made it for Ben and he didn’t get to see his 32nd birthday. Weirdly everyone loved it.

My taster for the second cake was my friend Asha who gave it a big thumbs up, and the girl knows chocolate. She sensibly stuck to tiny slivers but I devoured a huge chunk.

These were happier times for my sadness cake but after extensive research I can report it works wonders with a pint glass of Freixenet, Lost In Translation and a fast-growing mountain of sodden tissues.

Buttercream icing

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEN!

As I’m a nice person or something I decided to make Ben some Spurs-themed cupcakes. And thankfully after working at a men’s magazine I have an address book full of Real Men I could email to double check that Tottenham’s colours are (sort of) white, blue and yellow.

The last time I tried to make buttercream icing it wasn’t great – I had to add a load of milk and it was so soft it was more like mousse. But whenever I make cupcakes I worry that they taste like Ryvita, so I decided to try again. I dug out my mum’s The Dairy Book Of House Management (1969) which, as a guide to life, has everything from rules to training your budgie to wheat wine (mmm delish), seemed like it would be able to talk me through combining sugar and butter. And guess what? IT DID.

You need:
4oz of unsalted, softened butter
8oz of icing sugar

As I also added food colouring (and after trying a bit some vanilla essence) so stuck in another tablespoon of sugar.

Put everything in a bowl and shove an electric whisk in there. At first everything looks a bit weird and lumpy, like it will never work:


But soon it’ll look like actual icing, which for someone like me is astounding. I found it easiest to spread the icing on the cupcakes with a knife and then artistically sculpt it into what I can only describe as a rustic style.

Chocolate Cupcakes

As the owner of several bras I like chocolate. I also like cake. Especially tiny cakes that fit in my mouth whole. So the word ‘chocolate’ coupled with ‘cupcakes’ gets my attention pretty well.

The BBC food website churned up a recipe for some easy looking chocolate cakes which handily only needed ingredients I already had lying around.

These were:
1 egg
50g of softened, unsalted butter
8 tablespoons of milk
150g of caster sugar
125g of plain flour
25g of cocoa powder
1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder

After you’ve stuck the oven on at 180°c (gas mark 4) sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder together into a big bowl. In goes the butter and the sugar and then you beat this until you’re arm falls off or everything is well combined, whatever happens first. If it’s the former I’d like to inform you all that anything tried off this blog is done at the reader’s own risk.

Whisk in the egg and a couple of spoonfuls of the milk. Once that’s all mixed together add in another couple of tablespoons and whisk again. Keep this up until all the milk is in. I used skimmed but I think this left the finished product a bit dry so use semi at least. Your batter should be smooth and thick by this point. Mine was a bit lumpy but I’m not claiming to be Mr Kipling.


Spoon the mixture into some cupcake cases – probably around a tablespoon and a half or so. Too much and they’ll look like melted mini Quasimodos like my first batch.



These go into the oven for around 15 to 20 minutes and are done when they’re spongy to the touch or pass the skewer test (stick one in and it comes out clean: cooked cake).

Leave these to cool and then eat six in quick succession until you realise you need a lie-down.

Simple French dressing

That’s right! Sometimes I eat salad!!

I’m not sure how close to real French dressing this is (maybe honey and mustard’s bastard Gallic baby?) but it’s so easy even I can’t muck it up.

As I’m so laid back and intuitive I don’t really measure any of this out and have also recently been making it in a tumbler but here are the measurements from the recipe I adapted it from:

3 tablespoons of a good extra virgin olive oil
1 ½ tablespoons of red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon of runny honey
Freshly ground black pepper

Whisk everything up together. Tricky I know, but I’ve got a lot of faith in you and think you can handle it.

Learning

The learned and delightful Esther Walker has taught me how to do hyperlinks! I now feel like a proper modern person.

Ben's Boiled Eggs

This, I’m sure, will surprise no one. If it does then I’ll take it for granted that they’ve never read any of this before.

I’ve no idea how to boil an egg.

If you think back through the rain you’ll remember we had that steaming hot weekend way back when. And what better weather could there be to sit in a park drinking cold beer and eating homemade food? I’ll tell you what better weather: COLDER WEATHER. If you have ever run around a house blow-drying your hair while cooking frittata-thingy and then only when you are going out the door realise the heating is on on a 25°c day before having to stomp around Waitrose, carry 30 beers in and out of nearly every sodding shop in Twickenham looking for ice and then spend ten minutes shouting at people down the phone trying to track them down in a park you will understand.

But anyway what I am trying to say is that we had a picnic!!

The division of labour was decided in the pub and while Alex reeled off a long list of delicacies she was going to bring Ben and I plumped for said frittata and the boiled eggs Charlotte demanded someone make for her boyfriend Henry.

As the morning sun blazed down on Eel Pie Island we stood in Ben’s little kitchen wilting in the heat from the stove (and the bloody radiator) while I wondered how long it would take for me to drown if I jumped in the Thames to try and cool down. Peeling me off the window Ben managed to get my attention and started to talk me through the technical process of egg boiling.


How long does it take for a hard-boiled egg? “Six minutes? Not sure. I just wing it.” Hot. I love a man who lives on the edge.

One of the eggs cracked slightly when it was dropped in the pan but it turns out that is TOTALLY FINE! It just meant it was a funny shape. After six or seven minutes our eggs were done. And tasty! Apparently. I hate the things so really wouldn’t know.


Henry complimented Ben on the softness of the yolk. That’s good, right?

Barbecued quail

Wow I’ve been a bit rubbish at this over the past month or so, haven’t I? The last thing I posted wasn’t even about me wrecking a recipe either; it was simply a picture of an egg. Jesus.

While I’m going to lie and claim that my hectic schedule and whirlwind social life are to blame for the silence it’s actually just due to my inherent laziness and inability to do anything more than flap my arms about and complain in hot weather.

Anyway! Many moons ago I had a barbecue to celebrate the fact it had finally stopped raining and 2010 being the year I try to make a real, half-hearted attempt to expand my palate I decided to give quail a bash.


I found a recipe for barbecued quail on Nigella’s website – yep, that one again – which had a lovely sounding marinade. I decided to forgo this as a) I forgot to take a list of ingredients with me to the supermarket and b) I just wanted to see what plain old quail tasted like.

After cooing over the ostrich egg I popped off to find some quail. Nestled in between the chicken and grouse were pairs of little birdies, snuggled together in their dinky plastic trays. I threw a couple in the trolly and trundled off in a happy little daze, glad that everything seemed to be going my way. When I got home and read the packaging I could have kicked myself. My quail had grown up in a shed. In my strange little brain I had decided that they must be free range as it’s posh food. I have no idea how I came to this conclusion but was both scared and comforted by the fact Alex, Charlotte and my mum shared my warped view. Anyway, deep breaths etc.

Promisingly the first step of the quail recipe – spatchcocking the birds – contained the words ‘very easy’. Unfortunately this was a lie.
With a tiny naked bird on the chopping board I advanced with the sharpest kitchen scissors to 'cut along both sides of the backbone'. This was not ‘very easy’. This was very fiddly, very stupid and very annoying. And also very crackly as I snipped through its bones. Eventually I managed to cut its spine out and squished it all down. And then realised MOST OF ITS INSIDES WERE STILL INSIDE!!! After a bit of shrieking I realised I was actually okay with this and poked around with a knife trying to work out what everything was. I still have no idea but wow it sure beat a game of Operation. Unfortunately the next three birds didn’t go so well and in the end I just cut them in half and hoped for the best.

Alex loves food - and by that I don’t mean she’s a chunker - but when I excitedly shoved a quail in her face, beaming manically (me, not the quail) she looked a bit sick and told me she didn’t think she could try it as basically it was weeny and that made it cute and that made her feel bad. I stared at her blankly for around, ooooh, five minutes until she cracked and agreed to taste a bit.


After the throw-away barbecue was (unsafely) lit on top of our rusty, unused, real barbecue (and I’d put out the fire caused by the cardboard packaging) on went the birds. They took around fifteen minutes or so though in all honesty for all I know they were still raw. I’ve got no idea what quail should be like but they seemed pretty done.

After carefully eyeing up the quail Alex manned up and took a bite. And then proceeded to eat three. Charlotte and I watched on in wonder as she packed it away. “I know earlier I said I wouldn’t try rabbit stew if you made it but sod that! I’m going to eat everything from now on, however fluffy.” I’ll take that as a culinary success.

Personally I thought they were lovely. I was expecting them to have a very strong gamey flavour but they were beautifully delicate. While making sure I didn’t crunch down on a bit of tiny bone was a bit of a bore I would definitely do these again, maybe roasting them next time.