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I originally made this as a test run for a birthday cake for Ben, but when you’ve filled up someone’s kitchen with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.
