It's nearly Springtime! And while the trees are unmistakably beginning to blossom and the temperature teases higher numbers, there's still very much a part of me that is clinging to the habits and rituals of winter. I can't help myself, as nice as it is to see the mornings growing steadily lighter when my alarm goes off, I love cosy nights in so much that I take longer to adjust to the lighter evenings than anyone else I know. Maybe that's why March always feels like a slightly challenging month for me. By this time I am finally fed up of walking the dogs in winter weather but I'm still not quite ready to give up my scarves and hot chocolates. My qualms with March aside, this month has been quite a spectacular one as I've fought to get my work-life balance back under control and along the way have found new friends, a new happy place and the world's most decadent chocolate cake.
Pass-times, Penguins...
March started very well. Watson's birthday is at the start of the month and by the time it arrived, I was more excited about giving him his present than he was about receiving it. You see, I'm not great at keeping secrets. Anyone else's, fine, I will keep my mouth shut, but my own big news? I'm dying to tell anyone who will listen, so not telling my best friend about the very cool thing I had organised for his birthday present was driving me insane. I had arranged for him to feed the penguins at Marwell Zoo, something I knew he would be really excited about, and when he finally opened his card and revealed the surprise, he was just as excited as I hoped he would be. He loves penguins and when we first went to Marwell Zoo together a couple of years ago, I had to drag him away from the penguins just so that we could see something other than the admittedly adorable birds.
This year his birthday was on a Friday so we took the day off work and went for a gorgeous lunch at The Briny in Southsea; hello beer battered samphire! There's something extra-special about taking a weekday off work to go and do something lovely. Going out for lunch is always a favourite of ours but a weekday lunch versus a weekend lunch? That feels just a little bit luxurious. You get to see different people than you do on a weekend as well and I love me a spot of people watching.
After languishing over a long lunch, we took a leisurely stroll to the nearby board game café, Dice. We first went there only a couple of weeks beforehand with Watson's boss and her husband and fell in love with the place immediately. I had been expecting a cosy café, frequented by introverts that might be a nice to hole up in for a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon. What I got was a surprisingly cool, cafe/bar with an impressive drinks menu (including mocktails), really friendly and knowledgeable staff and a glowing atmosphere that begins as a gentle hum on a weekday afternoon and builds to a buzzing hive of laughter and competition on a Saturday night. And brownies. Boy does this place serve a good brownie. Never mind holing up there for a couple of hours, extend your parking because this place is hard to leave once you've settled in with a new board game and a really good cup of tea. Watson says the coffee is excellent too.
We had such a great afternoon there on Watson's birthday and got so absorbed by the game we were playing that when we were packing up to leave I caught Watson's eye and said "come back tomorrow?" We had no other plans for the weekend and so we did indeed go back the very next day and do it all over again and again the following Saturday too. Needless to say, Dice has become my new happy place and I'm already looking forward to the next time we can go back.
...and Psychedelic Chocolate Cake
Of course, no birthday is complete without cake and as keen cooks and bakers, Watson and I set about making his birthday cake together. This years extravaganza? Brooklyn Blackout Cake from my gorgeous Hummingbird Bakery book.
This cake, let alone it's recipe, is not one for the faint-hearted. I have made the cake once before and by some miracle or beginners luck got it right first time but on a second attempt of the chocolate custard element some years later (that's right, I said chocolate custard) got myself in such a muddle that I was both eager and anxious to try it again. I figured it would be easier with Watson's help but even with two adventurous bakers in the kitchen, it still took us three days to make this cake. However, to say it was worth the wait is an understatement. What we were finally left with was a cake so indulgent and so chocolately that we could only manage small slithers of it at a time and we are hardcore chocoholics in this house so this really was a thing to behold.
The cake element of the Brooklyn Blackout Cake is a simple, delicious sponge, wonderfully light and fluffy and not taxing at all. The complexity of this recipe comes from the chocolate custard frosting, but if you can get it right, my word you'll forgive it for all it's tricksiness within the first mouthful.
This recipe comes from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, Tarek Malouf and The Hummingbird Bakery, 2009.
BROOKLYN BLACKOUT CAKE
Ingredients
100g unsalted butter, at room temperature
260g caster sugar
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
45g cocoa powder
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
a pinch of salt
170g plain flour
160ml whole milk
Chocolate custard
500g caster sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
125g cocoa powder
200g cornflour
85g unsalted butter, cubed
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
three 20cm cake tins, base-lined with greaseproof paper
Method
Things went wrong for us with the very first step of combining cornflour with water until it was the consistency of "thick glue". Watson and I had differing views of what "thick glue" should look like and I still reckon that on our first attempt the consistency was right but his technique was all wrong. The recipe says "Mix the cornflour with 120-200ml water, whisking briskly as you add the water. The mixture should be the consistency of thick glue so add more water if it's still too thick (do not exceed 250ml)." This kind of loose guideline of quantities always trips me up and I think this was a rare occasion in the kitchen where Watson's presence actually made things worse. He's had less experience cooking with cornflour than me and having made this chocolate custard twice before and only once successfully, I was going with gut instinct on how much water to use.
We then went on to "whisk gradually into the cocoa mixture in the pan over a medium (not high) heat." Whisking cornflour is never fun. As Watson pointed out, it's a non-Newtonian fluid, which Wikipedia will tell you means that it has a variable viscosity dependent on stress. What that means in lay-mans terms is that it stays smooth and runny if you stir it slowly, but turns very hard when you apply force to it like, for example, by whisking it. So how, I ask you, are you supposed to whisk it briskly without it 1) forming a solid mass at the end of your whisk and 2) breaking said whisk? At this point I also had a variable viscosity dependent on stress.
Our first attempt at what should have been a smooth, silky, thick custard turned into a lumpy mess beyond saving. The cornflour collected into lots of hard little lumps of solid flour that couldn't be whisked out because the overall mixture was so solid and there was too much in the pan. Attempt number one went in the bin.
At this point, I'll give you an idea of timescale. As Watson's birthday was on the Friday, we wanted the cake ready by then and so made the sponge cake (very successfully) on the Wednesday evening. Our first attempt at chocolate custard was on the Thursday evening.
Attempt number 2 took place before we left for lunch on Friday morning. This time we used more water in the cornflour mix (this is where I think we went wrong for the second time) and added it verrrrrrry slowly to the cocoa mixture in our pan. This time round, the custard didn't thicken in the same way it had before and while it did become thick, it was still very much a liquid and not the "quite thick" consistency that I thought we were looking for. Watson disagreed and said that it was undoubtedly, quite thick. So we poured it into a bowl to chill in the fridge and off we popped for lunch.
Full of tea and brownies from the board game café, we had no urge to eat cake when we got home and so we didn't check our results until the next morning, at which point we saw that the custard had not set. By this time we had also run out of ingredients to make a third batch and so set about trying to save attempt number 2.
Now, the recipe says to "cook" the mixture when the cornflour and cocoa mix are combined. Watson felt we hadn't really cooked it and suggested we start there and we had so much of this thick chocolately gloop that I didn't see the harm in trying to cook a little of it in a very non-stick pan. The issue I had seen with attempt number 1 was the formation of lumps, that then couldn't be whisked out due to how much mixture was in the pan. I hoped that by cooking just a little of the mixture at a time, we could control it better and smooth out any lumps that formed as they appeared.
To my surprise (and joy!) this technique worked! I reheated a small amount of the custard in a milk pan and whisked it constantly. Then, slowly at first but then quite quickly, it transformed from a very thick liquid into something resembling a spreadable ganache. I immediately took the pan off the heat and kept stirring to dissipate the heat and prevent any lumps from forming with limited success, but having a much smaller amount to work with meant I could now whisk out the lumps and was finally left with a smooth, thick custard. Success!
Now we just had to repeat this process with the remaining 700ml or so of mixture. Armed with a pan and a whisk each, Watson and I heated and whisked all of the mixture in very small batches, wiping out our pans between turns until eventually, we had a bowl full of this very thick, very rich chocolate custard. Into the fridge it went and off we skipped, back to the board game café to finish the game we had started the day before. When we got home hours later, we were ready to assemble and finally sample this cake that we had been waiting three days to try.
Three layers of light, delicate sponge, spread with thick, smooth, rich chocolate custard and finished with a crumb coating, this was no ordinary cake. It was love at first bite, followed by the immediate understanding that we had both cut ourselves a slice that was over-ambitious. Even as chocolate lovers and cake connoisseurs, we could see that this would be a very rich cake and so deliberately cut smaller-than-usual slices but even they were hard to finish.
Half way through the first slice, I felt my cheeks flushing with the sugar rush but the symptoms we both experienced immediately following that first and each subsequent slice were why this cake became affectionately known as the psychedelic chocolate cake. The vast amount of chocolate sent us both into something of a sugar coma; a sort of tunnel vision occurred and everything going on behind our heads seemed somewhat dulled while the very blood in our veins appeared to be vibrating. More sensible grown-ups might have stopped eating the cake after such a vivid reaction to the first slice but for all our excellent qualities, Watson and I aren't exactly sensible when it comes to chocolate and/or cake.
Over the week that followed we enjoyed smaller slices with fewer alarming side effects and gave a large portion to Watson's boss and her husband with a warning label. By the time the cake was finished, the sensation of being ensconced in a truffle after each slice had diminished through sheer determination and desensitisation.
I would love to tell you that since that episode, we are taking a break from chocolately goods for a while but with Easter just around the corner, that simply isn't the case. This week is seeing us try two new brownie recipes to compare them to our usual Old Reliable but this time we won't be attempting to eat them all ourselves. They are coming with us to Easter lunch with our new board game buddies so now at least if I lose at our favourite game that we'll be teaching them, I will have something to soften the blow.
Happy Easter!
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