Easy Chocolate Nemesis revisited

Yesterday we were invited to our friends' new holiday house at Cowes for lunch. It was my turn to take dessert, and as it was my lovely friend Pauline's birthday last week I thought I'd take some sort of cake. I decided on River Cafe's Easy Chocolate Nemesis again . Since making it then I've bought the book that features it - River Cafe Pocket Books: Puddings, Cakes and Icecreams, so here's the dead easy recipe in its original form...

Easy Chocolate Nemesis

340g 70% chocolate, broken into pieces

225g unsalted butter

5 eggs

210g caster sugar divided into 2 lots (70g + 120g)

Preheat oven to 120C. Butter a 25cm round cake tin (not springform) and line the bottom with a circle of buttered baking paper.

Melt the chocolate with the butter in a bowl set over simmering water. Do not let the water touch the bowl. While it's melting, heat 120g of the sugar with 100ml of water in a small pan and let it boil for a minute or so until it forms a light syrup. Pour the hot syrup into the melted chocolate and cool slightly.

While it's cooling beat the eggs with the remaining 70g of sugar until quadrupled in volume. Add the chocolate to the eggs and beat slowly until combined. Pour into the prepared tin. Put a folded teatowel in the bottom of a deep baking tray and enough hot water to come 3/4 of the way up the tin. Bake for 50 minutes* or until set. Leave the cake to cool in the water before refrigerating.

Bring to room temperature before serving. I sprinkled the cake with rose flavoured Persian fairy floss and a few rose petals, and served with a dollop of thick cream, to which I'd added a few drops of rose water. To serve, slice with a hot knife wiped clean between each cut.

* I don't have a 25 cm tin or a baking dish big enough to hold one, so I used a 23cm one. My new oven is so much quicker than any I've ever used so the smaller cake took the same time as the bigger one in the recipe despite being deeper. Another oven may take a bit longer...note that the recipe I referred to in the original post says bake a 23cm cake for an hour and a half.


Happy birthday Pauline!

nigella's chocolate marsala cake

I made this for dessert last night. It was a delicious change from all the low/no fat, no sugar cake I've been baking lately, and was a cinch to make. It's from How to be a domestic goddess and this is how it appears in the book , with my note at the end.

Chocolate Marsala Cake

100g unsalted butter

100g dark chocolate, broken up

4 large eggs

175g caster sugar

50g self-raising flour, sifted 3 times

3 tablespoons Marsala

for the Icing:

100g dark chocolate

1 tablespoon Marsala

100ml double cream*

22cm Springform tin, greased and lined.

Preheat the oven to 180C / Gas Mark 4.
Melt the butter and chocolate together in the microwave or a double boiler, and then set aside to cool slightly. Beat the eggs and sugar together until thick, pale and moussy, and greatly increased in volume; it should double, triple even. Gently fold the sifted flour into the egg mixture, trying not to lose all of the air. Now fold the butter and chocolate very carefully into the cake mixture. Pour into the tin and cook for 35 minutes, by which time the top should be firm and the cake underneath dense and desirably damp.
Cool in a rack for 5 minutes, and then pour over the Marsala. I find it easier to do this by the teaspoonful so that the liquid is evenly distributed. Leave the cake to cool completely before releasing it from it’s tin.
So, the icing: melt the chocolate, Marsala and cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over a gentle heat. Take it off the heat, and whisk until it reaches a good icing consistency; smooth, thick, but not solid. I like to spread this just on the very top of the cake, which anyway sinks on cooling so that you have a roughly circular sunken pond to fill, leaving an outline of cooked-cake rim. When set, you're left, beautifully, with a Sacher-shiny disc of ganache suspened on top of this dusty-brown, matt cake.

*Note: I had a bottle of thickened cream in the fridge and foolishly used it instead of double (pure) cream. Eeew - the result was an oily, curdled mess, which I had to throw away and remake with the correct cream. A waste of 100g of good Callebaut chocolate.

I wish I was taking salad...

I've spent the morning baking and frosting two dozen chocolate cupcakes for the choir dinner tonight and now the kitchen (which was already pretty hot before I started) is 34C according to the temperature gauge thingy on the wall. And I'm thinking HOW COME I HAVE TO BAKE CAKES AND OTHERS GET TO MAKE A SALAD??

Ok, I've had my whinge. The good news is I now have a great chocolate cupcake recipe. Someone has recommended it on Rose Levy Beranbaum's website which I checked out to find an answer to yesterday's "flat/peaked cupcake" mystery. It seems that leaving the batter to sit for a while results in a "domier" cake. Anyway, the recipe is one from Rose's The Cake Bible. I've had my copy for years - it's practically falling to bits - and the thing Iove about it is that the recipes list the ingredients by cup measure and by weight. I've found most American recipes use only cup measures which are not nearly so accurate. The cakes turned out perfectly light and moist and not too sweet.

Rose Levy Beranbaum's Chocolate Fudge Cake(s) (makes 24)

All ingredients should be at room temperature.

85g Dutch process cocoa powder
354g boiling water
3 large eggs
1 1/2t pure vanilla extract
300g sifted cake flour (I used plain)
434g light brown sugar
2 1/4 t baking powder
1 1/4 t bicarb soda
3/4 t salt
227 unsalted butter (must be softened)

Preheat oven to 175C. In a medium bowl whisk together the cocoa and boiling water until smooth. Leave to cool to room temperature.

In another bowl lightly combine the eggs, 1/4 of the cocoa mixture and vanilla.

In a large mixing bowl combine the remaining dry ingredients and mix on low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter and remaining cocoa mixture and mix on low speed until the dry ingredients are moistened. Increase to medium speed (high if using a hand mixer) and beat for 11/2 minutes to aerate and develop the cake's structure. Scrape down the sides of bowl. Gradually add the egg mixture in 3 batches, beating for 20 seconds after each addition.

Measure into 2 paper-lined muffin tins and bake for 20 - 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool in tins for a minute before turning out. Leave until completely cool before frosting. **


Chocolate Ganache :
Heat 120 ml/g of thickened cream until boiling. Add 160g grated dark chocolate and leave to stand a minute or so until melted. Stir until smooth, add 1 Tab butter and stir until smooth again.


**I had enough mixture for a few small patty cakes as well and most of these separated from the paper liners while they were cooling. Will have to check that website again. This isn't baking - this is SCIENCE!

billy's chocolate cupcakes

As my Billy's Vanilla Vanilla cupcakes were such a success I was looking forward to trying out the chocolate version. I found both recipes here. I converted the ingredients to the Australian equivalents and again used the all-important cake flour. The raw mixture was smooth and silky and tasted delicious, and all was going well...


until they were baked. Every single one collapsed as soon as I took them out of the oven. There was enough mixture for about 30 so I cooked the 2nd batch longer but the same thing happened.


No way was I going to throw them all away and waste all that butter and chocolate. So I resurrected them by turning them upside down and trimming away the "crusts", then frosting them with ganache. Think I'll be sticking to chocolate cupcakes made with cocoa in future rather than melted chocolate.

New Year's Eve

New Years Eve always means dinner for 8 at our place. Everyone brings a course so I just have to cook the main. I decided to do lamb in the outdoor electric kettle barbecue, using Karen Martini's recipe for roasted boned leg of lamb with basil, lemon, almond, oregano and garlic from her Where the heart is. I hadn't made it before but everything from the book has turned out really well so I was confident it would be ok.

I marinated the lamb legs overnight in zip-lock bags and let them come to room temperature before roasting. They took about 1 1/2 hours to cook, and the result was delicious and meltingly tender.

I've been wanting to try roast potatoes in duck fat a la Nigella for ages, but couldn't find duck fat anywhere. I finally found some at the local poultry shop and made little roast potato cubes. Maybe not so healthy but they were crispier than done in oil and had a lovely flavour. (Note: I later remembered Nigella uses goose fat. It's Nigel Slater who uses duck fat. I'll keep a lookout for goose fat to try.)

I've just reread Julian Barnes' The pedant in the kitchen. This hilarious book is perfect for anyone who loves to cook, and particularly for those who, like me, collect and read cookbooks with a passion. One of the funniest chapters "No, I won't do that" is about the River Cafe Cook Book's (extravagant - 10 eggs!) Chocolate Nemesis, and the disasters that ensued when it was made by amateur cooks. This, says Julian Barnes, lead to the "paranoid explanation ...that some key element of the recipe had deliberately been omitted, thereby driving customers back to the (River Cafe) restaurant for the authentic item."

I made a version of Chocolate Nemesis for a NYE dinner a few years ago from a recipe in a delicious magazine. From what I can remember it was pretty straight forward and turned out fine, so perhaps it was not exactly the same as the original recipe. In the book Julian Barnes goes on to say that when River Cafe Easy was published, the Chocolate Nemesis recipe was halved and the cooking time altered considerably. I wanted to try out this "easy" version, but as our dessert was being brought by someone else, Georgie and I thought we'd make it for her own NYE dinner party. Here's the recipe .

I didn't get to try it but Georgie's guests apparently loved it. No-one took a photo of it once it was cut...hopefully it looked something like this picture of the delicious version!

New Year's Eve was a double celebration as it was the Beautiful Bridesmaid's 60th birthday on Christmas day. So of course, a good excuse for cupcakes! Happy birthday Jen.

And a very, very Happy New Year to all!

Flourless chocolate cupcakes

I'm having afternoon tea today with a friend at her work for her birthday. Haven't had time to bake over the weekend so have defrosted these cupcakes that've been in the freezer for a few weeks.

Recipes for flourless chocolate cakes are everywhere. Their authors sometimes give credit to, amongst others, Claudia Roden or Elizabeth David, but it was probably originally a cake for Passover, the Jewish festival where no unleavened food may be eaten. I've made this cake a hundred times since I was given a copy of Dolly Campbell's I Hate to Cook in 1991. Dolly Campbell was the pseudonym used by Jill Dupleix in her cookery column in the Melbourne Age. The recipe was called "I Hate to Cook Best Ever Chocolate Cake". and I agreed with her that it was the best ever. It has popped up frequently in Jill's books and columns over the years. In one she suggested that you should use whichever chocolate is appropriate to the occasion...the finest couverture chocolate for best, and supermarket chocolate for not-so-special occasions. I had, up until then, always used either Cadbury or Plaistowe cooking chocolate or dark eating chocolate. So I tried making it with 70% Lindt chocolate - with disastrous results. The melted chocolate hardened into an unworkable lump once the nuts and egg yolks were mixed in. I've not been game to use anything higher than 45% cocoa solids since, but it may be worth giving it a go using something in between the two. The flavour will be delicious even with the cheap stuff!

I now usually bake the cake in individual serves rather than as a large cake. Despite being a bit ugly and funny-looking (the cracking is inevitable) they're deliciously rich, yet light, and need nothing more than a dust of icing sugar or cocoa on the tops.


Flourless Chocolate Cake(s)

250g dark chocolate
150g unsalted butter
1 Tab strong black coffee
1 Tab brandy (opt.)
150g caster sugar
125 ground almonds/almond meal*
5 eggs, separated

Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Place chocolate, butter, sugar, coffee and brandy in a heat-proof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, stirring occasionally until butter and chocolate are completely melted and mixture is smooth. Stir in the ground almonds, then the lightly beaten egg-yolks. Whip egg whites until stiff but not dry. Stir a big spoonful into the chocolate mixture to lighten it, then fold in the rest with a large metal spoon or a whisk. Spoon into paper-lined muffin tins or a 23cm greased and paper-lined springform tin. Bake for about 30 mins. for the small cakes, or 45-50 mins. for the large cake, or until firm to the touch but still a little soft in the centre. Cool the small cakes for 5 mins. in the moulds before removing. Cool large cake completely before inverting onto serving plate. Sprinkle with icing sugar or cocoa.

Makes about 15 cupcakes or 1 large cake.

*You can use hazelnuts instead of almonds for a slightly different flavour. Finely ground is best, but coarsely ground works well too and will give a crunchier texture.

*They'll keep for 2-3 days in the fridge (bring to room-temp. before eating), but if you want to freeze them, open freeze first, then wrap in cling-film then foil.