Schokoladenkuchen a la Vera Slawinski

The Saucemaker presented me with the famous design-award-winning Konstantin Slawinski silicon cake form, which I have mentioned before, a year ago. It came with a card bearing Slawinski’s mother’s flourless chocolate cake recipe, which is magnificent, rich and darkly, Mittel-Europeanly adult, all eggs and chocolate.

The recipe is given in German with a shaky English translation underneath in paler font. I’ve never learnt German but have always wanted to and love the look and sound of it – mile-long capitalised nouns! umlauts! Die Zauberflöte! – so find it much more fun to follow. ‘Dark chocolate’, which could mean anything from Nestle Buttons down, becomes the much more specific and fabulous-sounding Zartbitter-Schokolade – who could resist getting out the 70% Callebaut Strong for that? So I’ll go with German as far as possible, if that’s okay with everyone. I would never make it too hard to follow, would I, meine Kinder?  

250g Butter

250g Zartbitter-Schokolade

200g geriebene Mandeln (okay, that’s almond meal)

8 Eier

200g Zucker

2 tablespoons cornflour

Puderzucker

pinch salt and splash vanilla extract

Preheat oven auf 180C.

Separate Eier, beat Eigelb und Zucker until weiss und fluffy. Add die Mandeln. Soften Butter in microwave along with melting Schokolade in 10-second bursts, und add to mixture along with some vanilla extract und a pinch of salt. Sift over cornflour.

Get out die second KitchenAid bowl, beat Eiweiß until stiff und gently fold into Schokolade mixture. Pour into Konstantin Slawinski form (or a round cake tin of no less than 24cm) und backen 40 Minuten. Test with a bamboo skewer – when it withdraws clean, der Kuchen durchgebacken. Remove from form and sift over Puderzucker. 

Spicy black bean brownies

 David Lebovitz wrote recently about a Mexican restaurant in Paris called Candelaria, which among other things, makes a Brownie Epicé Haricot Noirs. This idea of making a brownie out of black beans was intriguing, and when the Dumpling Fiend (who is also a nachos fiend) invited me to her Get Up in That Nacho party, it seemed the perfect occasion to wheel this out.

David mentioned a recipe on the 101 Cookbooks blog as forming the basis of this Candelaria one, and I gleaned that the added epicés were star anise and chili.

60g unsweetened chocolate
230g unsalted butter
2 cups soft-cooked black beans, drained
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon ground star anise

1.2 teaspoon chilli flakes
¼ cup instant coffee granules
¼ teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1½ cups light agave nectar (I used up all the Trader Joe’s Raw Agave Nectar I’d brought home from the US a few months ago, and made up the rest with brown malt syrup.)

Preheat the oven to 180°F. Line an 11x18-inch slice pan (a large one) with baking paper.

Begin melting the butter in the microwave for a minute before adding the chocolate – a trick I read somewhere recently that ensures the chocolate won’t catch. Stir to melt the chocolate completely.

Place the beans, half the walnuts, the vanilla extract, and a couple of spoonfuls of the melted chocolate mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Blitz for about 2 minutes, or until the batter is thick and the beans smooth – I added a bit more chocolate to loosen things up a bit.

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining 1/2 cup walnuts, remaining melted chocolate mixture, coffee substitute, and salt.

Beat the eggs until light and creamy, about 1 minute. Add the agave nectar, etc. and beat well.

Stir the bean/chocolate mixture into the coffee/chocolate mixture. Add the egg mixture, reserving about 1/2 cup. Mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Beat the remaining 1/2 cup egg mixture until light and fluffy, and drizzle it over the brownie batter. Lightly drag a chopstick through the egg mixture, creating a marbled effect.

Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the brownies are set – took about an hour for me. Let cool in the pan, and then refrigerate before cutting into squares – they’re too soft at room temperature to cut neatly, and they’d be messy and gooey when served unless well-refrigerated, so I kept them in the fridge. 

I also liberally sprinkled even more chilli flakes over, for heat and some sorely needed prettiness – these are no handsomer than any other brownie. People were kind about their lack of looks in the party post-midnight gloom, though, and they were found incredibly rich and fudgy, and I won a medal for my efforts. That was a great moment.

 In lieu of the concluding brownie pic I failed to capture, I'll go one better and give you the be-medalled Nachos Fiend bashing the crap out of her piñata with a broom.

Poppyseed and ricotta cake with lemon curd

This variation on Italian ricotta cheesecake from the Pickled Sisters Cafe is possibly the most excessively-ingrediented cake I’ve ever made, even counting The Most AMAZING Buttermilk Chocolate Cake EVER.  Alida Irwin should take note of this recipe for when her chooks are laying wildly and she has a thousand eggs to use up. Adding the final ingredient of 400g lemon curd to the mixer bowl (of no mean size) threatened to take the batter over the top of the beater. I had concerns about it all fitting in the 24cm tin that’s the closest I have to the recommended size. It went in – just – and thankfully there was no raising agent to worry about, although it did puff right up to the very edge.

It needed almost two hours in the oven. It also needed a knife dipped in warm water to slice it with, rather than a blunt serrated knife that left more of its innards piled up with every slice. It was very crumbly, and refrigerating didn’t seem to help that.

It does seem I’ve lost any remote knack I ever had for making sweet things that are also easy on the eye. But this was so lemony and lightly moist with all that ricotta and cream cheese and the nine eggs and the lemon cream accompaniment and the slight grittiness of the poppy seeds that all was forgiven. Just as well, as it fell into three pieces as I tried to shift it from springform base to serving plate, and it had to be wodged together and liberally covered in sifted icing sugar which covers a multitude of sins, as I always say, but wasn’t quite up to that crack in the centre.

Chocolate Amaretti Torte

Every blogger with even the slightest inclination towards cakeal matters must have blogged about Dorie Greenspan’s Fifteen-Minute Magic Chocolate Amaretti Torte by now. I found it in Baking, but when googling to see how others went with it, it seemed that everyone in the world had made it and saw that it was good. I would like to add my voice to the chorus of torte celebration, if I may, now that I’ve made it at least five times. 

It’s elegant, dark, grown-up and rich, and you’d never know that the cake part really is put together in fifteen minutes, albeit with the help of a food processor. There’s a little more to it than that – such as the later preparation of the chocolate ganache and the almond cream, which is listed as optional but should be considered absolutely compulsory.

The only departures I take from Dorie’s recipe is that:

• I toast the slivered almonds before they go in the food processor, as I often do with almonds; 
• I add a splash of Amaretto to the ganache, and sometimes to the cream, although this time I used Pure Almond Extract from Sur la Table, yes I did, because it's a pungent revelation after a lifetime of Queen’s almond essence; 
• I encircle the perimeter with the remaining whole amaretti biscuits* so that each slender cake slice has a high-domed, crunchy bit of delight on its widest end.

 *Unless there’s something else to be done with them; crushed up over icecream they’re fabulous, or over pumpkin and sage risotto. And in that case the torte has more toasted slivered almonds sprinkled around the edge instead, as it was in this case – as you can see in the appallingly bad photo that was all I had the opportunity to take before it was snaffled from under the very iPhone lens.

Pear-chocolate tart

It’s not all wine and dessert at my work, much as we may try. We do have a healthful regime, in the shape of a weekly fruit delivery from the people at CERES. Sadly, the end of every week finds the furry brown bosc pears unloved and unchosen, softening in the corners of the plastic tub, inexorably passed over for the peaches.

I know how they feel. I relate to those pears. I remember what it was like at school whenever competitive sports teams involving balls and other such horrors were chosen. I didn’t even want to be in a stupid team, any more than a pear wants to be quartered and eaten, but being last-picked every time, and then only grudgingly and because the teacher insisted … well, it rankled. I’m not bitter though.  

Anyway, so I took the rejected, humiliated, demoralised pears home, and brought about their meeting with dark chocolate and pastry, and, well, it was like they’d cast off their spectacles and found Clearasil. Judging by the state of the plate not long after they were returned to the kitchen at work, they’d have no trouble whatsoever getting a deb ball partner in Year 12. But before this analogy runs any further off the rails, let me consolidate here the many online sources I consulted.

Gluten-free crust adapted very loosely from Gluten-free Girl and others

1 cup rice flour

½ cup potato flour

¾ cup cornflour

3 teaspoons icing sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

120g unsalted butter, fridge-cold

1 egg

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

¼ cup water once 1 iceblock is in it (does that make sense?)

You’re supposed to use a pastry cutter or fork to work the butter into all the dry ingredients that precede it, but the thought of going anywhere near all that squeakily super-fine substance makes me come over all funny-like and goosebumpy. So I let the KitchenAid take care of that with its dough hook, but it didn’t really take care of it and I had to unhitch the bowl and get into all that dustiness with a fork after all. Awful, it was. I’m still washing my hands a day later like Lady Macbeth.

Once it had started crumbling a bit I returned it to the KA, adding the egg and vinegar. After a few-scrapings-down of the bowl it had started to form the desired crumbliness, and tentative additions of ice-water soon produced a ball of dough. It was flattened between two sheets of baking paper and went into the fridge to chill and relax.

Pears:

Most recipes seemed to go for halving the pears so that they could form a ring of turtle-like humps, but I felt this to be too much pear at once for my pear-shy colleagues, and quartered them so they could be arranged in more of an overlapping fan. Some bits had gone a little far in the ripening and had to be cut back, which meant a not-very-uniform array. Then they were poached for about 15 minutes in a litre of water with 250g raw sugar and a split vanilla bean, and left to cool in the syrup.

Back to the chilled pastry, which was rolled out between the sheets of baking paper. As is its wont, the paper started to crease up under the expanding dough after a while and I peeled one sheet off to apply the rolling pin directly to the dough, but that was to take a wrong turn, let me tell you. It was a very delicate and not at all flexible pastry – the edges started to crack and break off with very little provocation. When I’d lost patience – after about a minute – and once it was only about 4mm thick, I pressed it into a greased loose-based tart tin, sticking back the broken-off bits around the sides. Back to the fridge to rest for about half an hour, then blind-baked in a 180 C oven for about 20 minutes, then another 5 or so without the split peas to dry and firm it up a bit more. It didn’t shrink at all – I guess because it lacked the gluten.

Filling (mostly lifted from Jamie Oliver. If you go there, don’t look at the comments. Although I suppose it’s nice that Young People Today are looking at recipe sites instead of having food fights in the Home Ec room…):*

125g ground almonds, scattered over a tray and toasted in the oven until golden

2 eggs

125g butter, softened
95g caster sugar
185g dark chocolate, zapped in 20-second bursts in the microwave and stirred until just melted

Mix everything together and pour into the pastry case, then arrange the drained pears in a ring on top and into the oven at 170 C.

Jamie’s 170 C and my 170 C are clearly very different things – doubtless our ovens are barely related ­– as hardly anything was happening after the recommended 45 minutes and its central regions were still sticking damply to the skewer after an hour and a half, although I think it overcooked closer to the edges.

I failed to provide the suggested crème fraîche or indeed anything at all, though it would have been nice with. 

*That’s not an emoticon, thank you very much. It’s the correct way to close a parenthesis before a colon.