My Groundhog Day Chocolate Cake

                                     
Its become the “little black cocktail dress” of my baking repertoire!  (If you’ll excuse the momentary gender crossover.)   Everytime my family plans a celebration – a birthday, a farewell party, Christmas, or any of the other multitude of festivals that we celebrate here in India with a party – they always want me to make THE CHOCOLATE CAKE.

The kids ate most of the cake before I could take a picture!

                                   
And its not like I haven’t had any practice at the recipe; I have been making this flourless chocolate cake for the past 10 to 15 years.   In fact I seem to remember it was one of the first recipes I tried after I had bought famed food historian and cookery writer Claudia Roden’s magnum opus “The Book of Jewish Food” in the mid 1990s.



My faded copy of one of the world's classic cookbooks

Ms Roden comments in the book that this is itself a much copied recipe which she originally published some 25 years earlier in “A Book of Middle Eastern Food”, another of her highly praised and awarded recipe collections.   And I seem to recall this cake being around many a cafe in inner city Melbourne, Australia in the 1980s when I was living there; the trouble is my kids weren’t even born then so the novelty of it certainly hasn’t worn off on them!



Claudia Roden

The recipe is straightforward enough: a mix of dark chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and ground almonds.    But somehow the chemistry of baking transforms these ingredients into an unctuous, heavily chocolate tasting cake that is usually served only a sliver at a time with fresh thick double cream as the ideal accompaniment.   (Oh, how we miss the King Island Dairy and it’s cream here in Hyderabad!)

The chocolate cake with custard apple icecream

                                  
Here in India we serve it with the best ice cream we can find ... which for us comes from Bombay’s “Natural Icecream Company”  (there’s an outlet here in Banjara Hills).   They have a range of natural fruit ice creams, made with no added preservatives or stabilisers, and one of the best is made with custard apples – also called sitaphal.

So, no matter that everytime I make this cake I feel like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day”, where his character is trapped in a snowbound country town and due to a timewarp is forced to repeat the same actions every single day of his life!   No matter that I have baked cakes from the canons of other well known baking experts like David Lebovitz, Dorothy Greenspan and Dan Lepard.
   
They still always want the chocolate cake!    And despite the fact that you can add to this recipe various enhancers like grated peel, dried fruit or a sympathetic alcohol, as my daughter said just before her birthday earlier this year: ”No nuts, no peels, no oranges, no rum .... just the chocolate!
So here it is .... my Groundhog Day Chocolate Cake recipe ... with thanks to Ms Roden, of course.

The cake has a dense outside crust and soft inner crumb

                            
The Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:   250 gms dark cooking chocolate   100gms butter   6 eggs, separated   75gms caster sugar   100gms ground blanched almonds

Method:   Crush chocolate and then melt with butter in a bowl  (I zap it in the microwave at 30 sec intervals, stirring in between).   Beat egg yolks with the sugar until pale.   Add the ground almonds and the melted chocolate and butter mixture and stir to incorporate.  

In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until stiff (make sure the bowl is perfectly dry and clean and that there are no remnants of the yolks in the whites ... otherwise you won’t get body to the beaten whites).   Fold into chocolate/almond mixture.    Butter a 23cm/9“ cake tin and dust with flour.   (I use cocoa powder so you don’t get a white lining on your finished cake.)
Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C for approximately 45 minutes.   Leave to cool.   To serve - dust with powdered icing sugar though a sieve or slaver on a chocolate ganache made separately.

Warning:   don’t blame me if everyone wants  you to make it again and again!

Tony saab/Hyderabad July 2012

 

Fermentation & Ginger Beer

Fermenting fresh ginger can make a refreshing drink

                                       
Fermentation – the art of preserving foodstuffs and making them more digestible and nutritious – has been making a comeback in recent years.    Whilst the art of fermentation can be traced back to the beginning of mankind, the past 100 years has seen the industrialisation and centralisation of the world’s food supplies and a resultant dropping off in consumption of fermented foods around the world.    But now with the renewed interest in artisanal and localised food production, epitomised by the Slow Food movement - which now has Chapters in India -  fermentation is again on the rise – pun intended.

People are again making hand-made fermented foodstuffs like sauerkraut, sourdough breads, home brewed wines and beers and yogurt.  (Although interestingly home-made yogurt has never really gone out of vogue  here in the Indian household.)

Momofuku's David Chang

The wunderkid chef/restaurateur of the New York food scene Momofuku’s David Chang is currently experimenting with fermentation processes – and giving lectures around the world about his ‘discoveries’. " Lactic-acid fermentation, pickling and age-drying beef are things that we’ve been doing for centuries, but we don’t really know much about what’s going on behind the scenes,” Chang said in a recent lecture.   Perhaps his interest in fermentation is no coincidence given his Korean/Japanese background where kimchi and miso are two of the world’s last remaining recognisable examples of fermentation products.


And there are a number of recent publications dealing with aspects of fermentation including Sally Fallon’s “Nourishing Traditions” – an impressive collection of natural food recipes which also includes fermentation techniques and a book I have been using recently entitled “Wild Fermentation”, by a New Yorker with the unusual name of Sandor Ellix Katz!

Mr Katz’s book looks at fermentation techniques and recipes for cheese, miso, sauerkraut, soy products, sourdoughs and various types of beers, meads and wines.   They are easy to follow recipes which usually don’t require much in the way of special equipment or ingredients.

Preparing the 'ginger bug'

One recipe that I have used several times is for fermenting ginger beer.   It’s basically just fresh ginger, sugar, water and lemon juice but the fermentation part of the recipe requires nurturing a “ginger bug” and feeding it for a week or so to kick start the process.    The bug is basically grated fresh ginger – including the skin – mixed with sugar and water which is and topped up every 2 days in order to activate the fermentation process.  

 

Close up shot of the fermentation after 7 days

                                        
Once the bug is ready you mix it with a larger quantity of water, sugar and some lemon juice – boil it through for about half an hour – and then bottle it in recycled bottles – I use mid-sized soda bottles.

Washed & sterilised re-cycled soda bottles

You can vary the ‘strength’ of the ginger beer by simply adding more grated ginger and the end product – which is ready after about two weeks – is a feisty, intensely ginger-flavoured drink which is fermented enough to produce carbonation but not enough to produce significant levels of alcohol.
So it can be a great drink for everyone in the hot summer months – either served straight on ice or mixed with soda or made into a ‘ginger spider’ with icecream added.

The ginger beer is bottled and left to ferment for 2 weeks

For a more ‘adult’ taste I mix the ginger beer with dark rum and ice.  This mix is known in the U.S. as a “Dark and Stormy” and I think it’s the perfect alternative to a gin and tonic in India ... especially in the summer heat we've just been having where the temperature has been hitting 43 degrees here in Hyderabad for days at a time!

Bring on the 'Dark & Stormys'!

Tony saab/Hyderabad   June 2012