Being permanently in search of the perfect chocolate cake recipe, I had to try this one. "Made with cocoa powder, melted bittersweet chocolate, sour cream, and brown sugar, this cake is rich, moist, and a treat for the hungry school kid in you."  It also uses no butter, which is an advantage when one hasn't been to the shops in over a week!  (Yes, I have bittersweet chocolate and sour cream readily to hand, but no butter to spare.  Such is my life...)

My large cake tins have all gone walkabout (what did you do with my tin-base, people-next-door?) but luckily the recipe specifies that it can be used to make 24 cupcakes instead of one large cake.  I only have one cupcake tin and no patience to do two batches in a row, so I halved the recipe... and then had to make a few more adjustments: demerara instead of brown sugar, an extra egg because the mix seemed too dry.  Still, they came out ok: light and spongy, tender, dark and moist.  Another bonus feature of these cakes is that unlike most cupcakes, they come out with nice flat tops, which can be an advantage for certain sorts of decorating.

Finally, I had no Cocoa Puffs (do they even sell Cocoa Puffs here in the UK?) so regular buttercream frosting had to do instead.  And here they are, boxed up and ready!

Chocolate Cupcakes
1 cup minus 2 tbs flour
1/2 cup cocoa
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda (next time I think I'd use 1/2 tsp each)
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup creme fraiche (ok, I lied about having sour cream)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
100ml boiling water
1 tsp coffee powder
100g dark chocolate, melted

Preheat oven to 185C.  Sift dry ingredients together into a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, mix creme fraiche, oil and eggs until combined.  Add to dry ingredients and mix to form a fairly stiff batter.  Dissolve coffee powder in hot water and mix in.  Stir in dark chocolate.

Spoon mixture into cupcake cases.  I filled mine to about 1cm from the top and they rose over the tops of the tins and puffed out a bit; if you want them contained in their cases don't put too much in!  I got 15 cakes out of this quantity -- three had to be baked without the benefit of a tin and became somewhat deformed as a result (but still tasted good)!

Vegan Dinner Party: Part 2 - Roasted cauliflower and baba ganoush

Following on from my previous post about last week's vegan dinner party, here's the next recipe installment, for the main course of roasted cauliflower and chickpea salad with baba ganoush. 

As I think I have mentioned before, eggplant/aubergine is one of my very favourite things to eat.  In baba ganoush, which is basically a roasted eggplant puree, it bears very little resemblance to its usual texture, form or flavour but is still delicious.  Usually served as a dip, baba ganoush takes the soft flesh of the eggplant, tasting of a subtle smokiness imparted by the charred skin, and combines it with tahini, garlic and lemon to make the best thing ever to put on sliced bread.  (Well, maybe the second best or the third best... beetroot dip has to be up there too, and simple ripe tomato slices with a sprinkle of sea salt and fresh-ground black pepper.  Mmmmm.)

Some versions of this dish are loaded with tahini and olive oil to the point that the dip almost becomes a mayonnaise, creamy and thick-textured.  I prefer the kind where you can still tell it was once an aubergine, where the puree is more juicy than creamy, and with plenty of lemon.  I added sliced basil to this version, and might add a dash of chilli next time if cooking for other spiceheads like me.

Instead of using it as a dip, in this case I used it as a base on which to pile crispy, spice-coated florets of roasted cauliflower and chickpeas.  Since discovering roasted cauliflower last year I have made it on several occasions, including for parties as a nibble and Christmas dinner as an accompaniment, but it really is good enough to eat as the main event in itself, and eminently suitable for a vegan dinner.  Chickpeas and flaked almonds add a bit of extra body, and a squeeze of fresh lemon perks up everything.  I added soft strips of roasted pepper on the top for even more flavour, spooned some tomato-cucumber-onion-parsley salsa around for freshness, and garnished with a few crisp-baked pita wedges for texture -- and as a nod to the more familiar form of baba ganoush.

Baba ganoush
5 medium aubergines
1/3 cup tahini
2 lemons
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbs olive oil
1/2 cup basil leaves, shredded
salt, pepper

Place whole eggplants under a hot grill and cook until skin is blackened (it will turn lighter first as it cooks, then start to char); turn and cook similarly on other side.  Continue to cook until flesh is very soft.  Once eggplants are cool enough to handle, cut in half and scoop out flesh, stripping off skin.  Add tahini, zest of both lemons and juice of one, garlic and olive oil; whiz with hand blender (or mash well with fork) until pureed but not completely smooth.  Stir in basil, taste and adjust seasoning with sea salt, freshly-ground pepper and extra lemon juice as required.

Roasted cauliflower
2 large cauliflowers
2 tbs olive oil
3 tbs ground cumin
3 tbs ground coriander
1 tbs chilli powder
1 tbs chilli flakes
1 1/2 tbs sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup flaked almonds
lemon
Optional: chopped herbs (parsley or coriander), fresh chilli

Cut cauliflower into 2-inch pieces, cutting across some of the florets to expose inner surfaces (this gives extra surface area to develop brown crispy bits and deep roasted flavours).  Steam for about 5 minutes, or until just tender to a knife but still very firm.  Drain and allow to steam-dry.

Heat oven to 230C.  Toss cauliflower with olive oil, then with spices and almonds.  Spread evenly on baking tray, allowing enough space so that florets roast, rather than steam in their own moisture.  Roast for about 25 minutes or until brown, crisp and beginning to blacken just a little at the very edges.  Zest lemon over and squeeze juice. 

(Some fresh herbs are nice to sprinkle over; fresh chopped red chilli is an amazing addition but can be dangerously hot!)

Note: The above amounts made plenty for 5 people with some left over for lunch the next day.  For the chickpeas, I used two tins and roasted them the same way as the cauliflower, using a smaller amount of the same spices without the almonds, then put them all in a bowl at the end before adding the lemon zest and juice and tossing the whole lot together.  Next time I might use just one tin and not cook them quite so long, as they were a tiny bit dry.

Vegan Dinner Party: Part 1 - vegetable tempura

I used to throw Proper Dinner Parties, way back when (I had time, a proper house, decent furniture, etc etc).  They were elaborate, multi-course affairs, beginning with cocktails and elegant nibbles at around 7, progressing through small tasters, plated starter and main course, dessert and petits fours, all accompanied by matching wines, at a relaxed pace and finishing some time after midnight. Nowadays my usual entertaining style is to throw together a huge bunch of random food, pile it all out of the kitchen in a steady stream, let people help themselves and keep the drinks flowing.  But last weekend I decided it was time to return to something a bit more traditional.  I invited a few friends over, keeping the guest list deliberately small (doing a plated main for any more than about 6 people just wouldn't be possible in my current kitchen), and as one guest was vegan and another vegetarian, I planned a(n almost) completely vegan menu.

We began with cocktails made from grapefruit zest muddled with lemon, Campari (1 measure), gin (2 measures), Cointreau (1/2 measure was all I had left), sugar syrup (1 measure) and lemon juice (another splash).  They came out a beautiful pink colour and delightfully zesty, with a palate-tantalising bitterness from the grapefruit and Campari.  Nibbles were wasabi peas and (sadly non-vegan, the only item that was) chipotle-flavoured crisps.  (What's non-vegan about chipotle crisps, you ask?  Whey powder.  Why whey?  I don't know.  Curse you, Walkers.)

To get us properly going, next up was broccoli, asparagus and courgette tempura.  I'm a sucker for anything deep-fried; I also love green vegetables.  Tempura broccoli works particularly well -- there's just something about the way the crisp batter clings to the tender but satisfyingly textured florets, plus the savoury complexity of almost-charred cruciferous vegetable, that makes it the ultimate vegetable for the purpose.  Asparagus and courgette are similarly tender but with different flavours.  Combined with a delicately sweet, gingered soy for dipping, and a glass of Prosecco, it was a simple but delicious starter.

(By the time I thought to take a picture, we'd already eaten most of it...!)

Next course was a rich tomato soup, laced with chilli, lime, black pepper and a dash of gin (no photos but recipe loosely based on The Food Lab's vegan 'creamy' tomato soup, except for, well, the chilli, lime and gin, and with a bit less olive oil).

For main course: roasted spiced cauliflower and chickpea salad on eggplant puree, served with fresh tomato salsa and pita crisps (recipes to follow), accompanied by patatas bravas and a rocket, citrus and beetroot salad (thanks again, Kenji -- I used my standard honey-mustard-lemon vinaigrette rather than the pinenut-sherry-vinegar version, but the grapefruit and beetroot combination was a winner).

[Perhaps Blogger's photo capacity has run out -- my three attempts to upload this picture have resulted, respectively, in a strange red-only version; a half-coloured, half-fuzzy version and a half-only version.  Next time, Gadget...] ETA: aha!

Dessert was chocolate raspberry cake; recipe later perhaps.

For now, here's how I made the tempura:

Batter
2 cups plain flour
2 tsp salt
1 tbs baking powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper
2 cups iced water

Sift all dry ingredients together.  Just before frying, add iced water; stir with chopsticks until just combined (lumps are ok).  [This made too much batter for the below amount of vegetables; I could have done another batch at least with what was left.  Half the amount did about 8 pieces broccoli, 10 pieces courgette and a dozen or so mushrooms.  Go figure...]

Vegetables
I used:
1 small head broccoli, cut into 2-inch florets (about 12 pieces)
12 stalks asparagus
1 small courgette, cut into about 1-1.5cm slices (about 12 pieces)

Dip vegetables in turn and fry in batches: broccoli will take about 4 min, asparagus and courgette 2 min each.  Drain on kitchen towel and then serve with dipping sauce.

Dipping sauce
2 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs mirin
1 tbs pickled ginger juice
1 tbs chinkiang or balsamic vinegar
1/2 tbs sugar syrup

Cocktail cupcakes? Oh yes!

I have recently discovered the show Mad Men (ah, the biting satire on gender roles in 1950s America; thank goodness we live in a more enlightened time and place.  Ahem.) and less recently, the joy of cupcakes.  Imagine my delight, then, when I came across this:

http://thisisrocksalt.com/2012/03/24/mad-men-season-launch-you-need-these-cupcakes/


"A juniper-scented, gin-soaked sponge with a light and tangy lemon icing..."?  Oh yes, I need these cupcakes, I really do.  Luckily, a friend's birthday tea party last weekend provided the ideal opportunity to try them out. 

I couldn't quite bring myself to use most of a whole block of butter in the cakes AND an entire whole block of butter for the frosting (mostly because I only had one block!) so I fudged the quantities somewhat for the cake and made slightly less frosting, supplementing the butter with gin and lemon juice (for extra tang and because let's face it, gin makes EVERYTHING better).  I was also so inspired by the description of the 'gin-soaked sponge' that I decided a drizzle of lemon-gin syrup would be just what was required. 

My cakes weren't as perfectly pretty as the original examples, but they did come out exceptionally well.  This is probably the most tender, even-crumbed and moist cupcake recipe I've tried yet -- will definitely be using it in future!

Tom Collins Cupcakes

125g butter
2/3 cup caster sugar
zest and juice of one lemon
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup gin

Preheat oven to 180C (185 if you are my oven).  Beat softened butter, sugar and lemon zest together until light and fluffy (I used my hand blender with whisk attachment on medium speed); beat in eggs one at a time.  Fold in half of sifted dry ingredients, then gin and lemon juice, then remaining dry ingredients.

Divide mixture between 12 cupcake cases.  Bake for 20 minutes, rotating halfway through cooking time, or until cakes are lightly browned and spring back when pressed (mine took about 22 minutes).

Lemon-gin syrup
2-3 tbs gin
juice of one lemon (reserve zest for decoration)
2 tbs sugar

Mix together until sugar dissolves.  Drizzle about a teaspoon or so of syrup over each cake while still warm.

Frosting
350g(ish) icing sugar
125g butter, softened
zest and juice of one lemon
a splash of gin

Mix all ingredients together until well-combined, adding more liquid or more icing sugar as required until correct consistency (pipe-able or spreadable) is reached.  Ice cakes when cool; sprinkle with reserved lemon zest.

Sushi is simple

My first exposure to sushi was in my Year 7 Japanese class, when our teacher (who was not by any stretch of the imagination Japanese -- nor, I suspect, did she actually speak much more Japanese or have a deeper understanding of Japanese culture than we did, but bless her, she was willing to teach us anyway) made and brought some in for us to try.  Having a naturally sweet tooth and being fond of strange sweet-savoury combinations, I thought the squishy, sugary rice wrapped in seaweed with canned tuna in the middle, dipped in salty soy, was really quite tasty.

The next time I remember having sushi was about 6 years later, when I had freshly made temaki and nigiri at a high-class Hong Kong hotel.  It was nothing like Mrs O'Callaghan's sugary tuna creation.  It was also utterly delicious.

The Melbourne public must have (re)discovered sushi around the same time I did, because in the following years, sushi hand-roll chains began to spring up everywhere around Melbourne.  Wrapt was memorable for its after-3pm $1 handroll specials -- and also for its antipasto roll, filled with grilled eggplant, roasted red capsicum and shredded parmesan cheese.  I never would have guessed that parmesan and soy sauce would work so well together, but thinking further, it makes sense that their flavours complement each other: salty, fermented, umami-ful.  Another early contender was Yoyogi, on Swanston St, which I think still survives; nowadays the Sushi Sushi chain has grown and come to dominate much of the market.  And let's not forget Melbourne Uni's wonderful Plush Fish, home of delicious fresh salmon and avocado handrolls as well as the best coffee on campus (until Brunetti's opened a branch at the Potter) and an insanely rich white hot chocolate that would keep you on a sugar high all afternoon.

I first tried making sushi from the recipe in Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook.  We didn't have mirin, so I just used the vinegar, sugar and salt; we did have a rice cooker, so I used that to cook the rice.  We didn't have a rolling mat but I soon acquired one: they make it so much easier!

I've stuck to this method ever since, though my technique has improved considerably: early attempts suffered somewhat from too-hard rice, layered too thick, resulting in overstuffed rolls that would split down the sides.  I learned a tremendous amount from watching the sushi chefs in some of the abovementioned sushi outlets: take a modest amount of rice, no more than a tennis-ball; form a hedge of even thickness the entire width of the nori sheet; fold the hedge down with your fingers to form a uniform rectangle, leaving a little strip at the bottom; add your fillings (not too much!) and roll neatly, with the bare strip at the bottom contacting the far edge of the rice; use the edge of the rolling mat to neaten up the ends of the roll.  Or, more impressive, the method for making nigiri I observed from one chef: left hand grabs slice of fish, laying it flat in left palm; right hand grabs just the right amount of rice; right index finger scoops up dollop of wasabi while other three fingers squeeze rice into a neat block; right hand smears wasabi from index finger onto fish in left hand and then plops rice neatly onto wasabi-smeared fish; left hand deposits completed nigiri into tray.  The entire process took no more than five seconds; rinse and repeat.  I've never got quite that good...




Sushi rice
500g uncooked sushi rice (about 2 cups)
An equal volume water, plus a good splash more

Cook rice in a rice cooker until it pops; check, stir, add a bit more water if needed, leave to steam for another 5-10 minutes.

Dressing
80ml white vinegar
60g white sugar
2.5 tsp salt

Mix all ingredients together and heat in microwave, stir until sugar and salt dissolve.

When rice is cooked, remove from heat, pour over dressing, toss well to combine and leave to cool.  (Traditional methods have you fan the rice while tossing it continuously until cool, which results in a glossier grain; I find the lazy way still works fine though.)

Fillings
You can put whatever you like inside.  Some of my favourites:

• California roll: surimi (artificial crab meat) finely chopped and mixed with mayonnaise, avocado, cucumber, carrot and red pepper
• Garden roll: avocado, cucumber, carrot, red pepper, sweetcorn mixed with mayo and pink pickled ginger
• Teriyaki chicken: sliced cooked chicken breast, hoi sin sauce, cucumber and red pepper
• Salmon, avocado and cucumber
• Inari (sweet fried tofu), spinach and avocado/cucumber

(The picture above shows garden rolls, salmon mini-maki and salmon nigiri; the enormous heap of pickled ginger shows how much I love the stuff!)

Happiness is...

... going to make Jill Dupleix's flourless chocolate cake (for the first time in years!) and finding that one has all the necessary ingredients already in the pantry :) 

(Also, separating 5 eggs into the same bowl and not breaking any of the yolks.  I know it's always recommended to separate eggs one at a time, first into a cup and then tipping the white into the mixing bowl, in case you accidentally break one of the yolks and contaminate the batch, but I'm mostly a) quite good at separating eggs and b) too lazy.  When I made a scaled-up triple-quantity version of this recipe for my father's 50th birthday party, though -- then I did the eggs one at a time.  Even with good egg-separation skills, 15 eggs at a time is just pushing your luck...)

We're invited round to our neighbour's place for dinner tomorrow and I've offered to bring dessert.  It needs to be something I can make ahead and bring without last-minute preparations (so creme brulee, for example, is out); it also needs to look a bit impressive though still homemade, so fruit salad probably won't do (though my watermelon with Cointreau-macerated berries and lime zest finished off with sweet sparkling wine is quite swish, if I do say so myself).  I made chocolate raspberry mousse cake for our family-not!BBQ-party thing last Saturday and there's actually still some left in the fridge, so I don't feel particularly inspired to make that again; I contemplated cheesecake, but that takes time.  Then I thought about this recipe, which was one of my favourites from "I Hate To Cook" (by Jill Dupleix, alias Dolly Campbell).  Dressed up with fresh mixed berries piled on top and drizzled liberally with white chocolate ganache and a dusting of icing sugar (which is how we decorated it for my father's birthday, see above), it has the right combination of elegance and wow! factor.

The ingredients really are fairly simple; I stocked up on chocolate last weekend, and we usually have butter.  It's just the ground almonds that might be outside the usual pantry staples -- plus I thought we were out of sugar.  The cornucopia of cooking supplies bestowed upon me by friends moving house came to the rescue in both cases.  Thanks, John and Sheelagh!

Jill Dupleix's flourless chocolate cake

250g chocolate
150g butter
150g sugar
1 tbs strong coffee
1 tbs brandy (we are out of brandy, oops -- I used sherry instead)
125g almond meal
5 eggs, separated

Preheat oven to 180C; prepare a deep 20-23cm round cake tin.  (I use a non-stick loose-bottomed tin, so preparation consists of putting the base into the tin.  Otherwise grease and line.)

Melt chocolate (I used the microwave for 2 minutes), stir in butter until melted (it might need another quick zap in the microwave to get it all to melt in) and then sugar, coffee and brandy, then egg yolks.  Beat egg whites until stiff (peak curls over just at the end) but not dry; stir in a large spoonful to lighten the mix, then fold in the rest using a large metal spoon.

Pour gently into tin and bake for... well, I've set a timer for 40 minutes and am going to check in the expectation that it will need another 5-10 minutes after that.  We'll see!

I'll try to remember to take a picture tomorrow, after I've decorated it and before we eat it.

Curry in not much of a hurry

Curry is supposedly the new national dish of Britain.  Certainly, I've learned that it occupies a very special place in the local culinary consciousness: no more the strange concoction with curry powder, bananas, sultanas and cream that some old recipe books (including Australian ones) prescribe, a British curry (one of which you might 'go for', possibly after a night out -- 'nuff said) comes in more flavours than I'd ever heard of before (dhansak? bhuna? handi?) and is quite a different style to what, living in Australia, I'd come to think of as "Indian food".

Here are some of the dishes I'd expect to find on the menu at an Australian Indian restaurant.  Beef vindaloo.  Lamb rogan josh.  Aloo gobi.  Palak paneer.  Vegetable kofta (a staple of mine at the Roundabout of Death Curry Shop, who endeared themselves to me forever by being willing to deliver a $9 order to me one night at 10pm when I was working late in the lab, and then knocking another $1 off the price).  And chicken makhani, that bright orange, creamy, sweet and gently spicy paragon of bowdlerised -- but still irresistibly tasty -- 'ethnic' food.

To call the entire range of diverse local cuisines that happen to have developed within an area that is classed as a single country in terms of political geography "Indian food" is, I've long since realised, is as bad a culinary over-generalisation as to lump Sichuan, Cantonese, Hunan, Teochew and many other regional styles together as "Chinese food".  But, in the same way that what is known as "Chinese food" outside China began as predominantly Cantonese-influenced and has gradually expanded to include the food of other regions, our impressions of "Indian food" are based more on certain cuisines than others.  A friend with more knowledge than I have (in other words, some) of the various regional cuisines of India tells me that what we think of as "Indian food" in Melbourne is mainly influenced by Punjabi-style cooking, from the north.

Despite 'going for a curry' many times since coming to the UK, in many ways I still feel I have yet to wrap my head around the bewildering array of varieties available at even the average restaurant on the Curry Mile.  At some point I intend to go to a decent curry buffet restaurant and methodically sample all the flavours on offer in order to get to grips with exactly what the difference is between dopiaza and jalfrezi, korma and dhansak, makhani and tikka masala, and all the others. 

In the meantime, though, I still sometimes hanker after good old chicken makhani.  When looking for information on the slow-cooker lasagna I made the other week, I came across this blog and a recipe (originally from here) for slow-cooker "Indian butter chicken".  I was instantly tempted -- it sounded like so little work in return for so much tomatoey-creamy deliciousness.

Of course, I couldn't just follow the directions given.  That would a) have been too simple, and b) required me to go out shopping and buy ingredients, including chicken, and 'tandoori masala', an ingredient that not only do I not know where to get it, I don't even know what it is.  I had several assorted root vegetables left over from the past week's cooking exploits, the makings of a basic curry paste, and tomato paste, coconut milk and spices in the fridge.  Here is what I did:

Vegetable makhani curry

1 large mixing bowlful root and other vegetables (I used:
4 medium carrots
1/2 a large swede
1/2 a large butternut squash
about 100g mushrooms)

Curry paste
1-2 red onions
4 large garlic cloves
3 inch piece ginger, peeled
1-2 red chillies
1 tbs ground cumin
1 tbs ground coriander
1 tbs mild curry powder
15 cardamom pods (NB: would cut down for next time - maybe 10)

1 can (440 ml) coconut milk
1/2 jar tomato pasta sauce (because that's what I had left)
100ml tomato paste
1/2 jar water
1-2 tsp salt
2 tbs sweet chilli sauce


Chop all vegetables into rough chunks.  Preheat slow cooker and place vegetables inside.

For curry paste, blend onion, garlic, ginger and chillies; add spices.  Heat ~1tbs oil in a saucepan and fry curry paste until fragrant; add thick part of coconut milk if needed to keep from sticking.  Add rest of coconut milk, tomato sauce and tomato paste, salt and sweet chilli sauce; heat until just boiling.  Pour evenly over vegetables in slow cooker; rinse jar, can and saucepan with water and add this too.

Cook on high for... well, I meant to put it on high for an hour or two and then turn it down when I left, but forgot.  After about 8 hours on high the vegetables were well and truly soft; somewhat worryingly, things were a bit black around the edges!  Nothing was stuck or tasted burnt, though.  Probably 4-5 hours would have done it, and stirring in the middle might not have been a bad idea either, but it was fine in the end.

The flavour was not quite as creamy as the chicken makhani I remember, but had the right amount of spice and sweetness (helped by the root vegetables) and was still quite rich.  If I'd had the yoghurt on hand recommended by the recipes I (sort of) followed, that might have added to the creaminess; if I'd had any fresh coriander left, I would have chopped that and stirred it through at the end.  The flavour of cardamom -- a key element in makhani as I know it -- was distinct, possibly a bit too much so; I'd probably reduce the number of cardamom pods for next time.  Overall though, it was plenty tasty nonetheless!