Thursday 17 September 2009

Cake No. 1

Cake plays a significant part in my plans for the coming year. Might sound silly, but I think cake is a jolly good way to build community - it's much easier to talk to somebody if you have something to offer them. And it might be a bit of an old-fashioned-housewife sort of attitude, but I really do think that giving someone delicious home made food is a good way of showing them you care. However, despite my good intentions, the food I make isn't always delicious, so I thought I'd better break my new kitchen in slowly with a bit of practice. Cooking with electric hobs takes a while to get used to (Tuesday's noodles would have been ready a lot sooner if I'd remembered to turn that switch on the wall to 'on'...) and I'm already thinking it would be nice to have more than a metre of worktop, but really I can't complain. There's a fridge, freezer, grill, oven, hobs, sink and loads of cupboard space, and thanks to the kitchen-lounge arrangement there's even space for people to hang around while I cook [1].

I am sampling a (small) second slice of Cake No. 1 as I type [2]. It's actually quite delicious, which came as something of a surprise, because I thought I was making a complete mess of the weight conversions. It's from a Canadian recipe book [3] so everything is measured in cups, but I never quite liked the idea of measuring butter by squishing it into a mug, so I used this handy conversion site and it came out fine. I love the icing - you make it by melting up some jam and chocolate with a little milk, and it comes out yummy and sticky.

Anyway, it's quite a large cake, so there should be plenty left on Saturday to offer as a reward to any of my brothers who might feel like coming along with Mum to help carry the rest of my boxes up the stairs...

On the whole I would deem Cake No. 1 a success. May it be the first of many!

[1] All I need is some people... but, as I've mentioned, that's why I'm baking cake!
[2] For the peace of mind of Claire and Matthew, I would just like to state that before I had any cake I ate all of my first course, which included salad.
[3] Moosewood Restaurant New Classics, very kindly purchased for my by my Auntie Ann when I visited her in Vancouver in 2002.
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2 comments:

  1. KateSunday, 20 September, 2009

    By popular request (that is, Ed asking me) I thought I'd post the recipe for Cake No. 1 (which went down rather well). It's adapted from Presto! Chocolate Cake, in Moosewood Restaurant New Classics (Moosewood, Inc. 2001), p. 421. The conversions into ounces and grams are not in the book but they're the quantities I used.

    Ingredients:
    1 cup unbleached white flour (4.5oz/125g)
    1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (1.5oz/40g)
    1/2 tsp baking soda (.i. bicarbonate of soda)
    1/4 tsp salt
    1/2 cup butter (4oz/115g)
    1 cup sugar (7oz/200g)
    2 large eggs
    3/4 cup water
    1 tsp vanilla extract

    Preheat the oven to 350F (175C). Butter an 8 or 9 inch cake tin.

    Cream sugar and butter together. Add the eggs one at a time, beating them in well.

    Mix together the flour, cocoa, bicarb and salt in one bowl (I used my scales pan) and mix the water and vanilla in a separate vessel. Add a the water mix and the flour mix to the butter/sugar mix by thirds, alternating between water and flour, beating after each addition.

    Pour into the tin (it will be really runny!) and bake for 30-35 minutes (use the clean-knife test to check it's cooked).

    And the icing:
    1/2 cup chocolate chips (I used 3oz broken up dark chocolate)
    1/3 cup jam
    2 tbsp milk, water or cream

    Put the ingredients in a pan and melt slowly over a low heat, stirring all the time. When the cake is done, pour the icing on top (no need to remove cake from tin).

    It's lovely warm as soon as you've made it, but also good later on too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RanDomWednesday, 30 September, 2009

    I am expecting to see Ed comment on how his cake turns out ;)

    ReplyDelete

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