World Goth Day 2019: Black Raspberry Mud Cake

Happy World Goth Day, everyone!

(wishing someone a happy day isn't very goth, is it? How about gloomy World Goth Day?)

So, it rolls around again. Pretty much every year since I started this blog I've done a World Goth Day post, and it's kinda difficult to work within such a restricting colour scheme: black, white, grey, and dark bloody tones like red and purple. Maybe next year, I'll focus less on colour and more on cultural iconography.

I thought this year I'd do something with red wine: I tried making a red wine and white chocolate ganache, which tasted incredible but looked a very strange colour. I also made a red wine chocolate cake mixture, which tasted amazing when it was raw in the bowl, but once it was cooked it tasted kinda beery and the red colour had cooked out.

So, this year I decided to go completely black on black! I used very dark chocolate in the ganache, and dark chocolate in the cake mixture. Oddly enough, though, once the dark chocolate was cooked in the cake it turned a deep red colour. It must have reacted with the other ingredients, but I'm not complaining! It was a happy coincidence.

INGREDIMENTS

For the chocolate cake

3 medium eggs

4 ounces (115 grammes) caster sugar

2 ounces (55 grammes) brown sugar

3 ounces (85 grammes) butter

3 ounces (85 grammes) dark chocolate

5 ounces (140 grammes) white plain flour: spelt, wheat, or gluten free

Salt, to taste

1 ounce (30 grammes) cocoa powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

3 fluid ounces (90 millilitres) hot strong coffee

Vanilla essence

About 4 or 5 ounces (115 to 140 grammes) seedless raspberry jam

For the ganache

9 ounces (250 grammes) dark chocolate, at least 60% cocoa

3 ounces (85 grammes) unsalted butter

3 ounces (85 grammes) caster sugar

3 fluid ounces (90 millilitres) water

Black food colouring

METHOD

First, make the cake

• Preheat the oven to 170C (340F, Gas Mk.3), and grease an 8 inch (20 centimetre) with butter, and dust with caster sugar.
• In a small bowl or jug, melt the butter and chocolate together in a double boiler or in the microwave on low power. Make a slurry with the cocoa powder and coffee. In another bowl, mix together the flour and baking soda.
• In a large mixing bowl, whip the eggs and sugars together with three pinches of salt (one pinch for each egg) with an electric hand mixer until pale yellow, thickly foamy, and about doubled in size.
• Gradually beat in the melted butter and chocolate, and the vanilla essence. Sieve in half the flour mixture, then fold with a rubber spatula or wire balloon whisk until half mixed in. Fold in the coffee until, again, half folded. Sieve in the last of the flour and fold through completely.
• Pour into the tin, and bake on the centre shelf of the preheated oven for about 35 to 45 minutes. Check the doneness with a cocktail stick. You know the drill! 
• Once baked and cooled, level and split in half. Fill and coat with a thin coat of raspberry jam. chill thoroughly for about 2 hours before icing.

Then, make the ganache

• Chop the chocolate with a serrated knife into small pieces, and put it in a heatproof mixing bowl.
• In a saucepan, or in a jug in the microwave on high heat, melt and dissolve the water, sugar, and butter together until it boils and there are no more granules of sugar left.
• Pour the hot, buttery syrup over the chocolate and allow to sit and melt for about 3 minutes. With a wire baloon whisk, slowly mix the ganache together. Allow to cool completely and set into a spreadable consistency, about an hour or two. For best time management, make the ganache while the jam coating is setting. You can also colour it black, if you like.
• Ice the cake carefully with the ganache, so the jam doesn't get too disturbed. I made mine all swirly.

Happy Birthday, Mummee! How to do Swirled Icing

Wow, have I really written 360 blog posts? That's a lot! And to celebrate, I'm sharing the cake I made for my Mum's birthday! Seems quite ordinary, but I'll explain.

When you’ve made as many cakes as I have, sometimes you hit a creative drought. 2017 was an extremely prolific year for my blog, and I think since then my output has been a little stunted by life stresses and pressures: work, wedding planning, martial arts exams, learning how to drive, etc. The last two years has been a manic time in my life, all in good ways for a change! 

Because so much happened over such a short time, I’ve been playing catch up with myself pretty much all throughout. My blog, as such, went on the back burner. 

But now, as school is slackening off in preparation for summer (the Irish summer holidays are very long, and normally start in the last week of May right up until the last week of August, except for those doing state exams) and I’ll soon be having about three months’ paid holidays and loads of free time, baking will be back on the menu big style. 

But anyway, back to what I was saying about creative drought. 

When a family birthday comes around, sometimes I feel a little uninspired: my brother Paddy loves the same chocolate cake every year, my brother Andrew loves the same coffee cake every year, my Mum loves the same lemon cake every year, my Dad loves either a coffee cake or some kind of Bakewell thing every year, I love the same strawberry and cream cake every year.... the only person who likes to try something different every year is my sister Nix, because she loves having a big fuss made over her for her birthday (and why not?) 

So, May rolled around this year and again it’s time to make a lemon cake for Mum’s birthday. It’s always yellow, always zingy lemon, and always has lemon curd in it. However, this year I decided to use a piping technique that I’ve seen on Pinterest and Instagram so many times but never got around to doing myself. 

Normally, when you do a swirled icing with many colours, one folds the piping bag open over their hand and scrapes the different colour icings along the inside, avoiding contact with each other, so that when you twist and pipe they come together out through the nozzle. However, I’ve found sometimes the colours mix as you pipe, so the distinction between them completely disappears. You can also pop piping bags in piping bags, which is a little wasteful for me. 

I’ve seen people getting around this problem online by using clingfilm (which, albeit wasteful, is nowhere near as wasteful as using loads of piping bags) to keep the colours separate: they spoon the icing into a sheet of film, fold it over to enclose the colour, then add another colour alongside it, then wrap it again, and so on. What you end up with is like a clingfilm and icing Swiss roll of many colours. 

And this worked perfectly! I went with a classic complementary scheme (yellow and purple) and it worked wonders: the white, yellow, and purple stayed separate all throughout piping without mixing. I recommend this method, as long as you don’t mind using cling film.  

Banana Cheesecake Bread: Another Way to Use Up Overripe Bananas

What happens when you have too many bananas left over to simply make a banana bread? Then you crack out the big guns and make banana cheesecake bread! 

I bought an entire bunch of bananas, and completely forgot about them: they sat in my fruit bowl until they went brown and spotty. Now, I like spotty bananas, but even for me these went too far: they had got to the powdery stage of ripeness. 

So, I didn’t really want to make a load of banana bread because a) I’m not really banana bread’s biggest fan, and b) I already have a problem with baking more than can be eaten at home. But, I do have a friend who adores cheesecake in all its manifestations! I thought I’d make him a nice treat. 

This is an extremely banana-y dessert that’s sickly sweet, so I heartily recommend that it’s served with a dark chocolate, or mocha, sauce, or dusted liberally with a good quality deep, rich cocoa powder. The bitterness is key to mellowing out the sweetness. Alternatively, you can go all-out sugar-fest and eat with a delicious caramel sauce and some chopped pecans. 

The trick is to add one large mashed banana for every 225g (8 ounces) of cream cheese to your favourite cheesecake recipe. Mine is thick and crumbly, like a European baked cheesecake, but even if you use a more custardy style, like a New York cheesecake, bananas have a good setting quality like eggs when used in baking, so don’t worry about the recipe being too soft or soupy. 

Next time I make this, I'll make a round one; but, because I had so many bananas, I made two loaves. One went to my friend, and the other went to college with my fiancé.

Variation on a Theme: Lemon Medovik and Spartak

This... is.... SPARTAK! 

 

(I know, that's a terrible joke. I do apologise)

A few months ago, I did a Medovik: a Russian cake made of layers of honey flavoured biscuit and slightly sweetened sour cream. 

Immediately after making I knew I wanted to do a chocolate version, and took to the internet. I discovered that a chocolate medovik has its own name. It’s called a spartak, and is made a little differently. However, to keep things simple, I just used my medovik recipe, with two changes. 

One, I swapped the honey for condensed milk in the biscuit mixture, and replaced a sixth of the flour with cocoa powder. I made the biscuits in the exact same way thereafter.  

Two, I flavoured the cream with a touch of cocoa powder, to taste. It really does depend on how dark you want your chocolate flavour, but I made mine fairly light. 

I equally thought that something made with a whipping cream and sour cream filling could easily be adapted to have a cheesecake theme. I simply used the medovik recipe and added the zest of a large lemon to the biscuit mixture, and a touch of zest and juice to the creamy filling. This one was very light, summery, and refreshing. 

You could very easily do a strawberry cheesecake theme, too: you could gently fold some strawberry purée or strained jam through the cream and decorate with a strawberry fan. In fact, any tasty summer fruit would work perfectly here. 

All in all, this is an extremely adaptable cake technique. I even think a coffee flavoured one, or even a gingerbread one... or a coconut one.... really, I could come up with loads of variations. Watch this space!