Moving house, so trying to use up as many oddments as possible. Got a huge tub of cocoa, odd flours, a load of ground almonds, a few flaked almonds and some foul orange and geranium chocolate. These were the result. Unless you really like icky geranium chocolate, I’d avoid it and use orange choc, or even just a good dark choc, and add some orange zest, if you have any oranges.

It was experimental, and I played around with it as I went along, so this just approximate.

Preheat the oven to 160C (or 140C ish fan oven).

Cream together 100g unsalted butter with 120g sugar (I used soft brown, as that’s all I had left, but other recipes  use caster or granulated).
Beat in two eggs and 60g (or 60ml if you insist) of orange juice. It curdled, but don’t worry about that.

Sieve together 100g flour (I used rice flour with some SR, but preferable to use plain), 80g cocoa and 3/4 t of baking powder.

Beat a little of the sieved mix into the creamed mix, then when it’s cleared, fold in the rest. Fold in 100g of ground almonds.

Fold in couple of tablespoons of flaked almonds (though blanced almonds, roughly chopped would be preferable), and around 60g of roughly chopped chocolate.

Divide the mixture into two, and form it into logs. Put the logs on baking sheets and bake for around 30 minutes.

Slice the loaves into pieces about 15mm thick, and put these back on the baking sheets. Bake for about 10 minutes, then turn over and bake for another 10. You’re drying out the biscuits, to make them hard and crunchy – perfect for dipping in your coffee or whatever.

Oh, and for etymology geeks, biscotti, like the English word “biscuit”, ultimately derives from the Latin bis – “twice” – and coquere – “to cook”. So, “twice cooked”. Or indeed, twice-baked.

Apologies for crappy mobile snap.

(Oh, and Jo – the title isn’t busting the line for me. If it is for you – tough! I don’t want to put “choc” instead of “chocolate”!)

Inspired by Dan’s biscuits and leftover ganache I made these with Ivy – she helped with the mixing and cutting. The chocolate with orange icing biscuit recipe is from my M&S chocolate box book (which they don’t seem to make anymore) but I added some nutmeg for a change. I had some leftover icing from Lawrence’s heart cake so sandwiched them together with the rest of it.

Biscuits:

90g butter softened
60g caster sugar
1 egg
1 tbsp milk
280g plain flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
ground nutmeg (about a teaspoon)

Blend together the butter and sugar, add the egg then the flour and knead into a dough. Roll out to about 1/4 inch thickness and cut into rounds or stars or whatever you fancy. Place on baking trays lined with greaseproof paper and bake in a 180 over for about 12 minutes. Leave to cool on the trays for a bit before transferring to cooling racks. Allow to cool completely before sandwiching together with the icing. Yum.

I’m used to not receiving anything on Valentine’s Day so thought I’d make something for ‘him’ that we could all enjoy! In a way this cake it kind of sinister with it’s blood-red centre but it certainly has an impact! We’ll not dwell too long on the colouring – I could have used beetroot as I discovered one in the fridge afterwards, oh well – next time.

I’m not sure what I did this time but the cake was lovely and moist, it may be the extra egg I added as I only had a small batch. It’s a good old Victoria sandwich type cake with cocoa and colouring and chocolate butter icing; 8oz sf flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 60z butter, 6oz sugar, 2/3 eggs, 1 tablespoon cocoa, bit of milk perhaps. Divided between two tins and sandwiched together with the icing.

The way to a man’s heart!

Still had some ganache left over in the freezer from the wedding cake, so these seemed like a good idea. Very pleasant they are too. The biscuits are fairly crumbly when you bite them, and they use peanut butter, giving them a slight saltiness, which contrasts nicely with the richness of the ganache.

They’re from a series of biscuit recipes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did in the Guardian Weekend magazine. All the recipes can be found here, but here’s this one in particular. It includes a recipe for ganache:

For the biscuits
240g plain flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
½ t baking powder
¼ t salt
180g butter
140g smooth peanut butter
100g caster sugar
100g light brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
For the ganache filling
100g double cream
200g dark chocolate
30g butter, softened

Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt into a bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the butter and peanut butter until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla, beat until smooth, then stir in the flour until well combined. Pat into a disc, wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for an hour or two to firm up, as this is quite a soft dough.

Heat the oven to 170C. Line baking sheets with parchment (you may need to bake these in batches).

Lightly dust a work surface with flour, and pin out the dough to about 4-5mm thick. Cut into circles with a 5cm plain biscuit cutter. Place on the baking sheets about 2cm apart, and bake for 15-17 minutes, until the edges are slightly darkened. Transfer to a rack to cool.

Ganache: In a small pan, gently heat the cream until bubbles appear at the edges. Break the chocolate into small pieces and put in a bowl. Pour the hot cream over, stirring to blend, then add the butter a bit at a time, stirring until the mixture is smooth.

Leave to thicken slightly (can speed this up by putting it in the fridge), then pipe or spread the ganache on to half the biscuits, and sandwich together.

I have to make a huge apology to Dan for being a rubbish fellow cake-offer. I’ve obviously been totally preoccupied by some slightly majorly thing that was going on n my life! I would like to say that the cake was fantastic Dan, the wedding was such a crazy blur in many respects and you don’t feel that you say enough thanks to all the people that make massive contributions to your big day. The cake was obviously very important to us and it was fabulous. I’m really glad that we had some left over in the freezer which means we managed to savour it for a bit longer.

Do, I have been baking in between but not as much as usual. My resolution is to do more and experiment more in 2011. We had people for dinner the other week and I fancied making something indulgent so what better that Mississippi Mud Pie? I usually shy away from things that involve a lot of whipped cream but  really loved this, everyone had seconds.

Ingredients
Pastry:
175g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
115g butter
2-3 tbsp iced water

Filling:
75g plain chocolate broken into pieces
50g butter
3 tbsp golden syrup
3 eggs, beaten
150g soft light brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence

To decorate:
115g plain chocolate bar
300ml whipping cream

Preheat oven to 220 degrees. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Sprinkle in the water gradually and toss lightly with your fingers or a until until a dough forms.

Roll out the dough on a floured surface and line a 23cm flan tin, easing in the pastry and being careful not to stretch it (a mistake I made – it shrank down the sides when baking). Prick the base with a fork and bake for 10-15 minutes or unil brown, cool in the pan.

Make the filling – in a heatproof bowl over simmering water melt the chocolate, butter and the golden syrup. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the eggs, sugar and vanilla essence.

Lower the oven temperature to 180 degrees and pour the mixture into the pastry case. Bake for 35-40 minutes until the filling is set. Cool completely in the pan.

Before serving whip the cream until it forms soft peaks and spread over the pie. Decorate with shavings of dark chocolate (use a potatoe peeler to scrape curls of chilled chocolate. )

Serve! Dead easy.
Recipe from my well used Chocolate book

(Photo courtesy of Lawrence and that addictive app.)

A bloody great cake, Lawrence, Ivy and Jo, on the big day – 19 December 2010.

The cake itself was based on my old fave recipe, Mollie Katzen’s Cardamon coffee cake, which I’ve used for previous wedding cakes. I’ve continued to tweak the recipe (for example, reducing the butter in my metric conversion slightly), and in this cake we did alternating layers – chocolate and cinnamon, with a layer of nuts and plain choc in the actual sponge; vanilla and cardamon, with a layer of nutes and white chocolate in the sponge.

The whole lot was covered in plain choc ganache (I made 3.5kg of the stuff… didn’t need it all!), and decorated with chocolate leaves (plain and white), madewith bay leaves from the garden, as well as sugar paste ivy leaves (all made by Fran). The ivy around the bottom is silk.

Love this cake, and I know Jo and Lawrence similarly love cakes involving ground almonds and chocolate, so it’s surely a good choice to make for the day after Jo’s birthday.

It’s probably not a proper Sachertorte - that apparently has two layers of cake, filled with apricot jam. Instead, it’s a tried and tested recipe from the marvellous Unwrapped: Green & Black’s Chocolate Recipes, which the book credits to someone called Lorna Wing.

Grease and line a 23cm springform tin.

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Then, melt 200g dark choc (proper dark choc that is – with at least 60% cocoa solids) in a bowl over simmering water.
Meanwhile, separate 5 eggs, then beat the the yolks, along with 1 more whole egg, with 310g granulated sugar, until thick and creamy. (I used an electric hand-held.)
In another bowl, whisk the whites to stiff peaks.
Add 150g ground almonds, 1.5 t of ground coffee and the melted chocolate to the egg yolk/sugar mix, and combine.
Next comes the tricky bit – you have to fold the whites into that mixture, to give it some lightness and life. The egg/almond/choc mix is pretty heavy, so I add a tablespoon of the whites initially to lighten it up a bit, stirring them in well, then gently fold in the rest of the egg white.

Bake for 1 hour. Check – carefully – at 40 mins, and if it looks like the top is going to burn, cover with foil.

Cool on a rack, with the ring of the tin removed, but the base left in place.

When it’s fully cooled, brush all over with melted and strained apricot jam (abou 5T), then spread with icing made from 100g chocolate, melted as before, with 40g unsalted butter beaten into it.

Thanks to Jo for the pic.

So the big weekend came for Kate and Kerim where I had the pleasure of spending the day in her Mum and Dad’s lovely kitchen in glorious France. The top cake for cutting was a larger version of the Pear, Ginger and Chocolate ganache cupcakes, it survived until the next day so I was able to take a much  better, less intoxicated photograph. I had many compliments, particularly of the pear and ginger cakes, I think the lavender were most popular with the children. (I heard that some ‘grown-ups’ had four!)

So as the recipes for these cakes are already up I’ve littered this post with images – the cupcakes looked beautiful on their homemade (by Kate and her mum) tiered cake stands. I’m still waiting to reap my reward (I’ve bagged the one with a teacup on top).

I’d quite happily travel the world making cupcakes at weddings – what a great job!

I’ve been a bit off the boil, so to speak, with cake baking. I did however make these chocolate pots on Saturday night for some friends – they are pretty delicious and dead simple.  They are very mousse-like without the use of horrible gelatine, so I’d call them a mousse rather than a chocolate pot, which implies that they are dense and dark. It’s the first recipe I’ve made from Chocolate Box, a book that came with a chocolate hamper from Marks and Spencer (a welcome Christmas present).

Ingredients
225g/8oz plain chocolate (I used Co-op’s own fair trade, which is very good)
4 eggs, separated
6 tbsp caster sugar
4 tbsp dark rum
4 tbsp double cream

Method (makes 6)
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water and leave to cool slightly.
Whisk the egg yolks with the caster sugar until very pale and fluffy (I didn’t get mine to go ‘fluffy’ – i think that’s the wrong description?)
Drizzle in the melted chocolate and fold together with the rum and cream.
Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form and fold into the chocolate mix in two batches. Divide between 6 individual dishes (I used my lovely ivy-leaf cups and saucers and you can see) and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

They suggest decorating with whipped cream and chocolate shapes but I just plonked a few raspberries on top which went beautifully with the chocolate.

My sister-in-law Riette once made us a delicious South African dessert, which was very much like a steamed pudding even though it was baked in the oven. I then discovered this recipe in my Green & Black’s cookbook – another South African dish with that wonderful steamed pud texture to it, made ‘tipsy’ by the boozy syrup. I made it at Christmas as an alternative to the conventional pudding and in honour of Riette and her homeland! It’s best served with custard we think. The G&B book has its own twist (mainly just have got it into the book if you ask me – you could easily leave out the chocolate). I would never have though this kind of dish would come out of South Africa as I imagine it to be roasting hot all the time (obviously not true), but apparently they’re very into their hot dinners!

Batter:
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
240g dates, stoned (or 250g with stones), chopped
125ml/ 4fl oz boiling water
40g unsalted butter
200g granulated sugar
2 large eggs
250g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
25g preserved ginger, chopped
100g glace (yuk) or dried cherries – definitely dried!
40g walnuts, chopped (last time I used pecans)
50g dark chocolate, minimum 60 percent cocoa solids

Syrup:
75g granulated sugar
200ml water
salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
25g unsalted butter
60ml brandy or dark rum

Oven and 180 degrees, grease a 23cm flan or pie dish well with butter (needs to be quite deep).

Pat the bicarb over the dates and pour over the boiling water, stir and leave to cool. Cream the butter, sugar together and add the eggs, beat thoroughly. Sift together the flour, bp and salt and stir into the creamed mixture.
Add the date mixture, cherries and nuts. Spoon the mixture into the pie dish and bake for 35 minutes. Place the chocolate in the freezer. Prepare the syrup – you need to pour this over the tart as soon as you get it out of the oven. Boil all the ingredients for the syrup together for about 6 minutes until they form a syrup.
Remove the tart from the oven and prick the surface all over with a fork. Immediately pour over the syrup then grate the chocolate over the top. Delicious! Great with custard on a winter evening, or any time really.