Thursday 27 August 2009

Welcome home, Anita!

Anita gets back to the UK tomorrow (yay!), so I thought I'd bake her something to welcome her back. I found a marvellous recipe for a chocolate torte on Rouxbe that I thought would be perfect. Here is the recipe, with anglicised units.

Chocolate Torte
Ingredients
  • 200g Dark chocolate
  • 200g Butter
  • 240g Caster sugar
  • 5 Eggs
  • 1tsp Plain flour
Method
  1. Melt the chocolate and butter together over a double boiler.
  2. Stir in the sugar and cook for a few minutes over the lowest heat.
  3. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly before stirring in the eggs, one at a time.
  4. Stir in the flour.
  5. Pour into a cake tin and bake at 190C/Gas Mark 5 for 20-25 minutes.
  6. Allow to cool in the tin for at least 5 minutes, then tip out onto a wire rack to cool for another 15 minutes. Remove to a serving plate and cool for a further 3 hours.
So nice and simple, at least in theory. In my experience, incredibly simple recipes like this are the most difficult to get right though. Here's a picture of the tins ready to go into the oven (yes, they do just look like tins of brown goop, but that's because that's what they are).Oh my word! They rise in the oven! I wasn't really expecting that!And straight out of the oven. Looks good, doesn't it?But disaster! Attempting to tip one of the tortes out onto the rack.
Both tortes were completely stuck to the tin. Rouxbe warned not to use a springform cake tin as they can leak. In hindsight, I think I should have used a lined springform tin instead. Oh well, never mind. I'll just serve it in the tin and let everyone just hack bits off...

3 comments:

  1. Booo anglicized units. Don't you want odd fractions and arbitrary conversion ratios to plague you in the kitchen? (Hope it went over well--may try this recipe, actually.)

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  2. Oh so sorry to hear that you did not have complete success. For some reason this recipe has been a tricky for more than yourself. We were even tempeted to remove the recipe from Rouxbe (but it's just so darn good)

    Okay, lets see if we can figure this out.
    Were your pans good "non-stick" pans? They look like they were.

    Did only let the torte cool for 5 minutes (no more) before you turned them out? If not the chocolate starts to solidify and tuning them out is a big promblem.

    I am super glad to hear that you just said, whatever, I am going to eat them anyways. If you were to serve them in a bowl with some ice cream, no one would ever know :-)

    Do you think you would be willing to try it again? It seemed to be going so well for you up until the "turn-out".

    Let me know if I can be of any help at all.
    Cheers Dawn

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  3. It's not so much the odd fractions that I object to, so much as the insistence on measuring everything by volume (and if you must measure by volume, you could at least use some unit recognisable to those of us across the pond - I'm not sure I've ever seen one of these standard "cups" before!).

    I wouldn't class it as a failure to be honest - just a bit of a (pardon the pun) sticking point (sorry, couldn't resist). I did indeed use non-stick pans and attempt to turn them out before the chocolate solidified. To be honest, I don't think it really mattered at all, not being able to turn them out - individual slices could be coaxed out intact with a spatula, so even presentation wouldn't have suffered too badly!

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