One day, an orange tree and a cacao tree will be bred together and chocolate oranges will grow on trees

It's Frances' birthday party this evening. Frances, as those of you who know her can attest, appreciates good food. So in lieu of a present, I thought I'd bake a cake for her. I have used the recipe from Videojug for this cake.

Chocolate and Orange Cake
Ingredients

For the cake:

• 380g Dark chocolate
• 240g Butter
• 100ml Orange juice
• Zest of one orange
• 5 Eggs
• 100g Caster sugar
• 1 tbsp Vanilla extract
• 100g Plain flour

For the top:

• 200g Dark chocolate
• 150ml Double cream

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas mark 3.
2. Melt the chocolate and butter over a double boiler and add the orange juice and zest.
3. Whip the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract together in a separate bowl and continue to whip until volume doubles.
4. Add the egg mixture to the chocolate mixture and fold in until smooth and homogenous
5. Sift the flour and fold into the mixture
6. Pour into a cake tin and bake for 20-25 minutes. Check that it is cooked with a wooden skewer.
7. Turn cake out onto a wire rack and allow to cool.
8. Scald the cream and pour over the chocolate to make a ganache.
9. Spread the ganache over the top of the (cool) cake and allow to set.

When I did this, it actually took a *lot* longer than 25 minutes. At 25 minutes, it was still liquid. In reality, it took about 1 hour 10 mins in the oven. Here it is straight out of the oven (after step 6):
And here's the finished article:I think it looks pretty good, personally. Now, I'd better get down to the party before it's over!

Verdict: Almond and Crab Apple Jelly Torte

Well... it was delicious!
The torte was wonderful - sweet but not sickly, chewy but not too tough, soft but not ridiculously so. The only problems with it were not enough crab apple jelly - though the tartness and the flavour of the jelly was perfect to offset the very sweet almond paste - and the flan case was overcooked at the edge, so became somewhat dry and crunchy. But definitely a success!

Seafood and fruit? Crazy talk!

I'm off to Lindsey's for tea this afternoon and I said I'd bake something and bring it with me. I also tried crab apple jelly for the first time recently and think it is marvellous stuff. So I thought I'd try an experiment - I have adapted a recipe for a raspberry and almond torte from Rouxbe as an experiment. We'll see how it turns out! In the mean time, here's the recipe I used:

Almond and Crab Apple Jelly Torte

Ingredients

• 1 Pre-made medium flan case (yes, yes, I'm lazy and don't have a flan ring)
• 145g Ground almonds
• 130g Caster sugar
• 115g Butter
• 2 Eggs
• 1/2 tsp Almond Essence
  
• 50g Crab apple jelly

Method

1. Cream the sugar, butter and almond essence together with a fork until fluffy.
2. Beat the eggs in one at a time.
3. Fold in the ground almonds.
4. Spread the crab apple jelly over the base of the flan case.
5. Spoon the almond mixture into the case and spread out into an even layer to the edge of the case.
6. Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 50-60 minutes until golden brown and cooked through to the centre.
7. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

It turned out that the flan case was much too small. I scraped the bottom of the case thinner and compressed it as much as I could when spreading on the crab apple jelly, but only about 2/3rds of the almond mixture would fit in the case. As an experiment, I poured the rest into a baking tray and stuck it in the oven below the torte to see what would happen. I gave it about 25 minutes and then pulled it out.
It actually turned out surprisingly well. Once I broke off the burnt bits around the edges (which actually isn't as much as the photo would suggest), the remaining biscuit was wonderfully almondy, sweet and chewy. Slightly oily, but then it is mostly almond, so that's to be expected I guess. But really a heck of a lot better than I expected!

The torte itself looks like it may have been less successful:
I'd forgotten that, being a smaller torte than the recipe suggested, it would take less time in the oven. Luckily, I checked it after 40 minutes or so, and the top was rather dark, so I thought it best to take it out of the oven. The hole in the top was from me poking it with a chopstick to try to check if it was done - but then I still don't actually know, as the almondy batter probably wasn't that sticky to begin with, so might not stick to a skewer. We shall see what it tastes like!

Conversion of units - useful website

Just a useful website that I found:
Online cooking converter
It converts between imperial and metric which is handy but nothing more than Google calculator will do for you. But more usefully, it has densities of common ingredients built in, so when you come across an American recipe that tells you to use 1 1/2 cups of ground almonds, you can go to it and find out that really it means 130g.

Chocolate Truffles: Take 2

Rehearsals are over, now it's time for the real thing. This time, I took a bit more care over things and got the amounts of cream much closer to what I had been intending previously. Seeing how the milk chocolate truffles from the last batch turned out so much softer than the plain chocolate ones, I did adapt the amounts of cream slightly to how much cocoa was in the chocolate. So, eventually, here's what I used:

Extra dark chocolate truffles
100g 75% cocoa plain chocolate
~85ml cream

Dark chocolate truffles
200g 50% cocoa plain chocolate
~150ml cream

Milk chocolate truffles
100g 21% cocoa milk chocolate
~65ml cream

When it came to the extra dark chocolate truffles, I was worried about the cream not being hot enough to melt the chocolate, so I melted the chocolate first. Unfortunately, me being an idiot, I forgot to let the scalded cream cool before I added it to the molten chocolate - and so it split. I learned my lesson though - for the milk chocolate truffles, I just added the hot cream to the chocolate and then stuck it in the microwave for 10 seconds when not all of the chocolate melted. That worked much better.

The formed but not coated truffles:So after nearly four hours of work, here is the finished product!As you can see, some are dusted (the extra-dark chocolate truffles were a bit more bitter, so the dusting has had icing sugar added, hence the difference in colour), some rolled in chopped hazelnuts, some coated in chocolate and some rolled in chopped hazelnuts and coated in chocolate. I must say, it looks a lot more promising than the previous batch, though I didn't try any of the finished truffles. I did try a bit of each ganache, and even the split extra dark chocolate one tasted pretty good. I just hope Stéphanie likes them! I think I may have made one slight mistake though... I'm not sure the gift box I bought is big enough!

I think a dash of rum added to the ganache would be really nice, though I left it out as I don't know if Stéphanie drinks. I did think maybe a dash of vanilla or hazelnut extract in the ganache would go well too, but I thought I'd not experiment with this batch - perhaps I'll try it next time. I also thought that using chocolate orange to coat the truffles might be a nice change from the plain chocolate coating. So many possibilities!

Chocolate Truffles: Take 1

I'm going to visit my friend Stéphanie in Paris next weekend. Unfortunately for me, I don't believe she drinks (or if she does, she doesn't drink much), so my usual failsafe of bringing a bottle of my homemade gin infusions isn't going to work. After a bit of thinking, I eventually decided that I'd bring her some homemade chocolate truffles and possibly also some honeycomb (cinder toffee). The one slight snag is that I've never made truffles before. As I didn't want the possibility of making a hash of it the night before I left, I thought I'd better do a test batch.

Not Massively Successful Chocolate Truffles
Ingredients

• 100g dark chocolate
• 100g milk chocolate
• 300ml double cream
• Chopped hazelnuts
• Cocoa powder
• Ground cinnamon
• Ground nutmeg
  

Method

1. Chop the chocolate (separately) into small pieces.
2. Heat the cream in a saucepan to scalding point (just before it boils - when the cream starts making a hissing sound when you scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon)
3. Pour half of the cream over each portion of chocolate and stir with a wooden spoon until smooth - this is a ganache.
4. Refrigerate until the ganaches set.
5. Scoop and form into small balls with teaspoons and hands.
6. Refrigerate the truffles for another 15 minutes to let them set properly.
   
7. Roll the formed truffles in the toppings (nuts, cocoa, sugar and cinnamon) either individually or in mixtures to coat the outside of each truffle and prevent them from sticking.
8. Alternatively, melt some chocolate over a water bath and coat the truffles in the melted chocolate. Make sure the truffles are cool before being chocolate coated, or they go rather soft! Allow to set on a Teflon baking sheet.

It's just as well I did a test batch - my quantities are completely wrong! I used about twice as much cream as I had intended to. Oops. As a result, the milk chocolate truffles are unbelievably (and unworkably) soft. The dark chocolate truffles are difficult to work with, but just about manageable - these actually turned out okay, but the milk chocolate ones were a complete disaster.

Here are the ganaches just before refrigerating them:
And here are the ganaches straight out of the fridge:Just after forming, but before dusting:
And the finished truffles:
The milk chocolate truffles were so unbelievably soft that the only way that they could possibly be eaten was if they were coated in chocolate, so I didn't even try to dust any of them. As you can see, I didn't even finish coating all of them - it was a real uphill struggle. Anyway, the dark chocolate truffles were much better and seem to be salvagable.