It wasn't even her birthday (it was 2 months ago) but she has been reminding me about the cake and asking me to make her one, for the past 2 weeks. So this weekend I finally rolled up my sleeves and got her to assist me. She helped pour the ingredients into the bowl and eat the diced strawberries meant for the filling. Good thing I had one punnet of it.
I used this recipe for the chocolate cake. The first time I made it, it was too sweet for me. So this round I cut down the sugar to one cup and it was perfect! Still moist and super chocolaty. I think it's important to use good quality cocoa powder as it just gives your baked goods a push from very good to wow. I also prefer Dutch processed cocoa powder over natural cocoa powder as I found the taste more complex and rich, and I simply love that deep dark chocolate colour. Brands like Callebaut, Valrhona and van Houten are Dutch processed, whereas Hershey's, Nestle and Ghirardelli are natural.
There's a science behind the 2 types of cocoa powder but it got a bit too Heston Blumenthal for me. I mean, it's good to know but unless the recipe specifically calls for a certain type of cocoa powder, I don't think it matters much. I have always used Hershey's in chocolate recipes until I discovered Callebaut and Valrhona. If you're interested to read further, you can check out the insightful piece by the team at Serious Eats (brilliant work, as usual) here.
Let me give you a bit of background to the picture above. We have a fridge with a faulty thermostat and sometimes it freezes everything in it. It's most frustrating when it freezes my green vege because they end up wilted and mushy. Sometimes it turn our drinks into blocks of ice too. I had a jar of thickened cream in there waiting to be turned into whipped cream for the cake.
So, the thickened cream got frozen and I took it out to thaw. When I opened it, I could see the top layer was dry and cracked. Still, I scooped everything out into a bowl thinking that it should be fine since it smelled OK. I could see bits and pieces of stuff but that didn't stop me from tossing in icing sugar and whipping it up. About 2-3 minutes later, the cream started to curdle and separate. Bah.
I remembered coming across a blog post on making butter out of cream. So I continued whipping it until the whole thing separated. What you get is effectively butter and buttermilk. Then I put it into the fridge to harden up the butter. Once it hardens, used a cheese cloth to squeeze out the buttermilk. Since I have added icing sugar to the cream, I decided to make honey butter with dijon mustard and smoked paprika.
I made a divine grilled king prawns with the flavoured butter. Wash prawns, slice in half, season with salt and pepper, lather with butter and grill. Easy peasy dinner with minimal cooking involved.
