The night before this month’s challenge was posted, I dreamed it was going to be all about profiteroles. I was pleasantly surprised when I woke up the next morning and realised it was indeed a choux pastry recipe.
Yet another chocolate birthday cake!
Truth is, tough to please birthday boy only likes chocolate cake, and even then, he’s very demanding. The brownies I made for him were a bit too dry, Claudia’s cake was a bit too strong… But I’m not one to give up.
My friend Cláudia’s was 30 on Friday - Happy B’day C! - and I promised her a proper birthday cake for the dinner party.
She loves chocolate mousse, so I thought of creating a mousse-brownie sandwich sort of cake. But some of my recent experiments haven’t been very lucky, and I didn’t have the time to try again if this cake didn’t turn out just right. So I turned to one of my favourite food blogs - Smitten Kitchen - for something tried and tested, and found this recipe for a Double Chocolate Torte that seemed just perfect.
I adapted the quantities a little bit, removed the vanilla extract as I didn’t have any, and instead of using fresh raspberries I decided to decorate with chocolate shavings, following instructions I saw on a cook book. As it turns out, it’s not that easy to get nice big chocolate spirals, but I ended up with enough for what I had in mind.
In the end, everybody seemed to like it. The hard-core chocoholics, like the birthday girl, certainly did love it. But for me, it was a bit too rich and chocolaty, specially after the heavy meal we’d just had. It would have gone well with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side, to tone it down.
Double Chocolate Cake for Cláudia
Cake
200g dark chocolate, chopped
100g butter
200g sugar
5 large eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup all purpose flour
Mousse
50g butter
4 large eggs, separated
100ml whipping cream
200g dark chocolate
100g sugar
Decoration
100ml whipping cream
1 tbsp sugar
100g dark chocolate
Preheat oven to 200ºC. Butter a 25cm diameter springform pan and dust with sugar.
In a heavy large saucepan over low heat, melt chocolate and butter, always stirring. Remove from heat, and whisk in sugar and then the eggs, one at a time. Finally, mix in the salt and the flour.
Bake for about 35 minutes. Cool completely before chilling, and do not remove from the pan.
For the mousse, melt the butter in bain-marie. Whisk egg yolks and half of the cream in small bowl to blend and then whisk this mixture into the melted butter. Keep whisking over simmering water for about 6 minutes and then add the chocolate and mix until it melts. Mixture may appear broken.
In large bowl, beat the egg whites and the sugar to medium-stiff peaks. First, add a bit of the egg whites into the warm chocolate mixture. Then, fold in remaining egg white mixture, until smooth, but without beating too much. Pour mousse over cake in pan and chill until mousse is set.
For the shavings, you need to warm the chocolate a bit in your hands, and use a vegetable peeler to create the little curls. You’ll get your hands dirty, but if the chocolate isn’t warm enough, it will break into small bits. Chill the shavings in the freezer while you whip the remaining cream with a spoon of sugar.
Remove the cake from the pan, by loosening it with a sharp knife around the edge, and place it on a serving dish. Spread the whipped cream over the top, and decorate with the chocolate shavings.
My friend F. is extremely hard to please, specially when it comes to desserts. He only enjoys chocolate cake, and not all will do. So, after baking a disastrously dry chocolate cake for the Halloween party - one that would kill someone if thrown to their heads - I decided to bake him something slightly different for Christmas.
After some research I found this simple Chocolate Brownies recipe on Cooking for Engineers and gave it a go. It was fantastic on the first day, but they didn’t seem to keep very well. Is it always like this with brownies? I will have to try some other recipes and see what comes out. Still, this one is very very good if you plan on eating them straight away.
You can check the Cooking for Engineers website for step by step photos and very detailed instructions, but here’s the thick of it:
170 g dark chocolate
170 g butter
125 g all-purpose flour
300 g granulated sugar
3 large eggs
(the original recipe calls for a teaspoon of vanilla extract as well, but i really wanted to keep it simple, so i omitted it)
Preheat the oven to 160º C. In a double boiler, melt the chocolate and the butter. Stir in the sugar, then the beaten eggs and then the flour, trying not to leave any lumps. Butter and dust with flour a rectangular baking tray. Bake for about 35 minutes and cut into squares.
I love these warm with whipped cream or vanilla ice-cream, topped up with chocolate sauce, but they are also great on their own.
Yes, this is the 4th encarnation of my website. But you can still visit the ones that came before, should you be in the mood for a trip down memory lane. Just don't complain about the broken links, ok?
©2007 Patrícia Furtado
