Chestnuts cooking in a Chocolate Cake

It was the 10th of March and it had been a pretty decent weekend; Saturday night had involved stumbling on a beer festival at a village pub with a few friends and Sunday morning saw me brush off the cobwebs to walk my dog with another friend and his dog in the un-seasonal snow.

In the afternoon I kept a promise I made a couple of weeks earlier and made a chocolate cake filled with chestnut puree partly for the family, partly for my work colleagues and partly for me.

The album on the player that afternoon was Peter Gabriel's second album now commonly known as "Peter Gabriel 2" or "Scratch" and the fifth track White Shadow with its atmospheric, icy guitar lines certainly matched the weather outside.

In a mixing bowl I beat together two hundred and fifty grams of low fat margarine and two hundred and twenty five grams of caster sugar. I beat the margarine and sugar together with a metal tablespoon until the margarine took on a fluffy appearance.

In another mixing bowl I combined two hundred and twenty five grams of self-raising flour, two teaspoons of baking powder thirty grams of dark cocoa powder. I find that with this recipe it helps if you mix the margarine and sugar and the other more dry ingredients separately as this gives them chance to bind together and enhance the taste.

In a small bowl I whisked together the whites and yolks of four eggs that I had removed from the fridge about an hour earlier so as to bring them to room temperature. Once the eggs were combined I added them to the margarine and sugar together with the dry ingredients. It is this part of the preparation where this recipe will either succeed or fail on an epic scale. The trick is to reconcile all the dry ingredients with the eggs sugar and the margarine. If they are not mixed together fully then you will end up with an overly sloppy mixture that will not cook well. Ideally the mixture should be the consistency of a dark chocolate milkshake when it has been stirred together properly.

Once the ingredients were mixed I placed them in a cake tin that was around ten centimetres deep and twenty five centimetres across. I had been sure to grease the tin with plenty of margarine and dust its base with plain flour prior to adding the cake mix. I then cooked it in the oven at 160 degrees, 170 degrees for non-fan ovens, for fifty minutes. I undertook the usual test of poking a skewer into the cake to check if it was done in the middle and when only a small amount of cake came off of the skewer I knew it was ready.

After removing the cake from its tin and I left it to cool on a wire rack for about an hour. While the cake was cooling it made the filling. I took a dark chocolate bar, that amounted to about two hundred and fifty grams worth of chocolate and one hundred and twenty five grams of margarine, put them in a heatproof bowl and then balanced the bowl over a pan of boiling water until the margarine and bar of chocolate melted to form a thick and strong tasting paste.

I took the bowl off the heat and added a can of chestnut puree, that contained around four hundred grams of puree, mashed the puree and mixed it into the chocolate paste. Once the cake had cooled I sliced it lengthways, and put the top part upside down on the wire rack while I spread the puree mixture onto the top of the base of the cake. I then added the top part of the cake onto the base to create sandwich. I spread the excess mixture on top of the cake.

This is a cake that despite the puree is not too rich for its own good as the melted dark chocolate and the chestnut puree in the filling coupled with the dark cocoa make sure of this. Although the cake is fairly sweet it is not sweet enough to stop you coming back for several further helpings as the family and my colleagues found out subsequently.

Moroccan Role

The first Sunday in January was a quiet one and an opportunity to wind down after one of the best and most enjoyable Christmas holidays I had experienced. The weather was damp and overcast everywhere was shrouded in mist when I went out to walk the dog; it seemed that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't keep myself or the dog dry for the duration of the walk.

This meant that when I returned home I needed something hot and fiery to warm me up and take my mind off the dull weather. The solution was to make a Moroccan Lentil soup dressed with coriander oil.

As I poured enough olive oil into the bottom of the Le Cresceut dish to cover it the sound of Fleetwood Mac's 1969 record Then Play On rang out of the speakers of my stereo. The album was made at a time when they were fronted by blues purist and talented guitarist/ songwriter Peter Green and its very English take on North American blues is far removed from the yuppie corporate rock they became known for in the late seventies.

I first top and tailed two white onions and one carrot. I then peeled the carrot and diced the carrot and onion until they were the size of one centimetre square cubes and not dissimilar to the ones I and others were taught to count with at primary school.

After I had heated the oil in the Le Cresceut dish on the hob for about one minute I added the diced carrot and onion together with three finely sliced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of ground coriander, two teaspoons of cumin and a teaspoon of paprika to the dish.  After I had stirred everything together with a large tablespoon so as make the spices blend with the vegetables, I covered the dish for around ten minutes and sweated its contents on a low light while always remembering to stir the contents occasionally so they did not stick to the bottom of the dish.

After the ten minutes was up I added six ounces of dried red lentils, which are pretty easy to pick up from most local supermarkets, together with two and half pints of vegetable stock. I then brought the dish to boiling point and boiled it for ten minutes before leaving it to simmer slowly on the hob for around half an hour.

While the dish cooked on the hob I made the coriander oil by sticking two ounces of fresh coriander, grown in a box on the kitchen window, a clove of garlic, four tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of a whole lemon and half a teaspoon of chili flakes in the blender. After they had been sufficiently pureed by the blender I poured the coriander oil into a small side dish and reserved it to be added to the soup later.

After the soup had cooked for the requisite time I added it to the blender and then after blending I reheated it and served it. To give the soup an extra kick so as to ensure I was properly warmed through I drizzled some of the coriander oil atop it.

Hot green coriander oil on top of what is a substantial soup and the perfect winter warmer. 

The soup certainly got the job done as far as warming me up was concerned and the taste of the coriander oil served to transport me from a muddy wet field in the middle of winter to one of the many top class curry houses in my local area.

How many beans make five?

The first weekend in February was a good one; it really got going on the Saturday evening with a trip to a local beer festival with some good mates, top quality local beer, a free tankard and a welcome reunion with someone from my past. After the festival the Sunday morning involved sweating out a slight hangover by walking the dog and cooking a Tuscan Bean Casserole for lunch.

The music on the player was suitably mellow as I still had a slightly sore head and today's album of choice was the Moody Blues' 1967 offering Days of Future Passed which is a concept album about the day in the life of an ordinary person. The orchestral backing coupled with healthy doses of mellotron organ and songwriting that takes in a number of styles make this album something special. Also the cover is so intricate you could spend several hours just staring at it.

I first covered the bottom of my Le Cresceut dish with olive oil and then topped, tailed and peeled three carrots. I sliced the carrots length-ways thinly enough that they were two or three milometers thick. I then cut each strip of carrot in half and fried them gently in the dish. The way the cook the carrots quickly is to cut them into thin strips otherwise they remain tough to eat properly. Once the carrots began to brown round the edges I added the leaves from four fresh Thyme Sprigs together with three diced red onions and two diced garlic cloves.

While these ingredients cooked I took on the task of preparing two sticks of celery. As those of you who cook with celery will know, preparing it can be a little tedious. The first job was to scrub away the dirt from the sticks and then top and tail them. Once I had completed this task I cut the celery into one centimeter wide pieces and ensured that any string was pulled off the sticks and discarded. When this tedious task was completed I added the celery pieces to the dish with two bay leaves and cooked the ingredients on a medium light on the hob until the onions became translucent and the celery soft.

When the ingredients had softened I opened a can of Borlotti Beans and poured them into the dish with three teaspoons of red wine vinegar and a packet of Creative Cooks Tuscan Beans best found in Sainsburys. I also poured half a pint of water into the dish and let it stew on a low heat for about forty five minutes. So as to stop the food from drying up I periodically added water and red wine vinegar and stirred the dish until the forty-five minute period was up.

Bubbling away which allowed the flavours to infuse

The vegetarian sausages made a perfect accompaniment to this dish 

This dish can be served with a variety of side orders as a main meal including mashed potato and mashed parsnip. On this occasion I opted to serve it with some fried vegetarian sausages made using some Marjoram.  Despite not having any meat this meal is extremely substantial with the beans giving plenty of protein and a red wine vinegar providing a strong but not overpowering flavour. It certainly helped fortify me for the first indoor cricket practice of the season later that evening where I troubled the batters with some aggressive bowling.