Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Buttercream

                I’ve just spent an exhausting week in Lithuania with my university music society – lots of sun, two brilliant concerts and rather more alcohol (and less sleep) than I’m used to! Needless to say, the closest I got to cooking anything was the occasional picnic lunch. However, I’m now staying at my parents’ house for a week before heading back to my own home and my new job, so I’m taking the opportunity to do some baking in my mum’s shiny, spacious kitchen.

                For a while now, I’ve wanted to try making swiss meringue buttercream. I’ve seen so many beautifully iced cakes which use it as their topping, and I love the silky, shiny look of it. But I’ve never actually seen in in real life. It doesn’t seem to be a big thing around my neck of the woods, and when I’ve baked in the past I’ve always stuck with plain buttercreams or occasionally ganaches. So now seemed like a good time to finally pull my socks up and give it a shot.

                Before making the buttercream, I needed a cake to put it on. Left to my own devises, I probably would have gone for something coffee or fruit flavoured, but as I’m at home I let my brothers have the last say, and the consensus was that a chocolate cake would be most appreciated. I’ve tried many chocolate cake recipes over the years, but have never found one that really stuck. I can’t decide exactly what it is I look for in a chocolate cake. I’m not really fond of those which are too dense and rich, but chocolate cakes which are too dry and light always seem a little inappropriate too.

   My usual approach to finding a new recipe is to browse the internet, but there are so many chocolate cake recipes online that it’s not really a useful place to look. Instead, I went back to the most basic cook book my mum owns – one I’ve always been very jealous of – her Reader’s Digest: The Cookery Year. It’s a brilliant book, covering everything from meats and fish to puddings, cakes and biscuits. Each section has a few detailed recipes than a lot of simple recipes that can be varied. And of course, there’s a chocolate cake recipe.

                The ingredients were pretty conventional: egg, flour, butter, sugar, cocoa powder. For the most part, the method is also pretty basic. The one unusual step – at least to me – was the suggestion that the cocoa powder be made into a paste with a little bit of water before being added to the cake. I did as instructed, adding a splash of strong coffee (because I think it brings out chocolate flavour in a cake) and was quite pleased with the result. The cake itself was moist and chocolatey, without being overpoweringly rich. The only criticism I had of the recipe at all was that it suggested baking the cake for 30 minutes – mine only needed 22 minutes, but that may have been because I split it into two cake tins to make layering easier.

                Cake finished and cooling, it was time to attempt the SMB (as I believe Swiss meringue buttercream is often referred to). I was a little nervous about this, and I have to admit that I made a couple of mistakes which probably nearly ruined it. But with a little help from Sweetapolita’s wonderful post (make that a lot of help!) it turned out exactly as I’d hoped, and complimented the chocolate cake perfectly. My first near miss was due to a scale meltdown: the kitchen scales decided to tell me that 230g of butter only weighed 140g, and had I not been suspicious about the fact that I’d finished up a pat of butter in one go, I could easily have wound up adding double the required amount of butter to my meringue mix. Luckily, I caught that one early! My second mistake was to misread 140F as 140C, and spend quite a while attempting to get my meringue mixture to reach twice the intended temperature (140F is about 60C…). Luckily, it never got above 75C anyway, and it didn’t seem to do much harm in the long run! I finished it off with the scrapings from a vanilla pod, producing a beautifully textured, delicious tasting, indulgent frosting I was happy to spread on my cake.

                Overall, I’m really quite happy with today’s experiments. The cake recipe is one I’ll certainly revisit, and it may even become a standard. The buttercream was easier and tastier than I had expected, and whilst it’s more time consuming that my standard icing recipe, it’s worth the extra effort for the smooth, buttery finish and the silky appearance. I can’t wait to try out other flavours in the future!

Reader’s Digest Chocolate Cake (from Readers Digest The Cookery Year)

4oz butter

4oz caster sugar

2 eggs

1oz cocoa powder

2tsp strong coffee

4oz flour

Pinch of salt

1. Beat the butter until it is soft, then add the sugar and cream the two until they are light and fluffy.

2. Beat the 2 eggs separately (I did this in a bowl with a fork - they only need to beaten enough for the yolk and the whites to be combined), then beat into the butter and sugar mixture, adding a little at a time.

3. Mix the cocoa powder with the coffee and enough water to make a thick paste. Gradually beat this into the other ingredients.

4. Fold in the flour and salt gently.

5. Place in your baking tins and bake for 22-30 minutes at 180C.

6. Turn out onto a baking rack to cool.

Swiss Meringue Buttercream - I followed Sweetapolita's instructions here, using the following volumes to make enough to ice and fill my small layer cake. 

2 egg whites

140g butter

100g caster sugar

1 vanilla bean

I had enough left over to cover an extra layer, or possibly to go around the outside, but I tend to be a little bit mean with my frosting...

Enjoy!

Lemon, White Chocolate and Blueberry Shortbread

                I’ve always loved being in the kitchen. I like cooking, but more than anything I like baking. I’ve been baking since I was little – I was making microwave cakes before I was 10, and my range has been increasing ever since. It took a back seat when I started university though: for a start, I didn’t have an oven in my first year. Then other things took over, which I may or may not decide to talk about at some point in the future.

                Suffice to say, I went from baking fairly often to hardly ever. But now life is taking a big change again – I’ve graduated and am starting work in a month, I’m moving house (again) and I’m working on some health issues. So I’ve decided that I’m going to add baking to that. It’s a hobby I used to love so it’s one I’m going to revive.

                New resolution made, the only thing to do was to decide on a recipe to try. Life has been a wee bit hectic with finals, results, moving and various summer trips, so I didn’t want to make anything too big, or which couldn’t be kept or easily shared. Browsing the (numerous) baking blogs I visit in my spare time, I stumbled across a recipe for Lemon, White Chocolate and Blueberry Shortbread on Piece of Cake, which you can find here. Its a combination of three things I absolutely love, with some healthy blueberries chucked in, so sounded perfect. I’ve been gradually accumulating the required ingredients over the past few days, and today I finally got around to baking them.

    

            The recipe is simplicity itself, and it doesn’t take long to mix the ingredients together into a gorgeous smelling (and tasting) cookie dough. The most time-consuming step is the chilling, with the recipe I used suggesting at least 3 hours in the fridge. When I do bake, I always chill my biscuit or cookie dough, but usually for no more than 30 minutes to an hour. I did check on these after an hour though, and they definitely needed more time to solidify, so I stuck with the recommendation. 

The other novelty in the recipe was the first step, combining the sugar and the lemon zest by hand. I’ve never seen this done anywhere else, but I think it did make a difference. The lemon flavour was spread much more evenly through the finished product, and was more prominent than I expected, which was a very pleasant surprise. I had fun rubbing the oily zest into the sugar until it was moist too – though I had to convince myself that the resulting mix really should go into my batter and not into my stomach! Still, I might make the sugar-zest mix as a filling for pancakes or puff pastry biscuits at some point in the future…

When it came to slicing the dough, I struggled a bit. My knife kept getting caught on chocolate chips and refusing to go through neatly. The cookies turned out slightly less regular than I’d hoped, and I think the error may have been mine. Seeing how much they spread out during baking, I’ve reached the conclusion that next time, the biscuit log needs to be longer and thinner, and the cookies themselves need to be cut a bit thicker.

Still, the end result was heavenly. A gorgeous lemony crumbly cookie with punches of white sugar and blackberry…this was always going to be a combination I’d love and it certainly didn’t disappoint! I’m usually pretty restrained about tasting things straight out of the oven, but one of these beauties crumbled as I was putting it on the cooling rack and it would have been silly not to put it out of its misery there and then! 

Enjoy!