a sad centre

14 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

Tags

Almonds, Cake, Chocolate, forgotten towns, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Sugar, Sussex

This is what happens to some cakes, the ones that rise and then fall. The ‘sadness’ occurs in the centre which slumps defeatedly. Tamasin Day-Lewis was the cook I learnt this term from. It is purposeful, the slump, and not a mistake. Although here there is a hole; cake has been gouged out. It is that kind of cake – bitterly chocolatey, with espresso poured into the mix and with it almonds and butter. I only had a Pyrex dish to bake it in, because I was at my mum’s and I’d taken all her cake tins, slowly, stealthily, over the years. But it didn’t matter because it rose and fell as it should, was luscious and divine, thickly glottal and needing no accompaniment.

This is the most beautiful surface to photograph on. I never do anything to prep it, it is simply the north light and a navy counter hastily de-crumbed. I have had many late afternoon sessions, far at the end of a long corridor, where it is quiet, away from the bashing sea and the compulsive view – long stretches of water fill the windows at the front. The sea disappears gradually, engulfed in mist and the sun’s dazzle. You can’t not look. At the other end there’s nothing much, except height. I have been coming here to this plain seaside town for the last twenty years. I have never found a countertop to better it.

Late afternoons when we’ve trailed huffily up the stairs (92 of them) desperate for a cup of tea, after (just) getting the little green bus from Alfriston on a Sunday. Or a late swim in stagnant August weather, or I’m despatched to make something for an impromptu high tea. I’m miles away from it all in the kitchen and there are never any scales. I make do with the ones my mum uses for throwing her pots, I use her Cheffette mixer bought from a charity shop. I make a cake I ‘shouldn’t’ eat. “Are you allowed that?” is always the question I’m asked. As if I need written permission from a doctor before I can eat cake.

The flat belonged once to the painter Augustus John and when my mum bought it, it belonged to a potter, who with her husband decided after a year that Seaford was too friendless a place, and moved on back to France. From the beginning there were troubles; the building had heroin addicts and pigeon feeders and lots of ‘structural issues’. Neighbours were non-compliant. But my mum was left with a kiln and a room converted into a studio, perched over the English channel – overlooked only by the sea.

Seaford has no grand architecture. There are no great restaurants, food culture, no ‘scene’. It has a long and manmade shingle beach, is in a bit of a wind tunnel. It isn’t Dorset or those places in Suffolk that people flock to to eat organic ice cream and wear long ‘wraps’. It reminds me of the towns Paul Theroux visited in The Kingdom by the Sea, where he travelled by train and on foot round the coast of Britain during the period of the Falklands war. Seaford has a defeated, slightly belligerent air. It is true what he says here:

“The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast; it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tide-wrack from the sea. People naturally gravitated to the coast, and they wore fewer clothes there – it was normal on the coast to be semi-naked, exposed”.

He is also a bit mean about us – it’s one criticism I have of the book. It is easy to be mean about Seaford and I can see it through others’ eyes. But it is twenty years of my life, the branch line train, the wave goodbye (with a jar of something from the health store, something earthy), the two florists and their reasonable bouquets, Paul’s Plaice the fishmonger and the vinegary smell of the sea within, Sussex Stationer’s and the smell of new books and wads of paper, the long sloping road to the sea and then the sea, green or blue, smarting under the sun if it’s out. And then turning into my mum’s and the key under a pot and the note in the letterbox – I’m on the beach, bring down avocados. And then the cake that at some point must be made.

Chocolate espresso cake

Taken from Tamasin Day-Lewis, Good Tempered Food

TDL is quite firm here on her use of whole blanched almonds, roasted and then ground, but having done it this way many times, I think there’s a real difference in the end result; texture and nuttiness are emphasised.

Serves 8-10

185g (6.5oz) unsalted butter, diced, plus extra for greasing

185g (6.5oz) dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

50 ml (2fl oz) very strong freshly brewed coffee

6 eggs, separated

185g (6.5oz) unrefined caster sugar

185g (6.5oz) blanched, roasted and coarsely ground almonds

Heat oven to 375F/190C/gas mark 5. Melt the butter and chocolate together with the coffee in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Resist the temptation to stir. While they are melting, cream the egg yolks and sugar in an electric mixer until pale and light, about 8-10 minutes. Continue to whisk, adding the now melted chocolate and butter.

Stop the machine, remove the whisk and fold in the *almonds with a metal spoon. In a clean glass or metal bowl whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks. Stir a spoonful into the chocolate mixture to lighten it before folding in the rest. Pour the mixture into a 10in springform tin with greased sides into which you have placed a circle of buttered greaseproof paper. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325F/160C/gas mark 3 and continue cooking for a further 40 minutes.

Remove the cake and leave in the tin set on a rack until completely cool. Turn out of the tin and remove the paper. Delicious served with creme fraiche but also lovely on its own.

*I would recommend roasting rather than toasting on the hob as this tends to scorch the almonds – roasting in the oven (preheated to the above temperature) for a few minutes (5 – 10 min) will give them a burnished colour without burning, but you do need to check regularly.

The little lunch

10 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Art, Bananas, Cake, Chocolate, Food, France, Recipes, Stories, Stories from the Stove

I seem to have an endless supply of browning and defeated bananas. We buy them principally for the B&B guests who never eat them. But they may do. They never say outright that they don’t like bananas; there may come a time when they will feel like one, and that moment will be hard to define, but when it comes we better have a bunch of bananas standing by.

I think in the last year we have probably had two straight-forward banana-eating guests. Still, we continue to buy them and then I make banana bread with the softening, spotting ones, which I give to the guests who don’t eat bananas and strangely they wolf it down. We have French guests now and they have what I think is the classic French attitude to breakfast – it should hurt. Their plates afterwards are beautifully smeared with arabesques of apricot jam and chocolate (from the chocolate banana bread, a variant*), the French press empty but for the coffee grounds, the French girls’ voices throaty from their first blissful draw of nicotine. Of course they are beautiful and slender. This is how it is.

If you are English and were at school during the 1980s you would have gone on a French exchange programme; you lived with a French family for a few weeks and the French student then came and lived with you. You learned their language and way of life and they learned yours, sort of thing. I also did this in Bilbao, northern Spain where I lived on chocolate biscuits for four weeks and learned to say “I know what you’re up to and I’m going to tell my mum what you did when I get home” in Spanish.

Annie was nicer; she was from Normandy and liked smoking and camping. She drank bowls of black coffee just before she went to bed, and wore extremely tight jeans. We were both fourteen but I got the impression she was worldlier than me. Sometimes we went on long walks into the countryside, or at other times she would hitch up the family’s pony – what she called a ponette – to a wagon and we would ride to an old lady’s house nearby and buy Coke from her fridge.

Annie lived in a rural area and there was not much to do except this, and eat chocolate sandwiches. I met other kids in the area because they too would wade into the fields, pale wheaten and straggly, and we would all smoke. I had never smoked like this before; filtered Gitanes, in a beautiful, uniform white that made me think of freshly laundered shirts. I watched them gulp back big blue lungfuls. I think I knew then I wouldn’t be able to inhale and remain standing. It was on my return to England that I did it in the privacy of my bedroom – I inhaled a Gitanes and fell to my knees.

Anyway, it’s all rolled into one in my mind; the smoking, the Coca Cola, the way Annie sat on a bench outside the boulangerie and handed me the long snout of bread to try, its crust sharp, almost splintery in the mouth followed by chunks of dark chocolate that she had fed into the crevices – our petit déjeuner, our ‘little lunch’ eaten vaguely in the morning. And lastly (and lastingly), the boys in the field one of whom in a lull in conversation languidly enquired “Do you make love?”

I think I pretended not to understand which wasn’t too far from the truth; something to do with the strangeness of the present simple. As if it was a hobby. It was the only time I remember being singled out for attention. I replayed the moment endlessly in my mind, trying to reframe my muteness as intrigue, but really I was just lost for words.

I wanted to showcase these beautiful drawings of bananas and chocolate by Jasmin Bhanji, who currently lives in Kenya, though is formerly of north London, and it’s strange because since she’s gone to Africa, I’ve got to know her better and that is one of the wonders of the internet. I knew her in person in England (she’s my new cousin) and now I know her through her drawings and photos of her amazing pots and her blog, Jasmin Bhanji Studio.

*I lifted the recipe for double chocolate banana bread wholesale from Emma Gardner’s baking blog Poires au Chocolat (who in turn adapted it from Smitten Kitchen), so it would seem a bit silly to repeat it here when she has already done such a lovely job and I did nothing to improve it seeing as it was, in my view, perfect. If you like bananas and chocolate and a big fistful of cocoa powder and eating oblong cake, then this is for you. A bit naughty you might think for breakfast, but not if you imagine you’re a Parigot (slang for Parisian), in gold sandals and a lamé cardigan.

On the turn

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Almonds, B&B, Chocolate, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories, Stories from the Stove

Food-wise, I’m waiting for peaches. That’s when I know I’m in Los Angeles. More than lemons and oranges, which have an all-year-round prolific, whoreish quality – if they’re not blossoming they’re bearing fruit, it’s a constant publicity machine – peaches can only mean early summer here. And they get riper and more aromatic and squishier as the weeks go by, the skin seemingly more paper-thin, the round globe of flesh beneath more sunset-orange, more dripping, before it goes over, starts to rot.

We have a nectarine tree which is coming into blossom and that counts as my stone fruit barometer of how things will be. The blossoms are pink and furtive still, with only a few little dazzlers. There is no point waiting for the fruit, which will be eaten by squirrels. Every year I have been thwarted by them and so I don’t bother now – they know the perfect moment at which the fruit needs to be eaten better than I do and besides they’re more likely to be up and ready. They demolished my sunflowers, full of nascent seeds. They eat all the bird food.

And we have B&B to do. We’re ‘doing’ B&B though sometimes it feels as if we are being done to, depending on the caliber of guest. Some make it easy. Our first guests since our return were from Amsterdam and behaved as if these were their last days on earth. They breakfasted early and then played tennis, swam in the pool and generally ran themselves ragged in a pleasant and contained way. They loved the place and we loved them for loving it all.

Then came a mother and daughter team – New Yorkers originally from Egypt – who alternated between days spent dragging around theme parks and long hours holed up in their room lobbing shrill and indecipherable insults at each other. They also filled our fridge with foodstuffs of no particular seasonal bias: Ranch dressing, a bumper box of strawberries, little dwarf tomatoes, chocolate milk, an enormous chocolate Bundt cake, boxed up. “Fresh,” the mother announced, “I need fresh.” As if this explained it. It may have explained their blocked toilet, which I had to investigate with a forced smile and a plunger.

It was the Bundt cake that bothered me. They were passing up my homemade lemon shortbread, which languished to staleness. Five ingredients (lemon zest, butter, sugar, flour, almonds) versus – actually I lost count. They had me at sorbitan monostearate. I’m not against junk food in its place (a burger at midnight, fries, sweet fries for dipping into an omelette, a tranche of milk chocolate and a hot mug of tea), but if I’m being offered something home-made, I devour it. And I say thank you a lot. And where’s the fricking Ranch anyway? What is Ranch dressing? I need to know this before I leave.

Some strangers become stranger still, the longer you make their acquaintance; in this case, we were all mutually baffled by one another but tried for the sake of sanity to get along. They were nice people and kind in this instance: Joe did his back in and they gave us Tiger Balm and it helped. But it always happens in the first moment of meeting, the mould is set and there’s no turning back; the apartment becomes a set of enclosures, returning to rooms only when the keys are returned.

Back to blossoms. I will let you know when the peaches are in. In the meantime, there are rosemary blossoms (however, on the turn) to add to peach and nectarine and they are all edible. You could festoon salads with them, or adorn this cake with them if you are in favour of icing/frosting (they would need something to stick to, I should think). I immediately wanted to make chocolate cake; I wanted to make the opposite of the towering brown behemoth chilling in our fridge for seven days. So this is an austere, silken and rather un-American square of dark chocolate brownie spiked with rosemary. The herb gives it a silvery, savoury edge and the chocolate is dense and rather grown up. I also added a handful of almonds and two small clouds of cocoa.

Power of two

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Baking, Biscuits, Chocolate, Food, Hospital, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

I can’t get excited about root vegetables. Pressure-cooked parsnips and celeriac and the flaccid broths I am now closely acquainted with have started to distance me from their virtues. Yes, warm, inviting, steamy, filling, healthy, earthy, beefy and sustaining etc. Worthy.

If I want something wet and warm it is to be tea; strong, lactic and the colour of a cheap suntan. The cup is important: wide, thin-lipped and bone china, something that warms the hands through. And then there is the all important dunking element: the biscuit. Not cookies, which are too soft and yielding and will flop into the tea and turn it to mush. It must be a digestive. Sandy, burnished brown, the texture of rubble. A slight saltiness. Plain as plain can be. My childhood friend, Tuppy, would layer her digestives with butter and salt, an act I found impressive – she was the first as a child to make the connection between sweet biscuit and salted dairy. Digestives and cheddar are also a winner.

Digestives are also the fulcrum of the NHS – after a short stay you will be offered a dainty red packet of two and a cup of tea. It gets your blood sugar up, gives you something to gnaw on, brings you back to life. Sitting the other day with the curtain round me in a hospital ward, after a routine though still rather rugged procedure, I ripped open the red wrapper; the two fitted into my palm like medals. I made them last as long as I could.

“Are you alright in there?” the nurse asked, suspicious at my lingering. My answer was muffled with starch and sugar. I couldn’t just have one. “Fine!” I called out. She whipped the curtain back, but I’d already eaten most of the evidence. 24 hours of not eating and nothing can prepare you for the high. Digestives are genius. And she gave me another packet to go home with. She balanced them on a tray and walked beside me like a butler.

My cousin was waiting for me looking normal and smiling with the colour of a windswept sea walk still on her cheeks. I showed her my little red packet and she was impressed. It reminded me in that moment to be grateful – to be there in the first place and to be going home. With her, with digestives.

You can dip the digestives – once cooled – in melted chocolate, and then leave them to harden on non-stick baking paper. Here I used dark chocolate but milk would also work. As you can see, they are not particularly pretty to look at, but very nice to eat, and will enrich your tea dunking activities. The unchocolated ones mimic shop-bought digestives in their sheer plainness. They are also nicely crisp and not overly sweet – you can serve them with cheese or pâté. They are very good eaten on the day but can be stored in an airtight container and enjoyed a few days later.

The term ‘digestive’ was reportedly derived from the belief that the biscuits had antacid properties due to the use of bicarbonate of soda. They were originally made with exclusively ‘brown meal’ – composed of fine bran and white flour. Because brown meal includes the germ, the flour was sweet, and perhaps because of this, digestives have also been called ‘sweetmeal’ biscuits.

Ginger and chocolate digestive biscuits

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The Guardian

No, he’s not paying me. I just happen to like his column. These are based on the classic River Cottage digestive, but made with the addition of ginger and dark chocolate. Both are optional, but if you do go down the ginger route, be generous with the little squares of stem ginger or the flavour and texture can get a bit lost. I used light muscovado here for the soft brown sugar. Makes 20-25.

125g wholemeal spelt flour (or plain wholemeal flour), plus extra to dust
125g medium oatmeal
75g soft brown sugar
½ tsp ground ginger
Big pinch of fine sea salt
1 tsp baking powder
125g cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
5 – 6 largish squares of stem ginger, finely chopped
A little milk (I didn’t find this necessary)
200g dark chocolate (or good milk chocolate), broken into small pieces

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4 and line two baking trays with nonstick baking parchment. Put the flour, oatmeal, sugar, ginger, salt and baking powder in a food processor and pulse. Add the butter and pulse again until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. (Alternatively, combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, then rub in the butter with your fingertips.)

Add the stem ginger and, with the processor running, trickle in just enough milk (about 30ml) to bring the mix together into clumps. I didn’t need to add any milk in my batch, my dough was already fairly sticky, but see how you go.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour, tip out the dough and knead gently into a ball. Press into a fat disc, wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.

Cut the dough in half. Dust one half with flour and roll it out to 3-4mm thick, dusting regularly with flour to stop it sticking. The dough is slightly sticky and crumbly, so don’t worry if it breaks up a bit; just squash it back together and re-roll. Use a 7.5cm cutter, or a glass or cup, to stamp out biscuits, and transfer these to the baking sheets with a palette knife; re-roll the offcuts to make more. Repeat with the second piece of dough (or chill for use later), then bake for 10 – 12 minutes, until golden brown at the edges and lightly coloured on top.

Remove from the oven and leave the biscuits to cool and firm up on the baking sheets, then transfer them to an airtight container or eat them all.

If you want to: melt the chocolate in a basin over a pan of simmering water. Dip in one half of each biscuit, and leave to set on a silicone mat or a sheet of nonstick baking parchment, before serving.

Always winter

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Baking, Cake, Childhood, Chocolate, Dessert, Devon, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories

Perhaps it’s because I have been spending a lot of time in the mud, but I’m drawn very much to muscovado sugar. Dark as earth, moist, crumbly and rich with minerals, it has sizeable heft. It is always winter with muscovado. And it reminds me of the eternal cold of Devon, before central heating, and the way our small fingers stuck to the inside of the windows and having to get dressed with our foggy breath snorting out of our mouths like buffalo.

As children we only ever had muscovado and we put it in our tea, which was like drinking turf. We sprinkled it over our porridge in the mornings and the strong malt-like aniseed depth of it was not always easy to take, though it helped if there was a moat of cold milk which the muscovado sweetened to butterscotch. If muscovado is turf then molasses is tar. It was sometimes given to us ‘for nerves’ in the same way that cod liver oil was administered ‘for bones’. And I can still remember the thick gluey strings of molasses making my jaw ache, the smell strangely reminiscent of tobacco and the colour which was like Victorian yacht varnish.

I was aware that other households didn’t have such things. My school friends had white sugar that was often mistaken for salt, and a wet dab of the finger was needed to ascertain which was which. I also remember that theirs were houses filled with neatness and pullovers and tank tops knitted in luminous artificial colours.

011

My friends didn’t have to be wrapped in sheets stiff with heat from the storage heater just before bedtime. They didn’t know what they were missing, because being swaddled like this so you could barely move and feeling the starchy steam rise into the room was actually very satisfying. And then we were lowered into our beds like mummies. But apart from this one thing, I really wanted to be banal and suburban and have nothing unique about me at all.

This might be why I called myself Marian, which I did for a while, thinking it was a nice, quiet name. But the black sugar was too much of a give away. It marked us out as odd and therefore vulnerable to attack. And it wasn’t used for things people understood, like chutneys, marinades and fruit cake. It spoke of the chaos underpinning everything, that we used muscovado outside of its real purpose, that we didn’t differentiate. Eventually we left, dad to Exmouth and the rest of us to Exeter and later onwards to London. It has left me with a lifelong nervousness of parochial life, of so-called ‘country living’. Those small places can be tough. But muscovado put iron in the soul and molasses helped to calm our fraying nerves.

The lowdown on muscovado

Muscovado (from the Portuguese açúcar mascavado meaning ‘separated sugar’) is also known as Barbados sugar, and is made differently to other brown sugars: instead of being white sugar to which molasses is added, it is boiled down from sugar cane juice, purified with lime juice, but then not refined any further. Muscovado is made in Barbados, in Mauritius, and in the Antique province in the Philippines, where it was one of the most prominent export commodities, from the 19th century until the late 1970s. It is nutritionally richer than other brown sugars, and retains most of the natural minerals – such as calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium and iron – inherent in sugarcane juice.

Muscovado brownies with almonds

Adapted from Claire Thomson, The Guardian, Cook, 13/2/2016

You can use whatever nut takes your fancy, but almonds always work with this recipe and you can keep the skins on. Walnuts are also lovely as are prunes. This is on the ‘weeping’ end of the brownie spectrum – crisp on the outside and damp within. My earlier brownie recipe is even more luxe. I’m terrified now looking back at those ingredients; you will probably need a defibrillator standing by, just in case. This recipe is a bit more demure. Make it gluten-free by using rice flour or a gluten-free mix instead of the standard plain. You can go the whole hog here and only use dark muscovado or light muscovado if you want to forgo the caster sugar.

125g almonds (or walnuts/softened prunes, drained and roughly chopped)

150g dark cooking chocolate (60-70% cocoa solids)

150g unsalted butter

3 eggs

100g dark muscovado sugar

100g caster sugar

100g plain flour

15g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp salt (plus a pinch to sprinkle over the baked brownie)

Lightly grease a non-stick baking tin 6 x 10 inch (15 x 24 cm) and line with baking parchment. Allow the paper to come 1 inch (2.5 cm) above the tin. Heat the oven to 350F/180C, then chop the almonds roughly, put them on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 5-8 minutes, keeping an eye on them as they burn easily. Use skin-on or blanched, both are fine.

While the almonds are doing their work, put chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl fitted over a pan of barely simmering water. Allow the chocolate to melt without stirring it, then remove from the heat and gently stir to smoothness.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and sugars together until the mixture is creamy and thick. Mix the melted chocolate and butter into the egg and sugar mixture.

Sift the flour and cocoa powder and salt into the chocolate mixture. Beat together until smooth. Fold in the almonds.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake on the centre shelf for 20 -25 minutes. Don’t overcook the brownie – you want it to be just firm to the touch (not scorched at all) and still gooey inside. Leave to cool for ten minutes, and then put on a sheet of parchment on a wire rack. Cut squint, so you can eat the stray bits while no one’s looking.

Damp & Soulful

21 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Baking, Cake, Chocolate, England, Gluten-free, Ingredients, Nuts, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

This is an autumn cake – damp and soulful and lovely with a few late mulberries or some cooked and treacly damsons, as small as olives now. This might also be the time to get out some prunes and soak them in Armagnac (you could lob some into the cake itself). Nuts instead of flour here, which makes it gluten-free. I made the mistake the first time round of putting two tablespoons of spelt in, which was unnecessary and also catastrophic. The 2 tbs were my undoing. I made it for a party and no one would touch it. It was as if I’d announced that there was cat food in it. Instead of flour I now add cocoa powder, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Except of course there’s sugar and butter and nuts and chocolate.

“Do you do anything gluten-free?” the lady asked. She was the carer for a much older lady who she’d just seated with difficulty at a nearby table. Rain drummed on the windows. I was sitting right by the till. It was a lovely cafe, full of rare teas and little glass milk bottles and ironic tea cosies. My head was next to the tips jar. My head was ‘tips jar adjacent’ as they say, and I could have lain it down directly on the counter and had a nap were it not for the pneumatic espresso machine and screaming milk being banged out on to waiting coffees nearby. When did milk become so loud?

The waitress had to shout above the roar of the foam, “Plum and polenta!” She pointed to some sandy mounds under a glass dome. The lady looked at them blankly and then back at the waitress. “You don’t do anything like a baked potato?” There was a moment between them where they both seemed at a loss. “Coq au Vin?” the waitress said eventually. “Is that gluten-free?” “Yes.”

It struck me that the term ‘gluten-free’ had got in the way of this exchange. As if this was what you had to say these days, in these sorts of places. I don’t know why this made me feel sad. I felt sorry for the baked potato. And I’m not sure I want to live in a gluten-free world. I love flourless cakes – cakes made with nuts, for example – because their flourlessness is often germane to the cake’s identity: they were born flourless. But a baked potato isn’t any more gluten-free than my trousers. It was a baked potato first. This is a cake first (or torte…). Enjoy it. I hope there will always be a place for it in our post gluten world.

Chocolate and hazelnut torte

Adapted from and inspired by Emma Gardner’s beautiful blog, Poires au Chocolat

This cake is rather drum-like in appearance, and has less of the fallen soufflé effect common in the flourless. However, its surface does eventually crack reassuringly. I have no idea how the cold-eggs-straight-from-the-fridge idea works, but the proof is in the eating. Keep the cake wrapped in greaseproof paper for up to three days, if you can, to let the flavours develop and deepen. It gets better.

75g whole hazelnuts

2 tbs cocoa powder

170g good dark chocolate (60 – 70% cocoa solids) broken into chunks

140g unsalted butter, slightly softened

150g light brown sugar

Big pinch of fine sea salt

4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin and line with baking parchment.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground. – See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.3zwFHVRy.dpuf Place the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes or until nuts are brown and fragrant and the skins are starting to peel away from the nuts. Remove from oven and place the nuts in a clean dish towel. Roll up the towel and let the nuts ‘steam’ for about five minutes and then rub the nuts to remove the skins. Let cool.

Put the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 10-15 minutes or until the nuts are brown and fragrant and the skins are starting to peel away. Keep an eye on them – they burn easily. Remove from the oven and put the nuts in a clean tea towel. Roll up the towel and let the nuts ‘steam’ for about five minutes and then rub the nuts to remove the skins. Think of someone you hate. Let them cool.

To make the ground hazelnuts: once the hazelnuts have completely cooled, throw them in a food processor, along with the cocoa, and process until they are finely ground. Alternatively, put them in a coffee grinder and do them in batches.

Put a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Add the chocolate pieces and let them melt without stirring. When they look as though they’re almost there, take the bowl off the heat, stir, and add the hopefully rather soft butter, the sugar and salt. Whisk until it’s all of uniform smoothness. It will have lightened a little.

Add the first egg, beat until incorporated, then add the next, and keep going until all four eggs are in and then add the vanilla extract. Whip the mixture on high for 1-2 minutes until it’s stiff and becoming paler. Add the ground hazelnuts and cocoa powder and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Bake for 28-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cake brings out a few sticky crumbs.

Cool completely in the pan on a wire rack. It will rise and then fall gradually, leaving a higher rim of cake around the sides and there will also be some cracking. Wrap in foil or greaseproof paper for up to three days before eating. The flavours become more wickedly intense with time.

70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of smoked sea salt flakesPreheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground.Place a mixer bowl (or another bowl if using a hand mixer) over a pan of barely simmering water. Chop the chocolate up and tip into the bowl. Stir occasionally as it melts. Meanwhile weigh out the brown sugar and salt and cut the butter into cubes – it should be starting to soften, not squishy. When the chocolate has nearly melted, take it off the heat and stir until it’s smooth. Place on the mixer (with the whisk attached) and add the sugar, salt and butter. Whisk on medium until the ingredients have fully combined and the mixture has lightened a little. Scrape the sides down then add the first egg. Whip until combined, then add the next egg. Repeat until they’re all combined then add the vanilla and whip for 1-2 minutes on high until stiff and pale.Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Sprinkle the smoked sea salt over the top. Bake for 28-35 minutes – a tester should still bring up a few sticky crumbs. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool fully in the tin. Wrap in kitchen foil and leave for at least one day and up to three before serving. Lovely with a big spoonful of whipped cream or crème fraîche.
– See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.nKxGe4qV.dpuf

70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract – See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.nKxGe4qV.dpuf

Chocolate Hazelnut Torte with Smoked Salt
(adapted from Alice Medrich’s Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts)70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of smoked sea salt flakesPreheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground.Place a mixer bowl (or another bowl if using a hand mixer) over a pan of barely simmering water. Chop the chocolate up and tip into the bowl. Stir occasionally as it melts. Meanwhile weigh out the brown sugar and salt and cut the butter into cubes – it should be starting to soften, not squishy. When the chocolate has nearly melted, take it off the heat and stir until it’s smooth. Place on the mixer (with the whisk attached) and add the sugar, salt and butter. Whisk on medium until the ingredients have fully combined and the mixture has lightened a little. Scrape the sides down then add the first egg. Whip until combined, then add the next egg. Repeat until they’re all combined then add the vanilla and whip for 1-2 minutes on high until stiff and pale.Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Sprinkle the smoked sea salt over the top. Bake for 28-35 minutes – a tester should still bring up a few sticky crumbs. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool fully in the tin. Wrap in kitchen foil and leave for at least one day and up to three before serving. Lovely with a big spoonful of whipped cream or crème fraîche.(Serves 10-12) – See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.nKxGe4qV.dpuf

The cake about to be baked

A bowl of mulberries

Some other flourless cakes in my repertoire

Lemon and almond cake

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

Chocolate marmalade slump cake

Chocolate Hazelnut Torte with Smoked Salt
(adapted from Alice Medrich’s Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts)70g whole hazelnuts
30g plain flour
170g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
140g unsalted butter, slightly softened
150g light brown sugar
big pinch of fine sea salt
4 large cold eggs (from the fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of smoked sea salt flakesPreheat the oven to 180C/350F. Lightly butter an 8″ springform or loose-based tin. Place the hazelnuts on a small tray in the oven and toast for a few minutes until they start to smell and darken slightly. If they have skins, rub as much as you can off with a tea towel. Put into a food processor with the flour and blast until they are finely ground.Place a mixer bowl (or another bowl if using a hand mixer) over a pan of barely simmering water. Chop the chocolate up and tip into the bowl. Stir occasionally as it melts. Meanwhile weigh out the brown sugar and salt and cut the butter into cubes – it should be starting to soften, not squishy. When the chocolate has nearly melted, take it off the heat and stir until it’s smooth. Place on the mixer (with the whisk attached) and add the sugar, salt and butter. Whisk on medium until the ingredients have fully combined and the mixture has lightened a little. Scrape the sides down then add the first egg. Whip until combined, then add the next egg. Repeat until they’re all combined then add the vanilla and whip for 1-2 minutes on high until stiff and pale.Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in. Scoop into the pan and level out. Sprinkle the smoked sea salt over the top. Bake for 28-35 minutes – a tester should still bring up a few sticky crumbs. Place on a wire rack and leave to cool fully in the tin. Wrap in kitchen foil and leave for at least one day and up to three before serving. Lovely with a big spoonful of whipped cream or crème fraîche.(Serves 10-12)
– See more at: http://www.poiresauchocolat.net/2012/11/chocolate-hazelnut-torte-with-smoked.html#sthash.CDp8X22X.dpuf

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

03 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Cake, Chocolate, Cookbook, Cooking, Dessert, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Olive oil, Recipes, Stories

This is not a rant against butter. Far from it. But I am rather in love with olive oil and its peculiar affinity with desserts. And while butter highlights sweetness, is dense and comforting, olive oil is less weighty, making the crumb lighter, almost bubbly. Initially, I was scared of going for an extra virginal oil, but the fruity-pepper quality is reminiscent of spice. And good olive oil will have traces of bitterness and pungency, with echoes still of the actual olive. I know I’m probably a bit behind, but the notion of tasting fresh olive oil, sipping it like wine, was new to me, until I tried it. Weirdly, it’s not oily or greasy, but fresh and clean, spring-like.

And here in LA, it is spring; particularly early in the morning with the desert air still biting but with a still and steady sun above. After months of wet (it’s true what they say – LA in the rain is basically Slough with palm trees), it is good to remember the heat, the sharpness and dryness of the air. Things are budding again. Magnolia with its slip of pink just pushing through. Lemon trees a forest of blossom, with the first yellow fruit like tear drops. And everything is green, courtesy of the rain. Troughs of dried mud have appeared next to banks of luminous grass. It’s all very Hollywood.

Olive oil is big business and full of controversy. It’s a minefield, frankly. Here in California, olive trees were brought to the state by Spanish missionaries in the 18th century. Everywhere the silver-grey leaves, stark as bullets in the sun, remind you of the fact that despite its New World appearance, the terroir of this part of California is fundamentally Mediterranean.

I cannot begin to unravel the complexity of what makes a good olive oil, but apparently it has little to do with colour and everything to do with freshness; olives are a stone fruit and the oil is essentially the juice of the olive, and like all juice, it is perishable. Look for bottles with a ‘best by’ date, or better still a date of harvest. Early harvest oil will be generally much more pungent and more flavourful than late harvest. And the oil should be extracted by cold-pressing, using neither heat nor chemicals. This is obviously in an ideal world.

Anyway, back to cake. Try not to be cowed by the robustness of the oil you are using here; the bitterness in both the chocolate and the oil is tempered by the delightful texture of the almonds and the fissured exterior of the cake once baked – the way it cracks like a dinosaur’s egg and sinks gratefully into a thick mound of cream. It is not as truffle-like as it looks – it’s glistening because I decided, erroneously, to fleck it with olive oil for presentation purposes. I also sprinkled it with flaky salt, but have a glass of water on hand if you decide to go this route.

Bitter chocolate olive oil cake

Adapted from The Bojon Gourmet/Alice Medrich

50g (1/2 cup) blanched whole almonds

1 tbs cocoa powder

150g dark chocolate (70-72% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

120ml (½ cup) extra virgin olive oil

Pinch of flaky sea salt, plus some for serving

4 large eggs, separated at room temperature

170g (¾ cup) caster sugar, divided use

¼ tsp cream of tartar

Position a rack in the centre of the oven and pre-heat to 325F/170C. Grease an 8 or 9″ (20cm) round cake tin with a bit of olive oil. If using whole almonds (which I would recommend) toast them for a minute or so over a medium heat until they start to smell nice and turn a little golden. Then grind them with the cocoa powder in a blender or coffee grinder until powdery but with a few stray bits of nut left, for texture. Place the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Once it looks well on its way to melting, add the oil and the pinch of sea salt and stir.

Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in 110g (½ cup) of the sugar and the almond mixture until combined. Whisk in the egg yolks. If the mixture starts to get cold, it may ‘seize’ or look grainy. If this happens, place the bowl back over the simmering pan and stir until it loosens again. Place the egg whites in a very clean bowl and whisk until just frothy. Then add the cream of tartar and continue until foamy. Rain in the remaining sugar, continuing to whisk until the whites hold soft peaks.

Without delay, use a rubber spatula to stir a small portion of the whipped whites into the chocolate mixture to loosen, then gently fold in the remaining whites until the batter is just combined and no streaks remain. Immediately pour mixture into the prepared pan, smooth out the top and bake until a toothpick inserted comes out with moist crumbs attached – 35 to 45 minutes. Let the cake cool completely, then remove from the pan and sprinkle with sea salt – this may not be to your liking, so omit if not. The cake improves with time, courtesy of the almonds. Keep covered at room temperature for 3-4 days for the full effect.

Read on Read Tom Mueller’s book Extra Virginity if you’re interested in olive oil intrigue. Also check out his website and blog truthinoliveoil.com for lots of fascinating facts.

Chocolate pots with cardamom

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Chocolate, Cookbook, Cooking, Dessert, Dinner, Food, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Recipes, Spices, Stories

I know there are many cultures where you buy in dessert and LA is one of them. I wouldn’t gripe, but the bought stuff here is dazzling in its aesthetic perfection but tastes of nothing. And it’s incredibly sweet. So here’s what I’m thinking: I write a book (which will be read by about seven people, but to those people I say thank you) about what you can make or bring that is neither horrifically sweet nor terribly complicated. But it will taste good. And ‘afters’ need not be pudding or cake at all, but a rough cheek of apple and a chunk of crumbling Cheddar. Some toasted, spiced nuts. A bowl of sloping apricots with cardamom. Or a chocolate pot.

Cardamom was imported from its native India in the Middle Ages by Arabic traders to the Muslim Mediterranean (Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt for example), where it now belongs to the sphere of cooking known as the saffron-cinnamon link*. Beloved of Scandinavians too, it does well in sweet things (including sweet vegetables like carrots and parsnips). It is strong, searing almost – as if you have found yourself in a clearing after a recent bonfire involving eucalyptus: charcoal, menthol, ash, smoke and the shock of clean air combine, particularly if you whizz up the seeds in a blender and stick your head in. It belongs with almonds, pistachios, rose water, oranges and lemons. Good in bread and cake, bewitching in a poaching syrup for fruit. Chocolate it loves, including the white stuff where it cuts through the sweet gloop with masterful directness.

Oh yes, and Happy New Year! Due to technical ineptitude, I was unable to get my head round the so-called interactive report I posted at the beginning of January and those wishing to use it would have been blocked. I would like to say thank you to everyone who has read and enjoyed me, followed me and either commented publicly or privately and generally cheered me on. It is also very exciting to be featured on Freshly Pressed. It’s a solitary business, writing, so any encouragement is my meat and potatoes.

These chocolate pots have the minimum of sugar and no flour. There is cream though so forget it being good for you, except in the psychological, spiritual and sensual sense. As for chocolate, you can take the bitterness right to the edge, but try to keep it this side of fruity. I would stop at 70% cocoa solids myself. Though the recipe asks for an egg, I made it without and it was still lovely; a handy detail for the egg-intolerant.

This recipe comes from Lucas Hollweg’s so-much-more-than-just-good book Good Things To Eat. My take comes with a toasted almond or two, which gives the pudding a sort of carb-like purchase and is in keeping with its Moorish provenance. But go bare if you dare.

Chocolate pots with cardamom

Adapted from Lucas Hollweg, Good Things to Eat

Serves 6

15 cardamom pods

200ml (7fl oz) whole milk

200g (7oz) dark chocolate (60-70% cocoa solids), broken into small pieces

150ml (5fl oz) heavy/double cream, plus extra to serve

50g (1¾ oz) caster/superfine sugar

1 medium egg

“Crush the cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar, or roughly chop, squashing the black seeds inside as you go. Put in a small saucepan with the milk and bring to a simmer, then turn off the heat, cover and leave to stand for 1 hour.

Put the chocolate in a mixing bowl. Add the cream and sugar to the milk and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat and leave to stand for a minute, then strain through a sieve onto the chocolate. Allow everything to melt for a minute or two, then beat together until smooth and silky. Beat in the egg until everything is well combined.

Divide the mixture between 6 espresso-sized cups or small glasses and put in the fridge to set for a couple of hours. Add a splash of cream to the top of each one if you feel like it.”

*Read Sam and Sam Clark’s beautiful cookbook Moro for more on this.

Sweet and salty almonds

David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris

Deborah Madison, Seasonal Fruit Desserts

Serves 2

1 cup (170g) blanched almonds

1 tbs (15g) butter

1 tbs dark brown sugar

A good pinch of flaky sea salt (fleur de sel) or smoked sea salt

A good pinch of freshly ground black pepper

Spread the nuts on a baking sheet and roast in a 300F (180C) oven for about 5 minutes to ‘tickle out’ their flavour. Try to avoid colouring them too much. Melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat and then add the warmed almonds. Sprinkle the brown sugar over them, and stir until the sugar has melted. Remove from the heat, then sprinkle with the salt and a fresh grind of pepper. Let cool to harden. Tap the almonds gently with a rolling pin to break them up or leave them whole.

Intense

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Baking, Chocolate, Citrus, Fruit, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories

I’d like to clarify one thing: Los Angeles is not laid-back. I can illustrate this with a recent happening in Runyon Canyon which involved the lady in the picture below. It was immediately clear she was mad. To conflate the English and American uses of the word, she was both insane and angry. She strode up the hill, got very close to us, pivoted and marched back down. She did this a few times, and we took some surreptitious photos, which she seemed to know about even though she couldn’t see anything.

“Are you taking pictures of me?” she barked, striding up the hill again, ski hat and sunglasses obscuring most of her face. We assured her we were not, and continued on our way. But however far we got, she would find us, get very close, then pivot and stride in the opposite direction. It was like some sort of drama school exercise to do with spatial awareness. Specifically the work of Rudolf Laban, which she would have excelled at.

Each time she came near, she raised her voice, and started talking very loudly into her cellphone. It wasn’t clear if there was anyone real on the other end, but it was obvious she was talking about movies: meetings, castings, budgets were mentioned. And it occurred to me that this was like a mad and intense version of what happens in LA every day. This is a city of creatives. Imagine living in a city peopled only by librarians or lollipop ladies* (which would be nice, I think; you would have a wide selection of reading material while being able to cross the road safely).

I never thought I’d come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as too much creativity. Being surrounded by people who are expressing themselves all the time is quite frightening, particularly when there are also yawning canyons, deep bowls of dust, fissured, cracked earth. There are mountain lions and rattlesnakes in the vicinity. Hawks hang in the air. LA is quite wild enough.

In keeping with today’s theme, these cookies are very intense. They’re little explosions of citrus and chocolate, and leave you feeling quite caffeinated and in need of moisture. They use a lot of butter, so this is an opportunity to use the good stuff, if you can get your hands on it. They aren’t soft, but snap in the mouth, and have a crystalline, sandy quality. The flavour of orange is not subtle (the recipe asks for the zest of 5 oranges, no less) and the dark chocolate is strong and edgy. Children may well turn their noses up at them. All the more for you.

Orange chocolate chip cookies

Adapted from Dan Lepard, The Guardian

350g plain flour

½ tsp salt

150g icing sugar

200g unsalted butter, slightly softened

Finely grated zest of 5 oranges (have yourself an orange juice)

200g chocolate chips (or a block of dark chocolate roughly chopped)

Put the flour, salt, icing sugar, butter and zest in a bowl and rub together into a smooth, soft dough (or you can use a food processor). Add the chocolate and work quickly to combine. Either divide the dough in two, and roll each half into a cylinder, or pat the entire amount of dough into a wide, flat disc. Wrap in plastic wrap/clingfilm and put in the freezer to firm up (you can leave it there for a month).

To bake, heat the oven to 170C/335F. Line a baking tray with parchment/baking paper. Take the dough out of the freezer and let it soften slightly for about ten minutes. It needs to stay firm for slicing. Using a serrated knife, cut out thinnish rounds (0.75-1cm). Alternatively, place the whole disc of dough between two sheets of cling film/plastic wrap and roll out to the same thickness, and then use a pastry cutter. The first kind will look like coins, the second like your more conventional cookie.

Sit the cookies on the lined tray about 2-3cm apart and bake for about 15-20 minutes (I don’t know the fierceness of your oven), until lightly browned and crisp. Remove from the oven, transfer to wire racks and leave to cool.

An additional recipe

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Three Good Things on a Plate

These cookies can form the basis of a lovely chocolate tiffin, or refrigerator cake. Put 200g of broken up bits of dark chocolate, 110g butter and 1 tablespoon of syrup or honey into a heatproof bowl. Stand this over a pan of just-simmering water until the chocolate is melted and smooth. Roughly chop 75g of crystallised ginger (or a handful of raisins and/or dried apricots) and crush the cookies to small chunks. Pour the melted chocolate over the ginger/dried fruit and cookies, and mix. Tip this mixture into a lined loaf tin. Smooth out, leave to cool, then transfer to the fridge for several hours to set.

*Crossing guards

Dark chocolate gelato

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Chocolate, Food, Gelato, Ingredients, Marcella Hazan, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories

Apparently, green tea smells of old cars. Anything red is a no. No also to green and crunchy, to onions, to fruit. But this chocolate gelato was a winner. “Really nice,” said Oscar, my nephew, who had come to stay along with his two brothers. Homemade is always a bit suspicious to children, I’ve noticed. Because you’ve had some input and this is scary to them. And this is grown-up stuff; it has a dark, strong caffeine hit, almost – but not quite – bitter. It is salty, why I don’t know, but it makes you head straight for the tap afterwards and glug water like a person found wandering for days in the desert. It is rich, velvety, it has a tinge of red, like dried blood; it glistens, it drips from the spoon and forms dark, chocolatey pools. I thought it would get lost in all the fast food, the junk, the Twinkies and Oreos, the ice cream sandwiches. But it did not go unnoticed. They nodded wisely in between mouthfuls, the spoon tinkling like a bell and growing more insistent as the bowl emptied. There was silence, focus.

“I had a banana three months ago. It was in a smoothie. That was so I didn’t have to taste it,” said Oscar, in defense of fruit. I never realized food could hold such trepidation. I ate snails as a child, picked them out of their shells and dipped them in garlic butter. I ate earth – whole mouthfuls – and peeled chewing gum off the floor. I peeled it off the pavement and popped it in my mouth. I ate ratatouille and sweetbreads. I ate chalk. I was fearless, verging on deranged. And I lived. The only thing I wouldn’t eat was cheesecake and that was because of the name.

Dark chocolate gelato doesn’t seem like much of a stretch, but I think it was a surprise. Perhaps it went with all the other new things: the road signs, the accents, the crazy heat, the big waves, the seals, cars, loud women and lady boys. And they ate other stuff too – homemade tacos with spicy beef and sour cream, Mexican cheese, Orangina, chillies. They were brave in the sea and came back with bashed knees and bloodied feet. Being in a strange new land on another continent makes you more inclined to try new things perhaps; you are not quite yourself.

We ended up in a Thai restaurant, which was where the green tea debate began.

“It smells like a reptile enclosure,” said Ben.

It did in fact smell quite nasty. Dank, musty, old. Also, it was hot, and we were hot, overheated you could say, sweating and limp with fans not quite disguising the wet walls, the presence of steam. Why drink hot green tea and not water? But I have developed a taste for it; I like the weirdness, the way it heats my throat as it goes down, makes me wince. Maybe it’s the daredevil in me. It helps me remember when I was invincible.

I will try to shed some light on the difference between gelato and ice cream. In Southern Italy, gelato is traditionally made without eggs, using mainly milk rather than cream. As I wrote about in the Fior di Latte recipe, the base of many Sicilian ices consists of a milk pudding thickened with cornstarch (I used a little cream, because I wanted some richness). The homogenized fats in milk are what creates a lighter texture, with that lovely melting quality. Ices made with more cream and less milk or equal amounts, though luxuriously buttery, can coat the mouth in a way that gelato never does. It can also mask flavours. In Northern Italy, eggs are used, but the principle of milk over cream remains. If you go to a gelateria, you’ll find the gelato light yet dense. This is due to the speed at which it is churned, keeping a lot of the air out.

Dark chocolate gelato

Adapted from Marcella Hazan, Marcella’s Kitchen

Makes 2 ½ cups (600ml)

4 large egg yolks

½ cup (100g) plus 2 tbs extra-fine sugar

2 ¼ cups (500ml) whole milk

3 ½ oz (100g) dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

½ cup (50g) unsweetened cocoa powder

In a heatproof bowl, beat (using an electric whisk) the egg yolks with ½ cup (100g) of sugar until thick and creamy. Heat the milk gently in a saucepan until it looks as if it’s starting to rise to a boil. Remove from the heat and add only a little milk to the egg mixture, to temper the eggs, then gradually add the rest. Beat well.

Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water. Resist the temptation to stir. When no lumps remain, beat the melted chocolate into the egg mixture, followed by the cocoa powder. Place the bowl over the pan of barely simmering water again, and stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture coats the back of it. Remove from the heat. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, make a caramel by combining 2 tablespoons of sugar with 2 tablespoons of water. Boil the mixture until it turns a dark amber, but isn’t burnt. Swirl the pan as it darkens and watch it like a hawk.

Whisk the caramel into the chocolate until fully incorporated. It will sizzle. Leave to cool, then cover the surface of the bowl with plastic wrap/cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour, then churn in an ice cream maker, according to the manufacturer’s instructions. At this point you can serve it as it is – it will be soft and slightly sloppy. Alternatively, transfer to a freezer container, cover the surface with plastic wrap and freeze.