To the observer, it may look as if I've abandoned this blog. Not (quite) true. In February, I spent 3 amazing weeks in Japan, and then immediately on return, began honours study in Philosophy, which threw me into crazy levels of reading and writing, and therefore less time than before for experimental cooking. I was working on a few things, but somehow failed to get them to a publishable state. Apologies!

To make up for it, here is a truly decadent hot chocolate recipe. I was at San Churros with a friend, and had the revelation that surely I could reproduce their $6 Spanish Hot Chocolate at home, for much less. My first attempt, used a mixture of coca and melted chocolate, but didn't quite taste right. The second turned out as thick chocolate custard - not a success as such, but not exactly a failure either. After a few more attempts, and I hit on the winning formula. Rich and thick, sweet but not too sweet, and a hint of chili to really warm you up on a cold and wet winter's day. Because of all the cocoa, the amount of sugar listed below is enough to make it just-barely sweet. You may want to add another teaspoon if you prefer yours sweeter. The chilli is optional, but really makes the drink in my opinion.

This recipe also multiplies really easily - I've done up to six servings at once, just multiply it out, and see how many lives you can improve. Note, however, this drink is not for the faint-hearted, it is truly rich and decadent.

Spanish Hot Chocolate

Serves:1

Ingredients

• 1 cup soymilk (or milk of choice)
• 6 teaspoons (1 tbsp + 2 tsp) cocoa
• 3 tsp cornflour 
• 6 teaspoons (1 tbsp + 2 tsp) tablespoon sugar 
• Small dash of vanilla
• Large pinch of cinnamon
• Small pinch of chili or cayenne

Method

1. Add soymilk, cocoa and cornflour to a small saucepan. Whisk together over medium heat, ensuring that everything is well combined before the milk gets too warm. If in doubt, whisk together first, then heat, but I'm impatient.
2. Bring to the boil, whisking constantly, until mixture boils. Reduce heat, and keep stirring for 1-2 minutes more, or until desired thickness has been achieved.
3. Whisk in sugar, vanilla, cinnamon and cayenne.
4. Transfer to a mug (a silicone spatula is handy), and enjoy chocolate-induced bliss.

Decadent chocolate mousse with macerated berries

I've been slack on the blogging front lately. I've been playing with lots of recipes, but haven't been able to get anything to a level where I'm happy sharing it here. In the meantime, here's an overdue post, the dessert from our early Christmas dinner.

This dessert took a bit of assembly, but the result is rich, decadent, and visually impressive.

Decadent chocolate mousse with macerated berries

Serves: 5-6

Macerated Berries
I'm afraid I can't give too much precision here, because I was anything but precise, but the basic idea was:

• 1 punnet raspberries
• 1 punnet blueberries
• 1 punnet blackberries
• 1 punnet strawberries - quartered
• White sugar to taste
• Vanilla to taste

Mix all the berries in a bowl, sprinkle with maybe 2-3 tablespoons of sugar and 1-2 tablespoons of vanilla. Feel free to add other flavourings if you like, a splash of liqueur would go well. Stir gently, cover with clingwrap, and put in fridge, at least for 2 hours and preferably overnight, stirring every now and then if practical.

The berries will soften slightly, absorb the vanilla flavour, and create a deliciously sweet berry syrup.

Mousse
The mousse component was Miyoko Schinner's Ultimate Chocolate Mousse, which I can vouch for as being excellent. I used Green and Black's 70% dark chocolate (vegan and fairtrade), and the full 1 cup of coconut solids still resulted in a very dark and rich mousse - perfect for my tastes, but still a bit too strong for Hunter.

Refrigerate the mousse for about 15-30 minutes before assembly - if it's too runny, it will run down around the berries and cover them, but if it's too stiff you won't be able to get smooth layers.

Assembly
In a glass of choice (I used a tumbler, but a martini glass would work also), spoon a layer of mousse into the glass, add a layer of berries with some syrup, another layer of mousse, and another layer of berries.

I found it better to make fewer thicker layers, as if I tried to make my berry layers too thin, the mousse ended up largely hiding the berries. I also didn't refrigerate the mousse before starting, which I think was part of my problem, the last one I made had much more defined layers, but also a rough top, so feel free to play around with it and leave comments on what did and didn't work for you.

Happy Birthday to Me

Saturday was my birthday, so I baked myself a cake. Happy birthday to me!

Since it was my birthday, I chose to have a chocolatey chocolate cake. What else? The cake recipe was from veganbaking.net, topped and filled with a (not quite) double amount of Rich Chocolate Ganache from of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, p. 143, and drizzled with melted white chocolate. A friend helped with the strawberry arrangement. I would never have thought to stand them on end like that, but I was quite pleased with the result.

A few notes on the recipe:

• If you're looking for a rich vegan chocolate cake, this is a good one. You could look at it as a rich chocolate cake, or a light mud cake. Either way, it was good.
• The cake recipe explicitly said to use natural, not Dutch processed cocoa powder, and someone commented that they had had poor results using dutched cocoa. However, I bought a 5kg bag of organic fair trade Dutch processed cocoa powder earlier this year... The cake still rose as it should have. If you're Australian and confused about what I'm talking about, most cocoa in Australia is dutched.
• I didn't have any bread flour on hand, so I mixed vital wheat gluten/gluten flour into ordinary plain flour. Use 1 teaspoon per cup. I removed the equivalent amount of plain flour first, or, in other words, used 1 teaspoon of gluten flour for 1 cup minus 1 teaspoon of flour, though that may have been unnecessarily pedantic.
• I went easy on the espresso powder, because I didn't want a coffee flavour in my cake.
• There are two layers of cake here, sandwiched with chocolate ganache. To do this, I doubled the recipe and spread it between two cake tins. 
• Be careful watching the cake towards the end. I tested mine at the minimum time, and it was still underbaked, but a few minutes later, the toothpick came out completely clean, and I was aiming for not quite clean to ensure moistness - and it was on the dry side, though not badly so.
• There is a lot of cake here. You could get at least 16 slices out of this.
• I need to figure out how to ice the sides of a cake without also icing the plate...
• To do the white chocolate drizzle, I used a small round icing tip. However, if you don't have any icing tips, you should still be able to get a good effect using one of these methods
• Just dip a spoon in melted chocolate and gently drizzle it from a height. This will produce a thick and thin result, but I've done it in the past for other applications, and it still looks great.
• Snip the corner off a ziplock bag, fill it with melted chocolate, and use the snipped off corner as make-shift piping tip. The hole should small, err on the small side, you can always make it bigger.

My first multi-step decorated cupcakes

No new recipes today, I'm afraid, But I have some pictures of my recent efforts that I want to share. Yesterday was a good friend's birthday, and as I'm finished exams (Yay me!), I tried my hand at some decorated cupcakes to take along. This is only my second attempt at piping icing, and my first attempt at 2-part piping (the buttercream, and the ganache), but I think they looked impressive enough, if not exactly the product of an experienced and steady hand. Unfortunately, most of the photos didn't turn out (the photos of all the cupcakes laid out in rows for a start), but here are a couple of half-decent ones.

The recipe I used was the Peanut Butter Bombs on p. 37-38 of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World . I followed the instructions exactly, except that I only used 2 cups of icing sugar in the frosting instead of 2.5, and didn't add any soymilk to thin it out as a result. The icing was still more than sweet enough. I was a bit concerned that with less sugar, the icing mightn't be stiff enough, but I iced them the night before, and the icing was still well-defined the next day. I also sprinkled them with crushed nuts instead of chocolate shavings, for no particular reason.

I can see more decorated cupcakes in my future.

Rich chocolate brownies with raspberries

Game of Thrones is over for the year. Ok, so the last episode came out over a week ago, but evening work and the fact that we have a friend with an awesome TV set-up, means that we've usually watched Game of Thrones on the Friday rather than the Monday night.

To ensure we had something to lift our spirits after what was bound to be another depressing episode, I made my favourite (so far) chocolate brownie recipe. Mattie is truly a culinary genius. These are not just good vegan brownies. They are excellent brownies by anyone's standards, that also happen to be vegan. Even so, however, I couldn't resist changing them up a bit.

Instead of the walnuts, I stirred in about 1/3 cup frozen raspberries, and a handful of un-melted vegan chocolate chips, just to give it a bit of extra chocolateyness. Make sure you use frozen raspberries. I let mine partially thaw, and they kinda disintegrated when I mixed them in. I also left out the coffee.

The extra chocolate is a must, and the raspberries were a were a successful experiment. Rich and chocolately and fudgey, with raspberries. So said everyone, although I am still secretly dreaming about finding a way of making the brownies even richer...

As an aside, the last time I made this recipe, I didn't have any vegan butter, so I subbed in coconut oil, and while they were delicious, they were also a bit greasy. Do not use coconut oil, use vegan butter. If you can't be bothered making vegan butter, you can get away with using a combination of vegan margarine (such as Nuttlex), and coconut oil, which is what I did the first time I made these. You might also get away with pure Nuttlex, even though the instructions explicitly say not to... If you try that, let me know how it works.

Chocolate porridge

So here goes my first real post, a recipe, albeit a very simple one, chocolately, to fit in with the name of my blog. It's not so much a recipe really, as a breakfast idea, which can be easily tweaked to suit your tastes.

Until quite recently, I thought porridge was disgusting. This may have had something to do with the fact that when I was a kid, Mum thought that porridge was best served completely plain and unadorned, just oats, water and a bit of milk. I now know better, and now that it's winter, I have porridge for breakfast almost every morning.

I've tried a few variations, but this is the one I have most often, because chocolate. You can add a little sugar if you need it, but taste it first without as the banana adds quite a bit of sweetness, while the banana flavour is mostly masked by the cocoa.

Chocolate Porridge

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 
  1 large overripe banana, or 1.5 small ones
• 1 heaped teaspoon cocoa (when I say heaped, I mean heaped... it's probably closer to a tablespoon, but I think I feel better about myself when I can call it a teaspoon)
• Generous pinch shredded coconut (about 1 tablespoon)
• Scant 1/3 cup rolled oats (you may want more if you have a large appetite in the morning)
• 1 to 1 1/3 cups soymilk, or to desired consistency, I like mine pretty loose
• Small handful of berries to top - I'm currently using either frozen raspberries or frozen blueberries, but strawberries are great too, and fresh is better. If you're using larger berries, cut them up first (don't do what I did in the last picture, it's a pain to eat)

Method

1. Mash the banana
   

2. Mix in the cocoa

3. Mix in coconut and oats

4. Mix in soymilk, cover with a plate, and microwave for 1 minute, then wander off and do something, turn on the computer, check blog feeds, get dressed or whatever, for about 3-5 minutes.
5. Mix thoroughly, then return to microwave, and repeat step 4.
6. Top with berries. If the berries are frozen, you may wish to return to microwave for a further 30 seconds, or just stir through and let the heat from the porridge melt them.

What's your favourite everyday breakfast?