We invited Pam & Sid over for morning tea on Easter Sunday. Janet asked if I could make a chocolate cake and some cookies. As is usual, I started looking through my cookbooks and magazine clippings for some inspiration. I found a recipe for a chocolate sponge roll that I had kept from a baking tin I bought, so decided to give it a go. This was my first disaster. I think I cooked it wrongly, because it was a little crunchy on top, an when I tried to roll it, it just folded and broke into pieces. I tasted a bit of the broken cake, and it didnt even taste any good. So the cake AND the recipe went in the bin.
So I moved onto the cookies while I waited for some more butter to soften for Cake take 2. I chose some choc chip cookies from a generic tyoe of cookie and slice book that I have. Never cooked from the book before, may not do so again :-). The cookies looked ok when they went into the oven, they puffed up and looked fine when they were nearly baked, but when the timer went off and I looked in the oven, they had flattened like pancakes! Oh dear. These ones didn't go in the bin. We tasted them and decided they were still edlible - we renamed them "pancake cookies"
Onto cake number 2 - I made Nigella's Sponge cake recipe from "Domestic Goddess", substituting some cocoa powder for some of the flour. I like this recipe because everything gets thrown into the food processor!
My 2 sponge cakes came out of the oven looking nice and even! YAY another disaster avoided.
I decied to fill the cake with mock cream & grated chocolate, since I didnt want to go to a shop. Heres a tip - don't make mock cream in advance because (d'uh) when you put it in the fridge it goes hard. To fix this small problem, I just beat it up again, and added a couple of tablespoons of "Philadelphia Cream" yes, cream, not cream cheese! They have a new "cooking cream" product - its not for whipping though, so by mixing it with my mock cream, I softened the mock cream, and thickened the Philladelphia cream! Brilliant!!
the cake was goooooood!!
and generally too much food!