Baking and Ratios
04 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Cake, Desserts, Recipes Tags: baking, chocolate, dessert, eggless, ovenless, ratio cooking, ratios, recipe, require chilling
A love of maths is a supremely helpful quality for baking. Even if I mostly divide recipes by use of chrome’s toolbar rather than in my head these days, it’s my good old standard grade maths grounding that means I know to type in “300/3*2” to work out that 2/3 of 300 is 200. Ok, so I wouldn’t actually have to type that in to work out that particular sum. Honest. Apparently you’re not really meant to tweak recipes which specify a number of eggs, but I’ve never had any problems with doing so: if you don’t have a large enough baking tin or enough people to feed to do the whole batch of 20 brownies, I’ve found doing 2/3 of it in a smaller tin works perfectly.
Anyway, so one of the great things about baking is ratios. Though I’ve known for years that the basic sponge cake recipe has the perfect ratio of 1:1:1:1 for the weights of butter:sugar:eggs:self-raising flour (cream butter and sugar; beat in eggs 1 at a time; fold in half the flour then the other half then bake for about 20 minutes at gas mark 5*), and discovered recently that 1:1 for cream:chocolate makes the perfect ganache (or truffles), for some reason I’d not really thought of extending that to other recipes. But actually, it makes them so much easier to remember. And when I was given a recipe for
Chocolate Truffle Cake
By the lovely Sarah W, it was the perfect opportunity to test this ratio thing out further.
(apologies for photo quality, my camera was elsewhere so had to use a blackberry. Also, in the words of someone that wasn’t me: “It looks ok but tastes amazing!”)
The basic recipe serves about 8-12 depending on your portion-size, costs about £3.50 depending on the quality of your chocolate, and is:
225g digestive biscuits
450g dark chocolate
100g butter
1 pt double cream
cocoa powder/grated chocolate (for dusting/decoration).
- Relieve all your stress by bashing the digestives repeatedly over the head with a rolling pin until they are completely smooshed (my interpretation of ”smash biscuits to rough crumb form”) and melt the butter.
- Mix the crumbs and butter and press into a spring form cake tin (around 24cm). Place in the fridge.
- Melt the chocolate carefully, either in a bowl on top of some boiling water, or on a really gentle heat on the stovetop directly in a pot, or by turning the microwave power to low and stirring frequently.
- Whip the double cream until stiff.
- Pour in the melted chocolate and fold in gently – this may take a little time, but keep gently folding, making sure you don’t overmix.
- Pour chocolate cream mixture in over the base and leave to set in the fridge overnight.
- Dust with cocoa powder before serving.
But if you know that a pint is roughly 550 ml and it’s a sort of basic ganache topping (though the difference in method means it comes out completely differently), then you can take that ratio and make it 2:1:4:4 in terms of digestives:butter:chocolate:cream. And then make it for as many or as few people as you want. I had only 400g of chocolate so did 200g:100g:400g:400ml and that worked out fine (I also substituted the dark chocolate for 3 bars milk and 1 bar dark, and the double cream for single as the shop had run out, and that worked well – its recipients raved [somewhat to my surprise, in fact!], but I think it would be even better made with double or whipping cream as directed).
End summary: have fun, experiment, and look to see if your favourite recipes have an innate ratio that make them much easier to remember. And stay in school, kids, maths is the key to success…
*Interestingly when procrastinating by investigating for doing this blog, I found that using this method with plain flour should yield the denser pound cake. While for a different type of sponge cake, you can reclassify the ratio as egg:sugar:flour:melted butter (whisk eggs and sugar, fold in flour [plain or self raising], fold in melted butter)
Spice up your Ganache
22 Nov 2011 3 Comments
in Desserts, Recipes Tags: chocolate, cream, dessert, meal, ovenless, recipe, require chilling, student meal
I was in E Leclerc when I spotted Gu puds had 50c off. I was very sorely tempted by the thought of a nice pot of ganache… then realised that rather than paying 3€ with reduction for 3 tiny pots, I could get a carton of double cream for 40c and then use a couple of 40c bars of chocolates to make at least 4 of my own very generous portions!
The basic ganache recipe I use is heating a quantity of cream until it’s almost boiling (I’m told the word the French use for this is “singing”), and then taking it off the heat, adding the same quantity of broken chocolate in grams as cream in millilitres, leaving for a minute then stirring then whisking until it’s all melted. I thought it would be boring to have 4 massive pots of all chocolate ganache, so experimented:
In one, I put a sprinkle of ginger, in another a sprinkle of chilli powder, and in another a capful of raspberry liqueur (I left the fourth one plain). The glass bottom jars (Gu remnants in themselves) were useful because I could see where needed more scrapings. After each had been stirred, into the fridge to cool for a varying number of days.
The verdict?
Chocolate-Ginger: I ate it before it had had time to properly set. But it was still really yummy, with just a hint of a kick to it. Next time, I’ll whisk it more, as there are a few lumpy bits.
Chocolate-Raspberry: As you might expect, this didn’t really set properly. It did have a normally hard top, but inside was more of a thick liquid than a solid. I hadn’t labelled them and ate this after 1 day of refrigeration; maybe if it had been left longer (or been frozen! Mmmmm, shall be experimenting when I have a freezer) it would have been more properly set/ganache-like. Despite having said all this, it was really nice. Neither the alcohol flavour nor the raspberry flavour were too overpowering (you could also probably do this with raspberry juice or coulis; being in France, liqueur was cheaper for me and needed using up 
)
Chocolate-Chilli: Ate this on the 3rd day. Thought it was the plain chocolate one until the last few spoonfuls, when I suddenly got quite a powerful punch of chilli. The aftertaste is delicious…
Moral of the story: you can’t go wrong with cream and chocolate. Though make sure all the chocolate is melted in the premiere instance.
White Chocolate Cheesecake with Raspberries
16 Jun 2011 1 Comment
in Desserts, Recipes Tags: dessert, fruit, ovenless, recipe, require chilling
As requested by Gail, the white chocolate cheesecake that brought me round to the ways of the cheesecake after years of avoiding it based on the inclusion of the word “cheese” in the title! This has so much chocolate that the cream cheese is barely discernible, and the raspberries’ tartness sets off the sweet stodgyness of the cake wonderfully 
Bewarned, though: this is very filling, so when I say it serves 12, that’s not really an understatement! Apologies for the photo-quality, but I didn’t have a nice cheesecake dish and figured most students won’t either 
Chocolate Chip Cut-Out Cookies
03 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in Cookies, Recipes Tags: afternoon tea, baking, chocolate, recipe, require chilling
These are a pretty fun and yummy alternative to basic sugar or gingerbread cookies if you’re wanting to make shapes.
