Tuesday 23 October 2012

Crash! Boom! Cake!

To start with, this is not the 'Cos every time I seem to fall in love - Crash! Boom! Bang! I find the heart but then I hit the wall - Crash! Boom! Bang!' kind of post. Nor is it a 'Hello, you fool, i love you, C'mon join the joyride' thing, although I hope this ride will bring you some joy.


That's what is all about: a cake! However, as you may know - that is if you are an avid reader of this very blog - it's not all smooth sailing.
The past - solidly nailed in the plank of time - it can not be changed, unless you have a flying Delorean, which you most probably don't have. It has been quite some time until I came very close to one the last time.
Whatsoever, the past is back there and at times it may come to the fore in your mind - hopefully not to haunt you. Things that happened your past may come back as nice memories, or they give you new ideas, or they may help you to avoid bad situations, or ... who knows what ... maybe bake a cake?
Anyway, let's talk about 'Crash!' first of all. I don't think that the fact that I was hit by a car after school and the car sent me flying through the air. Nor did it have any effect when a car hit me while I was on my bike - well it was not so bad. The car wasn't even broken, nor was the bike, nor was I. About the effects of the third incidence when I was travelling with someone else in the car (I wasn't driving) I'm not so sure. The car was totally ruined. After all what would you expect, when being hit by a lorry at more or less full speed. I was only one night in intensive care.
Hm, that wasn't the plan at the outset of this post, to ponder over such things ...
I rather wanted to focus on 'Boom!' and 'Cake!'. So, have a bit of patience waiting for the cake, while we go through 'Boom!'
Maybe I can help you with another cake photo.


I'm not sure whether that helped, but let's go on.
As a child - somewhere between the first two and the last crash - I had a chemistry set. It even made me want to pursue a career in chemistry. But things happened differently and continue to happen quite differently again.
Anyhow, with some experimenting you can do funny and interesting things ... and not just growing crystals with magnesium sulphate. I won't talk about setting the stairs on fire and I will not disclose the recipe of gunpowder either at this point, although we had our share with that as well in the past.
Rather, I must say, we nearly made it to the cake. Once I nearly took all the chemicals I had in my chemistry set and mixed them all together. This resulted in a gooey brown substance, which didn't bring any joy at all.
'Bang!' Here we are! How much more joy do brown gooey substances bring in the field of cooking or better say baking.
Therefore, let's talk about that gooey substance on that cake and, of course, about the cake itself, that is, the thing beneath the brown gooey substance, which, as we know it, is nothing else but chocolate.
While experimenting in the kitchen with some ingredients I wanted to ... eh ... get rid off (obviously not the chocolate), I came up with this chocolate almond kind of cake.

Ingredients (if you please so):
100 g sugar
150 g sour cream (I needed to get rid of this for sure)
1 tsp vanilla extract (or similar)
100 g flour
200 g ground almonds
50 ml milk
6 egg whites (it's just a guess ... I had frozen some unspecified numbers of them over the course of the last weeks or months)
Salt
200 g of chocolate (half of the one I used was with Daim pieces)

Preparation (if you dare):
Now that we know what ingredients we have we can use them. Briefly scan over it.
If I would have taken a slightly different direction, this could have been a giant macaron cake, but now it's a bit closer to a Swedish almond tart.
Start with mixing the sour cream, the sugar and the vanilla extract. Then continue with the flour and the ground almonds.
As you can imagine, this is quite dry. No chance, I had to add some liquid. So I took the milk. Maybe it was even a slightly bit more, maybe just 10 ml.
Already things look a bit better.
Now to the egg whites ... I really could have gone for macarons. However, at that point, time and patience didn't allow for that. So I just went on with beating the egg whites together with a pinch of salt until it got to where all beaten egg whites have to go.
Following that rough beating, I tried my best to be gentle while incorporating the beaten egg whites into the cake dough.


All that went into the cake tin in order to be baked at 180°C for 40 minutes. You have to watch it as you most probably know your oven best.
After baking it needed a bit of time to cool down.
Meanwhile, that was a good opportunity to melt the chocolate. Said and done!
The last thing that remains is then too pour the chocolate over the cake. Of course, you can put the cake into the fridge afterwards or ... just use your imagination.


So ... 'every time I seem to bake with love - Crash! Boom! Cake!'

11 comments:

  1. What a light and wonderful cake! I love that glossy chocolate topping! And glad there was no crash with this cake...or was there????

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  2. Roxette, that was blast from the past, lol. The cake looks very tempting.

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  3. Great story, can't believe how many car crashes you've been in! I love your teapot on little legs by the way! Just realised I wasn't following (not sure how I missed that one!). Great cake too!

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    1. I didn't even mention the accident that killed my favourite car ... hm, it killed three cars ... but there was absolutely no injuries to any people.
      The teapot was a special offer, because the lid wasn't 100% the way it was supposed to be.
      Hm, I thought you were following. I saw your picture on the list, I believe. I don't know what happened.

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  4. Crikey Chris, you've done well to survive three car crashes - hopefully that's your three done and dusted now. Fantastic cake, it must be really light using all those egg whites and the Daim chocolate on top is a masterstroke.

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    1. I'm glad I didn't have anything the last 10 years apart from that rear view mirror that I ripped off, because I came a bit too close to the side.
      I enjoyed the Daim chocolate on top of the cake very much and it was absolutely no problem that I dilluted it with the same amount of dark chocolate.

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  5. LOL! Love your writing. Very funny. I was hit by a car once while crossing the street and tossed 30 feet. Does that count as a crash?

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  6. pass me this beautiful slice :)

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