Kitchen Notes: Lemon Cake and Chocolate Pots

Kitchen Notes: Lemon Cake and Chocolate Pots April 22, 2017

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This whole week has been ‘house’ laying around Notes, and now I really need to go paint. So here is what I did for that nice cake, and also the chocolate pots, and then I must dash off.

Lemon Cake
Take the recipe for Orange Rum cake in the Joy of Cooking but then, because you have no orange and no rum, start to make the cake but don’t do anything that it says in the recipe. Just do the butter and sugar and then sort of sling in most of the flour that it calls for, into the mixer that is, because you don’t have any upper body strength to mix this by hand, and then dump in a whole lot of lemon zest and juice, and then take the butter that your husband had melted for his roast potatoes out from under his nose and throw that in the batter. Butter and flour (or flower, sure autocorrect, that sounds fine too) a bunt pan and fling the batter in and then walk away because you’re not allowed to have the oven for what seems like hours. Finally get the oven and put it in and bake it at some temperature or other, who knows because someone pushed a button to make the gage read in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit and no one can change it back. Bake until glorious. Cool, turn out onto a nice platter and then lather with lemon curd (from the Joy of Cooking–so easy to do and no variations at all).

Chocolate Pots
We have to have these at every feast, for Matt, who can’t live without them. For me they are not quite sweet enough and far too rich. One small spoonful is enough to satiate me. Matt, however would eat them by the serving spoon. Basically they are from one of Nigella’s books but I can’t remember which one–which ever one has the Elvis trashy food section. What I do is I melt twelve ounces of dark dark chocolate in a double boiler. Then I shove some milk and cream (whatever the recipe calls for–like maybe a cup of milk and two of cream or something) into a nice big bowl. And here is where I deviate from the recipe. I don’t heat the milk or anything. I put two eggs straight in the milk and beat them in and let it all sit and mellow while the chocolate melts. You don’t want the milk to be super cold, but you don’t need to worry about the egg cooking if you drizzle the melted chocolate slowly into the milk/egg mixture and beat furiously. Then I usually do one turn with my immersion blender and pour the emulsified and decadent mixture into my beautiful little pots made for me by a friend and shove them in the fridge. But then I try to take them out a little bit before they’re wanted because the chocolate shouldn’t really be cold. It should be room temperature, smooth, luxurious, and consumed with a little swirl of cream poured straight over the top.

Easter Is Not Over! You still have like six weeks to eat sugar!
Have a delicious day!


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