Chocolate Truffle Cake, Nigella Lawson, Feast

Forgive the pictures this time. I forgot to take a picture of the cake when it was ready and by the time I remembered, it had been cut and messed up.

This Chocolate Truffle Cake recipe is from Nigella Feasts. It's a relatively simple recipe, although it does comprise 2 parts, which can be quite easy to mess up.

The first part, and the only baking part, is the making the chocolate meringue base of the cake. I made twice the amount required, as I didn't have a 20" springform tin, only a 22" one.

The second part of the recipe, involves melting down

the chocolate, which as highlighted in a previous post, can be a treacherous affair. This time round, I had to melt 400g (!) of dark chocolate with some golden syrup and rum, then mix it with double cream. First of all, I only had baker's chocolate and a couple of bars of 75% chocolate. So my chocolate was very very very dark. Then, the melting didn't seem to go as smoothly as before, possibly because there was just soooo much to melt. It was impossible to get the chocolate into that nice smooth paste. After mixing it with the cream, it realised that there were small chocolate lumps in the mixture!

The cake didn't turn out too badly, despite the few lumps of unmelted chocolate in it. It was very very rich, and because I used bakers chocolate, it was also very very very bitter, to the point of being sour! This is one recipe from Nigella's vast collection that results in a very unsweet cake. Even if I had used 70% chocolate, I think it would still have retained that bitterness, though probably not so intensely. The chocolate meringue base gave the cake a nice twist, and was a nice light touch juxtaposed with with intensity of the truffle.

I love chocolate truffle, but I'm not sure I would do this recipe again as I wasn't able to get the truffle smooth enough. And, in my book, that counts for everything in a chocolate truffle cake.

Meringue

Far too often, I've found myself with leftover egg whites from recipes that call for the yolks only. And the most recent one being the apple pie. Usually, I just dump the whites into some soup the next day or steam it up for lunch. I knew that I could probably find many recipes calling only for whites but I really keen to launch 2 back to back baking sessions just so I could use up the whites. That is, until I read Jamie Oliver's "Cook with Jamie" and read how easy it would be to whip up some meringues.

Basically, you need to make sure that all your equipment is dry and has absolutely no trace of oil. And you do need an electric mixer for this. I imagine it would be a pain doing this by hand.

Then you whip up your egg whites still they form stiff peaks. The test, Mr. Oliver says, is to turn the bowl of whipped whites over your head. They shouldn't budge. Then you whip in your caster sugar for many minutes, until the mixture is all smooth and shiny. Don't overwhip or the mixture could collapse. You could fold in various ingredients to get flavoured meringues, but I just left it plain. It goes into the oven, and you vary the cooking time depending on whether you want it all crisp, or crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside.

I managed to get 8 huge blobs from 3 egg whites. They looked really pretty and dreamy! Once done, they were beautifully crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside. They were really easy to whip up. My mum was impressed, as she has heard and seen enough about collapsed meringues.

I'm not sure what I can use them for though. I mixed them with some ice-cream, and it was good. The crispiness of the meringues with the creaminess of the ice-cream. You can't really eat too many of them neat, as they are rather sweet. Perhaps I'll test out an eton mess recipe, but the berries will be a bother to get as they are quite pricey. Anyway, the meringues are now sitting in the refrigerator looking rather forlorn.