Another Chocolate Fudge Cake

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chocolate cake

The last chocolate fudge cake has already had a couple of outings which is enough … time to look for another.

Having a couple of recipes up your sleeve is useful so you don’t bore people with the same cake all the time … and you never know, the next recipe may be better. This recipe comes from James Martin’s Desserts*. James Martin’s cake recipes rarely disappoint but my first attempt at this little number was not entirely successful – the chocolate fudge topping ended up rock hard, unspreadable and, frankly, pretty tasteless. I suspect the problem was with me and my handling of the hot sugar and evaporated milk mix. One day when I’m feeling brave I’ll have another go. In the meantime, the cake itself is still good and I came up with a clever work around for filling and topping.

The cake itself contains wholemeal flour so you can even pretend it’s healthy.

Grease and baseline a 20cm springform tin and preheat the oven to 170°C bake (not fan).

Cream 175g of unsalted butter with 175g of soft brown sugar. Measure out 175g of wholemeal self raising flour and remove one heaped tbsp of flour. Replace with 1 heaped tbsp of good quality cocoa and add 1 heaped tsp of baking powder before mixing with the butter and sugar. Add 3 large eggs.

The mixture is likely to be a little stiff so add a splash of water … Martin doesn’t give any exact quantities here but you are aiming for a mixture that plops off a spoon knocked against the edge of the bowl or mixer. Not too stiff but not a runny batter either … Of course, add extra water slowly and carefully because you can’t undo it if you add too much!

Bake the cake for 40 – 45 minutes (in my oven, 40 minutes is perfect) – until a skewer comes out clean. Allow the cake to cool in the tin for a few minutes and then tip out on to a rack.

To finish the cake, cut in half and fill with jam (raspberry, of course!) and whipped cream and top with ganache. We used the ganache from the earlier chocolate fudge cake recipe, but made in half quantity – so about 100g of dark chocolate, 50g of butter (melted together) with about 70mL of thick cream beaten through.

Ganache suffers from the heat so you may have to refrigerate the cake, but if you can avoid it it is better left at room temperature.

*Also available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and worldwide from The Book Depository.

Rose Revolution

- Alex 6 Comments

Onfalos BBQ and some very tasty meat

There are plenty of internet based wine ‘initiatives’ around this summer … I’ve already written about the Great South Australian Wine Adventure and, in addition to this, we have the Summer of Riesling and SC Pannell’s All for One, to encourage us to drink Australian wine between the start of the new year and Australia Day.

I guess it’s the warm weather that makes us thirsty …

To add to this, we also have the Rosé Revolution which is all about recognising that rosé can be a serious wine for serious wine lovers. All too often rosés are made to appeal to a market segment that doesn’t normally drink wine – and this can leave them a little too sweet and unbalanced for those of us more used to sipping wines like Sauvignon Blanc or Shiraz.

Last night, Wine Australia hosted the Adelaide Rosé Revolution Live Event at Homestyle Solutions and I was lucky enough to go along and mingle with Adelaide’s twitterati while tasting a variety of rosés, served in Reidel glasses no less, and enjoying some very tasty food provided by Feast! Fine Foods.

The rosés that were poured came from a mix of local and interstate wineries and many were tied in with those being tasted by the Qwoff Boys and their live twitter tasting from the Yarra Valley. The heavy social media element meant that a lot of time was spent with noses buried in phones (when not in the glasses!) but we all managed to fit in a lot of normal socialising along with the serious wine talk.

Of the wines tasted last night (I tasted about eight, but had a serious pen malfunction part way through the evening) there was a huge range of colour and degrees of dryness. There’s been some chat about whether or not winemakers should strive to make dry rosés pale and the sweeter styles darker/pinker in colour … personally, I think that’s a terrible idea. If you think about all the work that has been done to persuade people away from the “white wine with fish and white meat” style of thinking, such a simplistic aim has to be a bad thing, not to mention the constraints it puts on winemakers.* Everyone perceives sweetness slightly differently (and sometimes a wine can have so many fruit flavours it can seem sweet when it’s actually dry!) that the best way to navigate a new rosé is to try it. If you can’t do that – read the back label or have a chat to your wine merchant. A good wine store will have employees who can tell you this type of thing (or they’ll be honest if they don’t know!).

So … my personal highlights of last night were the (sparkling) De Bortoli Rococo Rosé – bone dry and an absolutely delicious wine to serve as an aperitif. The retail price looks to be around $22 which makes it good value for money too (often sparkling rosés are a little more expensive than their white counterparts).

In the still rosés my favourite was the Longview Boat Shed Nebbiolo Rosé. Although some punters may find it ever so slightly off dry that’s definitely balanced by some good acidity and it’s tasty to boot. Not only that, it comes from our own Adelaide Hills. It retails just under $20 and would pair well with food that has a bit of weight and even a bit of spice – think a meaty fish with a slightly spicy marinade that’s been grilled.

My faves from the night

It was a great evening and really showcased the diversity that can be found in Australian rosés and certainly means that I for one will be giving rosé a little more consideration this summer.

If you’ve been involved in a Rosé Revolution event, or just have a favourite rosé the rest of us must know about, please do leave a comment!

* If you care … the colour in a rosé comes from the time the wine spends on the grape skins, but sweetness (or otherwise) comes from fermentation and how much sugar is fermented out of the wine. To try to connect two really unconnected things seems like a bad idea to me!

Great South Australian Wine Adventure

- Alex 2 Comments

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A couple of weeks ago I received a mysterious invitation to the launch of the Qwoff Boys‘ next venture – complete with personalised link for RSVP and enigmatic clues.  Earlier this year I’d very much enjoyed participating in their Semillon tweet-up from the Landmark Australia tutorial so I figured that even though information was scanty (Adelaide CBD, 2:30pm, Friday 19 November) it would be churlish not to attend.

After RSVPing clues filtered through during the week preceding the big day … attendees needed to meet at the Franklin St bus station, we needed to have our social media skills at the ready (I suspect Adelaide had not seen a greater collection of iDevices and other smart bits and pieces prior to this) and, finally, that our first stop would be Petaluma’s Bridgewater Mill.

So 2:30 Friday arrives and the 60 odd invitees pile themselves in to Des’s minibuses and head off out of Adelaide for the launch of the Great South Australian Wine Adventure.

Now, I’m a teensy tiny bit over the social network thing … some of it I find valuable, some annoying but necessary and some a really irritating duplication of several other networks. So I take some impressing. But impressed I am because in the Great South Australian Wine Adventure, the Qwoff Boys, in conjunction with the South Australian Tourism Commission, have come up with a promotional tool for the South Australian wine regions which is genuinely useful for both locals and visitors.

At present, only the Adelaide Hills region is live (the Barossa is going live on Friday) but this gives you a good idea of what the site will eventually offer for all our great wine regions. There’s the usual ‘useful’ stuff – like a listing of cellar doors and an events listing but (and this is the bit I really like) there’s also a selection of ‘trips’ for each region. The trips cover a handful of cellar doors (that are close to each other!) and at each cellar door visitors can check in and, potentially, earn rewards (for example, today, you receive a glass of The Local Sav Blanc if you check in at Golding Wines). If you check in at all the cellar doors on a trip you unlock a badge and (of course) there are also prizes to be won.

The trips are a real bonus – if you’ve ever found yourself entertaining guests from overseas or interstate, visiting wine regions (especially spontaneously) can be tricky. I find that the wineries I like are widely scattered and we spend more time driving around than wine tasting and we always end up missing lunch. The Great South Australian Wine Adventure allows you to look like you’re vaguely organised. And if you’re not in to the whole social media thing, there’s no requirement to check in.

That’s the idea behind the Great South Australian Wine Adventure and, like all good launches, we got to try the idea out for real … jumping back in the bus and heading off on one of the trips. My bus took us on Northern Exposure.

We started at Golding Wines where we enjoyed a few of their wines along with some tasting platters. Of special note was their sparkling (sensational value at something like $18 a bottle) and their Francis John Pinot Noir. Next we headed to Chain of Ponds, where we were spoilt with more food and wine: their little beef pies were amazing and this is definitely a winery I’ll be heading back to for lunch at some point. And we finished up at Barristers’ Block, where the wines had been matched with cheeses from Woodside Cheese Wrights.

At each winery staff went out of their way to accommodate us and make us feel welcome and I think everyone involved in the launch should feel well and truly chuffed: it was a great day.

And I can’t wait to try out the Barossa trips!