Peak Chocolate

My parents are visiting us here in Santiago.  Today today we reached peak chocolate.  The two are not unconnected.
            The Chilean Easter bunny over-calculated how much chocolate four people could eat. The Australian Easter bunny wasn't interested in how much four people could eat - she knew how much chocolate she wanted to bring, and that was took up most of a suitcase.  A friend gave us a reasonably large chocolate chicken that turned out to be brooding a reasonably large clutch of chocolate eggs, and what with one thing or another (and most of a chicken) I am not feeling entirely my best.

Popo de Elefante

At the end of October we invited a few friends around for a light spot of Halloween cheer.  We even had a theme - worst nightmares in food and dress.
            Unfortunately for us, my "agoraphobia" costume suffered a fatal structural failure half an hour before the party started (the damned pigeon fell off my head), and on a warm October night, Mr "Arachnophobia" Tabubil flatly refused to wear 6 inches of fiberfill around his chest. To show willing, he hot glued a few wads of stuffing and a couple of spiders to and old t-shirt.  He looked a nightmare all right - a nightmare of last-minute design, and he lost his temper along with his stuffing.
            That's sort of how the evening went. Our friend Sal - rather a man's man - had found the food something of a stretch.  He's not a natural cook, so I set him a simple quiche - eggs, cheese and icky food coloring in a pre-made bought pastry shell.  Half an hour before the party (right when I was wrestling pigeons) he  called from the supermarket in a panic - the recipe had been in imperial measurements and he'd converted everything to grams to eight decimal places, but he was having trouble figuring out what sort of eggs he should buy - vitamin fortified?  Omega 3?  Grade AA?  Grade A?  Did he need to buy a baking dish?
            He arrived at the party 45 minutes late, looking cross and flustered.  He handed me a bag of chips and a jar of salsa.
            "The whole afternoon's been a horror show." He said sourly.  "I hate supermarkets. Why didn't you tell me that a quiche has too cook for an hour? Believe me, the chips count."*

*Speaking of horror shows, you wouldn't believe what a little pulverized walnut does to the look of  guacamole.  It's unspeakable.  Five stars and two hearty thumbs up. I recommend it for all your holiday parties.

And then there was the dessert.  Mr Tabubil and I own a recipe for chocolate mousse.  I may have mentioned it once or twice before, in passing. To do it right, you soak raisins in rum for an entire week beforehand and you use rather a lot of heavy cream  - 
           A triple batch of it makes a rather nice bowl of popo de elephante (elephant poop.): a voluptuous tureen of turds, studded with oozing alcoholic raisins, the heavy smell of rum rising up like drunken heat in summer* from the swirl of well-set soup -

*I might have used two full cups of rum in the raisins, and I might have tipped what was left in the bottle into the bowl as I stirred. Waste is a terrible thing.

After a couple of hours staring at the guacamole, our guests ate lots of it. With a pleasantly buzzy fruit drink on the side.  The blood-red ice hand floating in the punch bowl was a nifty touch. They giggled. And drank some more.  And ate a second helpings of the mousse  -
            Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of our guests got pished.
            One young lady had three glasses before we caught her.  She giggled, climbed carefully onto the sofa and closed her eyes -  right next to Sal - who is Bermudan and treats his relationship with rum like a religion, but who was lying with his head on the back of his chair and his feet up on hers, sort of snoring, and cradling his third bowl of elephant poop.

Post-script:
We really had radically overestimated how much mousse we'd need for a party of 12, and the next morning we still had a couple of liters of the stuff.  
            We gave it to our neighbors. They brought the bowl back the very next day - licked clean.
            Looking at us sort of anxiously, "That was the best dessert" they said "that we have ever had in our lives - would you like a plant?" 
            And they thrust a potted fern at our chests.

It must have been some seriously good mousse.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone!  Best wishes to all on this totally non-sectarian day of chocolate, finger-paint and bunny ears!

This year, I celebrated by dying chicken eggs with a friend and her two small children.  Bunny ears in place, the kids parked themselves at the kitchen ledge mixing bowls of food-color and vinegar.  Danette and I had a slightly more haute-couture technique in mind. 
            It is very elegant and simple - you take a stack of thrifted silk ties with nice bright patterns, and you cut the fabric into squares, and you wrap and tie the silk tightly around the eggs, and you boil the eggs in water with vinegar for quite a long time, and when the eggs are cooled, you unwrap them and you find that the patterns on the silk have transferred artistically to the eggshells.  It's very simple and very elegant and very lovely.
            Danette and I leaned on the kitchen ledge and snipped and wrapped and tied, while a small child dunked boiled eggs in yellow food coloring and solemnly explained that we did this to honor the Easter Rabbit, who once a year pooped out chocolate eggs for all the good little children everywhere. 
            My eyes crossed.  "Are you sure that's not the Easter Chicken?  I thought the Easter Chicken laid the eggs, and the Easter Bunny gives them away in baskets." 
            "Nope."  The small child fished the egg out of the yellow and held it half-way in and half-way out of the red food coloring, making a sort of ombre effect. "The Rabbit poops, and we get them under our pillows."
            Who am I to argue? The Easter Bunny and the Easter Chicken haven't graced my house with the Big Hop in years - I'm old enough that I'm expected to go find my own eggs.

The kid's eggs turned out fantastic.  Kid #1  did a whole Jackson Pollock thing with dribbles and stripes drawn on with a wax candle, and Kid #2 wanted pure colors - 
            "Not even a stripe?  Or your name in wax?" 
            "No thank you." He said politely.  "I like mine just plain.  They're perfect."  
            And they were. Really.

Ours, on the other hand…
            Our haute-couture eggs didn't come out quite exactly like the ones in the internet tutorial.  We had wrapped the silk as tightly as possible, but somehow the patterns on the silk didn't adhere to very much of the eggshell, and where it did stick we mostly got lumpy streaks and smears, and one of the ties turned out to contain a very unstable dye that gave everything a base shade of purple. 
            Some test-dyes might have been advisable, in retrospect. I might have done quite a lot of preliminary research, because after-the-fact, the deeper I looked into things, the less simple the silk-dyed-egg technique apparently was - there is quite a lot of crosss-chatter on crafting sites trouble-shooting the elegantly simple instructions and suggesting where to get lots of fresh silk ties in a very big hurry. 
            And most of the eggs burst during boiling, and they hadn't been very nice eggs in the first place, so the blotchy swirls smelled unpleasantly sulpherous and not at all like anything an Easter Rabbit would want underneath her in her Easter nest. 
            They were not, in short, our best efforts.

Mr Tabubil was very severe when he came home. "Not a failure.  Don't use that word.  Did you have fun?"
            "Well - " 
            "You all enjoyed yourselves, didn't you?" 
            "I guess - " 
            "Then it wasn't a failure, was it?" 
            "I suppose not." 
            "Right." And then he spoiled it all by giggling. "It's exactly like one of those Pinterest Fails. The instructions look so simple and clear and go step by step so that absolutely anyone can do it - they just don't tell you that doing it correctly needs five years of art school or an apprenticeship with the Culinary Institute of America. The result at home is… less polished.  But you had fun, right? That's what counts."
            The swirls on our eggs were lovely, when you really looked at them, and didn't compare them to the perfect internet version. I went away and ate some chocolate rabbit poop. Non-sulpherously.

Recipe: The Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse of All Good Dreams

Mr Tabubil tells me that my chocolate recipes are my dowry, and dreamily recounts the way I came to him with a notebook: a fat cardboard portfolio bursting with photocopies and handwritten recipes, all heavily smudged around the edges with egg, cream and chocolate – and rum.       
            I’m a boozy sort of cook. The recipes that Mr Tabubil counts among his favorites are a chocolate almond cake – with rum; a chocolate raisin mousse – with  lots of rum; and a boozy chocolate fondue sauce that kicks your teeth down the back of your throat and puts you to sleep at the table. If I could find a way to put rum into a cookie I'd try it, but philosophically speaking, an alcoholic cookie, doesn't feel quite right.  A cookie's a wholesome thing, and rum is hot and thick and dances on a tropical beach at midnight with its shirt off.  For cookies, dark chocolate alone (85% caffeine!) is as far as I dare go. Caffeine leave me dancing on a beach at midnight with my shirt off and bongo drums banging in both my ears, so I reckon that is sufficiently damned decadent.

             Chocolate, done properly, is a mouth full of silk and black velvet – with that lingering caffeine buzz.  Alcohol is a mouth full of fist and somebody else’s teeth.  Chocolate and alcohol, together, are a pairing that is divinely inspired, in which the alcohol ceases to be boozy, and becomes something intangible, a sensation that hovers, ghost-like, at the edge of your plate.  Try to pin it down and you won’t find it, but if you let go and return your attention to your plate and your fork, it will sneak sideways around the edges of your palate and lift the chocolate up into the realm of the sublime.

             Mr Tabubil has come over to the computer and snorted hugely and said that I wouldn’t know what to do with an elusive alcoholic essence if it came up to me on the street, wrapped its arms around my knees and begged me to take it home.  My recipes, he says, use alcohol in quantities that resemble a one-two punch, a knockout blow that leaves the eater flat on the floor with the carpet wrapped around his head.

             To which I replied that a dessert that isn’t intended as a showstopper is a waste of time and chocolate for both guest and baker, and referred him to the chocolate mousse I made for a party last Saturday night – a chocolate mousse that broke two diets, left four guests under the table (albeit smiling) and sent everyone home in taxis.

            Mr Tabubil snorted again and said it was a fault of my upbringing, and went away. 

            Mr Tabubil is not entirely wrong.  I was raised in a household both sozzly and decadent. Not to drink- my parents never drank, but they kept booze on hand for guests who did, and after the really good dinner parties there were always half-bottles by the score that needed using up - so we cooked with them. And my mother, an almost-teetotaler, tippled while she cooked, and dinners that started with beef bourguignon went down deep and twisting rabbit holes to places that were extremely interesting indeed.  

             Her magnum opus was the evening, two days after a really good party, when I came home to find that she'd used the leftover red wine in a cabbage stew, soaked the cucumber salad in chardonnay instead of vinegar (I don't recommend the substitution) and, halfway down the second half-bottle of the stuff, she'd had a brainwave and boiled the rice in champagne.
             It wasn't a meal that was precisely edible, but it got us through all of the leftover bottles, all right. The liqueurs and chocolates that we ate for dessert were almost conventional - except for the moment when someone giggled and cried 'whoops!' and sat down and missed her chair - with a carafe of hot coffee in her hand.  The next morning was all about caffeine - believe me- but the bongo drums came first.

             In her honor, and in the honor of the six sozzly guests of Saturday last, I present to you my mother’s own recipe for Chocolate Mousse.  You can work with the given amount of rum, or you can go the whole Tabubil and magnify it.  I leave the choice to you.  I will only note that dinner invitations to our house are a highly sought-after commodity, and a guest who doesn’t have a headache after the dessert course is a guest we haven’t yet satisfied. 

Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse

Begin Marinating raisins 2 days ahead of serving.

Make the mousse 1 day ahead of serving.  

You need at least twenty-four hours to soak the raisins (a full week is even better), and the completed dessert must rest in the fridge for another twenty-four before you serve it so that the flavors can blend and mellow.  Serve it early and you will be astonished by its insipid banality.  Wait a day and you will be hit with a bolt of pure chocolate goodness.

Ingredients:

225g semi-sweet chocolate (substitute for 112 g dark chocolate and 112 milk chocolate)

1/2 cup sour cream

3 eggs, separated

1/2 cup loosely chopped raisins (slice them open to allow entree to the alcohol)

3 tablespoons dark rum (start with 1 1/2 and add the rest as and when needed)

300ml thickened cream

2 tablespoons castor sugar

The day before you plan to make the mousse:  

 Put the rum and raisins together in a shallow bowl.  Cover and leave to soak.  Add more rum as and when necessary.  Use as much as you like!

The day of the cooking:   

Bring the sour cream and egg yolks to room temperature.  Melt the chocolate.  Add the melted chocolate to the sour cream and egg yolks and stir until smooth; add the raisins and all the unabsorbed alcohol.  Lightly whip the cream and fold it in. 

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, gradually beating in sugar.  Fold beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture. 

Spoon into serving glasses (keep portions small!) and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy!

(Important note – you must always add melted chocolate TO the eggs and dairy – and not the reverse.  There’s a complicated chemical reason for this that I can’t precisely recall  – but I can tell you from extensive personal experience that if you do it wrong the chocolate tends to seize and solidify and ruin, and you have to start over!)

Red Wine Cake Donts

After the fiasco of the vegan brownies I wanted to cook something that would not explode or sink or turn into powder under pressure – and restore my personal sense of kitchen confidence thereby.
            My mother-in-law's birthday is coming up, so I had an excuse to start baking.  I was thinking of another red velvet cake; a proper one, loaded with eggs and brown sugar and dairy products (I'm a cooking snob, okay?) but along the way to choosing a recipe, I became distracted by something I'd never heard of before: Red Wine Cake.
            Red Wine Cake is a chocolate cake where the moisture is provided by red wine instead of oil or butter. It sounded fantastic, and the whole entire internet was raving about it.  I had to try it.

            Yesterday I baked one - a tester cake.  The batter, once mixed, was amazing– a rich, chocolate-y cream that tasted like the best glass of red wine you ever had served with a side of almond panforte.  I restricted myself to half a cup or so of the batter before I popped it into the oven, and the cake settled down to rising happily and giving off rich alcoholic smells –

            But after all that, and in spite of its batter-y glory, the cake was unequivocally not a success. To look at, it was a lovely chocolate sponge, but the rich, winey flavor had an acrid, acidic aftertaste, and and the cake was dry dry dry – we found ourselves sucking our tongues for moisture as we ate.

            It also had a rather...awkward side effect.There was very little dairy in the cake, relative to most of the things I bake, but even with lactaid tablets to help the dairy go down, the lactose effects were outsize.  I ate a bite or two, and had to lie down. I felt wretched, nauseous.  My stomach was churning and I tossed and turned in my bed - I just couldn't get comfortable.  Mr Tabubil came into the room to check on me and I rose to meet him, and caught myself in the mirror and stared.

            Mr Tabubil yelled. “I've never seen you look so bloated! You look as if you’re five months pregnant. Are you allright?!?!"

            As I turned away from the mirror to answer him, there was a… let's just call it a spontaneous, gaseous dorsal emission, shall we?  Like a trumpet exploding. Mr Tabubil stared in shock. I turned back to the mirror and understood why - my bloating had reduced by seventy-five percent!!!!!

            So possibly we will not be making this cake for my mother-in-law's birthday.

            And Mr Tabubil may stop laughing sometime next week.

On Baking Vegan

I love to bake.  I really Really REALLY (with all the superlatives of an 11 year old girl who has just discovered unicorns and rhythmic gymnastics) love to bake.

            My mother is a fantastic cook, but I am the better baker.  (With the possible exception of the time that I got the tea-towel caught in the electric hand mixer and we had to scrape cookie batter off of the walls all the way over in the living room.  It only happened once, and shouldn’t still count against me.  Can we let it go?)

            While I was growing up, she and I tag-teamed in the kitchen - I kitchen-maid-ed for her while she cooked and she kitchen-maid-ed for me while I baked.  Our kitchen ran very smoothly and produced some seriously epic meals, but our system had one failing.  It wasn’t apparent at the time, but when I moved out and began cooking for myself, I discovered that while I was washed dishes and peeled potatoes, I was failing to learn the intuitive feel for a casserole or stir-fry that I had for a cake batter.

            When Mr Tabubil and I moved in together, the good meals happened when it was his turn to make dinner.  I could manage a plain roast, and produce a saucepan of plain steamed rice, but anything else was beyond me. 

            My magnum opus happened the evening I got home slightly earlier than Mr Tabubil and decided to pan-fry a pair of large pork chops I had found in the fridge - and have dinner ready for him when he got home.  Because I am very nice that way.

            I didn’t know much about meat but I knew that you were supposed to cook pork chops until all the pink had been cooked away.  I hadn’t realized that it would take so very long to happen – when Mr Tabubil got home an hour later, the apartment was full of smoke, I was sweaty and cross, the pork chops were dry as a bone and pure charcoal to a quarter inch depth on every side, and they were still pink in the middle. 

And Mr Tabubil had to sit down right there in the kitchen doorway to properly appreciate just what I had done to an extremely nice and extremely expensive pair of prime rib-eye steaks that he’d been resting in the fridge in anticipation of a really bang-up Friday dinner.

I didn’t truly learn how to cook until we moved to Whyalla, in rural South Australia, and began taking lessons with Saul the cordon bleu chef, who gave me, first and foremost, a basis of technique, and then, later, the beginning of an understanding.  These days I count myself a perfectly capable cook – in certain things, possibly even slightly better than the average.  But when it comes to baking – I rock.

            I do. I really do.  Cakes, brownies, cookies, bars, soufflés and lamingtons - bring on the sugar and the chocolate and the spices and the booze and the egg whites and the cream and the butter –!

            Which presents me with certain problems at the moment.  Here in Santiago my social circle includes several vegans, and the dairy and the eggs - even the sugar - aren’t working anymore, and I’m having real trouble finding recipes that make palatable alternatives.

            I’ve been all over the internet, and even ordered a book or two, but quite a lot of vegan-substitute ingredients are unavailable here in Chile, and I’ve found that even the best regarded recipes are rather hit and miss.  I’ve added a moderately decent red-velvet cake to my repertoire, and an adequate maple-syrup and hazelnut muffin.  My vegan friends rave, but not to put too fine a point on it, most of the vegan recipes I’m making are deeply mediocre.

            And Merely Acceptable is Not How I Roll.  Someone once tried to tell me that not every dessert needs to be a showstopper, and as far as I’m concerned, they might as well have been speaking Swahili or Bhasa Indonesia (neither of which I speak.)   If you’re going to invest yourself in a dessert, it had better be worth every single calorie.  Go Big, or Go Home.

            So when I stumbled onto a vegan recipe for chocolate brownies last month – a recipe that was not only good by vegan standards, but stood handsomely against most regular brownie recipes I know, I was ecstatic.  (They're not quite up there with the Best Chocolate Brownies Ever, but very few things in this universe are.  Sort of like the Chinese synchronized divers in the 2012 Olympics.  The nations of the world might duke it out for bronze and silver, but the Chinese divers were  diving on another plane entirely.)  And when Alba (who is vegan) asked me to make her birthday cake, I said ‘Sure!  No worries!’ and felt extremely smug and reckoned that my social cred was going to earn maximum points for the price of an hour in the kitchen on a Friday afternoon.

These brownies consist mostly of flour, melted chocolate and home-made applesauce, tossed together into a bowl, then stirred, and baked for half an hour in the oven. The night before the party, I mixed up a big double batch  and popped them into the oven, where they completely refused to bake. They wouldn't rise, they wouldn't brown -

          They boiled.  Mr Tabubil and I watched through the oven door as they simmered and bubbled, a lake of brown apple stew with ribbons of chocolate that rose like lava from the depths of the baking pan and swirled and sank again –

            We took them out after a full hour and threw them into the fridge for the night.

            “Maybe” Mr Tabubil said hopefully, “they’ll harden in there. Like a chocolate cheesecake sort of thing?”

            After a whole night in the fridge, the brownies remained a liquid.  Of a sort.  The sugar in the apple had caramelized and the alleged brownies had become two pans of a strange, sucking, toffee-like tar.  When I poked at it, my finger didn’t want to come away.  When I sliced into it, the incisions oozed slowly closed again while I watched, and as for the taste, Mr Tabubil has fillings in his teeth and I have crowns on mine and neither of us were silly enough to experiment.

            I had a theory.  The recipe called for melted chocolate or cocoa powder (eight ounces of each) and possibly – just possibly, I had misremembered myself and used cocoa powder the first time i made the recipe?  And maybe my applesauce had been too thin?  Mr Tabubil nipped off to the shops to buy up all their cocoa powder while I made up another batch of applesauce, and we stirred everything together and…

Um. 

Eight ounces is rather more cocoa powder than people might appreciate if they haven’t tried this themselves - it is finer and thinner than flour and a little goes a very very long way. The applesauce melted into it like it had never existed, and I had a mixing bowl that looked like an overflowing dustbath for chocolate sparrows. I added a cup of soy milk to wet it down.  The cocoa powder didn’t even notice.  I added another cup, and then I doubled the applesauce. The air in the kitchen was turning brown with floating cocoa powder, but at last, I had something that approximated at least a bread dough – if not a cake batter.  Good enough, we reckoned.  We threw it into the oven where it began to rise away happily, like a real cake. 

            And came out of the oven with the density of plutonium, and tasting exactly like the bowl of straight-up cocoa powder that it was.  Edible, it was not.

            Mr Tabubil and I had an afternoon engagement with another couple for an double-bill of back-to-back superhero movies. 

            “I think” I sighed “that I’m not going to make it to the cinema. Give my apologies, will you?”

            While Mr Tabubil went off to watch the new Batman movie, I whipped up an emergency red-velvet cake, and collapsed limply into bed for a nap.  And got up again to have a shower (my hair was full of cocoa powder, and my arms were streaked red to the elbows with food coloring from the red-velvet cake. There had been a small accident with the hand-mixer, and the kitchen looked like an abattoir.  Red food-coloring just keeps on giving.) and dashed off to the Parque Arauco mall to meet the others for the second movie on the afternoon’s schedule.

            And after that we had to go home and have a nap because we still had to ice the cakes before we got to the birthday party.  

            I wasn’t at all sure about the cocoa-powder neutron bomb, but Mr Tabubil made soothing noises and talked me into taking both.

It was a very nice party, if slightly schizophrenic.  The non-smokers refused to go outside on the balcony because out there it was freezing.  The smokers sat on the small balcony and froze and refused to come inside at all.  At one o'clock in the morning Alba’s husband Sebastian orchestrated a détente and turned down the lights and came out with my red velvet cake and we all sang happy birthday.  It was quite a nice cake.  People smiled a lot and I felt moderately fulfilled on a personal level.

            Half an hour later, Alba sliced up my death-by-cocoa cake and passed that around as well.  I picked up my purse and prepared to do a runner, but glory to the kitchen gods - 

            The vegans all dug in with relish and had a second slice!
            Which was about what Mr Tabubil had said when he'd talked me into bringing it.  "It's going to be pretty boozy party. So bring it.  When people get tanked, they'll eat anything." 

            And now I have a reputation as an epic-fantastic master baker, based, mostly, as far as I can tell, on the fact that I actually bake. 

            That’s a good thing, right? 

Recipe: No-Holds-Barred Tiramisu

Here's a recipe for tiramisu from our dairy-happy cordon bleu cooking teacher. It even makes native Italians happy. Holy Hootenanny!

No-Holds-Barred Tiramisu

Serves 4-6, depending

Ingredients

2 packets of Italian sponge fingers

375g dark chocolate

375ml cream

4 tablespoons instant coffee (the Good stuff.  No International Roast.  Don't even think about it.)

5 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla essence

180 ml Irish Baileys (or cheaper equivalent - i.e. Erin Cream)

600ml cream

cocoa powder for dusting

Place the chocolate and 375ml of cream in the microwave and heat until the chocolate has melted.  Stir until it combines to form a ganache.

Place 4 tablespoons of instant coffee in a coffee-cup. Fill the cup 3/4 full with hot water, add 2 tablespoons of sugar and stir till coffee and sugar are dissolved.

Whip 600ml cream with 1 tablespoon of vanilla essence and 5 tablespoons of sugar until firm peaks form.

In a deep tray, layer:

Drizzle of chocolate ganache

Layer of sponge fingers

1/2 coffee mixture

Drizzle of chocolate ganache

1/4 bottle of liqueur

Layer of whipped cream (about 1/3 of whipped cream)

Repeat Layering. Top the confection with the remaining cream - enough to create a 'mask' over the dish - a thick firm layer that does not show the contours of the dish below.

Through a small sieve, dust the tray with cocoa powder.

Refrigerate.  Serve chilled.  If you're like me, make sure you have your Lactaid (TM) tablets in your pocket because you ARE going to get a wicked stomach ache.  Halleluiah!

Recipe: Pumpkin Soup (and a Taxi Full of Grandma)

Last week it was Mr Tabubil's turn to bring something edible to his friday morning meeting, and everyone in his office voted, as they should have done, for the Best Chocolate Brownies Ever.
            I seemed to owe everybody chocolate last week - Mr Tabubil's office, my students, my supervisors, my sewing circle -
            What with a kitchen full of racks of cooling brownies I ran late for work.  The bus only comes past once an hour, so I called a taxi -
          And swung inside, with a knapsack full of tupperware tubs full of baked heaven.
The driver took a long, deep breath -
            "Oh my."   She sighed.  Long and deep and rapturous.  "Oh MY.  You smell - "
            "I do?"  I said, chagrined.  "I've had a shower, I've changed my clothes - I can't possibly still smell of cooking!"
            "Oh you do." She said emphatically.  "You smell like -oh, I shouldn't say it."
            "Like what?"  I said, intrigued.
            "Oh, you smell like my grandmother.  Like you remember your grandmother smelling from when you're small, after she's been baking good things all day."
            I gave her a brownie.
            And she gave me a recipe for pumpkin soup, and talked about the importance of not forgetting to add the bacon at the end all the way to the school.  I'd never contemplated bacon in a pumpkin soup.  Can't imagine why.  Bacon goes with everything.

Yesterday I caught another taxi (honestly, when the bus runs  through town once an hour in each direction, unless you have a lot of spare time on your hands, you tend to take a lot of taxis.) and the soup-lady was my driver.  
As soon as we were rolling:
            "Did you make the soup?"
            "The soup was fantastic."
            "Really? You really liked it?"
            "It was amazing."  I said.  "I made it on the weekend, when I boiled up a new pot of chicken stock."
            "I'm so glad."  She said, gazing at me in the rear view mirror.  "You wouldn't happen to have any more of those chocolate brownies on you, would you?"
            I laughed and said no, and she sighed and looked back to the road and was the model of silent chauffeurial service until we arrived at my destination.
            At which point she snapped the locks shut and turned around in her seat and said that if I liked the recipe for Pumpkin Soup I was going to love her pasta salad.  And her Backyard BBQ Hawaiian Coleslaw.

Pumpkin Soup:
1 Liter home-made chicken stock (the store bought stuff is insipid. Pre-packaged mediocrity.)
1 butternut squash
3 medium sized potatoes
4 carrots
3 cm of peeled ginger -diced
2-3 cloves garlic - crushed (only add garlic and ginger if you haven't used any in your stock.)
1 pack of English bacon (the sort with a minimum of fat)
A little sour cream
Fresh mint

Peel the vegetables.  Dice them and boil them, along with the ginger and garlic, in the stock till soft.  (20 minutes or so.) Mash with a potato masher.  Finely dice the bacon and toss into the soup.  then pull out the hand-held mixer (or the blender) and blend till you have a soft puree.   Stir in two or three spoons of sour cream to give it a kick. 
Dice a handful of mint.
Serve the soup with a spoonful of sour cream on top, and a side of diced mint to stir into it as you eat.

Hawaiian Coleslaw:
One packet of supermarket coleslaw mix from the fresh veg. section.
Half a bottle of mayonnaise.
One can of crushed pineapple (with juices.)
Tip everything into a bowl and stir until everything is coated with everything else.

I confess I haven't tried this one.  It's a little intimidating.

Recipe: The Best Chocolate Brownies EVER

Victorian Wisdom:
To ascertain whether a woman is passionate or not...
take a muddy dog into her parlor.

Or make her brownies and see if she swoons.

My second-all-time-favorite Goodwill find is a copy of 'Death By Chocolate' by Marcel Desaulniers - director emeritus of the Culinary Institute of America, and a man who has devoted many years of his life to a great and consuming passion - theobroma cacoa.
            This love song to the chocolate bean is choked with gorgeously lit photographs of lush, glistening, dark and fiendishly complicated desserts so deathly rich (calorie counts by slice helpfully provided on the opposing pages) that merely carrying a copy of this book through a cardiovascular ward would have a significant effect on Australian mortality statistics.
            But between recipes for Chocolate Wedlock (chocolate sponge cake, chocolate raspberry mousse, white chocolate butter cream and white chocolate ganache) and Chocolate Devastation (Chocolate whiskey-soaked raisin ice cream, mocha meringue and bittersweet ganache) and the awe-inspiring Chocolate Transportation (Cocoa meringue, chocolate mousse, chocolate brownie, chocolate ganache, mocha mousse and mocha rum sauce) we found a simple, unpretentious little recipe for chocolate brownies.
            Holy Cats!  What a brownie recipe - we were in love before they even went into the oven!  In fact, we weren't even convinced that they needed to be cooked.  We mixed, stirred, whisked, tasting at every step, and when the last spoon of  sour cream dissolved into the thick chocolate brew, we tasted one more time and sighed, our eyes glazing over and our smiles growing dreamy, and cordially invited each other to pull up a spoon.
            And if you don't stockpile the ingredients for this recipe away against the nearest rainy day, then your heart is stone and your taste buds atrophied and your sense of the fitness of things that of a small and timid dormouse.


Simply The Best Chocolate Brownie Ever

2 oz (56g) plus one teaspoon unsalted butter
1 ½  oz (42g) plus one teaspoon plain flour
1 oz (28g) cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
5 oz (142g) semisweet chocolate, broken up for melting (if in Australia, use Old Gold brand chocolate - the two bean strength.  If semisweet chocolate is not available, use half dark chocolate and half milk chocolate)
3 eggs
8 oz (227g) caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 oz (56g) sour cream
8 oz (227g) semi-sweet chocolate, broken into chunks
I personally believe that brownies are incomplete  with walnuts or pecans inside.  Mr. Tabubil claims the opposite.  If you side with me, add 8 oz chopped pecans or walnuts when you add the semisweet chocolate chunks.

Preheat the oven to 325 F (170C)

Lightly coat a 9x12 inch (or comparable) cake tin (we used a pyrex baking dish) with butter, then flour the tin with 1tsp flour, shaking out the excess.

Sift together the remaining flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt.  Set aside.



Place the eggs, sugar and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a balloon whisk.  Mix on high until thick and white and fluffy.  If you're not worried about salmonella, at this point you can chuck the rest of the ingredients and pull out a spoon and eat sweet heaven all afternoon.  If you're determined to continue, add the melted chocolate mixture and beat until well blended.  Add the sifted ingredients, and beat until well blended.  Add the sour cream and beat until there are no streaks of white visible.

Melt the chocolate.  (If melting chocolate in a microwave, and if using both light and dark chocolate, make sure to melt them separately, and not unite them until they are completely melted.) and add to the mixer.  Mix on medium setting until combined.

Melt the butter and add it to the mixer.  Mix on medium until well combined. 
Take your time!  Mix till it's light and fluffy. Patience will be rewarded!

Add the sour cream.  Mix on medium until well combined.  

Remove the bowl from the mixer and use a rubber spatula to mix in the chocolate chunks (and nuts, if you decide to add them.)

Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin, spreading evenly, including the corners.

Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean (about 40 minutes  with an extra 10 minutes if you are adding nuts.  Keep an eye on this yourself, however.  (Trust the oven, not a recipe you found on the internet.)

Remove the brownies from the oven and allow to cool in the tin at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes.  Cut into equitable portions.

Note:
Brownies are wonderful when warm, but even better when cooled and eaten a day later.  Once cooled to room temperature, these brownies can be stored in the fridge for several days before serving. Allow to come to room temperature before serving.  Because of the chocolate chunks, the brownies will probably not come out clean no matter how long you bake the brownies.  It is suggested that you pull them from the oven after 50 minutes baking time.