Chocolate Rum Cake

  

Drunk texting? Sure! We've all done that at some point of time. But drunk blogging? Well, that's definitely a first for me! Blame it on my mum's birthday. Yes, you read that right! Its my mum's b'day and her b'day cake that's gotten me here. Not that I am complaining! I could probably go for a couple of slices more, though the blurred edges of the words warn me otherwise.

Let me start by saying that my mum's favorite present are those beautiful boxes of dainty liqueur chocolates. With very little time to shop, I am embarrassed to say I came up with naught. This would have been acceptable had I a heartwarming present on standby. But alas! I failed there as well. So I thought of the next best thing. Make her some liqueur chocolates. And as my brains unfroze they decided to take it a step further. Chocolate and liqueur in a cake. An all in one dessert! 

Now it would have been great had I stuck to the thought and used one of my regular recipes. But no when you go big, why not go grand?! That's when we went from dainty to drunk! In my quest for the best ever chocolate rum cake, Google kept pointing me towards the Caribbean inspired dark chocolate and rum cakes. And the more I read, the more I knew I just had to make the most chocolatey, most boozy ever rum cake. Decadent and degenerate. 

Enter the recipe on foodinmybeard. After having devoured hundreds of rum and choc recipes, I can honestly say that this was hands down the booziest and easiest cake around. I knew I wouldn't rest till I made it. And well, ate it! Now the cake came out of the oven looking all normal and innocuous.

 

 

And then it was subjected to this. Now the bottles on top are merely to add weight to the lid, and don't actually form part of the recipe. But below the lid is a sinful, booze addled rum butter sauce that with the extra weight squishing it down, permeates every crumb of an already very rummy cake. The result? Drunk Blogging!

Ingredients:

Dark Chocolate Compound     170 grams

Butter                                       1/2 cup

Dark Rum                                1 cup

Flour                                        1 cup

Eggs                                         4

Sugar                                       1/2 cup

Brown Sugar                            1/2 cup 

Baking Powder                        1/2 teaspoon

Baking Soda                            1 teaspoon

Cocoa Powder                        1/2 cup

Salt                                          1/2 teaspoon

Rum Butter Sauce

Butter                                      1/4 cup

Sugar                                       1/4 cup

Dark Rum                                1/4 cup + 1/2 cup

Method:

Microwave the butter, chocolate and rum for 30 seconds. Whisk. If it hasn't melted completely, microwave again for 30 seconds. Whisk till smooth. Add the sugars and whisk well. Now add the eggs one at a time, whisking well after each addition. Sift all the dry ingredients together. Add half the dry mix to the wet batter and mix well. Now add the rest and mix till combined. Preheat the oven to 180 C. Pour the batter into a greased and lined cake tin. Bake for 45 minutes or till done. Once the cake is done, take it out and poke holes all over with a toothpick or skewer. Gently pour over the entire butter sauce. Cover with a lid that touches the surface of the cake, and weigh down with additional bottles. Once the cake cools completely, flip onto a serving tray and for once, you can drink your rum and eat it too!

Rum Butter Sauce: Heat together the butter, sugar and 1/4 cup of rum. Bring to a boil and let it boil for a minute more. Take off the heat and whisk in the remaining 1/2 cup of rum. Pour warm over the cake. This is the lethal weapon that turns your cake from decadent to drunk! 

Meat pickle

I can't stop dancing. Or singing. Its that time of the year finally! Time for my annual vacation home. Three weeks of doing absolutely nothing. Three weeks of being completely pampered by mum and dad. And three weeks of gorging on all my favourite food, cooked not by me, but by mum, granny, aunt and my darling Robert uncle! And yes, I absolutely aim to overindulge!

Last Sunday as we sat making plans for the upcoming vacay, Hubby Dear issued a dire warning against pilfering his share of the meat pickle this year. You see, every year when we go home, Mads Masi bottles a jar of the most sinfully addictive meat pickle, exclusively for HD. It was great in the earlier years when I was following a vegetarian diet. But then I returned to the meat fold, with a vengeance! So when last year's batch made its way to us, HD was none to happy he had to share. But imagine his disappointment a couple of hours later when he poured himself a chilled beer and headed to spoon a few pieces of his favourite snack. The pickle jar was empty! In my defence, running after the monster munchkin all day is hungry work. And did I mention the pickle is sinfully addictive?!

He was of course mollified when Masi bottled a batch specially for him and I swore to keep my fork away. 

The memory though, remained. Hence, the dire warning! And that was what led to my sleepy sunday turning into a sweaty one. Ever had one of those moments when you share a food memory and the description is so vivid you can almost taste it in your mouth. And so strong is that sensation that you just have to have it. Like right that moment. Or your tastebuds will drive you nuts as you drool unchecked?! Well, lets just say we needed our meat pickle fix. Right that moment. A week was too far away!

A frantic call to Masi for the recipe and we were raring to go! The only hitch? Goat's meat wasn't available! But as my friend said, Baa ain't too far from Oink. So pork it would be! The promise of that tangy, tasty pickle spurred everyone into action. HD took off to bring us the choicest cuts. And Oink Friend helped peel, chop, grind and stir. And stir. And stir! And...excuse me, while I go polish off that last forkful ;)

Ingredients:

Meat (boneless)       1 kg (goat/beef/pork/lamb)

Mustard oil              1 1/2 cups

Ginger                      100 gms

Garlic                       125 gm

Vinegar                     1/3 bottle

Sugar                         a pinch

Garam Masala          1 heaped tablespoon

Salt                            to rub

Method:

Wash the meat well and rub the pieces with salt. Keep aside for two hours. Grind the ginger and garlic to a fine paste. In a heavy bottomed pan, heat the oil on high flame and saute the meat. When the pieces start shrinking, and the meat is half done, add the ginger garlic paste. Reduce the flame to the minimum. Add cook till the meat is done. Stir frequently in between to ensure the meat doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan. Add the sugar and garam masala and cook for another five minutes. Let it cool for 1/2 an hour. Stir in the vinegar and store in sterilized jars. If the weather is warm, it is better to keep the pickle refrigerated. It will keep in refrigerator for a couple of months. Provided of course, you have the willpower ;)

Wine

There was a lot of backlash for my previous post. Homemade raisins? My friends and family couldn't believe I would waste precious grapes like that when instead I could have used them for more intoxicating purposes! To them I say, Fear Not! Of course, everytime I have a stockpile of grapes, the first thing I do is ferment a batch of my very special wine.  

You could say wine making is in my genes. My maternal grandmother did a professional course in food preservation, and with all the jams, jellies, pickle and marmalades, she also made vast quantities of sweet red wine. Bottles of which made an appearance even twenty years later. It is another matter though that being a teetotaller she never tasted a sip of the stuff. The rest of us, well, we were a 'happy' bunch! 

My paternal grandfather was quite the vintner as well. He was more experimental and apart from grapes, also distilled beetroot, carrot, apricot and mixed fruit wines. He was also known to brew his own beer at times. But that's a tale for another post. 

It comes as no surprise then that every year I distill a few bottles of the potent stuff for my friends and lazy sunday brunches. If you think wine making is complicated and time consuming, you are wrong. It really is the simplest. And requires very little effort on your part. After all, Nature does most of the hard work. 

Ingredients:

Grapes       2 kg

Sugar         1 kg

Yeast          1 tsp

Water         just enough to cover the grapes

Rum           1/2 cup (optional)

Method:

 Remove the stalks of the grapes and wash them thoroughly. Put them in a large glass jar with a wide mouth. Pour the water and mash the grapes coarsely. You can use your fingers or a potato masher. Add the sugar, mix and keep in a cool, dark place. Make sure the lid is secure. The next day, add the yeast to 1/4 cup luke warm water. When it froths, mix into the grapes. Cover and return to dark place. Let it stand for 21 days, ensuring you stir it with a clean, dry spoon every two days. On the 21st day, strain through a muslin cloth and add the rum. Pour into clean, dry and sterilized glass bottles. Store in a cool, dark place and leave to mature for two months. After two months, call over your friends and uncork a bottle for some good times!

Homemade Raisins

Its been a while that I've posted on the blog. That didn't mean I wasn't experimenting and turning my kitchen into a lab! The last I posted I was working my way through a large batch of oranges. Well, the oranges met a delicious end. And then came the avalanche of grapes. They found their way onto salads and fruit cream and the monster munchkin's snacks. But just when I thought I was done with them, a whole new bunch would make it to my fridge. This needed large scale tackling and I figured let me save them for a rainy day. Now the only way to make them last intact till the aforesaid rainy day was the sundried way aka raisins.

Now, i am a raisin phobe. Cannot abide those slimy squishy things in any dessert or cake. But hubby dear and monster munchkin like em well enough. And they are great for zinging desserts when we've got company. I trawled the net for various recipes and in the end settled for one I found between the yellowing pages of the first recipe diary I started at the age of ten! It is simple and requires practically no effort from my end, And a few glorious days later, I get rewarded with glossy, granola worthy raisins. It was almost like Farmville all over again!

Ingredients:

Seedless Grapes     1 kg

Water                      1 litre

Milk                        1 tablespoon

Method:

Remove the grapes from the stalk and wash them well. Boil the water and milk together in a deep pan. Add the grapes and continue boiling till the grapes turn a lighter green. Drain well in a colander. Spread out on a thin cloth under the sun. Cover with another thin muslin. After three to four days of bright sunshine, voila, the grapes are now golden raisins!