Lily's Blog

Well when I did get back to proper cooking, I had to make something chocolaty (that is a word!) for youngest mouse who had been off chocolate for the whole of 2009. This recipe came from Jim’s Kitchen. I’ve made a number of different chocolate cake recipes over the years. This recipe struck me as more healthy, (if chocolate cake can be) and very quick and easy. The dry ingredients, dark cocoa, plain flour, castor sugar, bread soda and baking powder were mixed together. The wet ingredients, eggs, sunflower oil and milk were mixed and then honey was mixed in. The wet ingredients were mixed with the dry ingredients, the mixture was put into a lined cake tin and baked for 50 minutes.

The icing was made by heating chocolate and cream. The cake was cut into three layers and each was covered with icing.

For the icing, I used dark chocolate. If, when repeating it for youngest mouse, I will use milk chocolate. Whilst I did weigh all the ingredients, I would probably add a little more honey next time.

This recipe goes into the ‘Definitely repeat category’.

Nyom, nom

I’ve been neglectful of the cookery experiment for a number of weeks. Various things, Christmas, busy at work, Young Scientist, etc all kept me from experimenting. Well normality now seems to be returning.

Though I’m always glad to get a break from cooking, I actually miss it a lot when I am away from it for any length. The break however helped me re-think my experiment. I’m going to change direction. Instead of doing all of the Avoca Cafe Cookbook, I’m going to emulate Kitchen Diaries Challenge and do about ten recipes from each of a number of books. It should be more interesting for both you, the reader and for me. I’m choosing books that have interesting everyday recipes. I’ll continue like before and serve them to whatever guinea pigs happen to be around and we’ll rate them using our new simpler rating system with just three categories:

The books I’ve identified for the moment are as follows:

Jim’s Kitchen by Jim Tynan

Eat Good Things Every Day by Carmel Somers

Roly’s Cafe and Bakery

Cornucopia at Home

Avoca Cafe Cookbook

I’ll finish ten from it, I’ve eight already done. I’ve posted a picture of this book before!

Please feel free to suggest others.

Let the experiment begin, I mean continue!