Chocolate sandwich

I decided to take advantage of the long weekend and bake something (also wake up without alarm clock, make plans and promptly forget them, spend an entire day in pyjamas). This recipe,  from the Passover chapter of Florence Greenberg’s Jewish Cookery looked interesting and challenging (my relationship with things contains whisked egg whites being somewhat troubled). I have never eaten anything like this before  and  imagined it to be a bit like a giant macaroon. (The title should be a clue to keep an open mind. Would it be a cake? A cookie? A chocolate sandwich what?) I had no qualms about pulling my food processor out to whisk the eggs as the book itself features an advert for the Sunbeam Mixmaster.

Chocolate cream cheese fudge

Recently I have made far too many tasteful, sensible recipes, the last (savoury) French dish I made was vegan, for pity’s sake. The time I fried macaroni cheese is so long ago, it’s moved from reality to pub anecdote. (Yes, I am very popular.) It’s time for something ridiculous, and what better to inspire me than the food industry itself, with the recent launch of chocolate-flavoured cream cheese, the thought of which makes me feel faintly nauseous, but this recipe… I was…intrigued.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

A recipe I decided to try while working at home on Friday and thus without access to the tin of ginger nuts and digestives which lurks in the office kitchen. (From  ‘Cookies and Biscuits’ in  the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Cookery Compendium, Waverly 1955)

Chocolate Butterscotch Brownies

On a recent trip to Scotland, I visited Leakeys (Greyfriars Hall, Church Street, Inverness, IV1 1EY), the bookshop of your dreams – a hundred thousand volumes on tall wooden shelves in a converted 18th century church whose mezzanine also houses a café where incredibly friendly and efficient staff serve exactly the kind of food you want to eat in an area where it sloshes down with rain in August. My travelling companion, a fiction buyer-bookseller extraordinaire and glutton, was most impressed, stating that while popular, the bookshop-café combination is rarely well-executed.

Chocolate Meringue Biscuits – Biscuits de Meringue Chocolat

Here begins a week (or probably a bit longer, seeing as we made loads of things) of posts from our Eurovision party.

You would think I would have learnt my lesson after the lime chiffon pie incident that I’m not really meringue material, yet. But no, in a moment of hubris, I decided to try and make miniature meringues for our Eurovision party as a French-Italian contribution. And if you want real proof of my idiocy/optimism, I used the same book, as I did for the chiffon pie. (The Complete Book of Desserts by Ann Seranne, Faber and Faber,1952.)

Chocolate Praline Tartlets

I have had a craving for these for a long time. Really, is there anything about them which doesn’t sound brilliant?

Recipe
(from The Complete Book of Desserts by Ann Seranne, 1952,  Faber and Faber)
½ cup semi-sweet chocolate pieces
2 tablespoons boiling water
1 tablespoon dark rum
2 egg yolks
3 tablespoons cream
¼ cup (½ stick) soft butter
¾ cup praline powder
12 baked 2 inch tart shells
Whipped cream

Victoria Sponge Cake and Spiced Victoria Sponge Cake

No birthday party is complete without a cake. I gamely volunteered to make one and by volunteered, I mean insisted. It seemed only right and proper that I should choose one from the Sandwich Cakes chapter of Good Housekeeping’s Picture Cake Making (Waverley, 1955) but as I realised I hadn’t baked a sponge cake for atleast a year, something simple would be advisable.

As we had a range of guests attending. I decided to make a two sorts of cake based around the same recipe – a classic Victoria sponge and a spiced Victoria sponge.

Chocolate Mousse

Was idly flipping through “beginner’s cookery” (Betty Falk, revised Penguin edition ’73, original ’64 – can any people tell me the appropriate citation when a publication has repeat editions? I should know this…), after a rough day at work and feeling like something simple… when I found… chocolate mousse! mousse?! no-one can make mousse at home! what is this doing in ‘beginner’s cookery’! How ridiculous! Yes, that’s what I thought too – but there’s only two essential ingredients and one optional one – and the optional one is BOOZE? And I do happen to have a bar of 70% Green and Blacks in the cupboard… how hard can it be!

Pavé au Chocolat

In which I raid Anne Seranne again and make what it basically a tiramisu but with chocolate instead of cream and filter coffee and cognac, instead of espresso and marsala. This is from chapter 4, ‘Cornstarch, rice, farina, and other creamy desserts’ from The Complete Book of Desserts (1952, Faber and Faber for the Cookery Book Club).

Pavé au Chocolat (Blender method)

6oz semi-sweet chocolate, broken into pieces
¼ cup boiling water or strong coffee
4 egg yolks
½ cup soft butter [this is translated at the front of the book as 4oz]
4 tablespoons cognac
½ cup cold water
5oz lady-fingers
Whipped cream

Custard Creams

Cream-filled biscuits seem to have dropped out of UK baking fashion in favour of American-style cookies, healthy things containing grated apple or dead easy things like flapjack (nice though all those can be).  The Good Housekeeping Institute’s Cookery Compendium (Waverly, 1955), however, is full of biscuits of every kind, from things like this (pretty much) and this to custard creams! I thought custard creams were dreamed up by some marketing person in, well, the past and I was basically right.  They were a late 19^th century invention, probably by Huntley & Palmers of Reading, probably to capitalise on the new popularity of custard powder. (More info here.)