Raspberry Debacle

15 August, 2007

Chocolate Raspberry Crumble Cake

Filed under: cake, dessert, fruit, gluten-free, summer, vegetarian — Holly @ 12:09 pm

Chocolate raspberry crumble cake, seen from above

Chocolate makes everything seem nicer. Stealing £140,000 worth of an unspecified product: pretty nasty. Stealing £140,000 worth of chocolate flakes: well, quite endearing, at least superficially. Stealing £140,000 worth of chocolate flakes and then offering them to ice-cream sellers: positively charming.

This seems to be a fairly consistent rule. A seven-metre-high scrambled egg sculpture would be repulsive. Make it out of chocolate, and suddenly it’s fine (although having a sculpture “modelled after the Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building and Chrysler Building in the United States” does, sadly, seem to mean “er, shaped like a big rectangle”). Squirrels stealing pieces of dog flesh: slightly alarming. Squirrels stealing chocolate eggs: delightful. And if you’re approached by cocoa bean thieves trying to sell $150,000 worth of beans, of course it’s going to be more exciting and less scary than if they were trying to sell you $150,000 worth of stolen TVs.

One of my favourite chocolate stories is set centuries ago, in the 1600s. Spanish colonists in Mexico had a habit of drinking hot chocolate everywhere, even in church, but their bishop — perhaps understandably — wasn’t too keen: sure, a few popes had decided that chocolate wasn’t a food, as long as it was drunk in water instead of being mixed with milk or eggs or chickpeas (chickpeas!), but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t distract from the sermon. The bishop banned chocolate in his church; the colonists responded by trooping off to another church; the bishop responded by excommunicating them; they, in turn, responded by killing him with a cup of poisoned hot chocolate. (Allegedly.) Somehow the mere presence of chocolate makes this a friendlier, if no less murderous, incident. And sure, the Aztecs sacrificed a lot of people to a lot of gods — but then they settled down with a nice mug of hot chocolate afterwards, so they can’t have been all that bad.

I’m not advising you to embark on a new career as a thief, or to begin sacrificing passers-by to Tezcatlipoca, but if by chance you’ve already started and you’re looking for a way to appease your horrified friends, you could do worse than bringing them a slice of this cake. It really is very nice.

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4 June, 2007

A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts

Filed under: dessert, discussion, obsessions — Holly @ 10:56 am

Close-up of a section of a meta-dessert chart

So, first I made flippant comments about “Convergence of Computer Science and Critical Theory Cookies”, and cookies that reference other cookies. Then I made some small loaf cakes with brownies for a base. Then Leonard pointed to his 2003 post on meta-desserts — desserts that reference other desserts.

As he points out, desserts can basically be piled on top of each other indefinitely, or at least until you hit the ceiling. This is why I like baking: you can leave out major ingredients, accidentally replace them with something else, freeze or heat up the result or cover it in chocolate sauce, and then when you’re finished you can chop it up, cover it with cream, mix it with fruit — and chances are it will still taste good.

However, there are limits, and also classificatory difficulties. What are the fundamental dessert types, the metaphorical atoms of dessert, or “dessertoms”? A brownie is very “stable”, which is to say it can be combined with many different desserts while still remaining delicious — but surely it isn’t a fundamental dessert type: a brownie is basically just a sulky teenage cake. A crepe, on the other hand, probably is a fundamental dessert type, but it’s a relatively unstable one — it won’t taste good if you put it on a cookie.

Furthermore, desserts can be transformed not just through the application of another sort of dessert, adding dessert type A to dessert type B, but also by the application of a Dessert Function. Dessert Functions are things like “freeze it”, “put nuts on it”, “take out all the flour”, “cover it in alcohol and set it on fire” — stuff you can do to any dessert that has a good chance of leaving it edible, or better still transforming it into an exciting new dessert.

Clearly this is a topic that requires for further discussion:

  1. a rigorously defined vocabulary;
  2. extensive research to discover the fundamental dessert types;
  3. some sort of consistency in what “applying dessert type A to dessert type B” actually entails; and
  4. Lots of little pictures on graph paper.

Well, if we have a Meta-Dessert Conference and Party, I can bring number 4.

I call it “A Sketch towards a Taxonomy of Desserts and Meta-Desserts”, though I’m thinking of adding a subtitle as well. I’ve listed dessertoms: cookie, cake, sweet bread, pastry, crepe, crumble, fruit, chocolate, cream, custard, egg-white-and-sugar, and ice-cream. (Obviously this is a very broad-grained study, and further research would be well-advised to, eg, clarify that the broad category of “cake” can itself be divided into a number of fundamental types which can have transformations enacted upon them while still remaining cake). These run along the top of the page; following a column down, you can see what might happen to each dessertom when a different dessertom is applied to it (to apply Dessertom A to Dessertom B, you either (a) use Dessertom A as a component ingredient in making Dessertom B; or (b) put Dessertom A inside Dessertom B; or (c) put Dessertom A on top of Dessertom B, in roughly that order of preference).

I’ve also included seven Dessert Functions: shrink, freeze, chill, put in food processor, heat, add leavening, and remove leavening. At this point I ran out of graph paper, and had to leave out “add nuts”, “squash”, “take out flour” etc, but just because they aren’t on the page doesn’t mean they aren’t equally valid.

To reference the entries on the sheet I will refer to the Dessertom in brackets, and prepend the applicable operation: the notation for applying Custard to Crumble is therefore Custard(Crumble); performing Freeze on Chocolate is Freeze(Chocolate). The result of the operation is indicated by an arrow: Freeze(Chocolate) -> Frozen Chocolate.

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1 June, 2007

Death by Rhubarb and Fig Tart

Filed under: dessert, fruit, gluten-free, spring, vegetarian — Holly @ 10:43 am

Pretentiously-photographed tulip and rhubarb-and-fig tart.

Another brilliant thing about South London: the charity shops. Yesterday it was Lou Jane Temple’s Death By Rhubarb, tagline: “At Cafe Heaven, the souffles don’t fall, but the bodies do”.

Cover of a book called Death by Rhubarb

It’s a “culinary mystery” from 1996 in which cafe-owner Heaven Lee “turns sleuth to save her restaurant”, and it has a fantastic disregard for genre boundaries. “Tonight they were sharing three Blue Heaven salads, and a double macaroni and cheese”, the main text says, and then there’s a recipe for Blue Heaven Salad. “You’re right, Pearl. What would this street do without you, you and your gingerbread?” says a character, and then there’s a recipe for Pearl’s Gingerbread Upside-Down Cake. The series also seems to be charmingly autobiographical; character Heaven runs Cafe Heaven, writer Lou runs Cafe Lulu.

There are now seven books about Cafe Heaven, including A Stiff Risotto (I feel like there’s a pun here I’m not getting?), Red Beans and Vice, and Bread on Arrival. I particularly like Bread on Arrival for being the wrong way round: instead of death being smuggled into a seemingly innocent meal, it’s a meal being smuggled into a macabre situation. Presumably ambulance attendants rush a dying patient to the hospital, and when they get him there he’s… been replaced by a life-size bread mannequin? I don’t know, the charity shop only had the first two books in the series.

The question, anyway, is whether I should take this as inspiration to rejig Raspberry Debacle as an ongoing mystery. The answer is “almost certainly not”, but I’ve been preparing possible renames, just in case:

  • Rest in Peas (restinpeas.com is unfortunately already registered, though there’s nothing there)
  • Vegetable Stir-DIE
  • Um, Scrambled Legs?
  • Fig-or Mortis?
  • Capital Bun-ishment?
  • I know, A Sudden Tart Attack!
  • This isn’t as easy as it looks, though
  • Portobello Mush Doom? Monosodium Glutafate?
  • Gluten-free chocolate cake but it isn’t really gluten-free and someone’s allergic to gluten oh no, though maybe that should just be called Gluten-FULL Chocolate Cake?
  • Last Dill and Testament

Ivy, Battersea’s bakingest postgrad, sighed as she looked at the body in the kitchen. “I don’t know where you’re going to keep it,” she said. “There’s no room in our fridge, and you know Patriona doesn’t like meat in hers.” Patriona was their housemate — she was a vegetarian and gluten-intolerant!

“It’s not mine,” Ivy’s boyfriend Keath replied, stroking his beard in a puzzled way, because he had one.

Ivy sighed again, and looked up the stairs. “Cory!”, she called, “is this your body in the kitchen?” Cory was their other housemate. He had short hair.

There was a bit of hilarious misunderstanding while Cory thought she’d meant his actual body, that he lived in and typed with and things, because that’s the natural assumption surely, what with people not usually leaving bodies in the kitchen. Finally, however, the misunderstanding was cleared up.

“Maybe it’s Patriona’s?” Cory said.

Ivy phoned Patriona.

“No,” Patriona said, “I didn’t leave a body in the kitchen. I’m a vegetarian and gluten-intolerant, remember! I hope you get rid of it before dinner, anyway, remember Robert and, I mean, um, Zobert and Snosh are coming over. Did you say you were making a tart?”

“Oh!” Ivy said. “The tart!” She ran to the oven, and pulled out her Rhubarb and Fig Tart just in time.

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4 April, 2007

Chocolate Mousse Cakes and counterfeit food

Filed under: cake, dairy-free, dessert, gluten-free, spring, vegan — Holly @ 9:29 am

Close-up of vegan chocolate mousse

Huckleberries are a real fruit!

This is important. Back in my first year of high-school, we played a class-wide game in a music lesson, and one round involved thinking of fruit that started with the same letter as your name. This is, okay, clearly not a great game anyway, since (1) you get into arguments about what constitutes a fruit and what a vegetable, arguments which music teachers and competitive twelve-year-old girls aren’t necessarily qualified to answer (but which they’ll be very keen to address anyway); and (2) people named, say, Beatrice (blueberries, blackberries, boysenberries, bananas) have an advantage over people named, I don’t know, Holly. Still, I would have pulled through the round, with “huckleberry”, if the teacher hadn’t deemed huckleberries entirely nonexistent, a character name rather than an actual fruit; and since I’d never seen one, I assumed she knew better than I.

But now it turns out they really do exist, and they really are a fruit. Bears like to eat them! There’s even a trade in fakes: “Al Hedman, who produces Larchwood Farms Huckleberry Jam, said an illicit trade in counterfeit huckleberry products has been going on for years with inferior blueberries or other farmed berries being substituted for Montana’s tart, wild bounty”!

It’s probably contrary to Mr Hedman’s intent, but my main thought on reading his complaint (after “they are too a fruit! I knew it! Every moment of success that Beatrice has had since 1994 should have been mine“, anyway) was “brilliant, I can make counterfeit huckleberry cake with blueberries.” I love the idea of food masquerading as other food, and surely counterfeiters — whose income and freedom depends on their expertise — must know better than most what works and what doesn’t.

Most counterfeit food is offputtingly unsuitable for cakes. It’s non-organic meat and vegetables substituted for organic, with surreptitious farmers “spraying ‘organic’ crops with chemicals under the cover of darkness”. It’s farmed salmon fed artificial colouring so it’ll look nice and pink. It’s counterfeit brand-name food, with Ferrero Rocher’s brand-name being trademarked in China by the rival company that was counterfeiting its chocolates, and brands like Coca-Cola and Kraft having similar problems. At the same time, it’s Kraft being sued for its guacamole dip that contained less than 2% avocadoes; it was eventually relabelled a “guacamole-flavoured dip”.

Tofu seems the best possible counterfeit food: inoffensive and pointless in itself, but confusingly good at pretending to be something different. Freeze and fry for a plausible chicken! Crumble it up for scrambled eggs! Dry it and tan it and wear it as a coat or hardy boots, for all I know, stretch it out and use it as violin strings, roll some in a pile of dust to make a charming pet hamster. And make mousse out of it: the vegan chocolate mousse at 101 Cookbooks is fantastic and resilient, absorbing pretty much any flavours you could plausibly want a mousse to have and just sitting there, wobbling gently.

Mousse, of course, is ideal for putting on cakes.

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