Raspberry Debacle

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.

Chocolate Cake Base
150g butter
150g caster sugar
50g cocoa
4 eggs
75g flour (gluten-free works fine)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 170C. Grease a 9×13 inch swiss roll tin or baking tray with edges, then line it with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.

Melt the butter, and stir in the sugar and cocoa. Set aside to cool.

While the mixture cools, beat the eggs with an electric beater for five minutes or so, or a whisk for about fifteen, until they’re thick and fluffy.

Stir the flour, baking powder, salt and vanilla into the butter-cocoa-sugar mixture; then fold in the beaten eggs.

Pour the cake batter into the baking tray, spreading it around and then tapping the baking tray against the countertop to get rid of any air bubbles. Bake for ten to fifteen minutes, until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean or with only crumbs clinging to it.

Counterfeit Chocolate Mousse (requires food processor or electric mixer)
(A minor variation of 101 Cookbooks’ Amaretto-spiked Chocolate Mousse)
400g silken tofu
300g dark chocolate
180ml soy milk
60ml hot percolated coffee
2 tablespoons cocoa

Drain the tofu, either in a colander for a couple of hours, or just by putting it on the sink with something heavy on top of it. If you’re using the same brand as me, there’ll be serving suggestions on the side telling you it’s delicious eaten cold. This is a lie.

Melt the chocolate, either in the microwave or in a saucepan over low heat.

Mix the cocoa into the hot coffee, and then the coffee into the soy milk. Stir it all around, and warm it a little (again, in the microwave or in a saucepan). Add it to the chocolate, and stir.

Add the chocolate mixture to the tofu, and mix (either in a food processor or with an electric mixer) until no lumps of tofu are visible, then continue to mix for another minute. If you’re just making the mousse, put it in the fridge for at least three or four hours before eating; if you’re using it for the cakes, then leave it to cool for half an hour before you begin assembling the cakes.

Assembly (you will need dessert rings or ten smallish plastic cups)
1 chocolate cake base
100g chopped walnuts
1 unset counterfeit chocolate mousse mixture
50g cocoa nibs (or more chopped walnuts)
100g dark chocolate

Cut ten six-centimetre circles out of the chocolate cake base (fewer if you want larger cakes). If you have dessert rings, use them to cut out the circles - it’s important that the circles should fill the mould exactly. If, like me, you don’t have dessert rings, then cut the bottom out of ten plastic cups, to leave tapered hollow cylinders. If the plastic cups have a rim at the top that’s sharp enough to push through cake, then you’re fine; but if they have a blunt folded-over bit at the rim, then you’ll have to cut that off too, leaving a sharp plastic edge which you can then use to cut out a circle from the cake base.

Place the cake circles on a tray, with a dessert ring or a cup over each one.

Sprinkle the chopped walnuts through the hole at the top of each cup, dividing them between the cakes, and then spoon the mousse through the hole as well (it’ll be around three or four tablespoons to a cup, divided evenly among ten). Flatten it out a little (don’t worry about getting the top perfectly straight; it’ll level out as it sets).

Sprinkle the cocoa nibs on top of the mousse, then put the cups in the fridge to set for at least three or four hours, and up to a day or two.

Melt the dark chocolate, and crumple up a sheet of baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Uncrumple it and spread the chocolate over it in a thin layer, and leave it to set (put it in the fridge if you like). Once it’s set, peel it away from the paper, breaking it into jagged-edged pieces.

To remove the cake from the cups, just pick them up whole, run a knife between the cup and the cake from below, and shake the cake out gently onto a plate. Stick a couple of the jagged-edged chocolate pieces into each one before serving. Makes ten.