Life, love and lessons in baking

Well the road to hell is paved with good intentions and my last post was full of them.I wanted to stop the whole sweet thing I really did, I had confined myself to baking sweet things for birthday cake orders only and was enjoying my liberation back into the world of savouries and sauces where all my cooking had begun. Then we had international food day at work.

We used to have international food day when we were in primary school, you'd bring a dish that was representative of your cultural back ground and you'd have to tell the class about it. I always felt somewhat embarrassed because John and I were the only Anglo Saxon kids who went to our primary school and everyone else always came with such fantastic things but all we had to offer was scones.
They don't seem so exotic compared to a vindaloo or goulash, this was the 80's and we were at a catholic primary school in Elwood that felt like it was still in the 50's so vindaloo's and goulash was still very much exotic, atheists were exotic, it was that kind of place.

Mercifully by the time I entered the work force the concept of international food day had simply become a device used to break up the crippling monotony of another day in the office, like lottos, quizes, or the guys who come to clean the windows on their little hydraulic platform because even though they look like paroled bank thieves and probably cant see you through the coated glass anyway, they are an oasis in the vast wasteland that is working for a corporation.
Some one will look around and sense that the morale level is low and cheerfully suggest that we all bring in a little something on a Friday and we'll all latch on to it like we've just been thrown a life line because now we have something to look forward to that isn't a fire drill or free cheap house wine and snacks at a quarterly departmental presentation.Hmm, jaded much?

There are a number of good cooks where I work, we get fantastic currys, dips, breads, I think we even had some baklava this time, but thankfully for me in the absence of a distinct cultural heritage I'm just looked upon to bring something cakey, preferably chocolate.
I use these occasions now to experiment, actually I do that pretty much anytime I'm cooking for someone now unless they're paying me for something specific, and when a food day is announced I'll usually get a couple of people coming up to me asking me what I'm going to bring in or maybe asking for something specific like the flourless nutella cupcakes I made for someone's going away but I'd been thinking of trying something brave.

I'm in a phase of my life at the moment where being brave and confronting scary things is a bit of a theme that I'm embracing, I'm about to pack up my life here and head off into the unknown for a bit of an adventure which while certainly not an indiana jones type adventure certainly feels big to me after working in a steady job for the last 7 years. I'm heading to Abu Dhabi, Sweden to stay at the icehotel and then a bunch of little trips to places like France, Spain, Italy, Norway and where ever else takes my fancy and I have enough money for. Its a deciding what to do with the next 10 years of my life trip basically, I was comfortable in my little rut for a while there but now comfortable isn't enough so instead I'm choosing the unknown.

Having opened that one door now it feels like all doors are opened so, possibly melodramatically, the occasion of deciding which cake to make for international food day is no longer just about a cake, its a metaphor for life damnit.

There has been a cake that I have wanted to try making for a good ten years or so now but I was a little intimidated by it. Ever since my Dad got cable and I watched episodes of the River Cafe and then got a copy of their cook book from a discount cook shop in Bendigo I've wanted to make The River Cafe's signature dessert, Chocolate Nemesis Cake.
What made me hesitate was a couple of things for one there is nearly 700g of chocolate in this recipe depending on which variation you chose and 10 years ago I was a struggling student sometimes forced to exist on minor acts of buffet fraud in order to survive (friends and I would go to the La Trobe Uni bar and buy one plate on all you can eat burger night and then take turns to go up and get refills till we all had a meal) so buying that much chocolate in one hit would pretty much wipe out my entire food budget till next austudy day.

The second hesitation was purely one of guts, there was a cooking technique needed for this recipe that I'd not tried before and I was at a point in my education as a cook that I can now recognise as the rather conservative, total lack of confidence phase that comes after experimenting wildly and failing miserably in the kitchen.

And so begin the metaphors, for me learning to cook has been like life in general, when I was little it was something I decided that I was going to be good at one day, when you're young and you have the luxury of time you imagine yourself being good at a great number of things but often lack the planning to figure out exactly how that is going to happen, its enough to just imagine that it will.

When you get to being a teenager you're hit by the inertia of physical and the social, your head along with the rest of your body makes you think that you know a great deal more than you really do and also that you're ready for a great deal more than you are. Society in the form of laws and some kind of parent or guardian usually steps in to remind you that you aren't as smart as you think you are bucko. At this point in my cooking career I had bought my first blow torch and abandoned recipe books as little more than food porn.

Usually what happens in life to slap you in the face during this phase is you fall in love and it all ends horribly this either causes an epiphany which after some very bad poetry, a drastic change in appearance and a couple of one night stands, serves you well for the rest of your life or alternatively you spend your remaining days playing out that relationship on other people you meet, like a serial killer of the heart, constantly seeking further refined examples of that one first love and forever wondering what went wrong. For me in my cooking history this experience involved blind baking and making my own pastry, and this ended as all tragic first loves do messily and after having done things of which I am not proud.

Whether in pastry making or love the lesson is the same, and its put best by Kenny Rodgers in his classic “The Gambler” “Know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run”.

Heartbreak and pastry can make you cautious, and I was, so when The River Cafe recipe called for this giant rather expensive cake to be cooked entirely without flour and in a water bath I just wasn't ready to put myself out there yet. So I put it aside and I moved on, played around with other things, made some cakes with nut meals so I could get my head around the chemistry of cooking without flour until I felt like I was confident enough to tackle the Nemesis.

I was familiar with my oven, I have a bunch of great suppliers for the raw ingredents like chocolate, I had all the equipment I needed, it was time.

So off I went, I preheated my oven to 160C, got myself 675g of dark chocolate (something around 70% cocoa is good but go with what you have on hand if you cant get that) melted it with 450g of unsalted butter and then beat the christ out of 10 eggs and 675g of caster sugar till it was all light and fluffy. Then I combined the melted and slightly cooled butter and chocolate to the eggs and poured into a spring form pan that I'd lightly greased and then floured with cocoa powder instead of flour so that you don't get white marks on your cake. Insulate the tin with a layer of greaseproof paper and foil wrapped around the outside and then place the tin in a roasting tray and fill with boiling water halfway up the sides of the pan, this helps cook the cake evenly.
Bake it for about an hour or until the cake is set, you can test it by putting your hand on the surface.
Then once its set let it cool in the oven with the door ajar, this will stop the surface from cracking, I do the same thing when making cheesecakes.

I took it to work the next day and served it with crème fraiche which I find balances out the cake beautifully and it was a total hit, I even got an order for one on the spot. Apart from the expense of the chocolate and the slight intimidation of having to use the water bath and being paranoid that the cake wouldn't set without flour I had nothing to fear but fear itself.

Let this be a lesson to all of you, don't spend the next 10 years wondering, get out of that crappy relationship, quit that mindless job, bake that expensive and intimidating chocolate cake and embrace your fears.
But don't make your own pastry some things just aren't meant to be.