Aint No Sunshine

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Another day, another chocolate cake. Seriously, I've eaten more chocolate cake in the last month than I normally do in a year. It has continued to rain steadily in Wellington - indeed, over the whole country - and there was even a sizeable slip not far from where my flat is. But on Saturday morning I felt the oddest sensation. I woke up with the sun streaming through the windows. I didn't know what to do with myself at the sight of blue sky. I felt like a babushka from Old Rumania, shucking off my winter cloak to prepare for the feasting of Springtide. Well, it wasn't so much "sunny" as "not raining" but Tim and I took the opportunity to zoom into town to do some jobs and that afternoon, while there was still more blue than grey in the sky, I made a cake.

I had some cream cheese leftover from the cheesecake I made for Tearaway magazine, and although it would have been entirely more economical to use it in some pasta sauce or something, I decided to build a chocolate cake around it. And no, I didn't use it in the icing, which is more conventional, but in the actual cake mix. The recipe comes from the bountiful Nigella's Feast, a cookbook which keeps on giving. No matter how much batter I shmeer on it, its pages never get stuck together. No matter how many times I read it, I always find something new I want to make now. In this case, the Tropical Chocolate Cake, which hosts an intriguing mix of pineapple, chocolate and coconut flavours.

I decided to modify Nigella's method somewhat. She makes an enticing two-layer cake sandwiched and slathered with a coconut meringue frosting. She says, a little snippily, to "lose the Bounty connection" if the idea of meringue palls somewhat, but I decided against it because I just couldn't be bothered. Instead I made one bigger, bungalow-type cake smothered in a coconut custard buttercream. Still sounds good, right? In fact that's all I'm-a talk about today, uncharacteristically. Because this cake is the only thing I've managed to get decent photos of.





Above: This isn't exactly photographically sound, but then the food-processor shots don't really have to be, do they? In fact they don't even offer anything at all; they are what my media studies lecturer would call a "kernel," that is, a sort of light, C-plot segment that doesn't move the narrative forward but offers light relief from the main thrust of the action. Consider yourself schooled!


Tropical Chocolate Cake, adapted slightly from Feast

1x400g can pineapple pieces in juice
75g cream cheese
200g butter, pretty soft
200g flour
100g sugar
100g brown sugar
40g cocoa
2 eggs
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
2 T malibu or juice from the can of pineapple

Set the oven to 180 C (360 F) and line a 23cm Springform. First you want to whizz up the pineapple and cream cheese. Then add the rest of the ingredients, scraping occasionally with a spatula. Pour this alluringly delicious mix into the caketin, bake for roughly 40 minutes, maybe more. And uhm, that's it. Simple, no?

I iced it with a mixture of 40g butter, 1 T custard powder, enough icing sugar to turn it into a cohesive substance, 1 t coconut essence, and a tablespoon each of milk and water. And then I thought I might as well dust it with chocolate sprinkles that I found in the cupboard. They were a year or two past their best before date, but how bad can sprinkles get?




It is moist, fragrant, delicious, and a genius combination of flavours. Very summery too, with elements of Pina Colada and Hawaiian Tropic Sunscreen. This hardly a bad thing; I say this as someone who can happily pass several minutes' time sitting there inhaling the scent of a bottle of SPF 40+ (truly, it's gooood.) As soon as I finished taking the photos of the cake it started raining again and hasn't really stopped (it's now Monday.)

Since the little tacker was so popular last time, and because Tim managed to catch this doozy of a picture, I thought we could be graced by the presence of *cough*Oscar the non-existent kitty*cough*.



I love that flagrant disdain he has for the laws of, you know, breathing.


Next time: well, the bread photos weren't so crash-hot, hence their lack of presence here. Who knows?