Happy Halloween

It's Halloween tomorrow, so I wanted to share a recipe for a slightly spooky treat.  The list of ingredients and the instructions seem long, and start to finish it is quite a bit of time, but they're more an exercise in patience (or scheduling, but who am I kidding?) than skill.  I made something similar last year as, like many people, I bought the mold back in 2012 after chocolate teacakes appeared on the Great British Bake off and have being trying to justify the admittedly rather single purpose purchase ever since.

The recipe is actually a fairly close adaptation of the one given on the BBC website.  I merely changed the flavors a little, and adapted the method to suit the fact that I have a standing mixer but not a handheld one.

Treacle Chocolate Teacakes

Makes 6

400g Dark Chocolate
50g White Chocolate

Biscuits
100g Chapatti Flour
1 tsp Ground Ginger
1/2 tsp baking powder
25g Brown Sugar
25g Butter
1 tsp treacle
1tsp milk

Marshmallow
3 egg whites
150g Caster sugar
6 tsp Treacle

1) Melt the white chocolate in a bowl over water that is barely simmering
2) Pipe into spirals on the inside of your teacake molds, starting in the center and finishing at the edge
3)  For each teacake draw a blunt knife or cocktail stick up from the center of each spiral to the edge of the mold, repeating at intervals of about 45o (doesn't have to be that accurate) all the way around.
4) Leave to set

5) Combine the dry ingredients for the biscuits in a mixing bowl and rub in the butter.
6) Stir in the wet ingredients and gather to make a dough
7)  Roll out, and cut into 7 and a half centimeter rounds
8)  Leave in the fridge while you preheat the oven to  170oC, and then bake for about 10 minutes.
9) Cool on a wire rack

10) Once your white chocolate is set, melt 300g dark chocolate in the same way, trying to get it as close to the melting point as possible (so it coats the moulds thickly and stands less chance of melting the white chocolate too much.
11)  Working as quickly as you can, tip the chocolate into the mounds and then tilt them around until they are coated, then turn them upside down over the bowl
12) When the biscuits are cool, brush them with the leftover melted chocolated

13) When everything is beginning to set, melt the treacle and caster sugar together in a pan with two tablespoons of water, on a gentle heat
14) Meanwhile, whisk the eggwhites into stiff peaks in the standing mixer.
15) Bring the syrup to the boil and then, with the standing mixer running on low/medium, pour slowly into the egg whites.
16) Turn the mixer up to high and whisk until the mixture has dropped to room temperature (about 10 minutes)

17)  Fill the chocolates shells about 3/4 full with mixture, then top each with a biscuit.  You will probably have marshmallow leftover.  It won't keep, so spoon it over some hot chocolate or something.
18) Top each teacake with a biscuit, and remelt the leftover chocolate from the shells if there is any, and about 75g of the remaining chocolate.
19) Pipe chocolate around each biscuit to seal, and then pipe at least 48 smallish V shapes on a sheet of baking paper
20) Wait until everything is absolutely set and then turn the teacakes out.
21) Melt the last 25g of chocolate and pipe a large blob in the center of each web.
22) After leaving  the blobs a few minutes more to firm up a little, comes the fiddly bit.  Stand the Vs upside down with one end in the blob, four on each side of each blob.  They will be wonky and all over the place by the time you're done, but that just goes to make them look more spidery.
23) Optionally, you can add sprinkle for eyes at this point, as I did.
24) Leave to set, and your done

Notes:

Don't put these in the bottom of your backpack and then jog because you're running late to your lecture.
That would be a bad plan.

Obviously the legs will break if you do such a thing.

You can tell that just by looking at them, and in no way did I have to learn this through personal experience...

Challenging beginnings

I had planned to start blogging this year.  What I hadn’t planned was coming back to university.  The trail went cold on my search for a placement rather late in the year, and I found myself with about a week to find a liveable flat, get through the necessary paperwork, and move in to start my studies.

It turns out renting a flat is not something you rush into.

 Two weeks after moving in I found myself still in a half empty flat, with no internet (and no prospect of it until I knew I wasn’t moving out again), no working hob and no working oven.   The cold water was tinted bluish green and tasted like metal (and produced interesting precipitates at the bottom of my tea).  The hot water was barely lukewarm and smelled of biology.

Attempts to bake in the toaster oven (emergency purchase, thank goodness I now live so close to Aldi), were mixed...

Mixed, honestly.  I swear the filling tasted fine!

But things rarely stay bad for long.  I borrowed a mini oven/hob combination from a family friend, the hard water worked do my advantage, in that it didn’t stay coppery for long.  I found some nice areas of the library, so the blog was back on the cards.  Most importantly, thanks to said mini-oven, I started to cook, and that always makes me feel better.

While it will probably never produce a prize winning Victoria sponge, the mini oven held temperature steady enough to get a rise out of cornbread, and the hob meant I could finally cook from scratch again.  

Since then there have been more repairs, and my furniture has arrived.  Things are almost at the point that they should have been a month ago.  The hob has replaced and the oven now turns on (although the thermostat doesn’t work), and the internet connection is on its way.   I can think about university a bit more and sorting things a bit less.  And perhaps the most relevant fact to write here is that I finally have the time to prattle on about eating, cooking, food and drink.  This time in a format where no one can interrupt me to point out that I should have been somewhere else half an hour ago.

So in the grand scheme of things, I guess the hiccups weren't the end of the world.