Steamed chocolate cake
23 November 2020 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeWhile trying to eke out my bag of sugar, I experimented with a wartime economy cake, made with '1 breakfast cup' (I used an ordinary mug) of flour and of milk, 1½ tablespoons of sugar, and two ounces of fat melted with two tablespoons of golden syrup (presumably cheaper than refined white sugar, plus a substitute for the missing egg). The raising agent is bicarb and vinegar, but it didn't rise all that much -- I don't know if that was my failure to compensate for a lack of self-raising flour, or a design feature. My one-egg sponge cake from the same book didn't rise all that well either. [Edit: although apparently that was actually due to using the wrong size cake tin!]
I realised when it was too late that attempting to steam a cake in a tin with a removable bottom was not a very good idea -- but neither was propping it up on an inverted plate to keep the bottom seam out of the water, which of course pushed the whole thing up in the tin! Just as well it didn't rise all that much, really... but that was the only 7-inch tin I had.
The steaming time was largely guesswork, as my pressure cooker no longer holds pressure; the recipe said an hour and a half, and I gave it twenty minutes without weights followed by forty minutes with the 'medium' weight on (which seemed like a reasonable compromise for the 15 + 30 minutes at low pressure recommended in the cooker handbook). It didn't look done in the middle after the pressure had reduced, so I gave it another 15 minutes 'medium', which seemed to do the job. I suspect that the sealing ring is now so leaky that even the 'high' pressure weight isn't sufficient to get it up to the 'low' design pressure :-(
Because the initial mixture is very liquid -- the instructions say 'pour into the tin'! -- and it hasn't risen a long way, the resulting cake looks incredibly rich and moist, is not particularly sweet and as a result tastes much more luxurious than the ingredients would lead one to expect. I 'iced' it with a teaspoon of bramble jelly, which gives a lovely glaze with a trace of rich red, plus an intriguing hint of extra flavour.
I'm afraid freezing slices for later might be tricky, though, and the rest of it will definitely have to live in the fridge. Which is awkward as it takes up quite a lot of space!
I realised when it was too late that attempting to steam a cake in a tin with a removable bottom was not a very good idea -- but neither was propping it up on an inverted plate to keep the bottom seam out of the water, which of course pushed the whole thing up in the tin! Just as well it didn't rise all that much, really... but that was the only 7-inch tin I had.
The steaming time was largely guesswork, as my pressure cooker no longer holds pressure; the recipe said an hour and a half, and I gave it twenty minutes without weights followed by forty minutes with the 'medium' weight on (which seemed like a reasonable compromise for the 15 + 30 minutes at low pressure recommended in the cooker handbook). It didn't look done in the middle after the pressure had reduced, so I gave it another 15 minutes 'medium', which seemed to do the job. I suspect that the sealing ring is now so leaky that even the 'high' pressure weight isn't sufficient to get it up to the 'low' design pressure :-(
Because the initial mixture is very liquid -- the instructions say 'pour into the tin'! -- and it hasn't risen a long way, the resulting cake looks incredibly rich and moist, is not particularly sweet and as a result tastes much more luxurious than the ingredients would lead one to expect. I 'iced' it with a teaspoon of bramble jelly, which gives a lovely glaze with a trace of rich red, plus an intriguing hint of extra flavour.
I'm afraid freezing slices for later might be tricky, though, and the rest of it will definitely have to live in the fridge. Which is awkward as it takes up quite a lot of space!
