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More baking

30 Sep 2008

Sunday was Ann’s birthday and so with a wonderful excuse to do some proper baking (which I hadn’t done in quite a while) I picked the most complex cake recipe I could find, raided the grocery store for enough chocolate to make everyone else in line raise an eyebrow (and look on quite jealously) and scoured the kitchen for anything that could make my job easier (I’m still using plastic pint glasses as measuring cups as they don’t have American style measuring cups here and we don’t have an ingredients scale).

Image of what the cake was supposed to look like - take from Martha Stewart's website.

The recipe I decided to use was from Martha Stewart’s website and is a Devil’s Food Cake with Chocolate Ganache (picture from her website above) which is basically an excuse for chocolate covered chocolate covered chocolate cake with chocolate filling. I’ve reposted the ingredients below so you can get a sense of how rich this cake is:

Ingredients

Makes one 9-inch layer cake

* 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans
* 3/4 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder, sifted, plus more for pans
* 3/4 cup hot water
* 3/4 cup sour cream
* 3 cups cake flour (not self-rising), sifted
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 2 1/4 cups sugar
* 4 large eggs
* 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
* Chocolate Ganache

For the instructions, check out the cake on Martha’s site.

I had used this recipe once before – in an attempt to make the cake while at college at Colby. Unfortunately due to a series of scheduling conflicts, we didn’t end up in the kitchen we had planned on using and found ourselves continually sticking the cake and the ganache out in the Maine snow in an attempt to get the chocolate to cool. This time, with at the very least a refrigerator, I wanted to prove that Martha’s cake couldn’t master me.

I’m not sure I entirely did so. The cake turned out pretty well (and quite delicious) but there were a number of minor issues. First – I would advise you NOT to try this recipe if you don’t have an electric mixer. I did it by hand and beating the ganache for the middle layer took about 40 minutes of whisking. Also, I didn’t have two layer cake pans so used a single, larger 9-inch pan, planning to cut the cake in half to create two layers. This worked alright, although it doubled the baking time which meant that the outsides were just a tad overdone. Unfortunately, in my impatience to get going with the frosting (which I had just spent 90 minutes preparing, including 40 minutes of whisking), I tried to start spreading the ganache before the cakes had cooled which caused the chocolate to melt all over the counter – and the top layer to break in half!

In the end, the cake came out surprisingly well and looking a lot more like the picture than I had ever expected. Let me know what you think:

Colby in London

29 Sep 2008

I didn’t have a chance to say that over the weekend, I had the opportunity to meet up with Parker Beverage, the director of Admissions at Colby, when he came to London to take part in a college fair for prospective students.

On Saturday afternoon I made my way across town to join him at the fair and had an absolutely wonderful time gushing about Colby to some quite scared-looking prospies and their rather intense-looking parents. In most cases, they were international students (from all over the world) studying in London but there were a number of Brits as well. I always forget how much I enjoy talking about Colby until I have a chance to start raving about my Alma Mater. It really was an incredible experience and I’m so happy I went by.

After the fair, Parker and I grabbed coffee and it was great to chat with him just on the level of someone who understands the Colby culture. He also was quite familiar with Castilleja (his niece went there) and the Bay Area. I gave him the DormWise pitch as well and if he comes across anyone who might be able to help me out by taking over the site, he promised to put us in touch.

Best part of it all? I am now on the radar for someone who can do alumni interviews in London :).

Beer Exposed

28 Sep 2008

In the ongoing quest to experience as much of London as possible in the name of event reviews (i.e. for free) I am always excited when I get press tickets from Spoonfed or complimentary tickets for no particular reason at all – as was the case when some random promoter handed me three tickets to Beer Exposed while I was on the tube to work earlier last week. Last night, Sarah and Steve (my now married dancing friends couple – congratulations to the two of them! Although it does make me feel a bit old to have friends who are married couples. I digress.) and I headed off to Beer Exposed at the Business Design Centre in Islington to see what this whole thing was about.

Well, as no one was really surprised to discover, it was about getting drunk. We made a solid effort to treat the event like the beer coineseur’s paradise that it was supposed to be – we took the small sample cups of international beers, read the brochures about what food to pair with which color of ale, got experimental with some fruit (raspberry and strawberry), savoury (coffee and chocolate) and vegetable (carrot and pumpkin) beers which was actually quite enjoyable, but in the end, it was lots of happy inebriated people.

Our two favourites had to be the champagne beer which is made with champagne yeast so as to have the consistency and flavour of champagne (courtesy of Kasteel Cru brewing company) and the raspberry beer (provided by the Brouwerij De Halve Maan group and, apparently, the Flanders and Belgium tourist board). After I had a few drinks in me, I got somewhat patriotically excited by the American brewing companies present which led to this photographic gem (thank you Sierra Nevada Pale Ale):

In addition to Sierra Nevada, some of the other American breweries present included Budwieser, Brookyn Brewers and Blue Moon - which I seem to remember being an on-tap favourite at the Colby pub. Yes, that's Steve in the background.

Also unsurprisingly, it was an incredibly friendly crowd. The patrons were happy, the distributors were happy, everyone was smiling and having a great time. Without a doubt, that event solicited the most interaction between strangers I’ve seen yet in London. It could be their new slogan for next year: “Sick of avoiding eye contact on the tube? Come to Beer Exposed where everyone is your friend whether you know them or not.” I meet a lovely promoter from Ireland who explained to me what the “quintessential British beer” was (she was less than flattering, Brits); an American guy doing a graduate program here who wants to get involved with Spoonfed, another promoter who also got really excited about Spoonfed and will be following up to do some writing with us, and a distributor’s housemate who got dragged along to the event – who gave me probably more free bottles of the beer to take home than he would have had he been working for the company himself and I think asked me out next Thursday.

Overall it was a lot of fun. I don’t know if I would have paid the 14 quid entry, although had I thought about it, since my ticket was free I should have signed up for one of the workshops where they teach you how to pair chocolate or other foods with different beers (with samples) for the extra fiver. It was the first one of these events and I think they’re looking to make it an annual thing. Definitely the most important change for next year would be to get more food at the event next year – the occasional cracker at one or two of the booths was definitely not enough.

Which meant that, after we left, Steve, Sarah and I poured ourselves into the first pizza place we saw. Sorry British kebab shops… we just wanted our drunk pizza.

Kebabs

26 Sep 2008

The British answer to the late-night drunken pizza order seems to be the kabab shop.  These things are everywhere, possibly more predominant than burger joints, and have even more questionable quality products.  Almost without exception, I have never seen a crowd outside a kebab shop at anytime other than late on a Friday or Saturday night.  There is one, however, that is fairly near my flat and happened to be the source of my very first meal in the UK and I happened to swing by around dinner time and grab dinner to go.  The food is tasty, the floors are clean and the prices are reasonable which makes for a good take away in my book.

In any case, kebab shops usually offer something called a doner kebab which, depending on where you get it, involves a thick flour tortilla, shavings from a roast lamb, and then some or all of the following: salad, chili sauce, chips (that’s “french fries” for the Americans in the room), mayonnaise and some other random items. The most interesting thing about this whole process is that the lamb is on an upright skewer rotating in a half open oven and as the day progresses, more and more is shaved off for the various patron’s kebabs.  By the end of the day, it’s been shaved down to the skewer and a new cut of meat is put on in the morning.

The thing is, these things are quite big and I’ve never been there in the morning when they open (hmm, kebab for breakfast….) but I have this somewhat repulsive image of a full sheep on a skewer in the morning that just gets wheedled down to meat bits by the end of the day.

And with that lovely mental picture… perhaps I’ve just discovered why kebab shops only appear to hungry drunk people.

Who’s is bigger?

25 Sep 2008

There’s a great little startup also based in London called The School of Everything which has the incredibly brilliant concept of allowing anyone to teach anything and have all of the information located in a central place. Want to teach piano lessons? Find students, get listed and charge through the site. Want to offer home yoga classes? Done. Want to be the foremost local teacher on soap carving? Great but don’t expect many people to sign up.

Alex and Henry, the CEOs of Spoonfed know the team over at School of Everything and swung by their office earlier this week for lunch, something which ended up getting a write up in their blog. This post made the rounds through the Spoonfed office today and we of course expected their lunch to have involved some highly intellectual conversation, innovative business initiatives, cutting edge technology… and all that jazz.

Imagine our surprise when the School of Everything blog exposed their true conversation: a debate between whether the School of Everything team or the Spoonfed team has the bigger teapot.

Tea is a big deal in this country.