Why is it that Ikea furniture absolutely needs a man's strong hand? On friday night we went to Ikea with the bright idea of buying my son Andre a bunkbed. I naturally assumed I could fix it all by myself considering I had built two bedside tables this summer and they had only taken me four hours! So, my mom and I set to work. It took us around one hour to get all bothered and angry at each other, another hour to push part of the frame together which absolutely refused to stick and another hour to realize something was wrong, very, very wrong...We had stuck the wrong parts together with superhuman strength and succeeded, in order to take it apart, by breaking those little annoying wooden pieces. At this point, my son had given up on us forever and I ended up calling my boyfriend Dairy trying to keep my voice calm and composed (which of course it was not - it was whiny bordering on hysterical) as I begged him to come help us useless weak pathetic and dusty females.
To cut a very long story short, he came and we had to undo the whole thing and after many other incidents involving bent nails we couldn't remove and that had to be removed, me hyperventilating, my threatening to throw the whole thing out right this moment as it was clearly the end of the world for me, my dog max jumping on us for attention, Dairy nearing leaving from exhaustion, we finished it!
Well, all this to tell you that no, I won't be giving you the recipe for swedish meatballs but rather a recipe for a chocolate fudge cake. This, my dear patient readers (if any at this point), was the reward for our backbreaking work. As this cake is cooked in a pan of water, it has a soft, compact and extremely moist interior and a brownie-like appearance and texture on top. I got the recipe for this cake from my mom who, in turn, got it off some Greek television cooking programme... Sorry, not very original, but believe me, this is the chocolate cake that will disappear at the speed of light. I didn't even have time to take a picture of it in its glorious entirety.
Dewy Chocolate Cake
Ingredients
250 grams margarine
1 cup sugar
300 grams black chocolate (70%) preferably chocolat noir cremant de cailler
5 eggs (yolks and whites separated)
1/2 cup flour
Zest of 1 orange (optional)
Heat up oven to 180 degrees celsius, lightly butter and flour a medium sized round baking tin. Mix the margarine with the sugar until the mixture is creamy and white. Melt the chocolate in a small bowl which you have placed over a saucepan of boiling water making sure that it doesn't actually touch the water. Add to the previous mixture. Incorporate the eggs yolks, flour and the eggs whites which you have beaten with a pinch of salt. You may also add the zest of one orange to give it a little more flavour even though, rest assured, the chocolate in this cake is so good it doesn't need anything else.
Place the baking tin within another larger one which you have half-filled with water keeping in mind that the water level will rise (when you put in the second pan with the mixture) and risk flooding the cake if you put too much. Bake for 45min, then switch off oven and leave for another 15min. After the 15min, place cake on a cooling rack and when it has cooled considerably, lightly dust it with icing sugar. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.
In case you are wondering why the Beatles are running in the picture above, it's because they caught a whiff of my cake and were running to find it in desperation. It's true, I swear...
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