Black Forest Misadventure

Black Cherries

Week from hell, Ladies and Gentlemen. Week. From. Hell. Whatever could go wrong last week, did. After finishing up a rather hellish day at work on Tuesday - first day back after the bank holiday etc. - I plopped exhausted into the car to drive home, hoping to beat the worst of the traffic. After driving for approximately two whole minutes, I heard a familiar whup-whup-whup sound and felt a slight drag on the car. Flat tyre. Wonderful. I sat there, stress levels building, waiting for assistance (yes yes, helpless female), knowing that Dublin's roads were quickly clogging up with the traffic I had hoped to miss. 

In an attempt to find a silver lining, I tried counting the good things about my little misadventure: it wasn't raining (which would snarl traffic up even more and would mean I'd get wet while my tyre was being changed); the lady mechanic arrived really quickly (clearly not all females are helpless in these matters); and I got to relax for half an hour (enforced stillness with no chores / projects / work to do). With time to breathe and none of the usual distractions, I decided to amuse myself by planning a new bake for this weekend.

Devilishly good chocolate muffin

And good thing I did too, as the week proceeded as it had begun. It descended painfully through Dante's nine circles of hell and reached its nadir on Friday afternoon, when Word decided to create it's own numbering format throughout the report I'd spent most of the day working on (and crucially, it wouldn't 'Undo' - why??!!). Cue two hours of (unpaid) overtime trying to get the report back to its original state. The only thing that helped was the thought of the (hopefully) delicious bake I had planned for Saturday.

It all began with the Black Forest Gateau I made a couple of weeks ago (recipe as promised below). After sending it off to meet its destiny, I had a bowl of black cherries left over - soaked in a reduced cherry syrup with a dash of fruity liqueur. Now, I could have eaten them with yoghurt and granola for breakfast (albeit a slightly naughty breakfast, given there was alcohol in the syrup) or even as a dessert with some creamy Greek Yoghurt or vanilla ice-cream and toasted coconut flakes. But I had other plans. Looking at the plump cherries glistening in the thick syrup and with memories of the lovely Black Forest fresh in my mind, I wondered if I could make something like that, but in miniature. A cupcake or muffin maybe. 

Chocolate had to be involved - dark and devilishly good - so my base would be a chocolate muffin. Cherries (obviously). Could I just mix the cherries through? Hmmm, not sure. Thinking of the black cherries in their luscious syrup brought me to cheesecake (I know, bit of a leap, but I do love a black cherry baked cheesecake), which led me straight to a chocolate chip muffin, with a cream cheese and black cherry swirl. 

Chocolate chip muffin with black cherry and cream cheese swirl

There was a bit of a palaver in the making of them. Not because they were tricky - couldn't be easier in fact - but because I was so tired on Saturday after The Week From Hell that I completely forgot to put sugar in the first batch (it seems I never learn my lesson about baking when tired). Thankfully I licked some cake batter off my finger (and quickly spat it out again) before they went into the oven or I would've been serving inedible muffins to No.1 Sister when I visited her later that day. As muffins are incredibly quick to rustle up (dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in another, mix them together and dollop into the muffin cases), it didn't take me long to get a new batch made and baked (recipe below). 

Fortune favours the brave and my instincts had not led me astray; the muffin sponge was light (the muffin mix only contains 75g butter in total) and perfectly chocolatey, but with a hint of decadence in the cheesecake, chunks of chocolate and juicy cherries. All in all, the ideal muffin with which to drink coffee, chat and wind down after a particularly hellish week. From Dante's Inferno to heavenly bliss - I really couldn't ask for anything more from a muffin, now could I?

Caution: Cake demolition in progress

I've been thinking a lot about destruction and its opposite, construction, lately - cake philosophising if you will. Destruction, although a word with mostly negative connotations, is not always a bad thing. In fact, two of my (many) favourite things - archaeology and cakes - have destruction at their very heart. 

Partly reconstructed basilica in Bolonia, Andalucia

When the lay person thinks about archaeology, they don’t automatically jump to ‘destruction’, but one of the first tenets of archaeological fieldwork is that the excavation of a site means its total destruction. Once you have dug a site, it’s gone and, a bit like poor Humpty Dumpty, there’s no putting it back together again. To counteract this necessary destruction, we record and document each little step (‘we call it ‘preservation by record’), so that the site can be ‘virtually’ reconstructed. Sometimes, where there are extensive stone remains, it also allows the partial reconstruction of a site (as you might see at excavations of a Roman town, for example) - giving us tourists something at least half-way recognisable to look at. Why excavate at all? I hear you ask. Well, sometimes it’s about ‘rescuing’ a site that would otherwise be destroyed (e.g. by erosion) or excavating it in advance of planned construction or as part of a research project. Ultimately it’s about knowledge. We excavate to find answers that are nowhere else to be found. When was the site built? What is it? Who built it? Why? Of course, we don’t always find the answers we’re looking for and there are times when we only find more questions. But without the 'destruction' of the site, there would be no answers at all.

Black Forest Gateau

Naturally, you can't have destruction without first having construction. Two of my friends are in the middle of building projects (one large-scale, one small; both driving them round the bend). As I'm in the process of re-building my blog (bigger, better, shinier - coming to a page near you soon!), I too have had construction on my mind. I have discovered that, much like a real building project, doing a bit of a refurb on my blog is just as slippery time-wise as the real thing. My friend with the small-scale project was told it would take five days to complete. Two weeks later, she's still suffering the hell of builders in the house all day (she works from home), plaster dust in the air and hearing the constant refrain of 'yep, should definitely be done by tomorrow luv'. I naively thought I'd re-name and re-design my blog overnight. Not so. And as I only have myself to blame (no tea-drinking, head-scratching builders to vent my frustrations at) it requires lots of deep breaths and patience - Rome was not built in a day and my new blog won't be either it seems.

Cake demolition

Construction of another kind altogether was involved in the creation of a birthday cake last weekend - there was a request for a Black Forest Gateau for a surprise 50th birthday celebration (a very retro cake and also very male, I often think - men usually request it. Odd fact of the day). So last Saturday morning saw me getting back to the 1970s to construct a towering gateau, with layers of chocolate sponge, cream and cherries (recipe next week). I rarely get to see my cakes once they reach the hungry hoards, but my sister happened to be at the party and sent me a photo of the gateau when it was all but demolished. Seeing the rubble and crumbs on the platter, with one lone slice standing of what was once a proud tower of Black Forest... well, it should have made me sad (all my hard work!), but instead it made me smile. Not just because all reports were that it was 'the best cake ever' (such outbursts always please), but because that is what a cake is for. A well-made, beautifully presented cake has only one real function - to be eaten and enjoyed. It is made for destruction and until it has been destroyed, it can't fulfil its destiny. I think Black Forest met his destiny very well indeed.