Two years ago Chestnut Chocolate Cake / Three years ago Duck Baked with Garlic & Honey

WINTER DELIGHTS

It’s a wet winter, and as they say here, rain is a blessing, but there are also sunny days in which to enjoy the almond blossoms and the promise of spring. And a chocolate, rosemary and olive oil cake, recipe below.

All the rare, even miraculous, rain means that Israel’s main water source, the sea of Galilee, is filling up. It is now at its highest level in years, up 1.75 meters since the start of the winter. While it is still more than a metre below its maximum level, there is even talk about perhaps having to open the sluice gates to let some water out into a nearby dam.  

Some Israelis confess to checking the official website daily to see where the water is climbing back to.  It’s therapeutic – a moment of calm and joy to distract from deadlocked elections, rockets from Gaza, or the Corona virus.  

Chocolate, Rosemary - and Cointreau

We have great news! Very excited to announce that Just Add Love has been won an award for excellence, a Gourmand Award for 2020.

Take a bow photographer David Mane, graphic designer Amanda Hampel and all the wonderful grandmothers (and 2 grandfathers!) in our book.

The Gourmand awards is an annual cookbook competition, run by the Cointreau family, yes the family behind the famous French liqueur. There’s a ceremony, usually in Paris or in Macau, where people cook dishes from their books. Will check the dates are and the location, but travel appears to be badly affected by the Corona virus this year, sigh.

There was one funny moment … you see, I heard about the award from a woman who also won this year, rather than from anyone official.

Sharon Lurie won for her book, the wonderfully named The Kosher Butcher’s Wife. (You can check our her Facebook page here.) I was a bit uncertain, since I didn’t enter the book in the awards myself, still have to find out who did that, and I hadn’t heard anything from Cointreau.

But it turns out that it IS true – Cointreau had a mixup with my email address – proving that you can always trust what the kosher butcher’s wife tells you!

wonder pot

I owe you this recipe because it didn’t fit into the last blog post. And I can also share some advice on how to bake a cake when your oven dies, which has just happened to me.

I will have to move house in the spring, so there’s no point replacing my oven right now. It is a bit of a blow if you’re putting out a cooking blog, though, so a friend kindly loaned me her toaster oven. I did try baking in it, and muffins were fine, but it turned out not to be great for cakes.

Uncertain what to do next, I dug back into Israeli cooking history and remembered the Sir Pele or wonder pot.

It’s in the shape of an angel food or bundt tin with a diffuser underneath and holes for steam in the lid, and you can plonk it on top of your gas stove to bake. (Perhaps even on top of your electric stove?)

A woman sent a photo to our Facebook page of her grandmother’s original wonder pot, which she still has and it looks sturdier than my aluminum version. But even with this one, you are able to produce a pretty decent cake! Another miracle. You do have to play around with it. My diffuser wasn’t great so I burnt the first two cakes but I am improving and the last one was such a success it was eaten before I could turn around to take a photo.

The wonder pot has a fascinating back story. It was invented in the early years of the “Yishuv” - the pre-state Jewish community in Israel - when few homes had proper ovens, with most only kitted out with primus stoves. There had to be a way out of the problem of how Jewish women could do their Sabbath baking. So they came up with the Wonder Pot!

There are minor questions, like creating a new state, and there are fundamental questions, like Jewish people eating cake. (Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion also put scientists onto the rice issue. With rice scarce, the new Jewish state had to have a substitute – and that’s how Ptititm were born. They are in fact a form of pasta in rice shape. When they are round, they are what we today call ‘Israeli cous cous’. They were an instant hit in the 50s and known then as ‘Ben Gurion rice.’ Credit where credit is due… )

Recipe

So however you’re baking, whether it’s in an oven or a wonder pot, do try this recipe. It has that combination I love – ‘savoury’ herbs in a sweet dish. It caught my eye because rosemary grows in huge amounts outside my front door. Accessible fresh spices are what we want…

Plus it is another cake, like the one from last week, where you basically need a large bowl and a whisk and that’s it. Simple is sometimes good. And sometimes necessary!

The recipe is from Kim Boyce, a pioneer of whole grain baking, whose beautiful book Good to the Grain is now 10 years old.

Chocolate & Rosemary Cake

Serves 8

INGREDIENTS

• 1 ½ cups / 210 g / 7.5 oz all-purpose flour

• ¾ cup / 80g / 3 oz spelt flour (or whole wheat flour)

• 2 teaspoons baking powder

• ¾ cup / 115g / 4 oz sugar

• ¾ teaspoon salt

• 3 eggs

• 1 cup / 250 ml / 8.5 fl oz olive oil

• ¾ cup / 180 ml / 6 fl oz milk or buttermilk

• 1 ½ tablespoons fresh rosemary

• 140 g / 5 oz dark chocolate (70% cacao)

• 2 tablespoons sugar or 1 sachet vanilla sugar for sprinkling on top

METHOD

1.    Preheat oven to 350F / 175C. Rub a loaf pan or 9 inch (24 cm) cake tin with olive oil, or line with baking paper. If it’s silicone, no need to prepare the pan.

2.    Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl. Set aside.

3.    Chop the rosemary finely and add to the sugar, mixing it together. Chop the chocolate, into 1 cm / ½ inch pieces. Keep any smaller pieces or chocolate powder created along the way.

4.    In a large bowl, whisk the eggs thoroughly. A hand whisk is fine, no need to get the machines out unless you want to. Add the olive oil, milk (or buttermilk) and sugar and rosemary mixture and whisk again.

5.    Fold in the dry ingredients until just combined. Stir in the chocolate, carefully including all the different sized bits and chocolate pow Pour the batter into the prepared tin. Sprinkle the extra sugar or vanilla sugar on top.

6.    Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the top is golden brown, and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.

FEEDBACK

This is a lovely cake, easy to prepare - and to eat. The mixture of chocolate and olive oil is already a winner, plus by this amount of rosemary – not too much! – adds an indefinable something. You don’t even recognise it, it’s just a lovely background taste.

If you have the ingredients at home, the cake can be in the oven in 15 minutes. That’s another winning feature.

Next time I think I will reverse the ratios of flours ie use double the amount of spelt flour to AP flour and see what effect that has.

By the way, the photos you are seeing are from the toaster oven version, which did change things a bit. The loaf pan didn’t fit, so I had to use a round cake tin instead. The original recipe called for sprinkling chocolate and sugar on top, but when I did that in the toaster oven, it started to burn. I tried a second time, and simply folded all the chopped chocolate into the mixture and that worked a treat. (That’s the version I’ve shared here). But all in all, this is a very forgiving recipe!

Till next week, some more spring moments, and my favourite baby donkey, growing up fast.