New Potatos au Gratin

Au gratin dishes are the ultimate in comfort food to me.  If you were wondering, ”gratin“ is of French etymology, coming from a combination of the words “gratter” (to scrape or to grate) and “gratiné” (having a crust or skin).  So it’s any baked dish with a nice crust on top, usually made with bread crumbs or melted cheese.  So much cheese.

For Easter dinner I bought some new potatoes in homage to spring.  And then I wanted to cover them with cheese, in homage to the fact that the weather is still miserable here and it might as well be winter yet.  This recipe is in essence the same as the one I made with Jerusalem artichokes last year, but with a few tweaks to reflect the season.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Start with your potatoes, however many will fit in the dish you wish to use.  Use a mandolin to slice them super thin.  I prefer them thin over thick, because they cook faster, and it means I don’t have to let them cook in the pan first before putting on the cheese crust.  I can put the cheese on before I bung it in the oven and I don’t have to worry about it burning.  I like to give them a rinse in cold water, too, to get rid of some of the starch.

In a measuring cup, pour about 2/3 cup heavy cream.  Obviously if you’re just making a small dish you can use less.

Fill it to about the 1 1/2 cup mark with milk and liberally add ground black pepper.  Give that a stir.

Grate a whole heckuva lotta cheese.  I have a mix here of gruyère and aged cheddar.

While you’re at it, chop up a bunch of Italian parsley.

Generously butter the dish you want to serve your potatoes in.  Line the bottom with a layer of potatoes.

Sprinkle on some parsley, then some cheese.

Repeat that until you get to the top layer.  Sprinkle on your parsley, then pour your milk mixture all over the whole thing.

THEN cover it with the rest of the cheese.

Pop that baby in the oven and bake until the top is crusty and bubbling, about 25 minutes. Enjoy!

Sweet Bread Pudding with Squash and Tres Leches Sauce

Second bread pudding of the week.  And this one is also made of squash.  But here’s the kicker: this one is a sweet one, a bread pudding you can have for dessert or even breakfast.  A very rich breakfast.  When the Pie and I ate this dish last Sunday morning we had to go and have a nap afterwards.  But it was worth it.

There’s a bunch of this that you can do the day before, to save yourself time.

First,  you roast a butternut squash at 400°F until it’s all tender and squishy, about 30-45 minutes.

If that doesn’t do the trick you can always put it in the microwave.

Cut up a baguette into chunks and leave it overnight to go stale.  If you’ve already got a stale one then you don’t have to wait for it, obviously.

Now the tres leches sauce takes about 45 minutes to make so you will probably want to do this the night before.

In a medium saucepan, bring a 12oz can of evaporated milk (I actually used coconut milk because that’s what I had on hand) and 6 tablespoons granulated sugar to a boil.

See how it’s all nice and foamy.

Dissolve 1/8 teaspoon baking soda in 2 teaspoons warm water and chuck that in as well.  Be wary of the foaming milk.  Keep stirring.

Reduce the heat to medium and keep it simmering.  Stir it frequently while it cooks, for about 30 minutes, until it’s significantly reduced and a light caramel in colour.

Add in 1 can sweetened condensed milk and 1 cup whipping cream and stir it around until it’s all warm and thoroughly mixed.

Now let it cool until it’s just warm and then you can serve it.  Or bung it into the fridge overnight.

So onto the bread pudding.  Set your oven at 350°F and butter a large casserole dish.

Take half your squash and plop it in a blender with 1/2 cup granulated sugar.

Add in 1 1/2 cups half-and-half milk (or use regular low-fat milk mixed with your preferred amount of cream), some freshly grated nutmeg, a pinch or two of garam masala, and a shake of cinnamon.

Give that whirl, then add 5 large eggs and whirl it again until just combined.

As for the other half of your squash, use a fork to roughly mash it up with 1/2 cup brown sugar.

Plop your stale bread chunks in a large bowl and add in the milk/squash mixture as well as the rest of your half-and-half.  Let that sit for a few minutes.

Dump in the rest of the squash and stir it around.

Pour it into the casserole dish and bake it for 30 minutes, until it’s all solid and browned.

Serve hot, either as a breakfast or as a dessert.

Drizzled with tres leches sauce it’s not a healthy breakfast but it sure is good.

Cream of Broccoli Soup

I was talking to Cait over GoogleChat the other day and she was scarfing down some cream of broccoli soup, a dish I adore.  She rubbed it in a little bit that she had some and I didn’t.  So I figured I’d blend myself up a batch.  And I thought that you could, too, if you wanted to.

Start with some onions.  Dice them up pretty finely.

Chuck them in a large pot with some garlic and a bit of olive oil and butter.  Let that cook on medium-high heat until the onions are translucent.

While that’s going on, you can start on your broccoli.  I used three heads of broccoli, chopped up, including the stems.  Use a vegetable peeler to get rid of the tough skin.

Then I also sliced up about two stalks of celery.

And cubed up several small potatoes. I leave the skins on for texture and vitamins but that’s up to you if you want to remove them.

Those go in the pot too, as well as about 4 cups chicken broth (you can use vegetable broth if you are feeling vegetarian).

Cover that and let it simmer for 20-30 minutes, until everything, including the potatoes, is tender and squishable.

Then remove it from the heat and use an immersion blender or a food processor to blend the soup to your ideal of smoothness.  I like mine a little chunky.

Then you can add in your flavourings.  The first is obviously some form of cream or milk.  You can use sour cream or yogurt or coconut milk or soy milk or whatever you like.  I’m going to go traditional here and use some heavy cream.  We keep it in a small Nalgene bottle because then we can see how much we have left and we don’t have to deal with the cream crusties on the mouth of the carton.

Dijon mustard is also a popular addition to this soup.  The Pie hates mustard but as long as I use it in moderation in things he doesn’t mind.  It definitely adds to the taste.

And finally, you are going to need a shot or two of Worcestershire sauce.  That goes without saying.

So add in whatever you like.  Feel free to adjust to your personal taste.

Give it a stir so it’s all nicely mixed in.

And serve.  With crusty bread on the side and chives to top, or, if you are a real cream of broccoli fan, more grated cheddar cheese than is really sane.

That’s it, that’s all.  Easy, huh?

That’s a Spicy Ice Cream!

I may have told you this already, but a while back my parents took a road trip down to Louisiana with the specific goal of visiting the Avery Island Tabasco factory.  As a result all their family and friends received a plethora of Tabasco-related gifts.

One of these is this, a Tabasco ice cream mix.

 

I’ve had saffron ice cream.  Black bean ice cream.  Taro ice cream.  Hemp ice cream. Even wasabi ice cream.  So this can’t be too weird, right?  Granted, I didn’t really ENJOY any of those (well the saffron was pretty good), but I’m always willing to try something new.  The Pie, not so much.

It’s a mix, so I can’t really give you the recipe here (because I don’t know it), but it involves milk, cream, the mix, and Tabasco’s Sweet & Spicy Sauce (which we also received as a present).

So here goes.

The mix is revealed to be sugar, vanilla, and xanthan gum.  So nothing too scary.  Sweetener, flavour, and thickener.  Fine.

Put that in a bowl, add the cream.  Whisk.

Add in the sweet and spicy sauce.  Whisk.

In the ice cream maker, it reveals itself to be a lovely pale peach colour.

And it actually froze up pretty quickly. You are supposed to put it back in the container in which the mix came, but ours didn’t fit.

The verdict?  The Pie, Fussellette, and I all tried it, and as Fussellette says, “It tastes like stir-fry.”  So if you like that, I recommend this stuff.  If you’d prefer your ice cream to be a little more traditional, you might want to leave this on the shelf.  I wonder if there’s anyway this could be saved.  Any suggestions?

Snow Day Dinner: Pasta Carbonara

As I said before, the charming Fussellette braved icy streets and our own half-assed driveway-shoveling job to make it to our house on Friday for a gluten-free extravaganza.  I decided to make pasta carbonara, not only because it’s freaking amazing, but also for another, rather peculiar reason.

Chel (she of the wedding cake), back before she married Invis, was dating this other fella who was from England.  And when she went to the UK to meet his parents, the fella’s mum made a pasta with a white sauce that Chel (who hates cheese and most things creamy) absolutely adored.  Problem is, of course, that the breakup didn’t go so well and she has since married someone else, someone who doesn’t know anything about this recipe.

So for the past year or so she has been puzzling this out.  She knew it wasn’t an alfredo, and she pooh-poohed my suggestion of a béchamel.  Last week she suggested it might be a carbonara.  Now, despite the fact that this woman is a tech genius, it didn’t occur to her to look on the internet herself and experiment with the various recipes.  Instead, she comes and asks me.  Silly girl (love you squishee!).  So it’s up to me to see if what I cobble together tastes like the heaven that SHE ate some time ago.  Also remember that she lives in Toronto, so it’s not like she can pop over for a bite.

So here goes.  I pulled inspiration from a bunch of different carbonara recipes, so I think you can be pretty flexible with your ingredients.

This is a pasta that you toss before serving, so it’s recommended that you use something like a penne, or that which is easy to stir around.  We had our fresh gluten-free linguini, so we just had to suck it up for this occasion.  This is also a recipe that you make on the fly — aside from cutting up the vegetables ahead of time, you pretty much have to do this all as you cook and then serve it immediately.

So let’s start with what prep work we can get out of the way.

Take 12 or so slices of bacon and cut them into little bits.  You can also use pancetta or prosciutto, or any other strongly flavoured cured pork.

Dice up an onion, a handful of mushrooms, and the florets from one head of broccoli.  You could also use zucchini, sweet peppers, any number of vegetable.  Go with what you’ve got in your fridge.  Don’t try to be too fancy.

Finely grate up about two hefty handfuls of parmesan cheese.  Because I have tiny munchkin hands, I got the Pie to do this part (also because I hate grating cheese and I’d already skinned off part of my finger).  His hands are sizeable.  He can cover my whole face with part of one hand.

Put one handful of cheese in a pretty serving dish and put it on the table for garnish.  Take the other handful and dump it in a measuring cup with 1 cup whipping cream and 4 egg yolks.

Give that a good stir and set it aside.

Set a pot of slightly salted water to boil (if you’re using fresh pasta, add a few drops of olive oil to prevent the pasta from sticking together). Cook your pasta.  You need to time it so that the vegetables are ready at the same time the noodles are.

In a very large, deep frying pan, heat up about 1 tablespoon olive oil.  Chuck in your bacon and fry until it’s crispy.

Chuck in the onions and stir for a few minutes until they start to become translucent.

Then add the rest of your vegetables, and cook, stirring often, until they are all tender and bacon-flavoured. I also sprinkled on some herbes de provence for extra flavour.  Thyme or oregano would also work well.

When you drain your pasta, reserve about half a cup of the cooking water.  Toss the pasta in with the vegetables and add a bit of the water.  Use only as much as you need to help coat the pasta with sauce.  If you like your sauce thick, add a few tablespoons.  If you like your sauce thin, add the full half cup.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour in your cream/egg/cheese sauce.  Toss to coat the pasta and then serve immediately.

Garnish with the extra parmesan, and go back for seconds.  Serves 4 generously.

O Canada: French Toast

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Wait a second. Are you telling me that French toast is Canadian?

No, not really.  In fact the first reference to a dish resembling French toast is written in Latin and dates back to the 4th or 5th century.  French toast, or pain doré (“golden bread”), can be found in a lot of recipe books from all over the world.

But it does form part of what the Pie and I refer to as a “lumberjack breakfast,” and that makes it part of our Canadian cuisine.

Picture this: most of Canada is unpopulated by people, and in many places still there are huge tracts of old-growth forest stretching off past the horizon.  One thing we do got is trees.  A steady supply of timber is one of the reasons Canada was colonized in the first place.  Our capital city was founded in the 1850s as a lumber town, and mills operated there even as late as the 1960s, clogging the Ottawa river with rafts and rafts of logs.

From our old $1 bill, image from Steve Briggs

The timber that flowed downriver to the mills came from logging camps far upstream, and these camps were occupied by big, rough men, mostly immigrants from Poland, Ireland, or the wilds of Québec, working in miserable conditions to earn enough money to send to their families, who often lived hundreds of miles away.

Logging was (and still is) a rather dangerous occupation, and it took a lot of energy just to stay alive and get the job done.  That is why every logging camp worth its salt (and many weren’t) had a reputable camp cook, and this cook was responsible for providing all the loggers with the caloric intake they needed to last out the day.  This meant a breakfast crammed with carbohydrates, proteins, and fats: bacon, biscuits, eggs, pancakes, bread, sausages, steaks — and French toast.

The traditional lumberjack French toast would have originally started out as a loaf of stale bread, sliced and left to soak overnight in a mixture of milk and eggs.  It was fried up and served hot, slathered with sugary maple syrup and dusted with more sugar.  Our version is only slightly more refined.  Oh, and if you’d like to read a bit more about logging camps, John Irving produced a great novel recently on the subject called Last Night in Twisted River.  It’s a good read, one of Irving’s best, in my opinion.

Anyway, French toast.  Here we go.  This recipe will give you six to eight slices of eggy toast, depending on the size and absorbency of your bread.

In a shallow bowl, whisk together 2/3 cup milk (or half milk and half cream) and 4 eggs.

Add in as well 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla.  If you want to go very traditional, try a teaspoon of rum instead and replace the sugar with maple syrup.

One at a time, soak your pieces of bread in the egg mixture.  Here we used raisin bread because we love it.

Traditionally you would use a thick hearth loaf, but if you want to get fancy, it’s also good with brioche, or pannetone, or even biscuits.  Experiment. Make sure to get both sides good and eggy.

Slip the bread into a hot buttered skillet.

Brown both sides (this takes about three minutes a side if you use medium heat).

Serve hot, sprinkled with icing sugar and fresh fruit, if available.

You can add a sprinkle of cinnamon, too, if the mood strikes you.

Canadian-style means, of course, lots and lots of maple syrup. Lumberjacks need their caffeine, too, so have it with a hot cup of coffee.

Makes a great start (or end) to any day.

O Canada: Nanaimo Bars

Despite having eaten probably a thousand of these over the years, I have never made one before.  I guess I thought it would be hard.  It really isn’t.

The origins of the Nanaimo bar are shrouded in mystery.  Some say they are not from Nanaimo at all, that some housewife merely pointed to a town on a map when she named her crusty buttery bar.

Others (Canadians, mostly, and especially those from Nanaimo), insist that the Nanaimo bar belongs in its rightful birthplace on Vancouver Island.  For our purposes, we’ll go with the second story.  According to that second story, miners in town would take the bars with them when they went to work.

There are, of course, a hojillion recipes out there for Nanaimo bars.  There are a bajillion variations (my neighbour makes a variation with candy canes at Christmas).  I kept seeing ones that told you to use custard powder or pudding mix and I kept thinking, where is the original recipe?  How can I make this from scratch?  Then I realized that using a powder mix IS the original recipe.  The custard powder is there more for flavour and sticky-together-ness than it is for making an original custard.

This particular recipe, with some very minor modifications, comes from Nanaimo [Nah-NIGH-mo] itself, which is a tiny town on the tiny Vancouver Island, a few hours’ ferry ride away from Vancouver in British Columbia.  Apparently the mayor of Nanaimo held a contest several years ago to find the BEST Nanaimo bar recipe in town.  It was re-posted by the owners of the Buccaneer Inn, in Nanaimo.  How many times do you think I can say “Nanaimo”?  I bet it’s more than you think.

In a double boiler, or a bowl suspended over a pot of simmering water, melt 4 or 5 ounces dark chocolate with 2 tablespoons butter.

Stir it until it’s smooth and set it aside to cool to room temperature.

It will cool faster if you swish it up on the sides of the bowl.

In a stand mixer or with an electric mixer, whip together 1/2 cup room temperature butter, 3 tablespoons cream, 2 tablespoons custard powder (I used Bird’s), 1 teaspoon vanilla, and 2 cups icing sugar.

Keep going  until it’s light and fluffy.

In another bowl over a pot of water, melt and stir together 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup sugar, and 5 tablespoons cocoa.

Beat up an egg.

Add that into the melted butter, sugar, and cocoa, and stir to thicken.  The egg will cook as you do this, and the texture might turn out a little lumpy, but that’s fine.

Remove the mix from the heat and stir in 1 1/4 cups graham crumbs, 1/2 cup finely chopped nuts (I used almonds), and 1 cup sweetened dessicated coconut.

You can easily chop the nuts in your food processor.

Press the coconut crumb mixture into the bottom of an ungreased 8″ square pan.  Lacking that, I used a 10″ x 7″ pan and hoped for the best.

Spread the yellow custard mixture over the top of the crumb base.

Pour on the melted, cooled chocolate and gently spread it to cover the whole area.

Chuck in the fridge and leave it to chill for at least an hour.

Cut it into squares and eat them all.

Store what you can’t in good conscience finish in an airtight container.

O Canada: Nova Scotia HodgePodge with Beer Bread

In light of the Multilinguist’s excursions in Vega, we are making October Canadian Cuisine feature month (the Pie is thrilled because none of it involves tofu).

What better way to start us off than to take advantage of what the autumn harvest in Newfoundland has to offer us?  This creamy vegetable stew is easy and comforting (vegetarian, too, though certainly not vegan).  The recipe for the stew comes from All Recipes (with my modifications), and the idea itself comes from Delilah, one of the Pie’s classmates.  The beer bread comes from my mother’s own cookbook on Nova Scotian eatery.

For the Beer Bread:

Didn't have any Nova Scotia beer on hand, sorry.

In a bowl, mix 3 cups self-raising flour with 3 tablespoons granulated sugar.  If you don’t have self-raising flour, mix 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt into every cup of all-purpose flour.

Add in 1 12oz bottle of beer and mix well.  Use a commercially produced beer for a lighter loaf, or a home made beer for a denser loaf.

This is supposed to turn out more like a batter, and you can see here that one bottle of beer has just produced a really dry dough.

I poured in almost a whole ‘nother beer before I got the consistency I was looking for, but this will depend on your flour, your beer, the temperature/pressure/humidity of your environment, whether or not you got out of bed on the right side or the left side, whether a butterfly really did flap its wings in Brazil … you get the idea.

Pour into a greased loaf pan and chuck it into a cold oven.  Turn the oven on to 350°F and bake for 40 to 45 minutes.

The loaf will sound solid when you tap it and be a pale golden when it’s done.

Serve hot.  Also good the next day if you have any left over.

For the HodgePodge:

Peel and dice 1 medium-sized turnip.  Chuck that in a large saucepan.

Dice 3-4 carrots and chuck those in as well.

Trim the ends off a couple handfuls of fresh wax beans (those are the yellow ones) and cut them into 1-2″ pieces.  Do the same with several handfuls fresh green beans.

Add enough water to the saucepan to cover the vegetables.  Bring the water to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Cube up 5-6 small potatoes and add that to the pot.  Let that simmer another 30 minutes.

Add in 6 tablespoons butter and 1-2 cups heavy cream (we used a blended table cream here) and stir that in for a few minutes.  Soy milk would also work well here.  I have used soy milk in chowders and it provides a rich, nutty flavour that complements the vegetables nicely.

Add 2-3 tablespoons flour to 1 cup water and stir that around.

Pour the flour water into the saucepan.  Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally, and cook for a few more minutes to thicken the broth.

Season generously with salt and pepper and serve hot with beer bread.

Frankly, both the Pie and I found the hodgepodge a little on the bland side.  It tasted kind of like invalid soup.  But it was good.  And totally freeze-able.  Next time, though, I think I’d add an onion, some garlic, and some spices.  The beer bread was excellent and we plan to have what’s leftover with some chili tomorrow night.

Iced Coffee (ARRRR MATEY!)

My man loves his morning coffee.  He also loves it with whipping cream.  He SAYS he’s just helping me use up the excess cream, but if there is some in the house, the first place it goes is in his coffee.  Oh, don’t have enough anymore for baking?  Let’s get some more!  And so it goes.  He’s a devious one, that man.

In addition to being International Talk Like a Pirate Day (I’m not making this up), today also marks the seventh anniversary of our first date.  We have been together for most of our adult lives.  That is so weird.  Anyway, this one is for the Pie, from his saucy sea wench.  ARRRRR!

Most of the recipes for iced coffee I found on the internet involved using instant coffee granules.  I personally feel like instant coffee tastes like beef broth and should only be used in baking.  So this recipe (which I have made up all with my own brain meats) uses fresh ground, fresh brewed coffee, and I won’t have it any other way.

I don’t want to water down any of my coffee goodness, so first I made a tray of coffee-ice cubes.  There’s your caffeine — with a crunch.

Then I made some more coffee, added a ton of cane sugar to it (it will dissolve best when hot), and let it cool.  And stuck it in the fridge so it was cold.  I wouldn’t leave coffee in the fridge for too long, lest it start to taste like old, cold coffee.  Maybe a day or two at best.

When it comes to the mixing, I think the best ratio is 1 part coffee ice cubes : 1 part whipping cream : 2 parts cold sweet coffee.  For two people, this worked out to 1 cup ice cubes, 1 cup cream, and 2 cups coffee.

Blend that sucker silly.

Pour it in a pretty glass (or your man’s favourite glass, thanks Cait), and drink it up.

Try some variations.  Use milk instead of cream for a beverage that won’t kill you as quickly (and deliciously).  Squirt in some chocolate syrup for a mocha iced coffee.  Add vanilla and white chocolate for a white chocolate latte.  Use espresso instead of coffee and create yourself an iced cappucino or mochacino.  Up the proportion of ice to liquid coffee if you like your coffee a little on the slushy side.  The possibilities are nearly endless!

Baked’s Sweet and Salty Cake

Not only do the Pie and il Principe share a birthday, but I’ll have you know that Cait’s birthday is only four days later.  And then Jiss’ birthday is only a scant five days after that.  Because we were heading back to Ottawa for a visit at the beginning of the month, we decided to postpone our birthday celebrations until we got there so that Cait  and Jiss could share in the fun.

So, for my husband on his birthday and my best friend on her birthday, and my husband’s friend’s spouse on HER birthday, I made them this fantastic confection, which comes out of our favourite cookbook of all time, Baked.

You can read the recipe online here, here, or here.  But you should really buy the book.  The pictures are glorious and the authors explain everything so well.

This recipe involves caramel, chocolate, and salt.  Yes, SALT.  I rarely use salt in baking but this one made it all worth it.  If you can get your hands on fleur de sel, all the better, but you can use sea salt as a substitute if necessary.  It’s also worth noting that this cake takes many steps, and you can save time by making things like the caramel the day before and putting it in the fridge.

For the Caramel:

Pour 1/4 cup water, 1 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons light corn syrup into a medium saucepan and stir it around.

Plop a candy thermometer in the pot (making sure it doesn’t touch the bottom) and bring the mixture to a boil, cooking until the temperature reaches 350°F, which will take about 10 minutes.

Keep a close eye on it.  If you cook it any higher than the specified temperature it can burn super quickly.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, combine 1/2 cup whipping cream and 1 teaspoon fleur de sel.  Bring that to a boil as well and cook until the salt is dissolved, about 5 minutes.  Remove that from the heat and set aside.

When the sugar has reached 350°F, remove it from the heat and allow it to cool for one minute.  See how it’s browned a little bit? That’s the caramelization of the sugar, but you don’t want it to get too dark.

Carefully (very carefully) add the hot cream to the sugar mixture.  It foams and fizzes quite a bit, so you don’t want that in your face.   Whisk that all up until it’s smooth.

Whisk in 1/4 cup sour cream and let the caramel cool.

For the Cake:

Preheat your oven to 325°F and butter three 8″ round cake pans.  Cut a circle out of parchment paper for the bottom of each one, butter it as well, and dust them all with flour.

You need two decent-sized bowls and the bowl of a mixer for this next part.  In one bowl, whisk together 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa, 1 1/4 cups hot water, and 2/3 cup sour cream.  Set that aside and let it cool while you do the other things.

In the other non-mixer bowl, sift together 2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon salt and set that aside.

Now, in the mixer bowl, beat together 3/4 cup softened butter and 1/2 cup vegetable shortening.  Beat them until they are smooth and kind of stringy when the paddle is spinning around, about 7 minutes.

Beat in 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar and 1 cup dark brown sugar until light and fluffy.

Add in 3 eggs, one at a time.

Add in 1 tablespoon vanilla extract, scrape down the sides of the bowl, and beat for a further 30 seconds or so.

Carefully add in a third of the flour mixture, then half your chocolate mixture, then a third of the flour, the rest of the chocolate, and the rest of the flour.

Divide the batter evenly between the three prepared pans and bake for 18-24 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the centre of each cake comes out clean.

Allow to cool completely before removing from the pans and peeling off the parchment paper.

For the Caramel Ganache:

First, finely chop 1lb dark chocolate.

Also, cut up 1lb butter into tablespoon-sized pieces.  Make sure they’re soft but still cool.

Now we’re going to make some more caramel, but this time without the salt or the sour cream.

So, in one pot, combine 1/4 cup water, 1 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons light corn syrup and stir it around.  Bring it to a boil over high heat until a candy thermometer reads 350°F, which will take about ten minutes.  Remember to watch closely.

In the other pot bring 1 1/2 cups heavy cream to a boil, then remove from heat and set aside.

When the caramel has reached 350°F, remove it from the heat and allow it to rest for a minute.

Carefully add the hot cream to the caramel and stir to combine, then let it cool for 5 minutes.

Plop your chopped chocolate in the bowl of a mixer and pour the caramel over the chocolate.  Let that sit for a minute, then stir the chocolate to dissolve it.

Shove your bowl into your mixer with a paddle attachment and mix the chocolate goo on low until the outside of the bowl feels cool to the touch.

Dump in your cut-up butter bits and mix on medium-high until it’s all well-combined and smooth and a little bit whipped, another 2 minutes or so.

To Put It All Together:

Now I followed the instructions up to this point to the letter, and ended up with a slippy-slide-y cake that ended up looking a bit like a giant pile of poop.  When I put my cake layers together, they kept sliding off on the caramel and the weight of the cake pushed all the lovely caramel goo out of its insides and it was altogether rather a disaster.  So I recommend cooling your ganache and your caramel slightly before you do this, just so they’re slightly colder than room temperature and a little easier to handle.

Slice the tops off your cakes to make them level and place one on your cake plate.

If you are concerned about making a mess with your icing (though considering how goopy mine was it didn’t matter anyway) you can place four strips of parchment paper on your cake plate under the cake to catch the excess, and then pull them away later, leaving a nice clean plate.

Take about 1/4 cup of the caramel and spread a thin layer on the cake, allowing it to soak into the cake a bit (which will only happen if your cake or your caramel is warm, and will just make everything quite slippery).

Layer on top of that about 1 cup of the caramel ganache (also, at room temperature, incredibly slippery).

Add another layer of cake.  See what I mean about gravity really being annoying here?

Repeat your caramel and ganache steps and top with your final cake layer.  This is where I tried to remove some of the excess and failed.

Use the remaining ganache (easy to do if it’s cold, if it’s room temperature you’ll use wayyy less) to cover the surface of the cake.  At this point the whole thing started to slide slowly and rather unnervingly to one side.  It was like watching a mudslide in slow motion.  There was much yelling.

Sprinkle the top with fleur de sel and chill for an hour or so before serving, to set the ganache.

At least it tasted good.