Chocolate Cake With Chocolate Canadian Halva
Preamble
Start by making Chocolate Cake except this time you use more almond flour and it comes a little drier and crumblier. Also you used some lemon zest but that didn’t seem to matter at all, confirming more than ever the foundational suspicion of this blog that baking is way more robust than Big Baking wants you to believe. Never mind that the whole premise of this post is that the cake is too crumbly …. shhhhh it’s a conspiracy from the upper echelons of the Baking Industrial Complex to coerce hapless consumers into purchasing expensive bespoke measuring cups and kitchen scales.
Want proof? You know who else has scales? Dragons. You know who can instantly flame-broil anything whenever they feel like it? And who hoards money? Why do you think they’re so excited to sell you their scales? Connect the dots!
To Prepare
Dry cake calls for icing, so we’re going to melt some butter, crack open the confectioner’s sugar we bought last weekend, and use the rest of the cream. As the butter is melting, add cocoa powder and confectioners sugar. Scour the fridge for the heavy cream. You just saw it! Recall that you told your wife you didn’t have plans for it and she could put it in her coffee if she wanted. Forensic detectives will later confirm a positive ID of the discarded husk of the heavy cream at the top of the trash pile. Tragic.
OK, change of plans. As you vaguely recall, Halva is a dessert made from tahini and probably whatever you feel like. Luckily you just bought two containers of tahini. Even more luckily, tahini is absolutely terrible in coffee.
Add some tahini and stir. Add a little salt. It’s too thick; it’s clumping up. Add a tiny bit more butter. Does normal halva call for butter? No time to check recipes now! It’s also not sweet enough. Consider a bipartite solution: maple syrup. You’re not sure, but it’s entirely possible that the aboriginal bedouins of Canadia would grind their tahini paste with boiled sap of the sugar-maple in order to preserve both ingredients against the harshness of their monsoon season. [Editor’s Note: No, it isn’t.]
Later you’ll read halva recipes that prescribe assiduously checking the temperature of hot syrups, warming the tahini separately, and/or chilling the mixture before further handling it. It seems that “traditional” halvas are made with honey, where recipes staking lesser claims of authenticity may call for sugar. Truthfully, half-assing it seems to work pretty well thus proving that candy thermometers are part of the scam: Have you ever seen a dragon use one?
Reviews
- 8/10 stars: everything tastes sweet and chocolatey. This is basically all I want out of life, don’t judge.
- “Oh, you made frosting”