Lady Lunchalot

I think I am possessed.

Lately I just haven’t been able to get chocolate cake out of my mind. I recently read an article about The Cake Lady. She describes her sure-fire recipe for career success; bring a cake to the office every Monday morning. This woman has baked 50 cakes for her colleagues over the past year. She’s got to be one of the most popular staff members around.

So with less than four weeks until my wedding and a size ten wedding dress at stake, I’m determined to resist the temptation of baking a cake a week. But ever since I read that damn article I’ve been hallucinating about bundts, mud cakes, flourless cakes, black forest cakes, devil’s food cakes, layer cakes and sachertortes.

My head is spinning worse than Linda Blair’s.

So I got home from work last night and went to my cookbook library to see what my exorcists (Nigella and Stephanie) had to say on the subject. I decided to go with Nigella’s Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake recipe from Feast, one of my favourite recipe books. It looked fairly simple, and it was getting late so I wasn’t up for anything too complicated. Besides, I had a tub of sour cream in the fridge that had nearly expired, and what better way to use it than in a chocolate indulgence.

The cake itself was fairly straightforward; sift flour, bicarb, baking powder, sugar and cocoa. Mix in two eggs, a sinful amount of butter, and a few tablespoons of sour cream. Bake until skewer comes out clean. No rocket science here.

It’s the icing on this cake that is really, well, the icing on the cake. Melt chocolate and another artery-clogging wodge of butter. Mix with more sour cream and icing sugar. Spread all over the cold cake in thick concrete-trowel slathers.

Then decorate. Because I was feeling delicate I chose the undisputed queen of all dessert fruits, the strawberry. There is really no competition when it comes to a cake crowned with fresh strawberries.

By now visions of Disney’s dancing hippos were swimming in my head like warning beacons.

I confess, I ate a slice for breakfast this morning. I know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I couldn’t help it. So I took the rest of the cake in to work with me to share with my colleagues, gain some brownie points and save my hips from a major blowout. Ok, it was also to appease my guilt. After all, there’s no fun in sinning alone.

The exorcism worked. The itch has been scratched. I’ve eaten two teensy little slices and thankfully I am no longer daydreaming of ganache or bathtubs filled with chocolate frosting.

So now that the devil horns have been replaced with my halo again, I am thinking I might just climb back on the wagon and lightly steam some veggies for dinner. After all, the size ten wedding dress is only three and a half weeks away.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.