All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [29]
The chocolate you use will depend on how much you want to spend and how discriminating your chocolate tastes are. A good grocery store will have a variety of brands to choose from. One of my co-workers, Julia Redpath Buckley, swears by the Safeway generic brand of chocolate chips. I’m a sucker for Hershey’s extra-dark Dutch process unsweetened cocoa. I like Lindt’s bittersweet bars, but Ghirardelli also makes a kick-ass chocolate.
Chocolate can keep for years. You’ll want to wrap your bars and blocks in aluminum foil and then put them in a zipper-top bag before storing them in a cool, dark place. Why? Because the cocoa butter in chocolate is a whorish sponge, which will pick up the flavor of anything it’s standing with. When you unwrap your chocolate for later use, you might notice a white film. It’s not the creeping crud, it’s that whorish cocoa butter separating from the solids. It’s harmless and will disappear when the chocolate is melted. Also keep your cocoa tightly lidded in that same dark, cool place.
Chocolate is sensitive and needs to be treated gently. Never melt your chocolate over direct heat. Use a double boiler or a bowl that fits into a saucepan filled with simmering water, which you maintain over low heat. You can also preheat an oven to 225 degrees F, set your chocolate in a bowl in the oven, then immediately turn off the oven and wait a few minutes. You can also nuke chocolate in the microwave. Start with 30 seconds on high power. Initially, the chocolate won’t look much different (it might look like a bar of chocolate in a bowl), so you’ll have to use a knife or fork to see if it’s melted. It’s important not to overheat chocolate. Sensitive, remember. And always break your chocolate chunk into smaller pieces before you try to melt it. Let your melted chocolate cool until it’s slightly tepid before adding to other ingredients.
Chocolate Pound Cake
Know some chocoholics? If they’re not in rehab, they’re going to become your very best friends when you bring this baby in. It’s another recipe Momma gave me. I made it for the Morning Edition overnight staff during the month after the 2000 presidential election, when we were still wondering who’d won: Bush or Gore. At 3 A.M., the cake was on the counter. At 3:16 it was gone. The cake would have lasted until 3:20, but Newscast’s Dave Mattingly had five pieces. He said one was for Carl Kasell, but I know that was a lie.
This cake slices thin and can serve between 20 and 32 people.
* * *
YOU’LL NEED
A 10-inch tube pan
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 cups sugar
½ cup unsweetened cocoa
1 stick (½ cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup shortening
1¼ cups milk
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 large eggs
1. Position a rack so the cake will sit in the middle of the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Line the bottom of your pan with parchment paper and spray the sides and bottom with baking spray.
2. In the bowl of an electric mixer, dry whisk the flour, sugar, and cocoa together.
3. Gradually add the butter, shortening, and milk and beat on medium speed until smooth.
4. Add the baking powder and salt, and beat until incorporated.
5. Still on medium speed, add the vanilla extract and then add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.
6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1½ hours, or until a toothpick or thin knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
7. Cool the cake in the pan for 10 minutes. Remove the cake from the pan using our rack-over-pan method and flip it onto a plate (see page 28). Continue cooling the cake.
Wait, wait, wait Melissa! In the first part of this book we spent God knows how many brain cells going over how to properly cream butter and sugar and add the dry ingredients, and this recipe doesn’t follow that