Flourless chocolate cakelets

Last night's feast went well, but the flourless chocolate cake turned out dry and uninteresting. So this afternoon I adapted the recipe and tried again. This time it worked beautifully. Here's what it looked like, and here's how to do it.

Makes six (four, two) individual cakes in ½ cup custard cups or ramekins. You could stretch the 6-serving recipe to fill 8 ramekins if you have plenty of fresh berries and you are serving this after a large meal.

6	4	2	servings
4oz	2.7oz	1.3oz	dark chocolate (bittersweet or semi-sweet)
1	⅔	⅓	stick unsalted butter
¾C	½C	¼C	sugar, or a bit less
3	2	1	large egg(s)
½C	⅓C	3T	unsweetened cocoa powder (dark is best)

Preheat oven to 325°F. Butter each ramekin, cover the bottom (but not the sides) of each with a circle of waxed paper, and butter the waxed paper.

• Chop chocolate into small pieces. Put it with butter in a large glass measuring cup or small, microwave-safe mixing bowl. Microwave briefly and gently until the chocolate and butter have almost melted. Be careful not to scorch them.
• Whisk sugar into chocolate-butter mixture. Add egg(s) and whisk well. Whisk in cocoa powder. Pour batter into ramekins (it will be fairly stiff; you may have to splat it in with a spoon).
• Bake for 12–14 minutes. You want the top to have formed a skin, but you don’t want the cakes to bake all the way through. Gloppiness is part of the fun. Besides, they will continue to bake after you remove them from the oven.
• Cook cakes on a rack for 5 or 10 minutes. Invert them; if they don’t slide out easily, run a thin knife around the edges. Remove waxed paper.
• Serve warm, or cover and refrigerate to serve later. In an air-tight container, they will keep for several days. They hold birthday candles well, and they look lovely if served on a dribble of sauce with berries for garnish.

Based on a recipe originally published in Gourmet (November 1997) and available at Epicurious .

Saki on grocery stores

If you enjoy Edwardian wit (think Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton), check out The Complete Saki or The Collected Short Stories of Saki.

I've had my battered Modern Library Edition for forty-five years--it was a Christmas gift from my best friend in high school--and it continues to charm. Saki is the pen name for H.H. Munro (1870-1916), a British journalist born in Burma and killed in France during World War I. His last words were "Put that damned cigarette out!"

Here are some lines from "Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business":

"It is the fashion nowadays," said Clovis, "to talk about the romance of Business. There isn't such a thing. The romance has all been the other way, with the idle apprentice, the truant, the runaway, the individual who couldn't be bothered with figures and book-keeping and left business to look after itself. I admit that a grocer's shop is one of the most romantic and thrilling things that I have ever happened on, but the romance and thrill are centred in the groceries, not the grocer. The citron and spices and nuts and dates, the barrelled anchovies and Dutch cheeses, the jars of caviar and the chests of tea, they carry the mind away to Levantine coast towns and tropic shores, to the Old World wharfs and quays of the Low Countries, to dusty Astrachan and far Cathay; if the grocer's apprentice has any romance in him it is not a business education he gets behind the grocer's counter, it is a standing invitation to dream and to wander, and to remain poor."

A Lenten birthday feast

crudités with hummus

Martellozzo prosecco (Veneto)

potage aux patates douces

crab ravioli with shallot cream

Litorale vermentino (Maremma Toscana) 2006

risotto with porcini, cremini, & shiitake mushrooms

roasted root vegetables

L’Ecole N° 41 syrah (Columbia Valley) 2004

fromages assortis

flourless chocolate cake

Hardy’s Whiskers Blake classic tawny dessert wine

Café

Give up carbon for Lent

Here's an idea that could do more good than fish on Fridays (though as a fish lover, I suggest fish not only on Fridays but on Wednesdays and Mondays as well)--Reduce your carbon intake for the next forty days.

This suggestion from two Church of England bishops is reported by Tearfund, a UK charity that fights global poverty on many fronts. The article includes several practical suggestions, including "snubbing plastic bags."














Merriam-Webster Online defines snub thus: "to check or stop with a cutting retort" or "to treat with contempt or neglect." Have the good bishops gone too far? Do we have to snub the bags? Will it be OK if we just politely refuse them?

Mark Bittman's new blog!

My favorite all-purpose cookbook is Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. For Christmas my daughter Molly gave me How to Cook Everything Vegetarian--a worthy addition to his line. And now the New York Times columnist ("The Minimalist") and PBS star has launched a blog about food and cooking called Bitten.

"We’re going to look at great food made with everyday ingredients and readily achievable techniques," he writes, "not food as something to be admired from afar, but as a part of daily life. We’ll also bat around the big ideas that foodies sometimes ignore: how it gets produced and moved from one place to another, as well as who pays for it and profits from it."

Better yet, he's posting a daily recipe, with photos.

Ash Wednesday

Reality
You are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3:19

Compassion
As a father has compassion for his children,
so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.
For he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.

Psalm 103:13-14

Gospel
The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

1 Corinthians 15:47-49

Death-defying Christians

In one way, early Christians had a much healthier view of the body than did their pagan neighbors: they believed that love required them to take care of the physical needs of others. In fact, according to sociologist Rodney Stark, compassion for others was a major reason that Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and supplanted ancient pagan religions.

Stark’s 1996 book, The Rise of Christianity, offers a fascinating discussion of early Christianity’s exponential growth rate. In chapter 4, “Epidemics, Networks, Conversion,” he quotes a letter from Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria written in about ad 260 during a major epidemic:

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ. . . . Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.

In contrast,

the heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease.

Paradoxically, the death-defying Christian community grew larger. According to Dionysius’s testimony (the plague’s “full impact fell on the heathen”) and Stark’s calculations, Christians who nursed the dying were far less likely to die during the epidemic than were pagans who did everything in their power to avoid getting sick.