Koko Black, and Stone Tools

Having a sweet tooth is an advantage for a hunter gatherer. On that sort of diet sweet foods, and calories, are difficult to find. These days a sweet tooth is not so useful, but I’m always looking for excuses to indulge mine. A day outdoors, investigating remnants of tool making by hunters, is the perfect excuse to say you’ve burned enough calories to earn a sweet treat.

For a Chocoholic Sydneysider one of the best sweet treats in Canberra is Koko Black. First though, we had to earn our chocolate by exercising. Luckily we had the pleasure of doing this in springtime in Namadgi National Park. We were looking for Aboriginal stone tool making sites.

The remnants of stone tool making are flakes which have split off from the tool when it was being shaped. The site we visited was located on a sunny granite outcrop above a creek, but the flakes were from a fine-grained igneous rock. The raw materials for the tools must have been mined elsewhere.

Our fearless leader lead us to the site using his antique GPS. Dating to the 1990s it even predated graphics. You needed a separate compass to use the bearing the GPS unit calculated for you.

Back in Canberra we had worked up our appetites, so after dinner we headed to Koko Black. The Chocolate Icecream Martini is hard to resist, with it’s intensely flavoured icecream served with fudge sauce and an artistic chocolate curl.

The Chocolate Tart is very rich, and accompanied by a contrasting orange cream.

Leaving without visiting the chocolate counter was impossible, and I came home with a little paper bag of goodies. My old favourite Baileys was a must, and the new honey ganache turned out to be good too. Most impressive though, was the rum and raisin, which managed to taste very fruity without actually containing any chewy bits. It might be my new favourite.

It’s nice to get your sugar fix as honey ganache, rather than having to gather wild honey. Being a hunter gatherer can’t have been easy. At springtime in Canberra the bees are feasting on wattle, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to rob them of their honey.

Koko Black
Canberra Centre
Bunda St
City ACT

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	3 snorts
Taste	4 snorts
Service	4 snorts
Atmosphere	3 snorts

Chocolate Gingerbread Cake

The chocolate cake hall of fame sounds like exactly the kind of museum I’d like to visit. Sadly it isn’t really a place, but a chapter in Nigella Lawson’s book Feast. It’s not as good as a room full of cakes, but it’s a good read.

Flicking through the hall of fame it can be hard to decide what to bake, but I was happy with my choice. When I read Nigella’s description of her chocolate gingerbread as a “glottally thickening wodge”, I knew that the cake would be beautifully moist. It’s the kind of recipe that’s perfect to adapt for a gluten free cake. I’ve used a combination of almond meal and a gluten free flour blend in my version.

This cake keeps well because it’s so moist. It even travels well because the icing sets firm, making it less vulnerable to damage during transport. The only thing that stops it from being perfectly presentable is the slicing. This cake is moist and rich, and it will stick to your knife. The crumbs are sticky and black, chocolatey and spicy. Eat this cake with people who recognise taste over looks, and who won’t fight you for knife-licking rights.

Chocolate Gingerbread Cake
Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Feast (my version is gluten free and uses Australian sized tablespoons)

Ingredients for the cake
To heat together
175g butter
125g brown sugar
1 1/2 tabs caster sugar
200g golden syrup
200g treacle
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger

To add next
1 1/4 tsp bicarb soda
1 1/2 tabs water
2 eggs
1 cup milk
150g almond meal
125g gluten free plain flour
40g cocoa
175g choc chips

Ingredients for the icing
250g icing sugar
30g butter
1 tab cocoa
60mL milk

Method
Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celcius. Line two springform pans (22cm round) with baking paper. Choose a large enough saucepan to contain all the ingredients so that the entire recipe can be prepared in this.

Melt together the butter, sugars, golden syrup, treacle, cloves, cinnamon and ginger.

Dissolve the bicarb soda in the water in a small cup.

Take the saucepan off the heat and beat in the eggs, milk and the bicarb dissolved in water.

Sift in the flour, almond meal and cocoa, and stir to combine. Finally stir in the chocolate chips.

Divide the mixture evenly between the two springform pans.

Bake for about 40 minutes until risen and set on top. Cool in the tin.

When cool prepare the icing by melting together the butter, cocoa and milk. Then sift in the icing sugar. Spread over the top of each cake.

The Rocks Aroma Festival

When I went out to meet an Old Friend a few weeks ago, I had no idea what delights I was in for (well, other than the delights of catching up with her).  Upon meeting her at Town Hall, she suggested that we go and meet up with another friend of ours, who was visiting the Aroma Festival in The Rocks. She said that basically it was a festival of coffee, chocolate and spices, anything that smells good. As soon as she said the word chocolate, I was in So the Old Friend and I wandered up to The Rocks, the main street of which was absolutely packed. And she hadn’t been kidding- there was a delicious aroma in the air, a mix of coffee and spices and sweetness. I hadn’t had lunch, but with that smell I felt like I could simply eat the air. I ended up having a gozleme for lunch, which if you haven’t had one before is a kind of gigantic savoury pancake/crepe thing, with fillings like cheese, spinach and mince or chicken, served with a wedge of lemon. Gozleme is one of my favourite festival foods- nearly every event you go to in Sydney seems to have at least one stand selling them. It’s great to watch the production line of women rolling out the dough, spreading them with filling and cooking them on hot plates before they’re chopped into pieces and thrown on a plate for you. They’re delicious, just simple flavours, and one of the things I like best about them is they aren’t greasy. They’re oily, yes, but they don’t leave you with the feeling that you’ve pressed your face into a vat of grease when you’re done. Anyway, one urge fulfilled, we moved on to explore the festival.

Being something of a chocoholic, I was absolutely delighted to see so many chocolate fountains. There is nothing quite like watching melted chocolate overflowing from one tier to another, filling the air with its warm, rich scent. It’s a good thing there was a glass cage between me and the fountain, or I wouldn’t have been able to resist just plunging face first into that liquid chocolate. There were skewers of strawberries, marshmallows and banana, which would be held under the fountain until they were dripping chocolate, then served to you on a paper plate. Absolutely to die for, particularly because the stalls were almost all specialist chocolate makers so the chocolate was divine. The Old Friend and I both had a chocolate shot- basically a paper shot glass full of milk or dark chocolate. Soooo gooood! We got milk chocolate shots from the Adora Chocolate stall, and they were rich, creamy and absolutely smooth. Fortunately they gave you a spoon, so you could scrape the maximum amount of chocolate from the sides of the cup. Unfortunately not even my tongue was long enough to lick all the chocolate from the insides, but I can tell you now I wanted to!

Another delight on the chocolate front was the Flower Fruits stall. They specialised in strawberries coated in chocolate and decorated in the most beautiful patterns, it was utterly amazing. You could buy them singly, as a box of three, or a box of six. We tried one of them, and it was spectacularly delicious, the strawberry flavour perfectly balancing the sweetness of the chocolate. Perhaps the most impressive though was the bouquet they had on display.

It was stunning. Imagine giving that to someone as a gift. Hell, imagine RECEIVING it as a gift! Wow. Just wow.

Another big focus of the festival, other than chocolate, was the coffee. Now I freely admit I am not a coffee person. I find it rather disgusting, in all its forms. It smells rather tasty sometimes (usually when it smells less like coffee and more like chocolate) but I’d really rather not drink it. Still, the rest of the population seems to love it, and there were sure a million stalls of every boutique kind of coffee you can imagine. Organic and free trade were very much in evidence. Of more interest to me, but less common, were the tea stalls. Tea is my brew of choice, and there were certainly a wide variety of unusual flavours as well as the normal ones. We stopped at the Chamellia Tea and Tisane stall to have a look at their selection. They had teabags out so you could smell the different flavours, which certainly helped to make a decision. I bought a box of loose leaf lemongrass and ginger tisane, which I have since had the opportunity to brew and try, and I can say now it’s delicious. It’s a very fresh, energising taste, more strongly lemongrassy at first but with a delightful ginger after taste. It also tastes fantastic cold, so each time I make a pot I refill it once I’ve made all the cups and let it cool, and then refrigerate it- a nice refreshing drink after a walk! The friend we met at the festival also quite likes tea, but had mostly just had ordinary black tea, so she was looking to try something a little bit different but not too adventurous. We eventually settled on Earl Grey, a fairly common flavour but the bergamot flavouring makes it quite distinctive. She messaged me later that night to say she’d tried it, it was deliciously smooth and she was glad she’d picked it, which is always a good result when you try something new!

Also available on the tea front were many different kinds of chai. I’m not a chai expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I was absolutely amazed at the different varieties. The Rainbow Chai stall had tiny pots of the different chais as well as some pots on the boil. I didn’t know this, but apparently there is both chai you brew in a pot like leaf tea, and chai that you boil and then simmer for 20 minutes or so. With the stuff you simmer, you can apparently add other teas as a base for the flavour. Amazing! What was even more stunning were the differences between the actual chai mixes. Some were fine and powdery, but some were made with whole cloves, pieces of cinnamon bark and cardamom pods. Usually, the chunkier it was the more it smelled- the chunkiest one had a scent strong enough to knock you sideways and leave a burning sensation in the back of your nose if you sniffed to hard. The lady at the stall was very helpful, discussing how to brew it and what went well with each flavour, and offering us different kinds to smell. In the end the friend bought a box of one of the spicier ones and also a box of Rainbow Chai which is a bit milder and their most popular blend, apparently.

Finally, the Old Friend and my other friend shared a Red Velvet cup cake. The stall had many different and interesting ones, all beautifully decorated- the red velvet was probably the simplest looking on there. In fact, they had a cake-size cupcake covered in fluted icing, it was beautiful. However, the Red Velvet contained the surprise that it was, in fact, red inside. Absolutely bright red, it was amazing, and I have it on good authority that it was very tasty. We also had miniature pavlovas, which were a bit lighter than I like (I like my pavlovas on the slightly chewy side) but were covered in delicious berry sauce or mango and passionfruit juice.

All this delicious food and drink was accompanied by various live bands. The whole experience was a smorgasboard for the senses with delicious aromas in the air, amazing looking food being prepared and presented on every side and the wonderful views of Circular Quay and The Rocks all around. Many thanks to the Old Friend for dragging me along!

Homemade chocolate sauce

A little while ago we invented a new homemade chocolate sauce from some half-remembered chocolate sauce recipes and the ingredients we had to hand. We’ve been meaning to post about it, but we’ve just been too busy eating it. We find it goes very well as topping on ice cream.

It’s very simple to make.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons water

Method

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally. Adjust quantities of ingredients to taste. Serve as soon as the sauce reaches the desired level of viscosity (about 5 min should be long enough for a nice gooey ice cream topping).

The sauce also works very well as chocolate flavouring in homemade milkshakes, but that’s the topic of another post. The sauce goes well with pretty much everything that cows give us – as Ogden Nash would say:

The cow is of the bovine ilk,
One end is moo, the other, milk.

Nougat Chocolate Balls

Dedicated forever to Windy, the housemate of Arwen (I think I might have actually met Windy once…) to whom I will be eternally indebted for this recipe. I’ve changed it a touch, as any good cook ends up doing. It’s one of the few things I make which require a lot of effort. It’s not difficult, it’s just fiddly, but it’s still effort.

We begin by chopping up 200g of nougat. Due mainly to the strenuous efforts of the Male of the Species, I’m using gluten free nougat this time (Arwen, there will be a box of these coming your way shortly ). I had a 300g bar of nougat, so I used the excess to sustain me while I was cooking. Chop it reasonably fine, since the smaller it is the easier it is to deal with later (all in due time). Needless to say, chopping nougat is a mongrel, and I never chop it as fine as I should. Still, you need reasonable sized chunks. Or that’s what I keep telling myself. Once that’s done, put the nougat aside and we get to the delicious bit. In a double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of water, melt about 450g/500g of milk chocolate. The original recipe I have says 375g, which is one packet of the coles brand stuff, but once it’s melted you’re going to add 300ml of double cream to it. The original recipe says 250ml of double cream, but what the hell are you going to do with 50ml of leftover cream? I’d rather have leftover chocolate than cream, so I simply increase the chocolate and use the cream up. Be careful not to overheat it, if you get the chocolate too hot it goes funky and you’ve stuffed it. Also with the cream and chocolate melt 50g of butter (yes, salted) until you end up with an incredibly delicious chocolate sauce. At this point it is utterly critical that you taste it. The whole thing will completely fail if you don’t, since you need the sugar to keep your energy up and if you don’t taste it you may faint from starvation and it’ll never get done.

Then you stir in your nougat bits, and slop it out into a greased lamington tin or a casserole dish or something of that nature, and put it in the fridge. Then you can walk away while it sets.

Once it’s set, you need to cut it into chunks. Smallish chunks, maybe 3cm by 3cm, err on the small side. Don’t get too worried about how much they break up at the edges, because you’re going to grab each chunk and manhandle it into a ball. This is harder than it sounds. It gets all melty on the outside (your hands are gonna get super messy at this point) and there are hard nobs of nougat in it that object to being rounded. None the less, get it vaguely orb shaped and then role it in crushed peanuts. You can get them in the baking section, one packet of 300g usually does it for me.

Throw them back into the fridge to reset a bit while you melt 375g of dark chocolate. If you have a bit of spare dark chocolate going, it doesn’t hurt to throw that in too, since I always end up a bit short at the end. If you haven’t done so already (and you probably haven’t, because I forgot to mention it) prepare some trays or plates by putting greaseproof or baking paper on them. Now you need 2 forks. You’re going to drop in each ball, and roll it around in the chocolate until it’s coated. Then pick it up, and balance it on one fork while you wipe the excess chocolate off the other fork. Then transfer it to the other fork without dropping it and wipe the chocolate off the first fork. Then do that one more time, and then put the ball on your tray or plate. The aim of this is to save chocolate. While you’re wiping your fork on the edge of the saucepan, it’s dripping, and you loose some in each transfer. If you don’t do this, you’re going to run out of coating chocolate. Of course, if you don’t want to bother, just make sure you melt more at the start.

One thing to do as you put each one down is check there’s no holes in your coat. The time I made them before this I found that there were little holes where it wasn’t properly coated, and as the chocolate cooled it contracted and squeezed the innards through like the vegemite worms you make with sao’s. Just give it a quick squiz and poke it with a little extra chocolate on any holes. Once you’re done, don’t put them in the fridge immediately (also reduces the worm problem), give them ten minutes to sit and then refrigerate. Then, go ahead and eat them. They’re very rich, and very delicious. I can manage maybe two at a sitting if I’m feeling hoggy. Which I usually am .