Someone's in the kitchen with Daddoo...
Aug. 23rd, 2005 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniDad came to visit this weekend, and we baked -- a recipe I made up out of my own imagination and cravings! Didn't have enough of all of my igredients, and we forgot how the oven worked, and made it much more complicated than it should be, but the end result was still edible, so I thought I'd share. Comments and suggestions from more experienced bakers welcome.
A while back, I craved chocolate cake like nobody's business -- for breakfast. I had milk, Eggbeaters™ (fat-free egg substitute -- mostly egg white with vitamins and color added), sugar and cocoa. But no flour. I did have a canister of quick-cook oats, though, a bowl and an emersion blender. So I literally dumped everything in the bowl, measuring by eye (except I measured the oats carefully, wanting, for conscience's sake, to make sure each serving of cake equalled a full serving of oatmeal). Then I stuck the blender thing into the glop and ground the bejeebers out of it until it looked something like batter, poured it into a ceramic flan ramikin I had, and baked it in my toaster oven.
It took a few tries for me to come up with something palatable (I'd been guessing at the sugar to cocoa ratio, and one version came out so bitter as to be almost painful to eat. When I did equal parts sugar and cocoa, it came out as perfectly neither sweet or bitter -- like a dark, chocolately bread rather than cake. When I set my toaster oven to 350 F (177 C), which all the cake recipes I've read call for, the cake came out horribly cracked and unevn, which, as I understand it, is a sign that your oven is too hot. When I set my oven to 325 F (163 C), it took forever to get cooked. And even after the toothpick came out clean, always tasted a little doughy. So I stuck the temperature knob somewhere in the middle, and called it "335 F" in my head, but it might have been 340-45. And that worked great -- perfect texture.
Because my oven was so small, I could only ever bake small batches. But though I still kinda eyeballed the ingredients, I got a better sense of the proportions.
Since Dad was going to be here over the weekend, I thought I'd take advantage of his ability to put things into and take things out of the big oven, and double the recipe. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much oats or sugar as I thought I had, so I just went with what I had with the former, and substituting wildflower honey for the latter. We also forgot how the big oven worked, and accidently turned it off before the cakes were done, and had to restart the oven all over again. Dad said the end result was perfect, in his eyes, anyway, especially if you have a glass of milk to go with it.
But I did take the time to actually measure the ingredients as I put them in, and this is the result; because I didn't have as much oats as I normally do , it took a lot longer to bake, even taking into account the fumbling with the oven. I used 2 cups (to about the 500 ml mark on the measuring cup), and if I'd doubled the oats as I doubled everything else, I probably would have used 6 cups. ... Now that I think about it, the chocolate cake recipe on the back of the cocoa box calls for 2 cups of flour ... the unusual density of my original batter may be why 350 F was too high, before, and it might have been the right tempurature for this version, if I'd known...
Anyway, here it is, as written down by my Daddoo (what I normally would have done, if I'd had the right amounts, follows in parantheses, in italics):
SEMI-SWEET CHOCOLATE/ALMOND OATMEAL CAKE
(A "blender" recipe. I dumped everything in a bowl and ground it into a batter with an emersion blender. If you have a powerful conventional blender, that would work, too)
Preheat oven to 335 F and coat your baking pan(s)* with cooking oil and flour.
Combine in a blender:
¼ C. Olive Oil
½ C. Almond Butter (or "natural style" peanut butter)
1 C. Eggbeaters™ (or any similiar fat-free egg substitute)
1 C. Skimmed Milk
4/5 C. Honey (1 C. Light Brown Sugar, firmly packed)
¾ C. (1 C.) Hot Water into which 3/4 C. Unsweetened Cocoa has been stirred (i.e., until the cocoa powder is thouroughly blended in the water, and no longer looks "dusty").
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla
Blend on high until smooth and evenly textured. Add 2 C. Quick-Cook oats (4 C. oats), and blend again, until the oats are well ground (stir in an additional 2 C., and let the batter stand a few minutes [do not grind]; the batter will thicken quickly).
Fill your pan(s) nearly to the top; as this recipe has no levening, it rises some, but not a lot. Bake at 335-340 F for 35-45 minutes, or until you can start to smell it, the cake has started to pull away from the sides of the pan, and a wooden toothpick stuck in the middle comes out clean.
Makes 8 full hearty-breakfast servings, or 32 bite sized snacks.
* I use 3" x 5" x 2" mini-loaf foil baking pans (the size that fits in my toaster oven). This recipe fills 4 of them.
A while back, I craved chocolate cake like nobody's business -- for breakfast. I had milk, Eggbeaters™ (fat-free egg substitute -- mostly egg white with vitamins and color added), sugar and cocoa. But no flour. I did have a canister of quick-cook oats, though, a bowl and an emersion blender. So I literally dumped everything in the bowl, measuring by eye (except I measured the oats carefully, wanting, for conscience's sake, to make sure each serving of cake equalled a full serving of oatmeal). Then I stuck the blender thing into the glop and ground the bejeebers out of it until it looked something like batter, poured it into a ceramic flan ramikin I had, and baked it in my toaster oven.
It took a few tries for me to come up with something palatable (I'd been guessing at the sugar to cocoa ratio, and one version came out so bitter as to be almost painful to eat. When I did equal parts sugar and cocoa, it came out as perfectly neither sweet or bitter -- like a dark, chocolately bread rather than cake. When I set my toaster oven to 350 F (177 C), which all the cake recipes I've read call for, the cake came out horribly cracked and unevn, which, as I understand it, is a sign that your oven is too hot. When I set my oven to 325 F (163 C), it took forever to get cooked. And even after the toothpick came out clean, always tasted a little doughy. So I stuck the temperature knob somewhere in the middle, and called it "335 F" in my head, but it might have been 340-45. And that worked great -- perfect texture.
Because my oven was so small, I could only ever bake small batches. But though I still kinda eyeballed the ingredients, I got a better sense of the proportions.
Since Dad was going to be here over the weekend, I thought I'd take advantage of his ability to put things into and take things out of the big oven, and double the recipe. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much oats or sugar as I thought I had, so I just went with what I had with the former, and substituting wildflower honey for the latter. We also forgot how the big oven worked, and accidently turned it off before the cakes were done, and had to restart the oven all over again. Dad said the end result was perfect, in his eyes, anyway, especially if you have a glass of milk to go with it.
But I did take the time to actually measure the ingredients as I put them in, and this is the result; because I didn't have as much oats as I normally do , it took a lot longer to bake, even taking into account the fumbling with the oven. I used 2 cups (to about the 500 ml mark on the measuring cup), and if I'd doubled the oats as I doubled everything else, I probably would have used 6 cups. ... Now that I think about it, the chocolate cake recipe on the back of the cocoa box calls for 2 cups of flour ... the unusual density of my original batter may be why 350 F was too high, before, and it might have been the right tempurature for this version, if I'd known...
Anyway, here it is, as written down by my Daddoo (what I normally would have done, if I'd had the right amounts, follows in parantheses, in italics):
SEMI-SWEET CHOCOLATE/ALMOND OATMEAL CAKE
(A "blender" recipe. I dumped everything in a bowl and ground it into a batter with an emersion blender. If you have a powerful conventional blender, that would work, too)
Preheat oven to 335 F and coat your baking pan(s)* with cooking oil and flour.
Combine in a blender:
¼ C. Olive Oil
½ C. Almond Butter (or "natural style" peanut butter)
1 C. Eggbeaters™ (or any similiar fat-free egg substitute)
1 C. Skimmed Milk
4/5 C. Honey (1 C. Light Brown Sugar, firmly packed)
¾ C. (1 C.) Hot Water into which 3/4 C. Unsweetened Cocoa has been stirred (i.e., until the cocoa powder is thouroughly blended in the water, and no longer looks "dusty").
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla
Blend on high until smooth and evenly textured. Add 2 C. Quick-Cook oats (4 C. oats), and blend again, until the oats are well ground (stir in an additional 2 C., and let the batter stand a few minutes [do not grind]; the batter will thicken quickly).
Fill your pan(s) nearly to the top; as this recipe has no levening, it rises some, but not a lot. Bake at 335-340 F for 35-45 minutes, or until you can start to smell it, the cake has started to pull away from the sides of the pan, and a wooden toothpick stuck in the middle comes out clean.
Makes 8 full hearty-breakfast servings, or 32 bite sized snacks.
* I use 3" x 5" x 2" mini-loaf foil baking pans (the size that fits in my toaster oven). This recipe fills 4 of them.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-23 10:47 pm (UTC)Nyxks
no subject
Date: 2005-08-23 11:40 pm (UTC)*twice the egg, half the sugar, replaced animal fat with vegetable fat, and replaced refined wheat flour with whole oats)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 10:39 pm (UTC)make me think I should be posting a few of the recipes I have on my HD (well over 10,000 of them at the moment, lol)
Take care,
Nyxks
no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 12:47 am (UTC)