For the past week I’ve been busy planning and preparing for a wedding cake I’ll be making for a friend. My relative inexperience with most things pertaining to weddings means I’m nervous yet very excited at the prospect of this new challenge. As our little kitchen isn’t geared towards the production of large items, I’ve had to be a bit more strategic with stacking all the cartons of cream in our modestly priced, modestly sized fridge. Our pantry is currently somehow also managing to absorb an extra 2.5kg of bitter chocolate, 4kg of flour, 1kg of cocoa powder and sugar, lots of sugar.

A small test cake was constructed a few days ago and the scrapheap of leftovers resulted in a bowl of cake truffles. Cake truffles are a great way to use cake trimmings or give new life to dry cake. The truffles pictured here were made from devil’s food cake scraps mixed with chocolate ganache and chocolate hazelnut sauce, then scooped and rolled in melted chocolate and cocoa powder. You can also return extra cake trimmings back into the oven to bake until they are crisp, then blitz in the food processor and use as a crunchy alternative to cocoa powder.

Once the construction of the final cake is well under way, I have a feeling there will be a few more trimmings crying out to be converted into truffles. The perfect thing to snack on, in case I don’t already feel completely surrounded by mountains of chocolate by that stage.

We interrupt our regular broadcast to bring you One Bowl! Vegan! Double Chocolate! Fudge Frosted! Cupcakes!

Sounds like a complete mouthful I know, and these actually are, in a delicious way. I made these the other day when in a cupcake kind of mood. Cupcake moods are defined by that instance you look in the baking drawer and discover you have way too many cupcake liners in colours you don’t ever recall wanting or buying. Orange, fire engine red and green polka dot, to name a few.

Not long after baking these, I started to notice vegan chocolate cake recipes popping up all over the internet and realised that not only are there a lot of said recipes out there, but like mine, they are pretty much all the same with minor variations in the type of sugar used or the ratio of vegetable oil to flour and cocoa powder.

Around this time, I also read an article where a chef claimed to have pioneered a technique used in a particular dish. Quite amusing when it’s obviously untrue, but since so many prize originality above all things, it seems almost expected that the wheel should be reinvented on a regular basis.

In an effort to reduce clutter, this is one less vegan chocolate cake recipe. The frosting is made with bittersweet chocolate, water, custard powder, brown sugar, cocoa powder and malt.

Following on from the bread we baked for the banquet, our next responsibility was the cheese course.

This is a cheese course that almost didn’t happen. It was beset with dramas from the very beginning, which meant we had to restart our planning several times over. The initial idea was to serve a ‘red vein cheese’, a wine streaked version of a blue-vein cheese, and a quirky nod to the theme of “Blood, Bones & Butter” that was chosen in homage to Gabrielle Hamilton. This was nixed when they decided the chefs shouldn’t take the theme too literally. Winding down many side streets and blind alleys later, we finally, with much expert navigation from Katrina Birchmeier of Garagistes, settled on this.

-A beautiful pecorino from Tuscany, aged with honey and hay.
-2010 Moriki Shuzo ‘Suppin Rumiko no Sake’. An artisanal sake with hints of pear and brown sugar, made by a female brewer.
-Accompaniments selected to echo the flavours of the sake : malt barley and cumin candied carrots, an apple and shiso paste and paradise pears pickled in sake, rice vinegar and brown sugar (actual versions not pictured, because I’m writing this in retrospect). All served on a cracker plate flavoured with organic rice syrup.

Of course, the dramas didn’t end there. Somehow in the process of transporting all our food from the prep kitchen to the dinner venue, two blocks of cheese got left on a sidewalk. When the error was discovered, I received a very ‘calm duck above water but paddling frantically underneath’ kind of phone call, which prompted me to race down escalators and run up and down the street in the middle of the city, shouting into my phone, “I’m in front of Prada! Is this where you parked? I can’t see it! I can’t see it!”. $300 of misplaced cheese would do that to a person.

The cheese was eventually located and aside from the general deliciousness with regards to this course (my favourite), there’s another positive to all of this. There may never be a definitive answer to the question of changing light bulbs, but I now know how many chefs it takes to lose a block of cheese.

Next, the dessert course.