After spending two weeks in Hobart, I return feeling somewhat re-energised. It’s all about a change of pace, experiencing great generosity, taking the M and E out of Team, and just eating well. Really well. Followed up with a run in 2’C weather with the wind whipping at your ears and legs. Turns out, it doesn’t take a lot to make things a little bit better.

So now I’m ready to get back into a commercial kitchen. Trouble is, I don’t know which kitchen.

I started baking with ricotta when I got back, having been inspired by the great ricotta and prune pastries at Pigeon Hole. This chocolate ricotta cake is one of several happy experiments. Remind me to also tell you soon about ricotta buttercream and ice-cream!

The chocolate ricotta cake is based on Tartine’s devils food cake recipe. The fudge frosting is like this but omit some of the caster sugar and increase the cocoa powder plus a pinch of salt. The beer caramel is adapted from here. Assembled cake then goes into mouth. No other instructions necessary.

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.

Before any mention of chocolate cake, I must first confess that I haven’t felt like baking much recently. (Is this it? Am I cured?) The boy is currently overseas for work reasons and prior to his departure, he had been sick for two weeks with a severe loss of appetite, though managed a miraculous recovery not long after touching down in Hong Kong. (Is this it? Is he cured?)

So, big absence of boy and very little baking happening. But rare is a situation which cannot be improved by the presence of a simple chocolate cake. On the first day this cake was made, I thought it was delicious. On the second day, I actually said Wow, out loud to myself. And because home economics for the single dweller often suffers from a lack of self-editing, I treated myself to a piece of this cake every evening thereafter. The one that got away : a piece not dissimilar in size to the one pictured above that was dispatched in foil to a friend who lives across the street and is currently suffering from relationship woes.

(Incidentally, did you also know that the leftover fudge frosting is phenomenal stirred into hot chocolate?)

Anyway, we are now down to the final slab, which brings us to the big question.. Save the last piece for his return, or eat it quickly and he’ll never know it ever existed in the first place?

Make this and tell me the answer is as plain and clear cut as a piece of simple chocolate cake.