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.

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.