I’m not usually one for following recipes. I tend to look at recipes for inspiration, but then sort of… “tweak” them based off of what I’m in the mood for. This makes me sound like a cooking genius who is a wizard at ingredient substitution and culinary magic. Hardly. Usually, my final creations turn out visually sub-par, though the taste is always top-notch. Though I’m not one to be picky when it comes to food I’ve made myself. I think crumbly cookies are endearing! I also never really have anyone to impress with my food, as I’m usually just making food for myself. And my family’s not picky, though they’ll give me sort of a “hmm,” and a smile, with most of my creations. Which is usually why I have most of it to myself.
Anyways, onto today’s recipe adventure. As this is my first post, you probably haven’t noticed how incredibly wordy I can get. I also digress a lot. Get used to it. It was always my crux in high school essays, and I remember quite a few English teachers making numerous red slashes through entire sentences. And here I am, digressing yet again.
Today my family was celebrating my younger brother’s “early” birthday, as I’m never usually home in the summer for his real one, and this summer, he won’t be either! Off to camp next week, and I couldn’t be more jealous. Recipe. Food. Here. Right. I’d been ogling pictures of Angela’s delicious Chilled Double Chocolate Torte for quite awhile, and I figured that now would be the perfect time to make it for my vegan-wary brother (seriously, he thinks tofu is the devil). It was an added bonus that I stalked up on the secret ingredient–avocados–during my mother’s shopping trip, as I’m usually too scared to spend my own money on the ever expensive avocado. Oh avocados, how you tempt me.
Another exciting thing: I love looking through cookbooks and picking things I’d like to make, but I so rarely have all the ingredients on hand– and I’m often too lazy to go to the store for the sake of one ingredient–that I don’t end up making the recipes exactly according to instruction, which is why they usually turn out… not the way they’re supposed to. But today I had all the ingredients!
The Dry Ingredients
The Wet Ingredients (Chocolate Chips: Ambiguous?)
So I set to work on the Torte. First things first, I prepared to bake the crust/cake. Now I know, after seeing the picture below, that you’re thinking I took pictures of the entire process. Not so. The camera I was using is rahhhther sub-par (I mean, in comparison to my own point-n-shoot– still haven’t earned my fancy camera wings yet), and it took about 3 tries to get a decent picture each time.
So the recipe calls to bake the cake in a springform pan. Now me, being the kitchen novice that I am, assumed that a springform pan was just any old kinda cake pan. Not so. Considering that this torte, after being adequately frozen, stands by itself even with it’s pudding-like topping, it was going to need some side support while it froze. Something that it could not have accomplished in the very shallow pan that I used. So naturally, after searching Google images for what a springform pan actually looks like, and after digging one up from the basement, I prepared to transfer the cake from one pan to another. And wound up with this:
Argh, just when I was so confident in my baking abilities! (Who am I kidding, I never am… but I did think that following a recipe word-for-word would yield near perfect results. I guess it’s because I sort of didn’t follow the recipe).
But never fear! I figured that since the cake was merely the base of a much more appealing dessert, that I could sort of… “puzzle-piece” it together in the springform pan. After all, it would spend 3+ hours in the freezer with a heavy pudding-like substance on top of it. I wasn’t too worried.
Final result? Voilà! I was pretty impressed with it, as was my brother. And mother. And father. And while the avocados weren’t immediately noticeable (at least not to the others, but I have a very strong “saltiness” detector), they definitely added richness to the cake. It was very rich. But good! I just didn’t find myself in the biggest of chocolate moods, though I can see how if I was, this cake would definitely. hit. the. spot.
I’m not going to post the recipe, because I included the link to Angela’s recipe and I don’t want to pass on a recipe that I have yet to master. If you want to make it, go check out the original! But hopefully as time goes on and I get my baking “sea legs,” if you will, there’ll be some original recipes coming your way! Or, at the very least, some adaptations. Or just recreations, all the while crossing my fingers that it turns out like the original!
