I’ve spent the afternoon doing maths. Food maths. The kind of maths you have to do when you own American cookbooks / read American food blogs, decide to give something a go, then realise that the measurements are all in cups and are therefore incomprehensible to English eyes.
It’s not that I can’t follow cup measurements, it’s that they don’t really mean anything to me. I can’t work out the ratios in my head to get a good enough grasp of how the recipe will work out. If I see a cake recipe for, say, 100g each of butter, sugar and flour, plus a couple of eggs, I know we’re working with Victoria Sponge-type mix. But a recipe that calls for 1 3/4 cups of flour, 2 cups of sugar, 3/4 cup cocoa plus buttermilk and oil? Means nothing. Cups measure by volume not weight, meaning that 1 cup of flour is a very different thing to 1 cup of, say, sugar.
(Matt would never have this issue btw. He can instantly work out the volume of something, picture its outcome AND foresee the problems. He is a human Google Sketchup. It’s a good life skill to have.)
So last night I was zoning out in front of Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network (the one and only reason that I own a TV) and she whisked up this chocolate cake. The invented reason was to celebrate her friends’ 20th anniversary of running their flower shop on the Hamptons. Nice. My reason is…just because. But it’s all in cups which is ALIEN so I measured everything individually in cups, then noted down the equivalent in grams, for easier future reference.
Is it any good? It’s tall, very moist, which you get with these cakes made with oil or melted butter, and the coffee gives it a bitter edge. Perhaps not as chocolatey as other recipes, but a good party cake. It does sink in the middle, but that can be covered up with icing – the original recipe includes a buttercream frosting, which isn’t my thing, so I’ve covered mine in a basic ganache.
One big cake