Dare you stare into the face of death?
Chocolate cake and meringue and chocolate sauce and strawberries and chocolate cake and meringue and strawberries.
This frightening cake stands a good 8 inches tall. In the photo, there is no sense of scale – it looks like it should be on a quite small plate. But that is actually the biggest plate we own.
Basically, the way this works is:
- Part bake a chocolate cake.
- pour a meringue on top. Bake until cooked.
- Repeat steps one and two.
- Make a chocolate sauce to go in the middle.
- Add some strawberries to pretend the whole thing is healthy.
It is also very difficult to make it look appealing. The problem is that, fundamentally, meringue is egg and sugar baked until it goes hard. It rises beautifully, creating a huge bubble bursting with sweet goodness. But then you need to get it out, and pile it up in an yummy deathly tower of goo. There really isn’t a way to do that neatly – it breaks up and falls apart. It tastes pretty good – sweetness mixed with bitterness, creating an unusual effect (though the chocolate sauce set again when we kept it in the fridge), and – if size counts for anything! – it looks impressive, in its own way.
Anna made this in a heart shaped tin, though sadly (due to subsidence) I couldn’t photograph it adequately from any other angle. Amusingly, the meringue on top cracked… read that how you will!
In conclusion: This would be great if it could be better presented, which would help if it was single layered and cooked in a tin with removable sides. Saying that, I think the intensity of the chocolate adds rather than multiplies the delicacy of the meringue – it is as tasty as a standard gateau. Not better, just different.
Who made it: Anna did the work but Dan “helped with the presentation”…
Recipe:”Simply Cadbury’s Chocolate” by Joanna Farrow.
