Chocolate Fudge Cake and Gentleman's Relish

Given that it was my mum's birthday on Friday and that she and my dad were calling in for tea on Sunday on the way back from London, it seemed like a good idea to plan on making a cake this weekend.

"What sort of cake shall I make?" say I to C on Saturday morning. "Chocolate fudge cake" says C. So I flick through my random collection of recipes, duly note down the ingredients, and off we go to the shops.

The following morning, food-mixer in hand, two things strike me about this cake:
1) It requires a whole block of butter, the best part of a bag of dark brown sugar, and very nearly all of a pot of cocoa powder.
2) Given the erratic spelling and instructions along the lines of "add flour and other things", this is almost certainly a recipe I have acquired at some point from my youngest brother, whose recipes are notoriously "experimental". Mercifully this one doesn't have any mystery ingredients that I can see (the chicken dessert of two Christmases ago has passed into family legend); neither am I instructed to "put it out in the sun to cook", or to grind the flour myself using a saddle quern made of stones recovered from the garden. Nevertheless, it was with a degree of trepidation that I embarked on the project.

However, in the end, the instructions seemed fairly sensible, the mixture very nearly fitted into my biggest, deepest cake tin, and it came out looking not all that bad. Unfortunately while trying to get it onto the cooling rack a slight miscalculation with an oven glove (i.e. it wasn't on my hand when I picked up the still-hot cake tin) resulted in a nasty fissure across the top but I struck on the idea of disguising this with icing sugar, first cutting out the letters of "Happy Birthday" in paper so as to leave a message on the top when the letters were removed. This (very nearly) worked well. The B of Birthday got a bit smudged trying to get the paper letter off and the a moved a bit so the over all effect was rather as though the message had been written by a small, semi-literate child, but it wasn't too bad. My mum seemed to like it anyway.



Only as the last notes of Happy Birthday died away and my mum took a deep breath did the drawback of this plan strike me. My mum blew out the candle and the three of us at that end of the table, most of the tablecloth, and a fair amount of the rest of the room turn white (and slightly sticky).

Still the cake was nice... If somewhat rich... There's a fair bit left...

Also in a spirit of culinary experiment this week C and I bought a pot of Gentleman's Relish (est. 1824). This is something I had often heard of but never before tried. The lid of the pot was emblazoned with a health warning along the lines of "to appreciate the fine flavour of this product to the full use VERY SPARINGLY". Accordingly we spread it thinly on hot buttered toast.

I can well imagine that to a Victorian gentleman, his palate hardened by quantities of mutton, port, and cigars this might have an interestingly piquant flavour, but to me it tastes like a mixture of crab paste, marmite and Vicks VapoRub. Pthah! C claims to like it and says that this demonstrates that he is in fact a true gentleman (in spite of all evidence to the contrary). I reckon this might have more to do with the fact that he burnt off all his tastebuds at an early age by consuming industrial quantities of kebab-van chilli sauce while an undergraduate, and now belongs to that category of people who believe that if something doesn't make your nose run (or better still bleed) it's not worth eating. I shan't be eating any more of it at any rate.