Sponge cake

I never considered making a sponge cake. It seemed like a lot of work to go through for not much bang. However, when I was growing up, it seemed like sponge cake (and its next-of-kind angel food and jelly roll) were the burden of all Jewish women. You baked a sponge cake for any occasion. Jelly rolls, infinitely more harrowing to assemble, were for serious illness, or post-funeral.

I couldn't put my hands on my mother's recipe, and my Passover cookbook had some ridiculous ground walnut cake instead of sponge cake. That's like leaving the mac and cheese out of The Joy of Cooking. Who needs books? I googled, and this one sounded right.
Sponge cake
and it was fine.

The hard part was that I'd bought matzo meal instead of matzo cake meal. I pulverized it in the Cuisinart until it looked fine enough. Here's the batter:



I also was short on lemon juice so I added some Caravella orangecello originale. I would have used limoncello, but I was out of that too. Against my better judgment I substituted 1 cup of Splenda for one of the two cups of sugar. We'll see tomorrow if that makes a difference in taste.

The recipe does not tell you that after you beat the egg yolks, and before you beat the egg whites, you have to wash the beaters. I've known since I could crawl that egg whites won't beat properly if there's a drop of fat in them (or so I was told), but I wonder if the average about.com reader is aware of this. Just one of the many dangers of getting recipes off the web. You also have to cool it by turning it upside down IMMEDIATELY. Within a minute of removing it from the oven, it will sink like a souffle in a cold draft if it's not upside down. My mother always used a soda bottle. I used what was handy, a Beaujolais-Villages.



It takes forever to cool, and then you have to saw it out of the aluminum tube pan with a thin knife. My mother had at least two of these tube pans, and there is one still in her apartment, which I will take home. You never know who will need a battered tube cake pan.



Tomorrow I will make one to ship to my niece in California. She has a thing for sponge cake, apparently, and my mother used to send her one every year.

Hot chocolate

The first time I had European hot chocolate was in 1996, at Wedel in Warsaw with Ewa and John. This was a place Ewa went to when she was a student at the University of Warsaw. The room was pink, white and sort of run down. I went back there a year ago, in March of 2005, and it was pretty gentrified. The chocolate was the same, thick and dark, even though the place is now owned by some multinational conglomerate and not the Wedel family. It's at ul. Szpitalna 8, and is in my top fifty (as yet unwritten) list of things to do in Warsaw.



So in 1997 I went to Spain and a student told me to go to the Chocolateria San Gines. There are probably better places to go for chocolate than this because it's in Frommer's and Fodor's and god knows what else. There can be a line around the block. The chocolate is served with churros, long, greasy, repellent doughnuts which are dipped in the chocolate. Add a cigarette to the mix and it's all pretty hazardous to your health.



So this hot chocolate is pretty easy to make.

for about 4 servings:
2 cups skim milk or soy milk
1 heaping teaspoon cornstarch
sugar to taste
chocolate chips
1 Tablespoon cocoa
1/2 tsp vanilla
chocolate liqueur

Dissolve the cornstarch in a little water and add to the milk. Whisk until it begins to thicken. Add sugar, a teaspoon at a time. Add some chocolate chips, or semi-sweet baking chocolate. Whisk until dissolved. When it is thickened, add chocolate, vanilla, liqueur to taste. You can add Cointreau or Kahlua, too. Not too much.



I made this for Jordan on Saturday. We came here after the Market and we went over the recipe pretty thoroughly. He had this chocolate for the first time in February, 2005 in Siena, and I forgot to ask Donna for the name of the shop where we had ciocolatte calda and panforte. However, I googled "caffe Siena panforte" and it came up: Nannini. This photo is of Jordan (wearing Federico's leather jacket) and he really liked this hot chocolate.

Chocolate pudding

So. I bought a 3 pound bag of chocolate chips at BJ's Wholesale Club, and it will take several years to use it up. I think the original thought was to create Italian hot chocolate which is thickened with corn starch and served in small cups. However, Phil was lobbying for Chocolate Chip Pie. It's one of the most revolting recipes I've ever read. I offered the Hot Chocolate. Phil rejected it because he said you can't have a slice of hot chocolate. I downgraded to Chocolate Pudding. Sara, who made the mistake of being out of the room at a time (okay, so this isn't a democracy) feels cheated. Phil liked the CP idea so much that I said what the hell. (This is NOT going down well with Sara.)



To make chocolate pudding, mix about 1/2 cup sugar with 3 Tablespoons cornstarch. Add a cup of skim milk and whisk well until there are no lumps. Begin to heat over low fire. Add another 2 cups of milk or soymilk, about 4 big tablespoons of Hershey's cocoa (dark is good), and whisk well. It will thicken. Don't let it alone and answer the phone, and don't get impatient and turn the fire up. Check it to see if it needs sugar, but first add a small pinch of salt, and maybe 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla, or Kahlua. if you think it needs to be thicker (it should more than coat a spoon) whish 1/4 cup milk with one very well-beaten egg, or better yet, 1/4 cup eggbeaters. Whisk in slowly over an even lower fire, or off the fire, so you don't get the pudding equivalent of egg drop soup. Curdled egg is not good in pudding.
Pour in cups and chill 20-30 minutes. Serve with sour cream or low-fat vanilla ice cream.