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Once Suzanne returned to the States, she then spent months of trial and error, and several burnt cakes, to adjust the recipe for oven cooking (and layering and frosting). It is now her family’s favorite cake, which they dub “Kenya Cake”. A rich, easy to make chocolate cake, with a great history. Thanks so much Suzanne!

Suzanne’s Chocolate Cake Recipe

Ingredients

Cake:

Frosting:

Method

Cake:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

1 In a large bowl, vigorously whisk together flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and cocoa.

2 Add 1 cup and 2 tablespoons of water and 1 cup and 2 tablespoons of canola oil. Mix for 1 minute.

3 Add eggs, 3/4 cup of water, vanilla. Mix 5-6 minutes with a whisk, 3-4 minutes with a hand mixer, or 2 minutes with a KitchenAid mixer.

4 Pour into three 10″ cake pans, bake at 350°F for 25-35 minutes (adjust for convection); test by placing and removing a toothpick through the center at 25 minutes. When toothpick comes out clean, loosen from pans and then put back in the pans . Let cakes cool for 15 minutes. Keep in the pans, wrap in foil, and put in the freezer for at least 2 hours.

Frosting:

This part is a little harder as it is really done to taste.

1 Put powdered sugar and 3/4 cup cocoa into a food processor. Pulse until blended.

2 Drizzle in, until about the consistency of firm butter, several tablespoons of flavoring liquid (water if you aren’t looking for flavor beyond the cocoa and butter). To not put in too much liquid, but if you do, add cocoa or sugar. Taste. When the flavor and consistency is right,

3 add 1 1/2 cup of butter (firm, not cold and not too soft). A good rule of thumb is that both the butter and the sugar mixture should be slightly firmer than you would want it to be to spread it, since the mixing action of the food processor will warm it slightly. Pulse until blended.

Assembling the cake:

Remove the cakes from the freezer and from their pans. Stack, frosting each layer as you go. Let sit for an hour before serving.

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“Have I got the best recipe for you!” my friend Tomas announced, upon his return from a trip to photograph vineyards in Italy. “It’s an Irish beef stew,” he added, “and it’s the best thing I’ve ever had.” Apparently the chef at one of the wineries Tom was visiting prepared this stew for Tom, based on a Bon Appetit recipe, with the main difference being the substitution of Guinness (a very dark beer) and excellent red wine for some of the beef stock the recipe called for. Always eager to try new recipes with friends, I made my way to Tom’s house and we cooked this up together for his family. As I suspected, the addition of Guinness and red wine makes all the difference.

Irish Beef Stew Recipe

Prep time: 25 minutes Cook time: 1 hour, 50 minutes Yield: Serves 4 to 6.

Please use beef chuck stew meat that is well marbled with fat. Lean stew meat will end up too dry.

Save prep time by prepping the onions, carrots, and potatoes while the stock with beef is simmering in step 2.

Ingredients 1 1/4 pounds well-marbled chuck beef stew meat, cut into 1 1/2-inch chunks 3 teaspoons of salt (more to taste) 1/4 cup olive oil 6 large garlic cloves, minced 4 cups beef stockor broth 2 cups water 1 cup of Guinness extra stout 1 cup of hearty red wine 2 tablespoons tomato paste 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon dried thyme 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 2 bay leaves 2 tablespoons butter 3 pounds russet potatoes, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces (about 7 cups) 1 large onion, chopped (1 1/2 to 2 cups) 2 cups 1/2-inch pieces peeled carrots (3 to 4 carrots, can substitute some of the carrot with parsnips) 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Method

1 Sprinkle about a teaspoon of salt over the beef pieces. Heat the olive oil in a large (6 to 8 quart), thick-bottomed pot over medium-high heat. Pat dry the beef with paper towels and working in batches, add the beef (do not crowd the pan, or the meat will steam and not brown) and cook, without stirring, until nicely browned on one side, then use tongs to turn the pieces over and brown on another side.

2 Add garlic to the pot with the beef and sauté 30 seconds or until fragrant. Add the beef stock, water, Guinness, red wine, tomato paste, sugar, thyme, Worcestershire sauce, and bay leaves. Stir to combine. Bring mixture to a simmer. Reduce heat to the lowest setting, then cover and cook at a bare simmer for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

3 While the pot of meat and stock is simmering, melt the butter in another pot over medium heat. Add the onions and carrots. Sauté the onions and carrots until the onions are golden, about 15 minutes. Set aside until the beef stew in step 2 has simmered for one hour.

4 Add the onions, carrots, and the potatoes to the beef stew. Add black pepper and two teaspoons of salt. Simmer uncovered until vegetables and beef are very tender, about 40 minutes. Discard the bay leaves. Tilt pan and spoon off any excess fat. Transfer stew to serving bowl. Add more salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.

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Chocolate Ganache Torte Recipe

Prep time: 15 minutes Cook time: 1 hour Yield: Serves 20.

Ingredients

The Shell

The Filling

The Sauce

Method

1 Prepare the crust. Chop/process the wafers and pecans until fine, add enough melted butter to press this into the spring-form pan (along the bottom and halfway up the sides). Bake in oven at 350°F for 20 minutes, put aside.

2 While the crust is baking, prepare the filling. In double boiler melt the butter and then add the chocolate. When chocolate is swirl-able, slowly add the whipping cream, stirring slowly, until mixture is blended and smooth. Pour mixture into the prepared shell. Refrigerate for at least four hours.

3 Prepare the sauce before serving (the sauce, served warm, should accompany the torte, served cold.) Melt butter over fairly high heat. Add sugar until saturated (the heat must be high enough for the sugar to dissolve; when no more will dissolve, the solution is saturated). Stirring only occasionally, let the mixture “burn” just enough to turn into a rich caramel. Add the cream, stirring briskly until well blended and smooth. Strain if necessary for smoothness.

One nine-inch torte has been known to serve twenty adults, so be careful…

Hello! All photos and content are copyright protected. Please do not use our photos without prior written permission. If you wish to republish this recipe, please rewrite the recipe in your own unique words and link back to the source recipe here on Simply Recipes. Thank you!

Note from Rob:
This torte was conceived by Freshfields restaurant in West Cornwall, CT. Astoundingly, they give away recipes, and I was merely brave enough to have asked for it. – RHK

Links:
Michael Ruhlman writes about ganache

There’s a certain line that gets crossed between the normal daily inadequacies I experience and the return of my old friend depression. There’s a certain kind of heart-heaviness that indicates I’ve descended into the darkness again. It’s a physical feeling like a heavy medallion that hangs down inside of my chest like Frodo’s necklace when he carried the ring of doom. I enter into an acute self-awareness that isn’t the same thing as mindfulness and contemplative prayer, but kind of like its perverse cousin, in which every moment I’m noticing how unfunny I am, how little I’ve accomplished that day, and how screwed I’m going to be when people figure out that I’m not good at anything. The darkness is back again. So I thought I would talk back to it and perhaps somehow gain the upper hand.

It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of 2014, my mind was a fertile place. I had a vision for the book I wanted to write. I got started. And it seemed like the first few chapters were really good. Things were flowing. I was having awesome charismatic and mystical spiritual encounters at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception every week. Then in about March or so, my ulcerative colitis ravaged me like a wrecking ball. Every night for the past 8 months, I have had to get up at least five and often up to eight or nine times during the night to sit on the toilet.

At first, I wasn’t taking sleeping pills and I would just stay awake after the third trip to the bathroom. Then I would go and bang out a blog post or make a trance song or something and be exhausted the next day. But then I started taking sleeping pills so I could go back to sleep after each toilet trip. And I don’t know whether it’s the sleeping pills or just the exhaustion of never getting a full night’s sleep, but I spend most of each day in a sluggish haze. The first two months of 2014, I had been trying to write a chapter a week for my book, which admittedly was an insane pace. But I had to give it up altogether when my colitis took over. Now I can barely pull together even a single blog post each week.

It’s pathetic, but so much of my identity has been bound up in my writing. Even more embarrassing to admit is the degree to which my ego came to rely upon the traffic and the likes and the comments on my blog. It’s come to be the case that most of my friends are online. I’ve forgotten how to socialize off-line. I didn’t have very many real life friends when I lived in Burke, but I was able to fool myself into thinking that church events counted as some sort of social life. Now I can’t fool myself as a campus minister because I’m spending my time with 18-22 year olds. And because the ministry is so small, I’m trying to invest every possible moment that I don’t have to be a dad or a husband into creating fellowship events for this ministry.

When I land among the right kind of people, I do reasonably well socially. Catholic Workers, tree-huggers, anarchists, French philosophy snobs, hippies, or really anybody who likes to dream about changing the world and is angry about how messed up things are right now. I love having those kinds of conversations. And I know that those kinds of people are all over the place here in New Orleans. But I don’t have time to meet them because I’m either doing stuff for my ministry or taking my kids to their events. And I suck at conversations with other parents when they’re in parent mode on the soccer field, at Cub Scouts, or at elementary school events. It never gets beyond really painfully awkward small-talk. And those are the only places where I encounter other adults: as a parent among other parents.

The Cub Scout dads at the campout a few weekends ago were all talking all about their man-toys and man-adventures. I don’t have man-toys or man-adventures. So I had nothing to contribute to the conversation. I garden. I fast. I read mystics. I do contemplative prayer. I’m an astonishingly boring person. I was a reasonably up-to-date musical hipster in 2005 before my first son was born. The problem is I stayed in 2005. I guess I bought some new music about two years ago, but that’s been pretty much it. And I don’t really feel like finding new music to listen to. I have a CD of Gregorian Chant that I play on repeat in my car as I go through my prayer beads while I drive. Sometimes I listen to the jazz station.

I really really wish I could live in a monastery or just have a life in which I could do very simple things every day and have very simple conversations with people who didn’t expect me to be clever or funny or hip to the latest slang. I suppose the good aspect of my depression is that it makes me long for a quiet life of prayer. My wife Cheryl has dreamed for a long time about establishing a spiritual retreat center. I’m just not sure how one goes about doing that. I presume it’s the kind of thing where you have to get credentialed in some kind of way or at least have some basis for getting clientele. My irrational dream is that I’ll somehow finish my book and it will take off and as a result I’ll magically gain the credibility of a Henri Nouwen type person who can open a spiritual retreat center where people will travel long distances to pray and garden and take long walks with me. I really wish I could just be Wendell Berry or maybe just take over whatever his official job is when he dies.

So now I’m completely out of energy and I’m not sure how to wrap up this post. It helps to put all this in front of me and realize that I am facing a legitimately difficult set of circumstances between my colitis and moving halfway across the country and being in a job where I have to come up with all of the structure for my time from scratch. I’m hoping that this will end up being one of those stories where “it sure was rough at first but then things started to happen.” I need for God to be my deus ex machina with my destiny in his hands. Pray for me.