a good day

Food photography is not my strength, but I made a flourless chocolate cake today (two, actually), and it may have been the most intense chocolate experience of my life. My god. o.o And so you get a picture of my cake, but I’ll be nice enough to put it (and the recipe) behind the

18 oz bittersweet chocolate
1 c butter
1/2 c water
3/4c sugar
1/4 tsp salt
6 eggs

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Thoroughly grease a 10 inch springform pan.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Meantime, combine sugar, salt and water in a small saucepan and heat until the sugar and salt are completely dissolved. Set aside.

Pour warm chocolate into a bowl and add butter in 2 or 3 chunks (I used room-temp butter, or a little cooler; that worked nicely), mixing until shiny. Add sugar water slowly, mixing thoroughly. Add eggs 1 at a time, mixing thoroughly.

Pour into the pan. Bake for 45 minutes. The recipe says chill overnight, but a couple hours will do it; basically it seems they want you to put it in the fridge immediately to stop the cooking process. I would think serving this hot would also be extremely good.

Turn upside-down onto your serving platter to de-plate. Serve with whatever garnishes you see fit. I’m making a berry coulis and whipped cream. :) Makes 16 pieces.

Also, most of the comments on this recipe suggested splitting the bittersweet with semi-sweet. I’m a huge bittersweet fan, but couldn’t find any here, and so in one cake used the two ounces we had, but made the other one 100% semisweet. It made a *distinct* difference in the flavor of the cake, and I really think a purely bittersweet cake would be too much.

And a couple other silly things: the other day I caught Chanti being bad, but cute, and a few days before that, I’d gone to take a nap. Ted had checked in on me, and then about half an hour later came to look again. I’d gotten up to use the bathroom, but I’d been sleeping on top of my sleeping clothes, so he came into the bedroom and said, “Did you *shrink*?!” :) :) :)

My letterer sent me a URL this afternoon that she thought might be useful, a posting from someone whose comic had been accepted at Image, with advice:

1. Find a really good artist.
I cannot stress this enough. If you think your art is good enough, it probably isn’t.

This made me laugh and laugh and laugh. :) Mostly because I know that’s the biggest problem with submissions, and it’s why I’ve been so bloody obsessed about my artist. You need a good story to keep people coming back in the long term, but you need phenomenal art to get them there in the first place.

Off to Dublin tomorrow to feed my family cake!