Recipe time: chocolate owl cake.

That's right, I promised recipes and recipes you shall get!

First off let me tell you, you're going to need a metric fuck-ton of chocolate for this. Not like that's a bad thing, but consider yourselves fairly warned, it's incredibly sweet, even for cake, so don't come running to me if you develop diabetes.
The cake itself is vanilla sponge, but you can make it any flavour you like, I was quite tempted to make it minty. You could either use the chocolate fudge frosting or just plain old butter cream icing for the filling.

I made this cake around this time last year, so unfortunately I don't have any "working" photos to show you what the batter/mix should look like, only the finished cake. If you're fairly used to baking, you'll know what to look for and in my experience you can generally tell if the mix looks "cakey" or not. Future recipes will all have working photos.

I'd say this was a fairly easy cake to make, the challenge for me was the decoration of all the little chocolate buttons as I'm generally quite ham fisted at that kind of thing. But I think mine turned out ok in the end. Right then, on to the baking!

Ingredients:
 
For the vanilla sponge

350 g unsalted butter, at room temperature
350 g caster sugar
6 large eggs, beaten
2 tsp vanilla extract
350 g plain flour
5 tsp baking powder
4-5 tbsp milk, at room temperature

For the chocolate fudge frosting

350 g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
225 g unsalted butter
225 ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
450 g icing sugar, sifted

For the decoration

chocolate buttons, in different sizes, we used Cadbury's.
chocolate vermicelli sprinkles
1 Flake chocolate bar
1 Twix chocolate bar


1. For the sponge: preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease two 23cm round cake tins with butter and line the bases with greased baking parchment.

2. Cream the butter and sugar until pale, light and fluffy. Very gradually add the beaten eggs, mixing well between each addition and scraping down the bowl with a rubber spatula from time to time. Stir in the vanilla extract.

3. Sift together the plain flour and baking powder and add to the cake mixture in two batches, mixing until smooth. Add the milk and mix until smooth.

4. Divide the mixture between the prepared cake tins. Bake on the middle shelf of the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, or until a skewer or toothpick inserted into the middle of the cakes comes out clean. Leave the cakes to cool in the tins for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire cooling rack. Turn the cakes the right way up and leave to cool completely.
Don't worry if your cakes have gone a bit wonky in the rising process, either even them out with a sharp knife or just leave them in all their lumpy glory.

5. For the frosting: melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barley simmering water (do not let the base of the bowl touch the water). Stir until melted and smooth, then set aside to cool slightly.

6. In another bowl, whisk together the milk, vanilla extract and icing sugar until smooth. Add the cooled chocolate mixture and stir until smooth. Leave the frosting to set and thicken up slightly before use.
I popped it in the fridge for about 5 minutes because the kitchen was roasting and I'm very impatient when it comes to feeding my face.

7. To decorate: Place one cake on a serving plate or board and spread the cut surface with about 3 tablespoons of frosting or butter cream. Cover with the other cake layer, flattest side down. Cover the top and sides of the whole cake with three-quarters of the remaining frosting, spreading evenly with a palette knife.

8. Arrange the chocolate buttons over the bottom half of the cake to resemble feathers and cover the top half of the cake with chocolate vermicelli.I also used white chocolate chips at the last minute for pupils. If you have a piping bag fit it with a star nozzle, fill the bag with the remaining frosting and use this to pipe feathers around the owl’s face.
Don't worry if you don't have one, I didn't at the time and I just made up for it with even more chocolate buttons.

9. Position assorted chocolate buttons on top of the sprinkles for the eyes. Cut the Flake into thin pieces and push into the bottom edge of the cake to make legs. Cut one Twix in half. Slice one half diagonally into 2 pieces for the wings and push one into each side of the owl. Cut the other Twix at an angle to make a beak and position on the owl’s face.

Like so...
My owl came out rather grumpy, but I think it reflects the baker rather well.

I didn't get the frosting entirely thick enough, so it was harder to make it stick to the sponge. Everything remained intact and tasty though and the cake itself was a big hit with manface and the in-laws.
Obviously feel free to alter the recipe to your tastes or needs, that's the whole fun in baking.
In the future I'll provide vegan and gluten free alternatives within my recipes.
If you make your own owl cakes, I would love to see how they turn out. Also, if you have a recipe you'd like to recommend or have me try out, feel free to ask.

So that was bakin' with no hatin', normal misanthropic service will resume tomorrow.

I guess "Man V slow and debilitating coronary heart disease and diabetes" just wasn't catchy enough.

A post about cooking (well, gorging) and vitriol! Look at me go! Just a note, all of my reviews will be pretty picture heavy.

I know the ridiculousness of this show has been touched upon and criticised before(Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn review being my favourite instance ) but I feel the need to purge my demons.

Firstly, let me say that I do not hate the show, it's one of a few guilty pleasures for me. I watch it for the same reason I watch things like Toddlers and Tiaras and Jeremy Kyle, for the catharsis only blindly shouting at your television can bring. Adam Richman is possibly one of the most unlike-able human beings in the history of the universe. He has given us such conversational gems as "This flying pie...may be a ring of fire" and "Nothing's worse than naked dough on national television." I think you may have to subject yourselves to a few youtube videos to really understand how much of an arse he is. There's just something about the way he says words that makes you angry.
Plus he has one of those faces that just make you want to punch him until you don't have any knuckles left. If you don't believe me just look at his smug, little simpering face.

If you don't want to punch him, you're a cyborg.
Plus...it's a fucking Travel Channel show?! So is this what we get instead of culture? Instead of watching an educational programme about different customs and languages we get to watch a retarded, bottom feeder of an individual experience the meat sweats and eat his way to delirium? Wow, we really are fucked as a species.
While I have my gripes with show for it's general feeling of "eat because you can", I still find it pretty amusing and shamefully, sometimes, I want to eat what Adam is eating, just not in such vast quantities.

There is no way that this much sandwich should be legal.
Yes, yes, it's Alice cooper, but FUCK look at the sandwich!

One of my absolute favourite things about this show is monitoring Adam's slow descent into obesity, as you can tell from the first picture, that was pretty near the beginning of this show and Adam looks pretty svelte and healthy. One of the first signs of dangerous weight gain is how different your face looks. Now, well, his fat rolls are multiplying faster than tribbles. I'm starting to wonder if this is some really elaborate suicide plot he's engaged in. He's decided he doesn't want to live any more, but is going to eat himself to death for our entertainment. The final season will have to be shot in the bedroom of his house as he can no longer lift his mass out of bed, or even navigate safely through door frames. I'm not saying this from a purely fatist standpoint, I'm almost sort of worried for the guy. I mean look, this is not the face of a healthy human being.

But then of course I remember that I hate people and one less fat idiot is a blessing. So eat up Adam!

Another brilliant game to play while watching this is "guess the level of arousal Adam is experiencing towards each new pile, trough or bucket of foodstuffs." This man has some serious sexual feelings towards batter. I think this is another reason you have to watch it, the noises this man makes over onion rings are just too sexual to cope with. So the next time it's on the television, even if you hate the show, watch it and play along. I think I'll just leave you with some fantastic examples.

This one is pretty low on the arousal scale, it looks more like child-like joy...for the moment. I still say that it's not normal to be this happy about fried food.

I have watched enough porn to know that he is thinking about putting his dick in there.

Full arousal has been reached. Note the crafty soft drink placement to hide an obvious erection. He can't believe what he's seeing and he can't look away. He's also slyly trying to slide his other hand toward his crotch region.

Seriously this man is a pervert.

In case you couldn't tell this was "Awesomely Terrible." All in all I give it 4/5 exploded hearts for sheer hilarity.

Baa. Ram. Ewe.

So people, namely my friend Ben, have been saying that they want me to make a blog. Plus, everyone else seems to be doing it at the moment and if there's one thing us herd animals love, it's following a trend. (Am I the only person that hates the word "blog"? It sounds like some kind of anal blockage.) Plus, boredom will always be a great motivator of people...who think that everyone wants to hear about their pointless opinions and shitty ideas.

Basically I figured this should have a use other than just venting my spleen because there are already people who do it so much more eloquently and hilariously. So while there will be plenty of venting, I'm also going to put up recipes for tasty food, because, well...people eat food and they generally like it to taste nice. I guess if I was the kind of asshole that believed in karmic alignment I could say it was to keep it all balanced out. But I don't, so that was a pretty invalid sentence right there.

This might fizzle out in a while, or I might actually find that it's something I enjoy doing. So yeah, no promises. There will probably be more vitriol than cooking though, sorry about that. I just hate things more often than I bake things.