moist chocolate cake recipe

Chocolate Cake with Mocha Frosting
Chocolate Cake with Mocha Frosting excerpted from Brunch Season: A Year of Delicious Mornings from the Buttermilk Kitchen by Suzanne Vizethann. Photography by Suzanne Vizethann.

Chocolate Cake with Mocha Frosting excerpted from Brunch Season: A Year of Delicious Mornings from the Buttermilk Kitchen by Suzanne Vizethann. Photography by Suzanne Vizethann.

Brunch Season: A Year of Delicious Mornings from the Buttermilk Kitchen by Suzanne Vizethann.From the Buttermilk Kitchen, a beautiful, year-round, go-to cookbook highlighting more than 60 made-from-scratch brunch recipes incorporating fresh fruits and vegetables at their peak times of year.

★ ★ ★ ★ “Straightforward yet elegant and full of inspiration, this will become a go-to for home cooks looking for an excuse to make brunch for any occasion.”   —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“The flavors of Atlanta’s Buttermilk Kitchen—famed for its dazzling breakfasts and lunches—shift to coastal Maine in Suzanne Vizethann’s Brunch Season, an inviting cookbook.”                          —Foreword Reviews

Brunch is a lovely way to celebrate a meal with friends and family, and a great way to make any midday or mid-week dining special. The recipes in Brunch Season: A Year of Delicious Mornings from the Buttermilk Kitchen include both sweet and savory dishes, drawing ideas from Buttermilk Kitchen breakfast favourites, and adding seasonal soups and salads, as well as drinks. Chef Suzanne Vizethann’s fresh farm-to-table approach to this cookbook, divided into spring, summer, fall, and winter chapters, reflects her commitment to providing high-quality meals made with ripe, flavourful ingredients.

All of the recipes are simple yet refined, and the seasonal section openers include a list of peak ingredients for that season. For spring, you will find recipes such as Young Garlic and Radish Focaccia and Rhubarb Cobbler; for summer, Heirloom Tomato Toasts and Watermelon Mimosas; for fall, Roasted Squash Oatmeal with Crispy Rosemary Seeds and Chocolate Hazelnut Sticky Cake; for winter, Coddled Egg with Creamed Kale and Winter Citrus with Whipped Ricotta and Honey. The home cook can expect balanced dishes that are as beautiful as they are delicious. (more…)

Italian Christmas chocolate cake with chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts
Italian Christmas chocolate cake with chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts

Italian Christmas chocolate cake with chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts excerpted from Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to warm the soul by Diana Henry. Photography by Jason Lowe.

Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to warm the soul by Diana Henry

Diana Henry’s classic cookbook, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, is now revisited, revised, and refreshed nearly 20 years after its first publication, with a new foreword by Nigel Slater and seven new recipes.

Full of comforting delights from cold-weather climates, it features recipes gathered from Diana’s travels to Scandinavia, the French and Italian Alps, Scotland, Ireland, and New England. This is irresistible food you’ll cook over and over again.

Choose Alpine dishes of melted cheese; autumnal pies and substantial winter salads; pastries from Viennese coffee houses; festive snow biscuits and – closer to home – Diana’s definitive recipe for warming Irish stew. Of course, there is also a recipe for Sugar-on-Snow as well.

These recipes will bring warmth to your heart as well as your home. And Diana’s evocative writing about both place and food make this a book well worth reading, as well as cooking from. (more…)

The Chocolate Cake

Chocolate Cake, Canal Hosue Cook Something, Photography by Christopher Hirsheimer

Canal House’s Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hirsheimer are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks. From a lifetime of making dinner every single night, they’ve edited their experience down to the essentials: 300 simple recipes that reveal the building blocks of all good cooking guaranteed to make you a better cook. (more…)

Hazelnut Maple Chocolate Cake

Celebrated the world over for their health benefits and dynamic flavours, cultured and fermented foods are becoming everyday meal mainstays. In this extensive collection, fermentation pioneer Holly Davis shares more than 120 recipes for familiar—and lesser-known—cultured foods, including yogurt, pickles, kimchi, umeboshi, scrumpy, and more. This inspiring resource contains more than 100 photographs, plus plenty of helpful how-tos and informational charts offering guidance on incorporating fermented ingredients into the diet. With a luxe textured cover and brimming with engaging projects for cooks of all skill levels, this cookbook will be the cornerstone of every preserving kitchen. (more…)

Cookbook Review: Eggs

Eggs, Michel RouxThe egg is the simplest and most complete food—versatile enough for the quickest of meals to the smartest of dinner parties and the favourite of patissiers and dessert chefs. With more than 30 years experience as a chef at the top of his profession, Michel Roux has garnered a vast wealth of culinary knowledge and expertise. Trained in the classic French style, but a global traveller with a passion for different cuisines, Michel uses all of his skill and experience to take a new look at one of the oldest foods of all.

(more…)

FAMILY RECIPES: Etelka’s Cocoa Chiffon Cake

I’ve come to realize that many of us have been bequeathed a cherished family recipe. Be it simple or elaborate to prepare, it’s a dish so fiendishly delicious that it is the unmistakable star of the family meal, whether celebrating triumphs, comforting woes, or keeping family traditions alive. Withholding such heirloom recipes from the world seems almost cruel. Hence, I am championing the family recipe. I will entice the people in my universe to share favourite, nostalgia-infused family recipes, and I will give one of them centre stage in this very space on a monthly basis. In the end, we are all family, and these recipes represent the legacies of our shared passions. This month’s post is written by my good friend Eva. Enjoy!

 

Etelka’s Cocoa Chiffon Cake
By Eva

The grand finale of every family birthday dinner was THE CAKE.  My mother, Etelka, always served her signature Chocolate Chiffon Cake. Festooned with  tiny, lit candles, it was ceremoniously placed before the celebrated one as the room broke into a full-throated, charmingly off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” (We are not a family of gifted singers.)  A hasty, silent wish, a quick whoosh to blow out the candles, and then bliss ensued as the cake was sliced, handed around and savoured.

The cake’s appearance underwent a few metamorphoses over the decades.  Sometimes it was rectangular, at other times round, depending on the baking pans my mother had on hand.  The cake’s magic lies in its ratios rather than its aesthetics. It has just enough cocoa and sugar to give chocolate lovers their fix without overpowering its rich texture, a combination of moist, delicate cake and silky icing.

(more…)