I have a love hate relationship with food photography. I love gazing at images of beautiful food, imagining how I could make my next few meals more rustic/glossy/fresh/cool... And then you come across on image which is so inspiring you ache to recreate it with complete disregard to its suitability. Last weekends Christmas party was the occasion I choose to recreate this:
Actually, when you look at the ingredients and method it's not such a difficult recreation, but two things stood in my way: Singapore's ambient temperature is terrible for iced cakes and my incessant (and in this case, ruinous) need to make things as healthy as possible.
My friends, when you are making a chocolate cake with cream cheese icing you are purchasing this much cream cheese, icing sugar and butter, so substituting low fat cream cheese will not make too much difference to your waistline (as opposed to declining the second or third slice, which will make a huge difference) so embrace the full fat content.
My ulterior motive for this recommendation is not driven by my ill will towards your calorie intake, but rather from a sense of perfectionism. Low-fat cream cheese will leave you with runny icing which will never thicken enough. I want your cake to succeed where mine did not - fluffy, white, gravity-defying icing could be yours!
It wasn't a complete disaster though. The cake tasted terrific (if I do say so myself, along with 15 other people) and my experiment adding dried chilli powder was a resounding success. Do it, you won't regret it. The tongue-tingling aftertaste of the chilli cuts wonderfully through the rich sweet chocolate.
I don't have any pictures of the final result because assembly was done on-site and the cocoa-sprinkling was the responsibility of the enthusiastic four-year-old-MasterChef-in-
 |
| Donna Hay iPad Magazine image |
My friends, when you are making a chocolate cake with cream cheese icing you are purchasing this much cream cheese, icing sugar and butter, so substituting low fat cream cheese will not make too much difference to your waistline (as opposed to declining the second or third slice, which will make a huge difference) so embrace the full fat content.
My ulterior motive for this recommendation is not driven by my ill will towards your calorie intake, but rather from a sense of perfectionism. Low-fat cream cheese will leave you with runny icing which will never thicken enough. I want your cake to succeed where mine did not - fluffy, white, gravity-defying icing could be yours!
It wasn't a complete disaster though. The cake tasted terrific (if I do say so myself, along with 15 other people) and my experiment adding dried chilli powder was a resounding success. Do it, you won't regret it. The tongue-tingling aftertaste of the chilli cuts wonderfully through the rich sweet chocolate.
I don't have any pictures of the final result because assembly was done on-site and the cocoa-sprinkling was the responsibility of the enthusiastic four-year-old-MasterChef-in-
 |
| iPad replacing recipe books? I hope not! They don't handle the flour dust as well |
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