Tanzanie Odyssey...

So, the family spoke and the chocolate won out.  So I cooked.  And cooked.  And cooked.

First off, the cast of characters.  It was actually not that varied a shopping list.

Chocolate, cream, eggs, cocoa and sugar were the main ingredients.  In very large quantities.  A few novelty items - gelatine and glucose syrup.  And a few things I didn't bother with (inverted sugar and pectin - more on this later).

Now, as you read the Adriano Zumbo book you will notice it is very precise.  69g of cold water precise. Heat to 103 C precise.  My task was made a little more difficult by one of the more... interesting features of our oven.

See that knob?  That's the temperature control knob.  See what's missing?

Yup.   Temperatures.

To be fair, it *did* have markings when we moved in.  But about a year ago, the fact that we actually clean our oven (sporadically) meant we no longer have markings.   I can guesstimate well enough for every day cooking, but I doubt Zumbo would approve.

Anyway, off we started with chocolate meringue.

I'm pretty good with meringue, so it didn't present too much of a challenge, except I didn't pipe it as instructed.  (My inability to follow instructions forms somewhat of an ongoing theme, you'll see.)

The chocolate jelly was next - I'm a fairly new convert to leaf gelatine, but I love it, baby!  I also liked the Zumbo tip of chopping the leaves up before adding the cold water.  Sensible, yes, but it didn't occur to me last time and I ended up dripping water all over the kitchen.

At this stage, vanilla creme brulee was also made, baked and popped into the freezer, but I forgot to take a photo.  Then I gave it a rest for the night, and started Saturday morning with the chocolate madness again.

First off was what Zumbo calls a 'chocolate flourless biscuit' but which is in fact a sponge.   I made two of them, coated one with melted chocolate, let it dry and popped it chocolate side down on the bottom of my square(ish) springform pan. 

 That got topped with the ganache I'd made.   The ganache was meant to be made with 75% cocoa tanzanie chocolate.  My local Coles didn't have tanzanie chocolate (quelle surprise!) so I substituted a mix of Green and Black's organic 55% cocoa mayan spice, beefed up with bit of Lindt extra dark (80%) to up the cocoa content.   I also made chocolate sea salt flakes (as directed), which were folded through the ganache.  A second piece of sponge then covered the ganache layer. 

Then came out the chocolate jelly (came out pretty well, except a slight cling wrap issue - but we overcame), which was topped with the meringue.

The meringue that cracked.  I then decided it was too thick anyway (ignoring the fact that if I had piped as instructed it probably would not have been too thick), so I tried to shave it down.   When it imploded. So then the meringue layer became a meringue crumb layer.  Topped with deconstructed vanilla creme brulee, because it refused to come out of the tin.

This, I might add, was the vanilla creme brulee I painstakingly prepared to Adriano Zumbo's exact (and I do mean exact) directions.  I weighed the egg yolks and cream.  I greased the pan.  I froze it the way he directed.  And yet it would not come out of the pan.  I ignored the concept that perhaps my oven temperature wasn't exactly right in the baking, and became increasingly cavalier with exactness in the next process.

Chocolate saboyan mousse.  Well!  I ignored my thermometer.   Melt chocolate and then cool to 45 C? I scoffed!  Forget it Zumbo.  I can tell if chocolate is too hot (it will melt the cream) or too cold (it will set too quickly).  Whisk sabayon until exactly 82C?  In your dreams!  I've made saboyan before without a thermometer.  I can do it this time.

So was I courting disaster?  Were the cooking gods going to teach me the importance of following instructions?  Was Adriano Zumbo going to descend into my kitchen in a fit of pastry pique?

Nope.  It worked perfectly.

So I topped off the whole shebang with the saboyan, put it in the freezer, and sat down for a cup of tea.

Then I lost a toddler,  (Bliss! No, I'm not that careless.  My mother took him.), had another cup of tea and made the chocolate mirror glaze.  No pictures of the glaze in progress or the state of my kitchen when I'd finished.

Emboldened by my success with saboyan, I strayed even more off the beaten path.  I couldn't find inverted sugar, so I used honey!  I couldn't find pure pectin, so I used Jamsetta!  (I did google extensively to find out the pectin-sugar proportions in Jamsetta and adjusted the recipe accordingly.  For the record, 50g of Jamsetta contains ~ 10g of pectin and 40g of sugar.)  When I accidentally measured out 3 g of water too much, I shrugged my shoulders and carried on.  I was living on the wild side.

Glaze made but not set, we packed the cake and glaze into a freezer bag and headed across to Mum's, to be greeted by this year's iteration of the Valentine's angel.

Unlike last year, when February was actually summer in the capital, it was a more clothed angel this time around.

People arrived, champagne was opened, and I had glazed the cake.  (Actually, I glazed the cake before the champagne.  I was taking no chances.)  Then it got cut up, and left to defrost for two hours.

It was, in the end, all ok.

Incredibly rich, incredibly good, and I don't think I'm going to need chocolate for the next 6 months.  The colour of my kitchen right now - brown.  Glossy, thick, shiny brown.