Mocha Cake in a Pie Plate – Update and a Recipe

Hello! I am, I think, almost almost ready to publish my cookbook and classic radio drama guide, which, after years, now has a proper title:
Blackmail, Bodies and Baked Noodles – a Guide and Recipe Collection Celebrating Box 13

As I hope this title makes obvious, the book is an episode guide specific to detective-adventure-mystery style drama Box 13 and also there are recipes to go with each episode. (In the future, there is a quite small chance that I will create guides/cookbooks for one or two other old radio shows, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you.) I realize that this is a very specific thing to make a book around, and it’s a bit unlikely to find much of an audience, but when I started it seemed like a fun little side idea for me as a radio drama nerd who makes food. I’ve learned a lot, including that I am very good at vastly underestimating how long it will take me to put together a cookbook. (I was quite certain, that no matter what, I’d have this book ready this time last year, and then the world laughed.)

I am now waiting on tenterhooks for Library and Archives Canada to respond to my application for an account which will allow me to register for ISBNs. Once I have my ISBNs, I can (hopefully, fingers very much crossed) simply slip those numbers into the two manuscripts I have formatted (one for paperback, the other for e-book.) And then I’ll test that all the formatting I’ve done actually works, and it hopefully will, and I will be able to press the “publish” button by the end of the month.

This is what I hope.

I hope that I will be publishing this cookbook by the last week of August. And if not by the last week of August, then by September 3rd.

The ISBN wait is, as far as I am aware, the last wait this book has to undergo before test printing happens. So it is all on Library and Archives Canada now! Come on, guys! I know it’s August and you probably want to be at the beach, but approve my account and send me my numbers! Please! I promise I’m an actual Canadian person who has made an actual book. (If I’d known Library & Archives can take several weeks to approve an account and issue ISBN, I would have asked them earlier. Be aware! If you’re in Canada, applying for free ISBN in order to publish your book, take my experience and apply a month before you want your numbers. It’s not as instantaneous here as it seems to be in some other places.)

Right up until what I think is my final edit, I have been changing and dropping recipes from the book, and this is one that ultimately, I decided to leave out of the book. You can have it now, instead!

Mocha Cake in a Pie Plate (Vegetarian)

Serves: 6 to 8

Cost: Less than $1 a serving
Time: up to two hours, but it’s not constant working time

This recipe requires a lot of bowls. I was grateful by the end of it that I have an automatic dishwasher.

Ingredients for cake:

½ cup butter – left out to soften or briefly softened/slightly melted in a pot on the stove

1 ¼ cups white sugar

3 egg yolks – separated from the egg whites – set aside the egg whites

2 Tablespoons egg white

3 Tablespoons unsweetened chocolate – melted – or 2.5 Tablespoons of Nutella if you’re naughty

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 ½ cups white flour

½ cup strong cold coffee

½ cup sour or sweet milk (or non-dairy substitute)

optional: a few nuts

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F.

Make a strong cup of coffee. Let it cool. Using instant coffee is fine.

In your first bowl, place softened butter. Add sugar, a little at a time, beating until the butter and sugar is well incorporated.

In your second and third bowl, crack eggs, separating the whites and the yolks into the separate bowls.

Beat egg yolks until they’re a little thicker looking and consistent in texture.

Add the egg yolks to the butter-sugar bowl, mixing them in well. Add your 3 tablespoons of melted chocolate or 2.5 tablespoons of Nutella, mix it in.

In your fourth bowl, sift and mix baking soda and flour together.

In yet another bowl – this should be your biggest bowl – combine coffee and milk and to this bowl add the flour bowl contents and the butter-sugar-egg bowl contents, alternating between the two as you add in stages, mixing as you add. Start and end by adding the flour mix. Stir gently and get everything well blended but don’t go overboard and mix too much. Don’t worry about tiny lumps.

In a sixth?!?! bowl, place roughly 2 tablespoons of egg white, and try to beat this egg white until it becomes stiff.

If you can’t get your egg whites to beat up, don’t worry about it, the cake will still work if you add them in without them becoming stiff.

Gently mix the egg white into your cake batter.

Set aside the remaining egg whites into the fridge to use in another recipe within the next day or so. Perhaps you can make scrambled eggs in the morning.

Grease a 9- or 9.5-inch glass pie plate, and pour it in to the cake batter. Spread the batter out evenly in the pan with the back of a spoon or spatula.

Pop the pie/cake into the oven and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, check for doneness at the 30 minute-mark. It’s done if you can stick a toothpick in the middle and the toothpick comes out cleanly.

Allow the cake to cool before adding icing.

Icing:

Start with two Tablespoons of milk or non-dairy substitute and add 1 ½ cups of sifted icing/powdered sugar. You want to sift the icing sugar so that it does not have any lumps

Mix together and add 1 Tablespoon of Nutella as well, or, use ½ a teaspoon of vanilla extract or use cold coffee in place of the milk or dairy substitute. Mix well.

If the icing is too liquid, add a little more icing sugar, if it is too hard, add more liquid.

Once you have a consistency that is spreadable, spoon or pour it onto the cake and spread it with a spatula.

Sprinkle a handful of crushed pecan or walnuts on top if you like.

I hope I will be able to update you again soon about this project, to tell you when I have actually been able to finally press publish on Blackmail, Bodies and Baked Noodles! There are seventy or so recipes, including soups, salads, mains and dessert, sometimes somewhat rambly guides to all 52 Box 13 episodes, and, bonus, three colouring pages to be included in the print edition! If you’re reading this blog post and you’re interested in a copy of the book when it comes out, let me know, I hope to make getting a copy especially easy for blog readers.

Thanks for reading!