HangZhou Rearranged Chocolate Apple Cake

I actually left the flat this past weekend. In fact, I even left Shanghai. For the past two months, I’ve been like the love child of an eccentric hermit and a domestic goddess, holed up in our cozy flat, dusted lightly with flour, filled with coffee, doing odd things, barefoot in the kitchen.

But a girl has to work sometimes. It’s unfortunate but it’s true.

So, sometime on Saturday morning, I went to Hangzhou. Unlike every other time I’ve been to Hangzhou, it wasn’t raining. However, since I was there for work and not for pleasure, the skies and their activities were irrelevant.

Before I tell you more about this trip and show you how to bake a particular cake in which I made substitutions for pretty much every ingredient, I want to show you some photos I took during a previous trip to Hangzhou.

What I saw in Hangzhou this time:

1. The train station
2. The interior of the B2 public bus (3 rmb for a 30 minute, non-scenic cross-town trip)
3. The interior of the tall, super modern building where the exams took place on Saturday and Sunday, in particular the enormous and empty supervisor’s room and room 304, my room. I had a half window with no view, a small potted plant, a simple table and two chairs. The walls were very white. A bit like Leonard Cohen’s old writing room on Hydra in the mid ’60s. Except different.
4. The interior of two small restaurants where I ate two lunches and one dinner with Kevin, my old boss. One was a pick’n’pay cafeteria joint with really nice eggplant and green bean dishes, and the other was an unexpected Japanese Ramen joint (Kevin had thought he was taking me to his favourite Vietnamese place, RIP) with the best spicy, chewy, glass-noodle udon and pickled veggies ever.
5. A rather large two block walking loop between the venue, the restaurants and the hotel.
6. Oh, and the hotel room. Very nice. Best shower I’d had in ages.
7. And then the train station again.

Out of the corner of my eye as we drove back to the train station last night I caught a glimpse of the lovely West Lake. With sunshine and flowers and laughing, shiny happy people strolling along the lakefront as I sat in the cramped mini bus with my daypack on my knees, eyelids heavy with exhaustion.

That was fun.

But anyway, one of the highlights of my whirlwind tour of the most uninteresting parts of Hangzhou was the fruit plate in my hotel room. I kid you not. Two Granny Smiths and two shiny red apples of unknown lineage.

Most business hotel fruit in China has been terribly disappointing so far- mealy apples at the Hefei Hilton; dry oranges at the Nanjing Sheraton.

These apples were different, however.

These apples were perfect.

I’m not really a fruit eater. I like veggies. Given the choice between a half decent bunch of grapes or a reasonable apple, I’ll choose the green beans and bok choy any day.

Saturday night after my big bowl of spicy glass udon, wrapped up snug in my very soft and padded complimentary bathrobe, I drank a cup of complimentary Earl Grey tea (made in my room’s absurdly well equipped kitchenette) and ate a whole apple, with great enthusiasm. I can’t say I have ever eaten an apple with enthusiasm. I don’t usually even eat apples at all. I’m just not that kind of girl.

And so, at breakfast the next morning, after I ate my complimentary bread and cheese and sushi and dim sum and had my fix of well made coffee, I went back to the breakfast buffet and stole four apples from the fruit table.

Since I’m unlikely to eat another whole apple with such relish for at least another decade, if ever, I decided to make good use of them.

This is technically a recipe for chocolate zucchini cake, and those of you who have families with vegetable gardens will probably know some variation on this recipe quite well.  When you have a cord of enormous zukes stacked up like firewood on the front porch, one must make do.

I, however, have no zucchinis today.

Thus, I give you a rather modified version of the Bon Appetit (1995) Chocolate Zucchini cake, as reprinted by Epicurious here.

A few notes on my alterations (which are many):

I used half rye, half all purpose flour; the sugar was half brown, half date/pepper; I added a teaspoon of cinnamon to the dry ingredients; I used 3 smallish eggs; the buttermilk was actually home made plain yogurt; the vanilla was my Indonesian vanilla bean collection steeped in gin; the zucchini was 2 Granny Smith apples, grated; the chocolate chips were one bar of dark chocolate, crushed; the walnuts didn’t exist.

• 2 1/4 cups sifted all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 cups grated unpeeled zucchini (about 2 1/2 medium)
• 1 6-ounce package (about 1 cup) semisweet chocolate chips
• 3/4 cup chopped walnuts

At this point, in a biggish bowl (because you’ll be adding the dry ingredients to it later), mix together the sugar, butter and oil until they’re all nice and creamed together. I cut my butter up into a million little balls using a spoon before I attempted to cream it, just to make it softer and more manageable. I creamed the mixture with a fork, but I’m a total Luddite masochist so if you have, say, a nice Kitchen Aid mixer, now is the time to haul it out.

After the fat and sugar is creamed (it only took a few minutes with my fork and left-arm of steel), add the eggs one by one, mixing them in with suitable vigor. Dump in the gin. I mean, the vanilla. Stir. Put that all aside.

Let’s look at the dry ingredients now.

The flour, cocoa, optional cinnamon, salt and baking soda need to be sifted together into a bowl. I have no sifter. My cocoa and my baking soda are rather clumpy from a long, humid summer. I had to break up all the clumps by hand, rubbing them through my fingertips. It got a bit messy.

At this point, you want to make sure you have a few things ready for the final step: the apples or zucchini, the chocolate, the yogurt (or buttermilk) and the walnuts (if you have any).

Once you have your extras at hand, you’re going to start adding stuff to your creamed sugar/fat/egg mixture. Start with about 1/3 of the dry ingredients, folding it in slowly at first so you don’t get a big puff of cocoa up your nose.

Then, add about 1/3 of the yogurt and fold that into the mixture. Alternate dry and wet until both are totally incorporated. Add the grated apples and stir them in gently. Add the chocolate and walnuts, and stir.

I ended up using 2 pie tins, greased with a bit of butter. I think the recipe called for a 9″ by 11″ pan but I forget. You can check the link above. Since none of the pans I have here ever match the dimensions in recipes, I just keep a few pans ready on the counter and just keep filling them to cake-height (about 5 cm?) until the batter is all poured out.

I diligently pre-heated my oven to the requisite 325F/165C for 20 minutes while I assembled the ingredients so it would be ready when I was done. I had failed, however, to notice that I’d unplugged it in order to use the electric kettle the other day. The oven was as hot as the room. Which wasn’t hot. So I plugged it in, left the unbaked cakes on the counter, and went off to read for twenty minutes while the oven attempted to heat itself.

This is the result of 50 minutes in the (heated) oven:

Now, I realize that this is my third chocolate cake recipe in just over a month. Not that you were counting or even noticing, I presume.  However, the first one was a specifically vegan chocolate brownie made with a ton of strong coffee and doused in a magnificent butter/dark chocolate glaze. My second one was an insanely rich, dense one loaded with red wine and covered in a home made mascarpone topping, lightly sweetened with date and pepper red sugar.

This one is… lovely. It’s really light, moist, apple-y, not too sweet, has just enough dark chocolate to feel rich, and enough cinnamon to feel dreamy. It’s a halfway house between two rather awesome worlds of fruit and chocolate.  It doesn’t need icing or anything else. Just a cup of tea would be fine. It’s getting to be that season anyway.

Did I mention it hasn’t stopped raining since I got back last night?

I believe it’s time for tea and cake.