A Plate of Soil......

with engine oil.....

that was my creative pinacle for the day!

Now before you think I have been gardening and getting my overalls on and scrabbling under the car (it's been far too wet in Ballarat for that today - we've had half the rainfall for the whole month of September in just 12 hours!!) let me put you straight.....

Today we had the final of our four 'little family' birthdays..... yipee..... what fun!

Isaac, my lovely golden haired, blue eyed boy, turned 11.....

Instead of a traditional cake he chose to have a Revolting Recipe (I had to fight hard to avoid the jokes being banded about claiming that we have revolting recipes every night in this house.....) and so today I found myself cooking 'A Plate of Soil with Engine Oil'.....

Really it's just a heap of chocolate cake, with huge chunks of chocolate, floating in chocolate milk ... yum!

and if you feel so inclined, let me help you make a plate of soil too.....

For this delicacy you'll need:

170 g plain flour
150g soft brown sugar
50g cocoa powder
150ml milk
50g butter, melted
100g dark choc (or milk, or white if you prefer or you could live dangerously and mix them up..... ooooooh, now there's a thought!)
55g soft brown sugar
400ml hot milk

Mix the flour and the first amount of brown sugar together with half the cocoa powder

Beat in the milk and the melted butter

Break the chocolate into rough pieces and stir into the mixture (have a little bit yourself just to keep you going.....)

Pour the mixture into a 2lb loaf tin

Sprinkle the second amount of sugar and the other half of the cocoa powder over the top of the mixture

Pour over the hot milk and place the loaf tin into a shallow baking dish just to catch any spills whilst cooking.

Here it is ready to go in to the oven......



Put into an oven at 180/350/Gas mark 4 and bake for 1 hour 15 mins until the top feels crusty (see I told you you needed a piece of chocolate just to keep you going..... this takes a LONG WHILE to cook.....)

Now just so you know, I didn't get a photo of the resulting cake because at just the crucial minute BOTH our cameras decided to run out of battery juice.... pah!

However, let me assure you that the cake was lovely and chocolatey, though it didn't have as much 'oil' as I think it was meant to - I'm going to put that down to the fact that my oven cooks everything at 'super-high' no matter what temp I set it at - but let's just say it didn't stop the lump of soil tasting scrum-diddly-umptious especially when topped with ice cream and/or cream.....

YUM.....