Chocolate Cake, Open Kitchen and Our Amazing Sense of Smell
And even more silly goodies if you keep reading
In this week’s newsletter we have a recipe for Chocolate Stout Cake with Strawberry Frosting, and a request for your letters and queries to start an advice column here! I also share an idea for a valentines gift and a poll asking you what your barriers are to getting in the kitchen. I hope the poll starts some conversation here or in your homes! For the next few weeks I want to talk to you about each one of the senses and how focusing on them while we cook can make cooking playful and restful instead of taxing or anxiety-producing. For more techniques, join my cooking club on patreon. This week I am writing about smell!
Starting an Advice/Acceptance Column: Open Kitchen.
I want to start an advice column here responding to queries and musings from you all (big or small anything goes!) about your experiences with cooking and food in particular, but also mental health, parenting and general life experience.
But to do this I need your help! Please write to me with anything you would like me to answer and I will, with your permission of course, print your letter (anonymously) and respond. We can all get to know each other and start a deeper conversation. Please respond directly to this or write to me at: leanne@leannebrown.com with subject line: Open Kitchen.
Research (and lived experience!) supports that breathing, combined with a focus on the sensory experience, calms anxiety and racing thoughts quickly and effectively. A wonderful method for calming anxiety and racing thoughts, is the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique. This poster by the folks at De-Stress Monday illustrates it beautifully.
So with that in mind, let’s talk more about smell!
How Smell Can Help us Slow Down and Get out of Our Head when Cooking
We all know the magnificent experience of walking into a room and being engulfed in the aroma of something wonderful cooking. Or the experience of walking by a trash can on a hot day. One says come toward me, the other says keep your distance! Our sense of smell is always with us, but we don’t really notice how much it does for us throughout our daily experience. Smell is just kind of there and we only take it in when something is super amazing or super gross.
But we can practice bringing more awareness to our sense of smell when we are cooking in particular. As we do this, we sharpen our focus and bring our thoughts back to what is in front of us. So focusing on smell is meditative and soothing.
We can heighten our ability to notice smells by naming them. One reason we don’t think we are great at smelling things compared to dogs say, is because we don’t have a lot of words for smell. So you can try making them up!
A practice for heightening your awareness of Aroma.
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As you practice smelling all the food smells as you prepare and eat food you can bring your awareness to aroma in the rest of your life as well, even at your desk at work. You might notice the smell of the fibers of your sweater or the leather of your chair or even that tinny smell of electronics.
If you want to read more about the undervalued but amazing sense of smell that humans have I highly recommend this article from a couple of years ago.
Barriers to Cooking
It would help me so much to create meaningful work for you here if I knew more of what you struggle with as well as what you like. So please let me know here which of these you find most challenging. Please be as honest as you possibly can. And email or comment if there is something else entirely or you want to share more.
Valentines Gift Idea: Mug and Self Love Potion
I had a wonderful suggestion for a Valentine’s gift idea from a reader this week. She suggested packaging a mug, some oat milk, cardamom and honey together with The Self Love Potion recipe from my book, Good Enough as a gift for either your sweet self or a bestie. I love this idea and will probably do it for a friend or two. Send me a pic if you do it!
Perhaps next year I could even sell them as a little package on here if I find the right ceramics person to work with. Let me know if you have a favorite I could work with!
February Mini-Retreat with Me!
I’ll be giving another mini-retreat, Saturday February 18th, featuring yoga, meditation and delicious, nourishing food made by me! So another great (slightly late) Valentine’s gift for your beautiful self or treat a friend. Please sign up or reach out to me if you have any questions or interest.
Everyone’s Favorite Chocolate Cake
I have been making a version of this for years and friends and family always request I make it or share the recipe again and again. The original recipe which I link to below uses a chocolate ganache for a frosting and Nigella Lawson’s version does a cream cheese frosting. I have tried it all kinds of ways, and all are wonderful. The key is that the cake itself is super fudgey and rich and special. This time I made a strawberry frosting, and as you can see in the picture I added too many fresh strawberries which split the frosting, but still tasted delicious. Follow the recipe below for a frosting that should stay light and fluffy. This is a small cake but very rich.
(adapted from this recipe.)
Serves 6 to 8
TL;DR: Melt the butter and stout then blend in the cocoa power. Add the rest of the dry ingredients, then the wet. Pour into prepared pan and bake at 350 F. While the cake bakes and cools, whip up the frosting then spread all over the top.
Cake
1/2 cup stout (such as Guinness)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoons salt
1 large egg
1/3 cup sour cream
Strawberry Frosting
1/2 lb strawberries
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
Preparation
For cake:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Line a 9 inch cake pan with parchment and butter the paper.
Bring the butter and stout to a simmer in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the cocoa powder and whisk until mixture is smooth. Set aside to cool.
Whisk the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl to blend. Set aside.
In a large bowl whisk the egg and sour cream together then whisk in the cooled butter/stout/sour cream mixture. Pour in the flour mixture and gently stir with a spatula or spoon until just combined. Do not over mix.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 25 minutes or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.
Let cool completely before frosting.
For Frosting:
Cut the strawberries then blend them in a blender until smooth. Pour them into a small pan and bring them to a simmer. Simmer them on medium heat until the strawberries have reduced and thickened, about 20 minutes. Let the mixture cool in the fridge (it will thicken up further).
Using an electric mixer, whip the butter and powdered sugar on high until fluffy. Add in the boiled and cooled strawberries and vanilla and beat until fluffy.
Frost the cake by gently spreading the frosting all over the top of the cake, then decorating with some cut strawberries.
Make Healthy Changes ANYTIME of year
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Big fan of your work and so glad to have found you here on substack. Just tonight I made the bean/chorizo/hearty greens stew from Good Enough, with a lot of tweaks (pinto beans, dry cured chorizo) and it was still great. Served over rice.
Besides time constraints, there are cost issues -- it is much more expensive to cook healthy than to throw something pre-packaged together -- but I also only have one functional hand. While I do have adaptive tools, the amount of packaging it is simply impossible to open one-handed is terribly frustrating., as are many other simple tasks in the kitchen.