Baking & the Art of Improvisation

We are very fortunate to have a lovely apartment with a balcony, a great view of the church, and cozy furnishings, but one of the things that really sold me on it is that the previous tenants left a really nice range of tools in the kitchen. There's the hand mixer, the rolling pin, 3 mixing bowls, and (my new favorite) the hand blender. However, the kitchen is not rich in pans beyond one white glass baking dish, the baking sheets in the oven, and pots for cooking on the stove. This is where the improvising comes in!

One of my favorite weeknight desserts is an easy, 5 ingredient chocolate cake. However, with limited bakeware (and a policy of not buying things for the apartment), I have found that a little stainless steel sauce pan perfectly holds half a recipe of chocolate cake and bakes up just fine.

Achtung! This particular improvisation requires an all metal pan--no plastic!

Other improvisation includes using mugs in place of small bowls and that sort of thing. I enjoy a fun kitchen gadget as much as the next person (if that person happens to like cooking and baking, I suppose), but it has been fun and interesting to see how much I can do with a small range of multi-function tools.

Enough soliloquizing about kitchen gadgets. Here's the recipe:

5-Ingredient Chocolate Cake
115 grams/1 stick of butter130 grams/4.5 oz dark chocolate (or 3/4 c semisweet chocolate chips)
3 eggs, room temperature*
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c flour

1. Melt chocolate with about 2 tablespoons of butter (good instructions here). Once it's melted, add in the rest of the butter and stir until the butter is melted.
2. Beat the sugar and eggs together for about 5 minutes til thick and pale yellow.
3. Gradually drizzle a stream of the melted chocolate/butter mix to the sugar/egg mix while beating. This prevents the chocolate from cooking the eggs -- chocolate scrambled eggs are not what we are going for.
4. Once the chocolate is fully combined with the egg/sugar mix, fold in the flour until it's just combined.
5. Pour the batter into a well buttered 8-9" pan (round, square, rectangular, 2 separate smaller pans -- doesn't really matter here. You're going for about 1.5" of batter in the pan(s)).
6. Bake at 350F for ~30 minutes or until the top is cracked and a toothpick comes out clean. Let it cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then dump it out on a plate and eat!
* If you are halving the recipe, just use 2 eggs. It will be fine :)

And that's it! I like to mix it up and have it baking while I make dinner.

Fun fact: Butter in Germany is sold in big blocks rather than sticks and eggs are sold in packs of 10, not 12.