Death by chocolate

The other day I tried my hand at making (as opposed to merely eating) one of my favourite puddings, the deliciously named Bolo de Bolacha Maria. The recipe sounds easy enough. Take some egg yolk, butter, sugar, coffe and cocoa powder, whisk it together and layer the resulting chocolate cream on Marie biscuits stacked one top of each other to eventually end up with something like this:

It's simplicity itself and it would take a special kind of idiot to mess up something like that. Yes? Enter moi.

For starters, I couldn't find Marie biscuits in the local store so I bought Diget biscuits, because I thought they were perfect substitutes for Marie biscuits. I mean they are both round in shape and they both have something to do with being healthy or something. Good enough for me!

Secondly, I didn't bother buying milk 'cos the recipe I had didn't mention it and I was super confident that I would get the consistency of the chocolate cream right with mere butter and egg yolk. My wife did mention that I should mix some milk in, but what does she know eh? I mean, the recipe is from a website about recipes for godsake! She doesn't have any recipes on a website.

At this point I was pretty chuffed with myself for having thought all of this through clearly and saving some money on the milk in the bargain. Splendid! I was doing so well so far.

After quickly gulping down a glass of beer to get the creative juices flowing, I quickly put together the egg yolks (after a quick check with my wife on how to separate the eggs 'cos creativity can only get you so far), sugar, butter and other bits and pieces and briskly set about to whisk up a rich, chocolaty, coagulated mass of dark nightmare that stuck to the bowl like a limpet mine. Wait. What?

A quick check in the recipe book confirmed that I hadn't missed anything but the alien in my bowl looked like it hadn't just come from another planet but an entirely different universe altogether. Thankfully, the beer I had downed had set my senses on a keen edge and my brain was ticking like a furious time bomb. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

What I needed was a way to make the tarry blob of cocoa a little less tarry. Some more butter and egg yolk perhaps? I really couldn't see a fault in the logic and so after a dash of more of the same, I ended up with a slightly larger tarry blob of cocoa.

There was nothing to it but to use what I had to layer the Marie - sorry, Diget - biscuits. First brew some strong black coffee. Then dunk the biscuits in the coffee (after cooling it down a bit) before stacking them on a plate. Cooling down the coffee would take a while I suppose. Hmm.. why not apply elementary physics that I had learned in my glorious academic days to get around this? See, the thing to remember is that if you dip the biscuit in the hot coffee and pull it out really really fast, there wouldn't be enough time for the coffee to transfer heat to the biscuit. So you will still get coffee soaked biscuits but in one fourth the time! Einstein couldn't have reasoned it better.

Right. Enough thinking. Brew some strong black coffee. Now the important bit: quickly ninja-dunk biscuit in the coffee and ...wait, where's the biscuit gone? Ah, there it is, half submerged in the coffee cup like a cotton ball. Maybe I wasn't ninja-fast enough. Let's try another biscuit.... Oh look, now I have two soggy biscuits in the coffee cup. I knew the physics they taught us in school was all for nothing. Meh.

It turns out that Diget biscuits have this property called "crumbliness" that makes them fall apart at the slightest hint of heat and touch. So it wasn't my physics entirely at fault. Anyway, after putting the coffee in the fridge for a few mins, I was ready to continue.

The next step is to layer the chocolate as you stack up the biscuits on the plate. Unfortunately, applying the blobby mass of cocoa to the biscuits, without making them crumble completely, wasn't an easy task but thanks to my mad skillz with a butter knife, fork and a spoon (not to mention plenty of swear words), I somehow managed to bring it altogether just like some of clever contestants do on MasterChef.

And so ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bolo de Bolacha Diget!

It's a great feeling when something comes together just the way you had imagined it, isn't it?

PS: The photo doesn't do it justice. No, really. Honest. That was the best of the lot.