the webmaster speaks

the webmaster was in last night and accused me of being too morose in my sometimes daily missives. so, to start a joke.

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground.
He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator:

"My friend is dead! What can I do?"

The operator, in a calm soothing voice says:

"Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."

There is a silence as the man walks away. then a shot is heard.

A few seconds later he returns to the phone and says

"OK, now what?"

That was judged to be the funniest joke ever, although personally i like the fishsticks joke on south park, written by jimmy and stolen by cartman. i'd let you in on it but we have fishfingers in this country so the homophone disappears.

anyway the point is to put the recipe for the cherry chocolate cake up so that i don't forget it.

this is what i use, you can scale down.

1 680g jar of cherries in syrup, blended and sieved if any are unpitted. this needs to be heated. (use the syrup for the blending, don't throw it away or it won't work)

300g SR flour
225g caster sugar
60g cocoa powder
1 dsp bicarb
150ml veg oil

sieve the dry ingredients into a bowl, add the oil to the boiling cherry mix and whisk. add hot mix to the dry mix and whisk until fully combined. it will be bubbling away and will seem very wet. pour into a lined tray, we use a big one for this much mix.

this is a nice way of making good vegan cakes, for our chocolate fudge cake we use prunes and add some maple syrup to the mix, sticky toffee it's dates and/or raisins. the finished cakes are moist and light. for any coeliacs, this is also a very good baking method for gluten free cakes.

i hope that was upbeat enough for the webmaster or he'll remove my writing privileges.

go the lions