On Valentine’s day, a new big screen arrived in the UH Space Physics meeting room, a.k.a. Koskinen’s Korner.
In order to test the screen, we had our monthly Space Journal Club meeting right on the same day. Our journal club works in a special way: the person who is presenting a recent scientific article also bakes a cake for the whole team to enjoy during the meeting!
Our presenter was Maxime Grandin, who recently joined the team and used to work in the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory on ionosphere and particle precipitation. The paper he presented was in fact about the beautiful Northern lights! In order to celebrate Valentine’s day and the beauty of auroras, he baked a delicious Valentine’s aurora-themed cake.
Maxime took inspiration for his cake from here [Chichichoc et al., 2013].
…and here is his full recipe!
Ingredients
– 4 eggs (at room temperature)
– 150 g sugar
– 1 tbs water
– 125 g butter
– 70 g flour
– 45 g bitter cocoa powder
– 1 pinch of salt
– 500 ml milk
– a few drops of lemon/lime juice
– black cherry jam
– icing sugar
– decoration (coloured sugar, chocolate chips…)
Instructions
– Pre-heat the oven at 160°C and put the butter to melt. Warm up the milk.
– Separate the egg whites and yolks. Add the sugar and the water to the yolks and mix for a couple of minutes. Add in the molten butter and mix for one more minute.
– Sift the flour in, and add the cocoa and the pinch of salt. Keep mixing and gradually add the lukewarm milk. The obtained batter should be quite liquid.
– Whisk the egg whites with a few drops of lemon/lime juice until stiff. Gently add the egg whites to the batter using a bowl scraper.
– Pour the batter in a circular cake mold (~25 cm in diameter), and let it cook in the oven for 50 min.
– Let it cool down before unmolding. Decorate the cake with icing sugar, black cherry jam and your imagination. Keep in the refrigerator until serving.
…et voilà!
