Chocolate cakes ! As decadent as possible !

ok, so I've decided that if you're going to make a chocolate cake you should just look away from all those low fat, lite option out there, just make the original thing, and try not to eat it all yourself, bring it to work, to a birthday party invite friends over, share in the decadence !
these days it seems that what is really bad for you is the processes foods, because of the different kinds of oils and additives they put in, so what is better than making it on your own, you know exactly what's in it, and how much of it, chocolate, sugar, butter, eggs and a bit of flour.

So, I've tried three different chocolate recipes recently, two come from the Zucchini and Chocolate blog, the third, and the upcoming fourth one come from a Cucina Italiana little chocolate book.

(musical aside: I'm listening to the Decembrists, Valencia on the last album, just love how it sounds so much like an REM song... it's like comfort food, know what I mean ? Every band I listen to lately has a pinch of the pixies here, a taste of REM there, some Velvet Underground tones, and even some sleater kinney accents, it's a nice feeling when your memory gets tickled !)

yes a music entry is way overdue, been to a couple of show have not reported on yet, but you can see what I've been listening to on that last.fm link on the right, I'm also trying to get lala.com setup, it claims it will let me listen to the music on my home itunes while at work...

so, back to chocolate, there are two main families of chocolate cakes, the fluffy ones and the gooye ones. For me the perfect one is somewhere in between, a rich, fluffy cake. There is the moelleux au chocolat, which is fluffy on the outside and warm and liquid on the inside, have not made that yet, mainly because you need to have individual little bakeproof ceramic cups. But then there is the Sachetorte the queen of all chocolate cakes, which I have made before, but a long time ago, and so will attempt again soon.

The danger with fluffy cakes is that when the fluffyness comes from baking soda you might get some backing soda backtaste, the best to get your cake fluffy is probably by beating the egg whites, although it is more work, it might be worth it. So to cut to the chase I have tried the "melt in your mouth chocolate cake" with a name like that, how can you resist ! That is at the gooye end of the scale, and veeeery decadent, and another recipe from the Chocolate and Zucchini blog, the aerial cake, on the fluffy end of the scale. Both got very good votes from friends and coworkers, but my favorite is something more in the middle that I made for my friend Henriette's bday party. I was looking for a cake where the dark chocolate to sugar ratio was maximized, and that was not too gooye or too baking soda-fluffy. It comes from the Cucina Italiana little book I mentioned before, but could not find it on their web site.

320 g dark chocolate (11 ounces)
160 g butter (5.5 ounces)
160 g sugar
40 g flour (a full tablespoon and a bit more)
5 eggs

preheat the oven at 175 °C, 350° F
melt the chocolate butter and sugar on top of boiling water on in the microwave on the low-med setting. Mix it well with a beater, the recipe says until it "grows" but it's a bit too thick to do any growing at this point. Beat the egg whites till stiff. When the chocolate mix has cooled down add the egg yolks while beating some more and the flour, then carefully add the egg whites.
Bake for 40 minutes.

PS chocolate cakes taste better the next day.... but you wont know unless you taste some before too :-)

So this might be the beginning of the quest for the perfect cake, or a temporary passion, although my taste for chocolate is not temporary at all.

on the road

after a long hiatus I'm back. that's because I am finally on vacation !
Yesterday (was it just yesterday ?) I flew from paris to prague and from prague to split, with a 6 hour layover, which ended up being a very good thing for at least two reasons, the first is that we left paris late due to a bomb scare at the airport, the second is that it gave me time to go to prague and take a bike tour through the city.

I would highly recommend doing the bike tour through prague ! It is a very nice way to get a feel of the city and get oriented, it is the first time I had done such a thing but apparently it is possible in other cities as well. I will post pictures as soon as I find a way to upload them. Prague is a jewel of a city, very beautiful, I will defenetly go back, for longer next time, and probably not in august, too many tourists. I almost killed a few of them because I was not used to the cruiser bike with the backpedal brakes !

now I am in split, doing a workshop on interdisciplinary research, it begins tonight. The setting is fantastic and the weather has cooled down since last week, which is a good thing. This morning I woke up early and took a nice walk through the quiet sunday morning downtown, the market was already buzzing with activity, and now I think back of the figs and blackberries that I didn't buy...

Haruki Murakami quote

it's true for lyrics as well I guess.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when
someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note.
When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you
mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you
really mean!”
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s
true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and
special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Haruki Murakami ( Novelist )

parthenogenesis for the modern girl

Sharks can do it (see below), for humans it's still a bit more difficult.... but what if... ?

basically the main reason seems to be that it is not just the sequence of our DNA that matters, but also whether parts of it have been modified. These modifications can affect the activity of a given gene, and they are passed on from one cell division to the next. The pattern of modification is different in male and females, and it turns out that these differences are very important for the proper development of the embryo, including its brain...

in the wikipedia entry quoted below they mention that by reproducing some of the male modifications in a female genome they were able to come up with a fullyfemale mouse.... science fiction is not so far away !


Female Shark Reproduced Without Male DNA, Scientists Say

Previously, Dr. Schuett said, zookeepers and others tended to discount evidence of virgin births precisely because they were so out of the ordinary. But in recent years it has been found in Komodo dragons, other lizards and snake species.

“It’s all over the place,” Dr. Schuett said.

Still, parthenogenesis among vertebrates tends to be rare, and, while it may occur in the wild, has been documented only in captivity.

“It’s a last-resort tactic that animals use when they absolutely can’t find another mate,” Dr. Hueter said.

While it has the advantage of ensuring the survival of a species in the absence of males, it also comes at a cost: a loss of genetic diversity. And that, Dr. Shivji said, may spell conservation problems for some shark species whose populations are declining. If it becomes more difficult for female sharks in the wild to find a mate and instead they reproduce through parthenogenesis, then the offspring will be less genetically diverse, making the species more susceptible to diseases and other problems.

But Dr. Hueter said he thought it unlikely that most sharks, which are highly mobile, would end up so isolated that parthenogenesis would be much of a factor. Sharks have plenty of other problems that are of potentially greater impact.

“I would be concerned about a lot of other things than whether or not a female shark can get a date for an evening,” he said.

From wikipedia's entry on genomic imprinting:

Experimental manipulation of mouse embryos in the early 1980s showed that normal development requires the contribution of both the maternal and paternal genomes. Gynogenetic embryos (containing two female genomes) show relatively normal embryonic development, but poor placental development. In contrast, androgenetic embryos (containing two male genomes) show very poor embryonic development but normal placental development. Further investigation identified that these phenotypes were the result of unbalanced imprinted gene expression (Barton et al., 1984; McGrath and Solter, 1984).

The gynogenetic embryos have twice the normal level of maternally expressed genes, and completely lack expression of paternally expressed genes, whereas the reverse is true for androgenetic embryos. It is now known that there are approximately 80 imprinted genes in humans and mice, many of which are involved in embryonic and placental growth and development (Isles and Holland, 2005; Morison et al., 2005; Reik and Lewis, 2005; Wood and Oakey, 2006).

No naturally occurring cases of parthenogenesis exist in mammals because of imprinted genes. Experimental manipulation of a paternal methylation imprint controlling the Igf2 gene has, however, recently allowed the creation of rare individual mice with two maternal sets of chromosomes - but this is not a true parthenogenote. Hybrid offspring of two species may exhibit unusual growth due to the novel combination of imprinted genes.^[1]

dancin' bugs

I'm back, been a while I know, lots more to come, but in the meanwhile enjoy my first bacteria dance video, have to figure out how to add the music, let me know if you know how to do it, here it is :

A perfect day

Spring has arrived, there are flowers everywhere, and the sun is back, ah !
Here's a picture of Menilmontant on saturday night:

I should have said perfect weekend in the title, because already saturday, though a bit hazy at first turned out to be a nice day too, the birthday party of one year old Giulia :-) . (will have cute baby picts of course).
Sunday I skipped on my usual trip to the Marché d'Aligre because I still had veggies in the fridge from the previous one (somehow once I'm there I'm only limited to how much I can carry home). Instead went and had a nice walk along the canal St. Martin, and then up and over to a bustling rue Faubourg du Temple and rue de Belleville. In Paris most of the shops are closed on sunday, but not in this neighborhood where you can find hallal meat shop, next to a kosher supermarket, just down the street from the chinese grocer with all these unknown vegetables I wish I knew how to cook.

On rue de Belleville we stopped for a nice lunch at one of the best Thai restaurants I know in Paris. Of course I don't remember the name, but if you walk uphill from metro Belleville, you pass the first light, and a little farther up on the left you'll see it, it's quite large. Here you can find superb thai food that is nicely spicy (food in Paris in general tends to be quite on the mild side), I recommend the fish in the banana leaf, the shrimp in coconut milk and of course a nice plate of pad thai. oh ! and the calamari salad ! nice and hot !

the afternoon we slowly walked our way down to republique and then through the marais, another bustling neighborhood on sunday, with a lot of shops open, but quite different from the ones in Belleville. Here you'll find the latest design and fashion, and on rue de Rosiers the nice kosher bakeries and falafel shops. Rue vielle du temple is invaded by pedestrians, so if you can get a table at one of the cafés there's some good trendy crowd watching.

The point of our walk was to go to my favorite pub to watch the rugby game of france against england. The fact that italy won its last two games in the six nation tournament might have something to do with my renewed interest in this sport, and it was also a key game, that, since it was won by england, now next weekend the final games will determine which of the tied top three teams will win, and next weekend is also st patrick's and italy is playing ireland (one of the top three) so it bodes to be another interesting weekend.

Finally I took the metro all the way up to la villette for the concert of the And You'll Know us by the Trail of the Dead ! The opening band, who played too short a set, was great, they are called forget cassettes and you should defenetly check them out. The lady in charge (Beth Cameron) has a great voice, and some good ideas, she was with a shifting cast of musicians from the Trail of the Dead. The main act rocked of course, and there was even a pit, for a short while ! (It was in the Trabendo, nice small venue). Here's a pict, as usual with my cell phone, this is when Beth from forget cassettes came on stage with the trail of the dead:

after the show a nice kebab sandwich and then off to bed, sunday night is still a school night after all, and I had to start thinking of what I would make for monday dinner (8 friends came over... pici with ragu' ai porcini, not bad...). Such a perfect day.
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