This time last year when my blog turned eleven I made a moderate fuss — a big chocolate cake that I ate with my best friends and a solemnly cogitative post about everything I’d learned from the moment I pressed send back in 2007 right up to that very second. This year I kind of completely forgot until literally just now, but that’s okay! Sometimes you’re Dewey Cox in Walk Hard singing a retrospective song that sums up your entire career, sometimes you’re Dewey Cox in Walk Hard telling his wife “I’m gonna miss some birthdays…I’m gonna miss some births, period.”

Nevertheless, let us take a moment, because if nothing else, twelve years is a ludicrously long time for a food blog to exist. Like, you can fit a WHOLE DECADE in there with wiggle room on either side. That’s so long ago technologically and culturally that it might as well be the 90s. Yes, I’ve hit some walls, and yes, only some of them were metaphorical. Yes, as I’ve said, I sometimes feel like the Velvet Underground of food blogs but instead of the six people who listened to them going on to form influential bands there’s just six people out there who have read this and then gone on to make a nice pilaf. Yes, it’s just a food blog, not War and Peace. The War and Peace of food blogs, perhaps? (I mean, I’ve never thought “that’s three hours I’ll never get back” about my own writing.)

Last year to mark the occasion there was chocolate cake and entirely coincidentally I have a chocolate recipe for you this time as well. These Balsamic Triple Chocolate Squares were intended to be brownies but they’re just not quite there, texturally — you might feel differently and can call them what you like. They are nevertheless extremely delicious. The idea simply appeared in my head, fully formed, but based on the concept that balsamic vinegar and chocolate have pleasantly overlapping properties — inspired by another chocolate cake this year which was itself a variation on last year’s aforementioned celebratory chocolate cake — you know what, maybe this is on a level with War and Peace.

The balsamic vinegar doesn’t override the strident flavour of the chocolate — how could it, when the chocolate is present threefold — but it has this kind of fruity juiciness which is wonderful alongside the rasping bitter edges of the cocoa, it almost, but not quite, tastes like some berries were involved. Any actual vinegary sourness is completely bevelled off by all the sugar, but the pleasing complexity remains. It’s 2019 so I don’t know if we are still surprised that aquafaba, the brine from a can of chickpeas, is a useful ingredient — indeed, I made macarons with it this year — but in case this is new to you, the brine acts very similarly to egg whites and is thus a useful means to glue all the remaining ingredients together. As I said, I couldn’t in good conscience call these brownies, they’re just a little too cakey, although once they’re in your mouth the texture turns melting and dense. I can’t put that last sentence in a recipe title so chocolate squares they shall be. Most importantly, this recipe is as delicious as it is easy, and vice versa.

Balsamic Triple Chocolate Squares

A recipe by myself.

• 150g dark chocolate (roughly a measuring cup full)
• 4 tablespoons plain oil, such as rice bran
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup soy milk (or your preferred variant of this stuff)
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 cup aquafaba (canned chickpea brine)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons cocoa
• 1 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 cup dark chocolate drops (or just more dark chocolate, roughly chopped

Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a regular baking tin, the kind that you’d make this sort of thing in, you know the one I mean, with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate (I do a few 20 second bursts in the microwave.) While this is happening, stir the balsamic vinegar and soy milk together.

Thoroughly mix the brown sugar, white sugar, balsamic/soymilk mixture, oil and aquafaba into the melted chocolate. Sift in the salt, cocoa, flour and baking powder and then stir it in along with the chocolate drops or extra dark chocolate.

Spatula the lot into your baking tin, and bake for 35 minutes. Allow to cool for around ten minutes before slicing. Store in an airtight container.

You might ask, Laura, what is your end game here? Are you like one of those shrews in that self-help book, Women Who Love Too Much, clinging on to a loveless unreciprocated relationship, because you’re too scared of doing anything different and don’t believe in yourself? And because I spend much of my time rehearsing powerful answers to hypothetical yet inevitable interviews, I would say: somehow, twelve years on I love hungryandfrozen.com more than ever and I imagine this will continue to extrapolate out with mathematical accuracy until my ecstatic food blogging is ceased only by the collapse of the earth itself. I am currently writing a novel, I would love to write another cookbook of some kind, I would like it if a new quantity of readers — numbering the population of a New York borough, perhaps — somehow found me. Is this blog a strange manifestation of my absolute tunnel vision, is it a work of art, is it a snake, asking whether eating its own tail is vegan? Whatever: I’m going to keep writing.

title from: I’m Still Here, the bitterly triumphant song from Sondheim’s musical Follies that eventually came to belong to Elaine Stritch, a woman as elegant and acidic as balsamic vinegar itself. I think I’ve earned the right to use it here (not least because Stritch is now dead and therefore can’t beat me up for being impudent.)

music lately:

A Mistake, by Fiona Apple. This song is so on point it’s puncturing me, I get actual shivers when she sings I’m gonna make a mistake, I’m gonna do it on purpose, the absolute swaggering recklessness of it all.

Work It Out, Monie Love. She’s so good, effortlessly getting the words out rapid-fire as though the crunchy beat were actually moving three times as slowly.

PS: you might say, damn it Laura, now I’m impressed, what can I do after twelve years to show my sincere adoration of you? And I would say, first of all it’s an obvious horse to lead to water but sharing my blog around to anyone you think might like it is a lovely thing to do; if you want to support me even more directly there is of course my Patreon where you can join a discerning coterie of people who, for a modest monthly sum receive exclusive content from me.