Tag: budget-friendly recipes

Absolutely nothing chocolate cake (with a cookie variation)

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A square chocolate cake drizzled in melted chocolate

Given these vile economic times that we find ourselves unwilling pawns in, I’ve resurrected this absolutely nothing chocolate cake recipe which uses no eggs, no butter, and no substitutions after a long time between bites. And it really does come together out of various dusts and a bit of tap water to form a cake that isn’t just surprisingly good, it’s just a good — and functional — chocolate cake. Now, the last thing I want to do is bring you a recipe that I’m obliged to damn through faint praise, and I was somewhat uncertain as this baked away in the oven. Yes, it’s based on the recipe that fed my childhood, but given that I also used to make myself tomato ketchup and cheese sandwiches, microwaved until either the cheese or the plastic plate was volcanically bubbling, and pretend it was pizza, I’m not sure my tastebuds’ memories can be trusted in that regard. I then repurposed this recipe for my 2013 cult hit eponymous cookbook, published through Penguin — but that was a long decade ago, and then some.

After a further, and for now, final tutu with this recipe, I am happy to report that it tastes genuinely, beguilingly fantastic. Whether a birthday is looming ominously or a vexing (or celebratory) day requires dessert, you deserve cake, regardless of possessing the means to make one. This can be that cake.

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Butternut, chickpea, and peanut soup

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a spoon resting in a bowl of butternut soup with bread on a plate next to it

I have an old cookbook — as in, it’s from 1980 and I found it in an opshop — called, with brisk disregard for tautology, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook. Fascinatingly, it lists milk, cheese, and eggs as three of the most important ingredients for an economical kitchen; meanwhile I remember butter and cheese quadrupling in cost overnight somewhere around the beginning of the recession in 2007 and never, ever lowering or even settling in price ever again. When the consumer cannot control the rapidly-shifting sands underneath our feet nor the repellant deciders who dictate the prices of ingredients, it makes me wary of claiming a recipe to be cheap or budget-friendly. But if you can’t guarantee cost-of-living-crisis-amenability — and it’s hard to guarantee much of anything at all in these trying times — I can at least promise a certain versatility that can meet you where you’re at, in this Butternut, Chickpea, and Peanut Soup.

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