Chocolate custard and my battle with cups and teaspoons..

This picture shows the quite pleasing result of a struggle. My struggle is with cups, tablespoons and the rest of American cooking weights and measures. How does a certain quantity of sugar weigh several millilitres? As many times as I am told how simple are cups to understand I still fail to understand. The fridge door is covered in conversion charts, so I perform like a spinning dervish when cooking from American recipes, which is most of the time as every book I buy from Amazon appears to be an American edition. Could it be that the Americans don’t buy that many books, but publishers have decided to print several million copies of every cook book with American measurements in the hope that the sleeping giant will awake once more. Aside from that, I think I misunderstood, or mis- measured, this recipe. Although entitled “Chocolate Custard” it is more like “Chocolate Cement about to set” but is nonetheless delicious. I beat some creme fraiche with unrefined sugar and poured some into each glass. They looked like two perfect miniature glasses of Guinness. Unfortunately they didn’t get photographed in that state as the hunger was then upon me. Something tells me that a small draft of Grand Marnier mixed with the chocolate would do no harm to this dark beauty.

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