Montezuma chocolate

I have been a bit quiet on the blog recently. Well, not wholly surprising that in the aftermath of my sister's untimely death, I would find myself randomly unable to complete tasks, or in fact start some of them. So the blog has seemed a bit overwhelming. But you find your way back to most things one step at a time, and my way back to my blog is of course via baking. I started this blog thinking about baking through the lens of adversity - a huge piece of surgery to rebuild one of my feet which made me immobile for months. I had no idea at the time that worse adversity was in store for me, but thank goodness I discovered then the rehabilitative power of baking. It was a skill I drew on, numbly at first in the last month, but increasingly thankfully as day by painful day has passed. When I was kneeling on a chair, my plaster encased foot sticking out awkwardly as I kneaded dough or operated my Kitchen Aid (and yes I did have one of these well before The Great British Bake Off), combining flour, eggs and sugar took my mind away from the daily frustration of crutches. Now, the combining of the same ingredients gives me parameters to which my bewildered mind clings. Every baker has favourite tasks, and mine is the chopping of highest quality chocolate. I was making double chocolate brownies at the weekend - easy enough to chuck Dr Oetker chocolate chips into the mix and be done with it, and up to about a year or so ago I would have been happy to do that. But really, where's the joy in it? Satisfying baking processes involve personal commitment. And my expression of personal commitment, is unwrapping a lump of Montezuma couverture chocolate, sharpening my knife, and cutting carefully so that I get knobbly shards. Anyone will tell you the difference between evenly shaped chocolate chips, and knobbly shards in your double chocolate brownies, is absolutely crucial. The odd huge lump of chocolate in a bite of brownie is pure dark chocolate heaven. A bite of chocolate chip is barely savoured. But this time, I chopped, and chopped, and chopped, and chopped. Carefully, mesmerisingly, almost as if my brain were reminding my hands of the long practised task, helping to re-establish predictability, satisfaction in conducting a task, stability and control into a world that had been rocked by grief. I must have chopped for at least an hour. My recipe gleefully proclaimed that the length of the entire brownie making process would not be more than 25 minutes. I was sorely tempted to add, or 2 hours if using this task as therapy.