Chocolate Pizza

Every so often I get inspired to produce something other than a cake for somebody's birthday. Years back when my eldest kid was small, I copied Nigella and made a stack of gooey brownies, cascaded icing sugar all over them, and then stuck a candle in every one, stacking them pyramid-like. My son needed the help of all his mates to blow them out, and he loved it, loved that he could pick the brownie with his favourite colour candle on it (blue), loved that nobody had to wait for me to slice it up but could just grab their first, second or third brownie on the go. It was a huge success. I didn't repeat the idea until earlier this year, when my younger sister came over to my house so I could take her for a makeover for her birthday, and while the heavily made up Mac consultant attacked her with a mascara wand, I headed up to the top floor of the shop with her eldest daughter, where I bought a box of 12 Krispy Kremes, and when we got back to my house, I stuck a candle in each one...well, you know how the story ends.  Recently, my eldest son got some fairly significant exam results, and I mulled over how to congratulate with him via my baking. Have you ever seen those chocolate pizzas that you can buy in shops or online? They cost a princely fifteen quid and they are a round slab of what is alleged to be Belgian chocolate, cut into pizza squares, and decorated with M&Ms and chocolate sprinkles, marshmallows and red glitter and white chocolate curls. They look sickening, but really what's not to love for the ultimate chocolate fix. And they gave me the idea of making a chocolate pizza. A while back I experimented with chocolate pasta - I bought the pasta ready chocolatified from Hotel Chocolat, made a butterscotch sauce for it, served it up, we all took a mouthful each and had to go and lie down, it was so ridiculously rich. It was a fun experiment, but it did not enter the Melinda Simmons hall of dessert fame. But the itch to continue the theme was strong, and I figured I could probably work out for myself how I might make a chocolate pizza. So, using my usual dough recipe, I added 20g of cocoa powder. Sieved it all in, added my liquid of yeast, sugar, oil and water, formed my brownish dough and left it to rise. An hour or two later, I took a quarter of it, rolled it out, and spread melted Galaxy chocolate over it as its sauce. Put it in the oven. For a minute too long as it turned out - the sauce had been absorbed into the base. But no matter - I smeared another layer of Galaxy over it, and then had what you might call a loss of perspective. I grated chocolate curls over it. I scattered Galaxy buttons over it. I chopped up flake bars and scattered them around the outside. I let it all sit, so the base of the extra chocolate would melt enough for it to stick to the base. And then I cut it into slices and I served it. And it was gone in minutes, bar one slice, which I kept to show my neighbours. Fast forward to the weekend and I find myself planning another two chocolate pizzas - for kids' birthday parties. Hooray. I've hit on the ultimate birthday cake alternative. If only people would keep their hands off my chocolate pizza for long enough for me to take a picture of the damn thing and post it on Instagram/Pinterest/Twitter, I might actually have the beginnings of a viral trend. Sigh.