Chocolate Pate

I am the colleague that gave Allan this recipe from and I got it from a friend in the US and "translated" it for use in the UK. This is a HIT if you have to bring in a sweet to the office. Watch your colleagues go orgasmic (or maybe you DON'T want to see that!) and then watch them go for seconds! (actually, the more I think about this, I think you should avoid this recipe unless you are prepared to see pleasure on their face that they wouldn't normally show in public......)

This recipe took much longer to cook than expected - all in all this took me 4 hours, excluding chilling time! The chocolate, even though broken into small chunks, took absolutely ages to melt. Then I waited around for ages for the pate to bake - 180C didn't do it for me, I had to up the temperature to 190C in the end as I lost patience after having kept it in the oven for 2 hours. To top it off, a good deal of butter separated during baking, forming unpleasant chunks once cooled. Also my pate seemed to have two layers - a nice melt-in-the-mouth, dark layer on the top, and a lighter-coloured, coffee-less, grainier layer on the bottom: the part with the butter chunks. In the end I had to separate the two layers and discard the latter. By this time this looked nothing like pate any more. I would have used less sugar as well. This recipe is probably heavily dependent on what kind of chocolate you get - please specify which brand is good for this! I was very disappointed, to say the least - although the top layer tasted good, it wasn't as amazing as the ravings suggested.

Yes Allan...you were right, there are some things best not seen...LOL. This recipe was easy to follow, went together well, and the final product was better than sex. Definitely making this again for Christmas get-togethers. I couldn't find clotted cream here in my supermarket in NZ, so served it with marscapone...in a word..DELISH!!!