Chocolate Marshmallow Cake of Zen

Now I've gone and entitled it the Chocolate Marshmallow Cake of Zen. Perhaps that's not really what it was. Or perhaps it was. You decide.

The Chocolate Marshmallow Cake is an invention of my daughter, when she was about thirteen. There is no recipe.

Instead, there is a drawing in blue biro on a scrap of paper seven centimetres wide, and ten centimetres long, torn on three sides and cut straight along the bottom. There are six tiny holes at the top indicating that the drawing has been pinned to a cork board, taken down and replaced five times.

This would seem to indicate the cake was made five times which is not the case. We only made it once.

The drawing looks like this: The top half of the paper is blank, except for the six pinholes. In the centre is the word Chocolate. Under the second 'o' in Chocolate an arrow points diagonally to a rectangle, covered on the top and two sides in scribble, representing melted chocolate. The rectangle is divided horizontally in two. In the top half of the rectangle is the word MARSHMALOW and, in the lower half, the word CAKE, only just identifiable, because the biro ink is running out.

From the drawing the cook can see that the way to make the cake is to get a slab of cake, melt marshmallow over it, and then melt chocolate over that.

I told you we only made it once, and that was for two reasons. One, because it was difficult to cut precisely, the chocolate being hard and the marshmallow underneath being soft, so that when you cut the chocolate layer it cracked into large pieces unrelated to a natural slice of cake.

And secondly, we never wanted to.