Cooking In The Dark : Witch Toast

For someone who eat, sleeps, breathes black, I shouldn’t have, in theory, fallen madly, deeply in love with Mermaid Toast . But I did. The Insta-toast-artisans captured what looked like the Aurora Borealis in cream cheese. Of course I was going to be impressed.

But naturally, I needed to go against the grain, and I thought to myself ‘Witch Toast. Make some black as sin Witch Toast. It’ll be fucking brilliant. People will love it.’

While nobody has made said ‘Witch Toast’ before, somebody did make  Troll Toast. Peeved was I? Only slightly. It looked perfectly grim. My thunder had been dampened, but I went ahead and made my Witch Toast anyway.

The fantastical toasts I’d been enviously examining had all been crafted with natural colourants, and an ideal world I would love to have used charcoal like they did with the Troll Toast, but sadly today was not that day and I had to go with your basic food dye.

While I was expecting my cream cheese to go a glorious matte black – as the dye had promised – I ended up with a misanthropic looking storm cloud on one slice of toast and a choppy sea mid winter on the other.  Not all too terrible a result then.

Unlike the people who made the Mermaid Toast, I did eat mine. Philadelphia Cream Cheese isn’t cheap. It was bloody delicious and, interestingly, the first grey foodstuff I’ve ever consumed before.

If you want to give this a go…

Ingredients

• About half a 200g tub of Philadelphia, maybe a bit more (I went for the Light version.)
• Black food dye. I got it in a little tube. Probably about 5 grams. I used it all.
• 2 slices of wholemeal bread. The thicker the better.

Directions

• Toast your bread. Let it cool. Spread a thickish layer of Philadelphia on each slice as your base.
• Divide the rest of the Philadelphia up into two bowls.
• Use your best judgement as to how much dye to use. Be creative. I used a lot for the misanthropic storm cloud toast, and was more sparing with the choppy sea.
• Apply your dyed cheese in dollops and smear it around as artistically as you can.
• Photograph the shit out of your toast and spread the images like the plague. With any luck they’ll go viral.
• Don’t forget to eat the stuff. There’s enough food waste in the world as it is.