Making delicious chocolate salami

For as long as we’ve been serving food, we’ve been unable to resist a bit of culinary deception. Making one thing look like another thing — especially if it makes a sweet thing look savory or vice versa — seems to have universal comedic value. There’s something Willy Wonka-ish about the visual wrong-footing, the surprise — we find it delightful.

I’m not even going to stop you slinging some mini marshmallows in there — it is Christmas, after all

There’s a long history here. At medieval and Tudor banquets, the food was entertainment as much as it was sustenance: huge pastries made to look like life-size stags and swans stood alongside carefully carved marzipan fruits, both imitating the real thing as closely as possible.

Chefs have long played with this form of trickery. Heston Blumenthal’s famous “meat fruit” — where chicken liver and foie gras parfait are set inside a jelly glaze to make it look exactly like a mandarin — takes its lessons directly from the medieval culinary jape of disguising meat to look like, well, fruit. Ferran Adrià, the king of molecular gastronomy, was known for his “liquid olive,” shaped like a solid green olive, but made from olive juice using the reverse spherification technique, so it burst in the mouth of the unsuspecting diner. Pastry chef Cédric Grolet makes exquisite fruit creations — a perfect pomegranate, a blushing peach — that look entirely lifelike, but which have half a dozen different layers of texture, technique and flavor to create the perfect pudding.

The vogue now on social media for “Is it cake?” videos (such a popular idea that it even spawned its own television game show) celebrates this tradition, with an enormous chef’s knife looming over everyday items — a trainer, a burger, toilet paper — ready to cut into it and reveal whether it is the object it appears to be, or a sponge-filled simulacrum. The trend has gone further and become self-referential: a stand mixer, the knife, even the arm of the chef doing the cutting… all cake.

But long before there was Instagram or stand mixers or even trainers, there was chocolate salami. Chocolate salami, or salame di cioccolato in Italy and chocolate chouriço in Portugal where they are most traditional, are the original trompe l’oeil food.

Often served at Christmas, at its most simple, chocolate salami is a chocolate biscuit cake. It is made by mixing together cream, chocolate and butter to make a ganache, with broken biscuits stirred through, before it is chilled in the refrigerator in a sausage shape. The small chunks of biscuit scattered through the set ganache look, once sliced, like the fat set against the meat of the salami. Dusted with icing sugar and cut into thick slices, it really does look like coins of the finest charcuterie. It is surprisingly realistic.

Although only technically requiring biscuits for the deception, it’s hard not to play around with the inclusions, and I’ve thrown in all my festive favorites. Pistachios I easily justify, because they’re found in real salami anyway, so I’m simply adding to the verisimilitude of my chocolate version. The crystallized ginger is calling to me from the pantry, the amaretti biscuits are already on the worktop, and pecans always feel festive. I just about manage to stop myself chucking in a handful of dried cranberries, as that felt like gilding this particular lily, but I know they’d be wonderful — or, even better, sour cherries.

A slug of rum or amaretto is a fine addition. Next time, I’m considering replacing the amaretti biscuits with ginger nuts and the crystallized ginger with candied peel — the really good stuff, not the sad little colorless bits they try to flog you for your Christmas cake. I’m not even going to stop you slinging some mini marshmallows in there — it is Christmas, after all. Chocolate salami makes a truly charming homemade Christmas present that can be made either ages in advance (it has an excellent shelf-life) or at the very last minute, which is, in those strange, frantic weeks leading to Christmas that seem to both last for ever and be over in the blink of an eye, ideal. Just make sure you’re there when the lucky recipient cuts into it, so you can enjoy their reaction.

Makes 2 large salami (one for you, one to give as a present)
Takes 15 mins 
Cooks 5 mins, plus refrigeration

• ½ cup skin-on almonds
• ½ cup pecans
• ½ cup pistachios
• 1½ cup dark chocolate
• ½ cup heavy cream
• ½ cup butter
• 1 tablespoon instant coffee, made up with 1 tablespoon boiling water
• 1 cup rich tea biscuits
• 1 cup amaretti biscuits
• ⅓ cup cocoa powder
• 1 cup caster sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ⅓ cup crystallized ginger, finely chopped
• Icing sugar, to coat

1. First, toast all the nuts in a pan over a medium heat, just until you can smell them. Set to one side and, once cool, chop roughly
2. In a medium-sized pan, melt the chocolate, butter and cream together, stirring gently until smooth, then stir through the coffee
3. In a large bowl, break up the biscuits and amaretti into tiny pieces
4. Add the cocoa, sugar, salt, nuts and ginger to the biscuits and stir together, then pour in the melted chocolate mixture and mix well. Leave to cool for ten minutes
5. Lay out two large sheets of Saran wrap, and divide the mixture between the two sheets. Shape the mixture into a log, and wrap tightly in the wrapping, twisting the ends to compress. Refrigerate for at least three hours, or overnight
6. Unwrap carefully, and roll the salami in icing sugar to coat it. Wrap in brown paper to store, and cut off the ends to reveal the interior to serve