Frozen Hot Chocolate

On this warm but lovely Memorial Day, I felt like making something new. Not hard, but new. Looked through some recipes I had scanned recently and found this one for Frozen Hot Chocolate in Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts So I gave it a whirl. Since I've got the recipe already scanned, I'll upload it, with all rights reserved to the author, of course (click for the larger version):

I halved the recipe and used the espresso powder. This is what it looked like after warming slightly (and I do mean slightly, it was still cool to the touch when all the sugar had defrosted). It took all of 5 minutes. Maybe even less. Oh and I used raw turbinado sugar, because that's what I had. I wonder if it would work out with agave... probably not too well:

Next day, I followed the rest of the recipe. I have no idea if this is what it's really supposed to look like, but it was damn good, so I can't say that I care much!

More Farmer's Market Goodies and a Breakfast of Champions

To the farmers market again today. Good news is that there were BELL PEPPERS!!!!!!!!!!!! Bad news is that I splurged on a really unhealthy croissant (see below). Today's loot: lettuce, tomatoes, grapefruit, cucumber, cherries (regular and rainier), peppers, sugar snaps, and white nectarines.

So here's the croissant (with an iced cappuccino). Just for your reference for how humongous it was, that's about a 6-7 inch plate. And I finished the whole thing. Oh dear.

Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies

It's been so long since I downloaded the PDF of this flourless peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie recipe for that I don't even remember where I found it (almost 2 years to be exact). Finally decided to try it as part of a birthday present for a friend.

I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except I left out the peanut chunks. I made a double batch so that I'd have some for myself too. They are more crumbly than a normal cookie. I generally prefer chewy cookies but I guess with no flour and no butter, that's not really going to happen. I also overcooked a few of them, as you can see in the last picture, but oh well. Still very tasty!

Chocolate Nibby Espresso Cookies

Recently took Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate, which is all about cooking with really good dark chocolate, out of the library after having made brownies from the book as posted by one of my favorite blogs Smitten Kitchen. Not too many of the recipes really struck me, but I scanned a few to save, this being one of them. I had bought some cocoa nibs not long ago and had no idea what to do with them, so this recipe seemed perfect. The "espresso" comes from ground coffee beans. I didn't have unsweetened chocolate, but luckily she provides substitution instructions for using 70%, etc., chocolate instead.

When I made the dough on Saturday, I was worried because it was more like a batter than a cookie dough. But the recipe called for it to sit in the fridge anywhere from an hour to four days. So I figured we'd see how it turned out overnight.

Of course, it had a lot of melted butter and chocolate in it so I knew it would harden, and of course, it hardened too much so I left it out to warm up a bit. Then I got impatient so I made a mess digging and scooping and whatnot. Anyway, this is what they looked like beforehand:

Cooked them about 9 min.....as you can see they spread a bit and blistered a little on the top, but I could tell they were still quite soft inside. Fine by me, I'd rather undercook than overcook.

Tried putting some chocolate covered coffee beans I had lying around in some of them while they were still hot...

Needless to say, they're amazing. There's not quite enough coffee flavor, but it's there. And the nibs add a cocoa-y crunch. Delicious.

More Adventures in Chocolate (Truffles)!

For the perfect truffles, I sort of combined two recipes from two of my favorite Food Network chefs. I like this one from Tyler Florence because I like the idea of whipping up the filling to be creamy and smooth, and I like this one from Alton Brown because I like the idea of a Lindt Lindor truffle-like thing.

My truffles have only three ingredients, though. Great chocolate (70%+), cream, and some decaf espresso.

First, chop the chocolate finely. It has to be chopped because unlike with the chocolate cake, where the chocolate was melted over a double boiler, the chocolate is melted by just a little bit of hot cream:




Cream and espresso heating together. It's done here, when you have the little bubbles around the edge... don't want to burn it!



Pour cream/coffee mixture over finely chopped chocolate:



And stir til nice and smooth. This is pure ganache at its finest. Gimme a spoon!!!!



Per Tyler Florence's recipe, I mixed it for about a minute with a hand blender. You can see that it has lightened a little, grown a bit in volume, and has a really lovely glossy sheen



Pour mixture into saran wrap-lined plastic container and spread til relatively even. I go for tasty, not pretty, as you can see LOL:



After letting cool in the fridge at least 2 hours, I cut the ganache into squares. Here, you could take the time and mess to roll these into round balls, but uh, why? Or, at this point you could roll the truffles into anything you want - cocoa powder, chopped nuts, etc.



But I followed Alton Brown's recipe.... chopped more chocolate really finely again, this time I did melt it - VERY SLOWLY - over boiling water. as you can see in the finished truffles, they are fairly shiny and because I melted it so slowly and took care to make sure the chocolate never got too hot, they have a nice chocolate "snap" that they should have. Nah, they don't look perfect. But oh boy.... they taste it :)

Flourless Sugarless Chocolate "Cake"

I took this recipe from a Montignac book I got from the library. I promptly returned the book without copying the recipe. d'ooohhhhhhh. You can find a good enough reproduction here though. What I basically did was halve the recipe and make it in individual pyrex bowls, for a more manageable portion size. It's really pretty tasty and I am all for recipes that have only 2 ingredients and really rely on the quality.

The key is of course the chocolate. This was 72% tastiness from Trader Joe's. When you can get 500 grams of it there (or Fresh & Easy) for $3.98, why eat anything else? :D


Melted over a double boiler on the stovetop:


I don't have anything of the eggs.... and I'm not sure why. Sorry about that LOL

So this is what they looked like, right before going into the oven (at a high heat for a short time)




And this is right after coming out of the oven - i mean right after - they are still puffy. That went down as they cooled.



After refrigerating for a few hours, I turned it out onto a plate and this is what it looks like. A fluffy yet dense and rich cakelike dessert delicacy.



Melt some chocolate for a ganache and spread it on top and bam, delicious low-glycemic dessert with no added sugar besides what's in the dark chocolate. And man, really tasty.

Chocolate Espresso Shortbreads

In my new addiction to Stumble, a great Firefox add-on that shows you sites that match you're interests, I've been brought to a lot of cooking sites. One in particular has some really amazing-looking stuff, and i signed up for the email list, so when I got this delivered to my inbox, i knew I was gonna break down and make it - and probably sooner rather than later ;)

So, of course, mine did not come out as pretty, but what I did was halve the recipe to control the fatty unhealthy goodness I was about to concoct (in other words, if I only made half as many shortbreads, I could only eat half as many shortbreads ;)), and I think it worked out pretty well. I don't have instant espresso so I used about a tablespoon and a half of regular pre-made mokka pot espresso. I didn't really taste the coffee in the finished product unfortunately, but I didn't want to add more than that in case it'd throw off the recipe with too much liquid.

Of course, I am too lazy to get all measuring and stuff, probably to the cookies' detriment. But oh well. They taste good and are very delicate and tender, they almost melt in your mouth because of the powdered sugar and very little mixing the recipe calls for. Baking is more fun now that i've figured out my oven runs a good 50 degrees too hot - no more burned cookie bottoms with raw middles, hooray!

Passover

Passover was about a month ago. I made myself some chocolate-covered matzah. All I did was melt some odds and ends of really good chocolate (all above 50%) really slowly, dipped fresh pieces of matzah in it and scraped it down using tongs and a spatula and let cool on a plastic-lined cookie sheet. They're similar to chocolate-covered pretzels, but without the extra salt and with muuuuuuuch better chocolate ;)



I made a traditional Passover dinner - my family's recipe for "Jewish Roast Chicken" (which consists of bone-in chicken of your choice - for me, breast - marinated in a paste of canola oil, onion, garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper pureed up and slathered on), roasted potatoes til nice and crispy, and homemade matzah ball soup. Not much else to say except yummy, and for me, quintessential comfort food.