Mint chocolate bars

Haha, sugar free. April Fool's! I was just a few months late. Right.

Anyway, back to real life. Where all things are good in moderation. These bars are adapted from the creme de menthe bars sold at Gabriel's. They are really something else. When I had one from the restaurant, I immediately determined to make something as close as possible at home, and was pleased to realize it was nothing more than a rich brownie base, a sort of fluffy (but thin) mint filling, and a thin layer of icing. Before I tried reproducing them, I googled for a recipe, just in case, and was rewarded with a preview page of Johnnie Gabriel's cookbook on Google Books that let me see the original recipe. So that simplified things!

I used a slightly different brownie recipe (the justly famous Nick's supernatural brownies) and halved all the components, since a 8" square pan makes more than enough for a family of 2 1/2 (we are not feeding the baby such unwholesome things yet), plus some to share.

Mint chocolate bars
adapted from Johnnie Gabriel's Cooking in the South
Makes 16 squares

Brownie base:
8 Tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter
4 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup all-purpose flour

Filling:
5 Tbsp. butter, softened
2 cups confectioners' sugar
2 Tbsp. whipped cream (go ahead and whip up a few tablespoons while you're at it, and save the rest for hot chocolate or whatever)
3/4 tsp. peppermint extract (or you can use 2 Tbsp. creme de menthe liqueur if you're fancy enough to have that around)

1-2 drops green food coloring (optional)

Chocolate icing:
3 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped (or use chips)
2 Tbsp. butter

For the base:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8" square baking pan with parchment paper and grease the paper.

In a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan filled with 1" of barely simmering water, melt the chocolate with the butter, stirring frequently, until smooth. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, sugars, vanilla, and salt. Stir in the melted chocolate mixture, then fold in the flour just til combined.

Scrape batter into prepared pan, smoothing the top, and bake 25-30 minutes, just until a toothpick inserted comes out with a few moist crumbs attached. Do not overbake! (In my opinion it is always better to underbake brownies a tad than risk drying them out.)

Cool on a wire rack to room temperature.

For the filling: While brownies are cooling, beat the softened butter and confectioners' sugar til fluffy. Fold in the whipped cream and peppermint extract (and food coloring if desired), then spread over cooled brownie base. Refrigerate for at least 1 1/2 hours.

For the icing:
Melt butter and chocolate together (in microwave or in double boiler as described for brownies), then pour over the top of the chilled brownies, smoothing as you go. Chill at least a couple hours, til topping is firm, then cut and serve.

Cherry-chocolate Bundt cake

I made a chocolate cake today that was a fantastic hybrid of Bundt cake recipes from two sources: Bon Appetit (Sept. 2009) and Cook's Illustrated's The Best Light Recipe. For a couple of years now, with widely varying results, I have been trying to make the latter recipe work. After the most recent attempt, I resigned myself to the fact that significantly underbaking the cake was the only way to make it worth the trouble, maybe. Otherwise there's no getting around the dryness and surprisingly anemic chocolate flavor.

I don't remember the last time I tried baking something "new" (okay, semi-new) and got exactly what I was hoping for. It is a good feeling for an amateurish home baker to have, especially while enjoying a slice of her success, still slightly warm from the oven.

Cherry-chocolate Bundt cake
Yields one standard-sized Bundt cake, serving about 16

1 3/4 cups (8 3/4 oz.) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. salt
1 cup boiling water
3/4 cup (2 1/4 oz.) natural cocoa powder (you can use Dutch-processed if desired, but it's not necessary)
2 cups (14 oz.) packed light or dark brown sugar
3/4 cup vegetable/canola oil
1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 cup chopped semisweet chocolate, or chocolate chips (most are not dairy-free; I use Trader Joe's Pound Plus baking bars, which are)
1/2 cup sour Morello cherries in light syrup, drained and chopped coarsely (watch for and remove any pits, of course)

Directions
1. Preheat your oven to 350 with a rack in the middle. Grease a 12-cup Bundt pan with Baker's Joy, or grease and flour.

2. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Set aside. In a 2-cup glass measuring cup, whisk the cocoa powder into the boiling water. Let cool about 5 minutes.

3. In a large mixer bowl, beat the sugar, oil, and vanilla until well combined. Add the eggs and beat another 30 seconds or so, scraping down the side of the bowl, til combined. Add half of the flour mixture, beat til combined, and then add all the cocoa/water mixture. Mix in the remaining flour, then fold in the chopped chocolate and cherries.

4. Scrape batter into the prepared pan and bake for 45-50 minutes, turning the pan once halfway through, until a toothpick or skewer inserted in the middle of the cake comes out with a few wet crumbs attached. Remove from the oven and let sit 15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. Serve with cherries, whipped cream, powdered sugar, or nothing at all.

Mexican chocolate ice cream

Mexican drinking chocolate is a very sweet, spicy-cinnamony disk of chocolate meant for grating into hot milk to make, well, hot chocolate. That is all I had used it for before I found this recipe and was intrigued by the use of half-and-half only and just three whole eggs rather than a mess of egg yolks. To accommodate the amount of half-and-half I had left, I reduced the recipe by about a third (it was still close to filling up my ice cream maker, so not sure how the full recipe would have done). This was a perfectly balanced, creamy, delicious ice cream and a great use of Mexican chocolate if you find that the hot drink season has yet again passed before you could get through your tea and chocolate stash. I bought Ibarra chocolate at the Buford Highway Farmers Market in Atlanta, but this is a pretty good deal if you need to buy it online.

Mexican Chocolate Ice Cream
Yield: about 1 quart

1/2 a vanilla bean
7 1/2 oz. Mexican chocolate, coarsely chopped (do not substitute regular chocolate)
2 1/2 cups half-and-half
2 large eggs
1/8 tsp. salt

1. Halve the vanilla bean and scrape the seeds into a medium saucepan. Add the chopped chocolate and half-and-half and bring to a boil over moderate heat, whisking frequently. Remove from heat.

2. Lightly beat the eggs with the salt in large bowl or glass 4-cup measuring cup. Slowly add half the hot chocolate mixture to the eggs, whisking vigorously, then scrape that mixture back into the saucepan. Return to moderately low heat and cook, whisking constantly, until it thickens (or reaches 170 degrees), about 1-3 minutes. Immediately pour through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl set in an ice bath. Cool to about 40 degrees before transferring to the refrigerator. Chill for several hours and then freeze in your ice cream maker.

Babka saga finale

Don't ask why I dragged this out into three installments, when it was an easy one-afternoon project. As I've observed with other eastern European delicacies, the dough itself is only slightly sweet (it's hard to taste any sweetness in it at all with a sugar-loaded American palate like mine). But contrasted with the chocolate it's wonderful. Peter doesn't give very specific instructions for baking for each way that you can shape the bread (loaf, coffee-cake style in a tube pan, or braided like this), so FWIW, my kranz-style loaf took 40 minutes (rotated once halfway through) to reach the desired 185 degree internal temp. Some of the edges burned just slightly, but nothing too bad. I am so glad I finally made this bread. Half of it did indeed go to the neighbors, so we'll see what the verdict is on authenticity/overall deliciousness from an objective third party. :) Next up (after moving!): Polish poppyseed roll. I still have to decide on a recipe for that one...

Babka saga part II

While the first rise was finishing I made the filling:

Herr Reinhart says to grind the chocolate in a food processor, or if you don't have one, chop it as small as possible. This was my best effort. (The lighter stuff is the cinnamon). We'll see how it works.

This is the chocolate I used. The price is right, and the flavor is oh so wrong. In the right way.

This is the filling once the butter has been added to the chopped chocolate and cinnamon. Do you know how much restraint it took me not to eat this as is?

And this is the soft pillowy dough rolled out to the size of a small car, ready to be rolled up jellyroll style and rocked gently to about 18" in length. Since my loaf pans are packed away I opted to make my bread kranz-cake (Israeli) style, which means braided. I think it's prettier this way too, even though my braid is a little too loose, so I'm hoping the chocolate doesn't start falling out of the bread and melting everywhere when it bakes.

I am now waiting on the second rise to finish, at which point I will bake the bread...

Just kidding!

Today, some nine days before moving, against the common sense which would dictate focusing my energies on things like packing, or even just sitting down and thinking through logistics, I was overcome with the need to make, at long last, Peter Reinhart's chocolate cinnamon babka. Why I have waited so long, having owned this magnificent book for two years, I cannot tell. If it comes out well it might make a proper goodbye gift to our Polish neighbors who have been the best neighbors anyone could ask for; if it comes out poorly, well, it will be preparation for when I move into a house with a gas oven. *mournful sigh* I seriously am not sure what effect that will have on my baking mojo (what mojo I have), because all I hear is that electric ovens are so much more reliable, so much better for bread baking (because the heat is less dry, which makes for better crusts), etc., etc. I have never had gas appliances of any kind and frankly gas scares me. I think of it as "the silent killer." No offense to heart disease which I think is what rightfully claims that title. I will probably have five carbon monoxide detectors in our 2000 sq ft house. I exaggerate, but the uncertainty of how things will go with this new oven makes me want to especially cherish this my last (for real---I am packing away the mixer this weekend!) baking project in the apartment.

And as a special last-baking-project-ever-for-now feature, I am going to take pictures at each step of the way like any self-respecting food blogger normally does.

Cream the butter and the sugar just til mixed.

Mixing in action. (I never promised the photos would be any good.)

Once the four egg yolks are added the dough becomes a lovely golden yellow.

And that is where we find ourselves: I kneaded the dough (what a dream to knead--soft as a pillow) for a couple of minutes after adding the flour, milk, and yeast to the butter-egg yolk mixture, and now I await the end of the first 2 1/2 hour rise. As an aside, the recipe calls for 2 Tablespoons of yeast, which is a huge amount for one (albeit large) loaf. I was a little worried about it being a typo and having the dough explode while it sits out for two hours at room temp, so we'll see. 

Chocolate-mint tuiles; blackberry-lime sorbet

This was technically not my first time making tuiles, but I'd rather not revisit the utter failure that was my previous attempt. Different recipe, different time. This week, since I had a couple of egg whites sitting in the fridge, I decided to try Sherry Yard's chocolate-dipped tuile recipe (from Baking by the Yard). I ended up filling the tuiles instead with a whipped chocolate ganache flavored with the tiniest bit of peppermint extract (I've learned the hard way how potent it is). I daresay it worked, though my whipped ganache recipe was a little guess-y.

I was probably a little crazy to take on tuiles this week, with temperatures keeping around 95: after the tuiles have baked (about 4 at a time) you open the oven door, set the baking sheet on it, and work with them that way so they stay warm and malleable. Then you do the other three batches. After each batch you have to wrap the cookies quickly around the handle of a wooden spoon (they're hot of course) so that they hold their characteristic shape. I have pretty callused/heat resistant fingers, so this wasn't too hard. Shaping is one of the top 5 things in the kitchen that tend to provoke my temper---I'm clumsy and don't follow written directions as well as pictures and/or videos---so I was surprised that these went so smoothly. The one hitch was that I didn't bake them long enough; scared by her warning that overbaking makes them difficult to shape, I didn't let them go longer than the indicated time even though they weren't quite golden brown, so the cookies never really crisped up. I'll remember that next time, and there will be a next time---this is a great way to use up whites left over from custard-based ice creams, and it doesn't involve finicky whipping! I'll take a hot kitchen over egg whites that refuse to whip right any day.

For the ganache filling, which I piped in with a makeshift pastry bag, I used about 2 oz. of Trader Joe's 72% dark chocolate and 1/3 cup of heavy cream, with a tiny splash of mint extract and maybe 1/4 tsp. vanilla. You just chop the chocolate, heat the cream in the microwave at intervals of 30 seconds til hot, then pour it over the chocolate, whisking til smooth. Add the extracts, put it in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, then take it out and whip it with a mixer til light and fluffy. This results in an interesting texture that dissolves in your mouth instantly. Very tasty.

Also this week I tried a David Lebovitz recipe (The Perfect Scoop) I've been eyeing for a while: blackberry lime sorbet. I don't usually get too excited about sorbet---yay, it tastes like fruit with all the nutritional value (painstakingly) strained out---but this combination sounded compelling. It did not disappoint. I'm fairly in love with this sorbet. Unapologetically tart, it has the perfect balance of sweetness, is a gorgeous, appetizing color, and somehow feels more substantial than a mixture of fruit puree, sugar syrup, and lime juice. (Lots of lime juice.)

I couldn't bear throwing out all the seedy pulp strained from the blackberry mixture, so with the blender already out I threw it in with about a cup of plain whole milk yogurt and about 3 Tbsp of fresh mint. It doesn't hold a candle to the sorbet recipe, but it makes a nice texture contrast, as shown below, and was a decent way to use up the pulp. Leftover tuiles, which I (re)crisped in the oven first, were a perfect foil. This photo is bad, because you can barely see the gorgeous dark purple sorbet sneaking through my attempt at granita on top.

This is the mixture before freezing:

Miscellanies

* For anyone who's wondering, I'm afraid the new unsweetened chocolate in an 8 oz bag for $1.99 at Trader Joe's...tastes like $0.25/oz chocolate. Surprise! I think the combination of irresistible price + fancy shape (they are little disks, 6 to an ounce) drew me in against my better judgment. I'm no chocolate connoisseur, but Trader Joe's' Pound Plus bars ($5/17.6 oz) seem to me to be much better chocolate than this; they're actually rumored to be supplied by Callebaut, a fine Belgian chocolate company. So these new unsweetened disks are cheaper per ounce even than the Pound Plus chocolate with less cocoa butter (which is where the money's at in chocolate, if I understand correctly). I should have done the math more carefully. Alas, buyer beware.

* Tonight for dinner I was going to try what looked like a fantastic eggplant-mozzarella roll recipe from CI's Restaurant Favorites at Home. I couldn't find smoked mozzarella, though I know I bought some a few months ago at Kroger and even made a trip to Trader Joe's confident that they'd have some. But that was a minor obstacle compared to the disgusting dilemma presented by the eggplant itself. I'd have preferred to buy it at one of the farmer's markets, but I wasn't going anywhere near them, so I tried to pick out a nice looking one at Kroger. On the outside it was spotless, but when I sliced down the middle getting ready for dinner tonight, there was a large black and furry mass, for lack of a better word, inside the seed cavity on one side that had "bled" over into the other side a bit. I did a Google images search for sliced eggplant, hoping against hope, but no, neither black nor furry seems to be a normal occurrence inside an eggplant. Plan B was a simple tomato sauce I had made for the same recipe earlier, over fresh (storebought) pasta with ciabatta and a Caesar salad. Boring, but it could have been worse. Like whipping the egg whites for your cheese souffle to perfect peaks, only to unwrap the cheese and find it rotten. Or something like that.


* I've been spending as much of the day as possible immersed in Spanish, with a little housework interspersed to keep my restless self from going crazy, and I can't afford to lose myself in cookbooks planning elaborate baking projects for the day, so stuff like the chocolate blackout cake happens instead. Five-minute pudding (the recipe in a previous post); an easy cake with coffee, chocolate, and buttermilk, which are as good as pantry staples around here; and an extra half hour's oven time after my bread was done baking. Since I throw everything possible into the dishwasher and have no qualms about running it twice a day when necessary, clean-up doesn't take long. The cake itself is fine, though it probably needed a couple more minutes of baking time; it's a little too moist and sticky, and so fell apart a little when I was halving it into layers. But it's something sweet that will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, which was all I was after.

everyday chocolate pudding

I've found the chocolate pudding I've been looking for all my life: no cream, no egg yolks leaving me with a bowl of whites in the fridge that eventually gets thrown away because I have a visceral dread of whipping egg whites, and no special mixture of unsweetened and bittersweet chocolates. All of which were true of the chocolate cream pie I made at Thankgsiving, which was probably worth it. But this tastes darn near the same to me, and it takes about 10 minutes plus chilling time.

Recalling the cute little "cup of dirt" concept I served this with chocolate wafers crumbled on top---no thanks on the gummy worms. I can't resist putting whipped cream on just about anything sweet, though I couldn't figure out what a puff of white would signify in a cup of dirt. Let's say snow.

Everyday Chocolate Pudding
Serves 6-ish
2 Tbsp. cornstarch
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup half-and-half
1/2 cup milk (can be low-fat)
3 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 tsp. vanilla

Whisk together the cornstarch, granulated sugar, and salt in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the half-and-half and milk, then bring to a boil over medium heat. Add chocolate and whisk til melted and the mixture thickens noticeably. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Pour into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, pressing it directly on the surface of the pudding. Refrigerate until cold, at least 4 hours. Keeps up to 3 days.