Tag: chocolate

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

184. Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies p.688

The recipe

You know who I have an irrational dislike for? Katharine Hepburn. I know she’s one of the best respected and beloved actresses of all time, and the Oscar winningest lady ever, but she just drives me nuts. Admittedly I haven’t seen much of her work, but one film is all it took. In Bringing Up Baby she plays the lighthearted and carefree Susan Vance who drives the films comedy of errors with her impetuous, irresponsible, behaviour that we’re meant to take as cute and endearing. Every line she delivers just gets on my last nerve. Obviously this is some personal damage of mine, as the rest of the world seems to think it’s a pretty good film. Katharine Hepburn is a lot better in her more dramatic roles, but even there her upper class New-England accent chips away at my soul. I’m also a Star Trek fan, and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) who bears a strong resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, seems to have used Hepburn as the model for her character. Janeway has all the weird vocal ticks, the grandiose delivery of her lines, and the obstinate bullheadedness of so many of Hepburn’s characters. I can’t stand Janeway, and it turns out that she’s just a pale imitation of the grating irritation that Ms. Hepburn could bring to the screen. All that to say, I was predisposed to dislike Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, which are apparently her once-secret family recipe.

The recipe starts by melting together butter with 2 ounces of chocolate in a double boiler, then stirring in sugar, eggs and vanilla. A quarter cup of flour and a bit of salt are then barely mixed in. A cup of chopped walnuts and folded into the batter, and everything goes into 325 oven for about 40 minutes.

This is a very simple brownie recipe, unfortunately I thought they were awful. As the recipe promised the brownies were gooey-soft, which some people are really into, but it’s not my ideal texture. There were way too many nuts, which further weakened the integrity of these very soft brownies. They were hard to pick up without risking catastrophic brownie structural failure. My main complaint was that they hardly tasted like chocolate. 2 ounces was just enough to give the brownies a chocolate appearance, without any chocolate taste at all. Really they just tasted like sugar and walnuts.

Unfortunately the gold standard for judging a brownie recipe is the ubiquitous boxed mix. Those boxed brownies are not bad, but any recipe you’re going to make yourself ought to be able to beat the pants off them. Katharine Hepburn’s brownies have conclusively failed that test. If you’re going to make brownies from The Book I’d suggest the Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies on page 689. I’ve made them a bunch of times, but haven’t blogged them because I’ve just replaced the three chocolates the recipe calls for with all semi-sweet. They’re seriously fantastic brownies, and they’d just destroy Katharine Hepburn’s mockery of a brownie in a head to head competition.

Interestingly both Teena and Adam have made these brownies and given them grades of A- and A respectively. There are rave reviews for these things all over the internet, but they’re just not for me. These brownies just give me one more thing to dislike about Katharine Hepburn.

Categories
Cakes The Book

154. Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting p.726


The recipe

As I mentioned yesterday I’m not a huge fan of icing on cakes. As a result, my icing skills suck. I’m far more likely to bake a cake, and sprinkle it with powdered sugar, or cocoa than make icing. If I do decide to top a cake, I prefer to use flavoured whipped cream. I’d probably only make two or three iced cakes before this one, and unfortunately it shows. I have a real incentive to get better, and get better quickly, though. A good friend has asked me to bake his wedding cake in August. That means I need to go on a crash course in icing, piping, and decorating. I’m planning on making one of the wedding cakes from the book for the event, and I’ll have to do a couple of trial runs before the big day. I imagine this cake as the first humiliating defeat in a sports movie, after a musical montage I’ll be churning out lovely confections, then I’ll really dig deep, and defy expectations to turn out a picture perfect wedding cake.

This particular frosting is make with a mixture of mild and semisweet chocolates, sour cream, and vanilla. The chocolate is melted in a double boiler, and the sour cream and vanilla are whisked in.

The frosting starts out very liquidy, and sets up quite firmly. There’s a narrow window when the icing is firm enough to stay on the cake, but soft enough to spread nicely. Since I’m not an experienced froster it took me approximately forever to get the layers covered, and to put on a crumb coating. I didn’t know what a crumb coating was until I read the how to decorate a cake page next to this recipe (p.727). It’s a smart idea, you put a thin layer of icing on the cake to seal in the crumbs before trying to do the pretty exterior layer. By the time I was ready to ice the cake for real, my frosting was setting up. I didn’t really notice, and just started trying to get the frosting on the cake. It was chunky, thick and highly uncooperative. Then I read the little cook’s note after the recipe which suggested just warming it on the double boiler again. This helped a lot, but I had to rewarm it several times over the course of my icing. All in all I did a pretty poor job, and it probably didn’t have very much to do with the frosting itself.

There’s a huge amount of technique in decorating a cake, and I just need more experience to get there. When I first started cooking, I was befuddled by people who could chop things quickly and easily, but I worked at it for a while, learned to hold my knife properly, and started using a rock-chop technique it became obvious. I’m hoping to master the offset spatula in the same way.

The frosting tasted just fine, but it really didn’t move me. It was hardly sweet, which was a nice change from many other icings, but it was a bit too sour cream tangy. A few reviews of this icing suggest that using really top quality chocolate is important. I used perfectly good thank-you-very-much chocolate, but nothing crazy, maybe it would have made a difference.

I liked this frosting more than most, but mostly for the pitfalls it avoided. I found it a bit hard to work with, but if you’re a quick icer the cooling and setting up problems I had might not be an issue. It got the job done, but I won’t rush to make it again.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

83. Oatmeal Cookies p.664

The recipe

People are funny about baking. Not everyone, but probably a majority of people who “don’t bake” would at least be willing to try their hand at making oatmeal cookies. When their 5 year olds help bake, they make cookies. These are the same people who will look at you funny if you tell them you’re making biscotti, they think shortbread is too complicated, and are convinced that brownies and cakes only come from a box mix. It must be an issue of familiarity and comfort, but in reality making good cookies is often harder than any of those other baking projects. The skills are the same, sifting, creaming, beating, cracking eggs, the order is just a bit different. Cookies are notorious for burning, and cooking unevenly. Pans have got to be rotated, and racks switched. This is not to say that baking cookies is hard, just that there are many many baking projects which people won’t try because they lack the confidence. Since everyone can bake a cookie, it’s a chink in their armour, and a lead in to more unfamiliar projects. It’s possible that all of these straw men I’ve set up know perfectly well that they could bake other things if they wanted to, but feel it’s just too much effort. Fresh warm cookies are pretty much universally agreed to be worth working for.

These particular oatmeal cookies are fairly standard issue, a bit rough around the edges, but in a very satisfying way. These are about as casual as cookies get, standard butter cookies spiced up with rolled oats, cinnamon, vanilla, and brown sugar. Chocolate chips are given as an optional addition, so I stirred in half a cup. Sift the dry stuff together, cream the wet stuff together, then mix the two doing your best not to create gluten. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes, and contemplate just accepting the second degree burns to your mouth while you wait for them to cool.

If you’ve had an oatmeal cookie before you know what to expect with these. When I’m in the mood for an oatmeal cookie, familiarity is what I’m after though. They’re miles better than the cracker crisp packaged ones, and the oily and inexplicably huge cafeteria cookies. The cinnamon and vanilla come through nicely, and the use of both white and brown sugar adds a bit of molasses depth. The rolled oats let you pretend they’re healthy, but the added chocolate chips give away the lie. This is my standard go-to oatmeal cookie recipe, I probably make them four times a year, and I love them every singe time. Just make sure to have a glass of milk on hand.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

79. Dark Chocolate Shortbread p.688

The recipe

I made this recipe before I’d formally started The Project. I didn’t have my own camera back then so I invited friends over to both eat, and photograph, my food. I recently received a batch of those photos, and now I’m trying to remember how something tasted a year and a half later. Frankly I’m quite surprised at how well I do remember some of them. There’s a Roast Pork With Sweet-and-Sour Chile Cilantro Sauce that has faded from memory enough that I don’t feel confident writing about it, so I’ll submit it to the redo pile. But, on the whole I feel pretty confident in my memories. For next few recipes you might have to excuse some hazy spots in my recollection. I’ll try to fill in the missing bits with lies and wild imaginings.

The Book is a fan of shortbread, it gets integrated into all sorts of squares, cookies, bars, confections and who knows what else. Both of the ones I’ve tried have turned out beautifully. Shortbread is about as simple as a baked good can get, and provided that the very short list of ingredients that go in are top quality the results are inevitably delicious. It does burn rather easily, so careful monitoring is a good habit to get into. In this recipe the shortbread is cut into wedge shaped cookies, and eaten on it’s own. The recipe recommends pairing these with a glass of port after dinner.

The twist in this recipe is the addition of 1/4 cup of dutch-process cocoa powder to the basic recipe. The cocoa was successful in turning the shortbread a dark chocolaty colour, and between the name and appearance of these cookies you’d expect them to taste chocolaty. In fact they taste like shortbread, with a hint of bitterness. I was surprised at how un-chocolaty these ended up, food colouring would have produced the same result. Now, shortbread is delicious, but when you bite into something billed as Dark Chocolate Shortbread, you might expect it to taste like chocolate. I was a bit let down by that trickery.

I might make these again if I was serving a shortbread tray a Christmas and wanted to alternate light and dark pieces for visual effect, but as it was it just built up and dashed a hope of chocolately shortbread goodness. I might try cutting the white flour down to 1/2 cup, and bumping the cocoa up to 1/2 cup, maybe then we’d have a chocolate shortbread recipe worth talking about. These were by no means bad, but they were by no means chocolate either.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

66. Mocha Toffee Cashew Bars p.694

The recipe.

Opinion varied wildly about these bars. We brought these to dinner with another couple. The guy loved them, my dining companion hated them, and the other girl and I were of mixed opinions. They’re built on a fairly dense espresso flavoured cookie base, then topped with chocolate and salted roasted cashews.

I thought things were going well until the cashews. The cookie base was rich, full of espresso flavour, firm and a bit chewy. All on it’s own it would have made a very good cookie. Adding chocolate on top was a perfectly good idea, espresso and chocolate do wonders together. Adding cashews didn’t seem like a bad idea either, but this is where the problems came in.

The recipe called for a quite a lot of nuts, 3/4 of a cup, which may have been a bit excessive, 1/2 cup would have been fine. The nuts were supposed to be chopped. I thought I’d chop them with a few pulses in the food processor, which resulted in more of a cashew dust than anything else. The real issue with the cashew topping was the salt though. It’s possible that I just picked up particularly heavily salted cashews, but I don’t really think that was the case. Adding this much salt to a sweet bar made things very confusing for the palate. There was definately something wrong with the flavour, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Eventually my dining companion pointed out that they tasted like trail mix. Once she said it my imagination filled in the little bits of dried fruit, and my ability to imagine this as a refined after dinner square to be sipped with a macchiato disappeared. The final effect of these squares is like a coffee flavoured energy bar.

I had some of the leftover bars as afternoon snacks, and they worked much better in that context. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the flavours going on here, other than the excessive saltiness, they were just poorly marketed.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

65. Chocolate Truffles p.696

The recipe.

This recipe has three ingredients, chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder. Almost by definition the success of failure of the recipe is in the quality of those ingredients, and the method of combining them. I used the wrong ingredients, and ignored parts of the method. They still came out tasty, if a bit ugly. The recipe calls for 56% cacao Valrhona chocolate, I ignored this and used another good quality dark chocolate with about the same cocoa percentage. I couldn’t find the Valrhona and decided the recipe was just being snooty. I’m not sure if it would have made a difference, but you should definitely use a chocolate you like the taste of before it’s used in the ganache.

The recipe is dead simple, the cream is boiled, and then poured over the cut up chocolate, it’s then gently stirred (in concentric circles starting from the centre, while standing on one leg, under a full moon). The resultant ganache is then cooled and piped into truffle shapes. After the truffles are frozen they’re smeared with bit of melted chocolate and tossed in cacao powder before serving.

I ran into a bit of trouble in the piping section of the recipe. I didn’t have the right size tip and found I couldn’t pipe and elegant looking truffle with the desired soft point on top. Even cooling the ganache for the recommended time I needed to put in in the fridge for a while to get it to firm up enough for easy piping. As you can see in the picture above I didn’t get anything near the elegant teardrop shaped confections I was going for. Real truffles are ugly and misshapen, and so are mine. I’m not going to let myself feel too bad about it.

The coating with chocolate and tossing in cacao powder step was much messier than I would have predicted. I think it takes a lot more planning, and forethought than I gave it. You need to reserve one gloved hand for smearing the chocolate and dropping the truffles into the cocoa powder, and one hand for extracting them to a sheet pan on the other end. Mixing this method up results in the dreaded club hand. I’ll know better for next time.

Although this was a really simple recipe I have hardly any experience working with confections. I found it to be more complicated than it seemed at first. But, I’m sure a second attempt would go much more smoothly. Flavourwise, they were good. It’s chocolate and cream, it tastes like chocolate and cream. Fancy chocolatiers seem to be able to take those same ingredients and make absolute magic happen. For me, this recipe produced tasty little after dinner treats, but there was nothing transcendent about it.

Categories
Cakes The Book

40. Warm Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake p.740


the recipe

I can’t say that I pulled this off with the grace or style of Julia Child, I hope that I honored her commitment to salvaging disasters with this dish. The concept here is basically an upside down cake. The bottom of the pan has a chocolate pudding layer, and then a cake batter goes in on top. The Book says that “When the cake is inverted on the a cake plate a few minutes after it emerges from the oven, it is instantly bathed with a rich, creamy, oozy frosting.”

My version did involve some oozing, but that was mostly cake batter spilling over the sides of my pan and onto the bottom of my oven, where it provided that smoky barbecue flavour that is so valued in fine pastry making. I think what ended up on the bottom of the oven was mostly the “pudding” part, and what was left mixed in with the top layer of cake. It came out as normal cake topped by extra moist yet somehow burnt cake. As the picture indicates it didn’t come out of the pan without a fight either. But, I forged ahead, topped it with some powdered sugar and hoped for the best.

I can explain the bit of burning and setting of the pudding that occurred, because I baked this before I got an oven thermometer. I now know that the oven is always 25 degrees hotter than I think it is. However, the spillover is inexplicable. I used the right size pan, and it spilled over within the first 5 minutes of baking. I’d go with a 10 inch plate if I were to make it again.

The recipe calls for seedless raspberry jam. I couldn’t find any anywhere, so I was reduced to running a jar of seeded jam through a fine mesh sieve. This was far more annoying than I ever would have expected.

I was pleasantly surprised when my guests and I set into it. The cake had a nice super-moist texture, and there was great chocolate-raspberry flavour. Unfortunately, like almost all deserts in the book, it was cloyingly sweet. My guests and my dining companion had nothing but good things to say about it, and when we talked about this cake yesterday she only remembered how delicious it was. I thought the book was just into sweet sweets, but it turns out other people are too.

Personally I wasn’t a huge fan of the cake, it didn’t work out anywhere near how I’d expected it to, and it left me with a lot of oven cleanup to do. However, it delighted my guests, and after all entertaining is about pleasing them and not yourself. I’ll have to give this a higher rating than I think it deserves out of deference to the palates of my friends.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

35. Cranberry Caramel Bars p.691


the recipe

I really enjoyed these bars. I brought half of them to a party, and they disappeared instantly. I enjoyed more of them over the next week, and brought out even more from the freezer a couple months later. All that to say, the recipe make a lot of bars, and they keep and freeze well. They’re filled with pecans coated in a buttery-tart cranberry caramel. This filling goes down onto a shortbread base, and the whole thing is drizzled with melted chocolate. They weren’t light, they weren’t particularly easy to put together, they weren’t cheap, but they were absolutely worth it.

Any bar that starts with a shortbread base is off to a good start in my book. It’s so simple, and invariably fantastic. The cranberry caramel tasted great. The butter and sugar were cut by the tart cranberries, which kept it from tasting too rich. The caramel allowed me to play with my candy thermometer, and convinced me I really need a better one. Because the butter goes into the caramel from the beginning it’s got to be monitored carefully. It needs to get hot enough for the sugar to caramelize, but not so hot that the milk-solids in the butter burn. Once the cranberries and pecans have been added and the mixture has been allowed to return to 245 degrees it has to be spread out on the shortbread base very quickly. The caramel is dense, sticky, stringy, and ferociously hot. An errant bit of pecan slipped off my silicone spatula and landed on my wrist. The candy Gods reminded me not to be too casual with a nice little burn.

After the bars have cooled you can add the chocolate. The book recommends snipping the end off a Ziplock bag, but there’s no reason you can’t use a pastry bag if you have one. I wish I’d been a bit more careful in decorating them, my random crosshatch wasn’t the most attractive, nothing wrong with it, but I could have made them prettier. The chocolate was nice, but certainly not necessary. They might have been better looking without it, and while the flavour didn’t detract at all I’m not sure it added much. Between cranberries, pecans, and shortbread there was a lot going on flavour-wise, and chocolate didn’t particularly elevate, or marry these flavours. I know the “add chocolate to make it better” school is strong, but in this case adding chocolate made them chocolatier, not necessarily better.

These squares would be a welcome addition to any Christmas baking repertoire, and work well for pretty much any occasion the rest of the year too. Because they keep so well, they’re ideal do-aheads. I thought the flavour and texture were great, really crunchy between the shortbread and nuts, with a gooey chewiness from the caramel. The caramel also acted as a glue, and counteracted some of the crumbling problems that shortbread is prone to. With or without chocolate these are delicious, reliable, and impressive squares. They probably merit a 5 mushroom rating, but they lost half a mushroom for attacking me.

Categories
Cakes The Book

32. Flourless Chocolate Cake p.739


the recipe

This cake will make you believe flour and leavening were just getting in the way of every cake you’ve ever made before. It’s the chocolate cake equivalent of shortbread, the essence of the dish with all the frills stripped away. Cheap butter spoils shortbread; cheap chocolate would spoil this cake. There’s nothing in here but chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, and enough cocoa powder to hold it together (the linked recipe makes an 8 inch cake’s worth, The Book’s a 10 inch).

The cake is moist, dense, rich, and intensely chocolaty. It’s elegant enough for any dinner party, and decadent enough to drown your sorrows in. It also comes together as easily as a batch of brownies. In fact there are a lot of similarities between this cake and really really good brownies. An article in the NY Times Dining and Wine section this week (link, username and password = metafilter) suggests that brownies may be fine dining after all.

I really appreciated the versatility of this cake. It would be a great finish to a romantic dinner, it travels well, it gets around a lot of dietary restrictions (no flour, no nuts), and it will appeal to the kids as much as the grown ups. This cake is forthright, unapologetically bad for you, requires nothing you don’t have on hand, takes 20 minutes, and most importantly it’s tasty.