Tag: cocoa

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

165. Chocolate Macaroons p.676

I can’t find the recipe for these online, but they’re so good I’ll retype it for you lovely people.

FOR MACAROONS

1 1/3 cups (7 ounces) skinned whole almonds

3 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar

1/3 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder

7/8 cup egg whites (from 6 large eggs)

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

FOR GANACHE FILLING

1/2 cup heavy cream

2 teaspoons whole milk

2 1/2 tablespoons unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder

4 ounces good bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

1 stick unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT: Parchment paper; a pastry bag fitted with a 1/4-inch plain tip

MAKE THE MACAROONS: Put a rack in middle of oven and preheat oven to 400F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.

Pulse almonds with 2 cups confectioners’ sugar in a food processor until finely ground (almost to a powder). Add cocoa and remaining 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar and pulse until combined.

Beat egg whites with salt in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until they hold soft peaks. Add granulated sugar and beat until whites just hold stiff peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold in almond mixture in 3 batches (batter will be very soft).

Transfer batter to a pastry bag and pipe 1-inch-wide mounds about 2 inches apart on lined baking sheets. Bake macaroons in batches until tops are slightly cracked and appear dry but are still slightly soft to the touch, 8 to 10 minutes per batch. Transfer macaroons, still on parchment, to dampened kitchen towels and cool for 5 minutes, then peel from paper and cool completely on racks.

MEANWHILE, MAKE THE GANACHE FILLING: Bring cream and milk to a boil in a small heavy saucepan over moderate heat. Whisk in cocoa and remove from heat. Add chopped chocolate and butter and stir until smooth. Cool filling, then refrigerate, covered, until firm enough to hold its shape when spread, about 30 minutes.

Sandwich flat sides of macaroons together with 1/2 teaspoon filling per pair.

COOK’S NOTES

  • While 7/8 cup egg whites may seem and odd measure, this amount gives the ideal texture and flavour. Measure the whites in a liquid-measuring cup.
  • The macaroons can be made up to 1 day before you fill them. Refrigerate, layered between sheets of wax or parchment paper, in an airtight container.
  • The filled macaroons keep, layered between sheets of way or parchment paper in an airtight container and refrigerated, for up to 1 week.

I don’t have enough good things to say about this recipe. The cookies were delicious and elegant. The recipe makes a lot of cookies, so I brought them to several gatherings, always to rave reviews. The chocolate filling is wonderful, and everyone loves ganache, but the cookie itself was my favourite part. I really like flourless cookies like this, the almonds provide substance, but the structure is all from the meringue. The outer surface of the cookie was smooth and crisp, the interior was like almond sponge candy, soft, but with just a little bit of toothsomeness. Despite all the sugar, they miraculously avoided being too sweet.

My only bone to pick with this recipe, is the use of the word macaroon in the title. A double O macaroon is an American coconut cookie, a single O macaron is a French almond cookie, get it straight Gourmet. These were truly excellent cookies, they were a bit time consuming and finicky, but I enjoyed the process. The recipe was well written and didn’t lead to any major surprises. My only caveat is to make sure to grind the almonds very finely, otherwise they’ll clog up the tip of the pastry bag when you’re piping the cookies.

A while ago my brother brought me some Macarons from a very posh bakery in Paris, and while theirs were certainly prettier, I preferred the flavour of my homemade version. These macarons are my new favourite cookie, and I expect them to be on frequent rotation in our house.

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

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

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.