Showing posts with label dark chocolate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dark chocolate. Show all posts

Monday, February 9, 2015

Dark Chocolate Toasted Sesame Muffins #MuffinMonday

Toasted sesame seeds and toasted sesame seed oil boost and complement the dark chocolate roasted sesame Lindt bar in this fragrant chocolate muffin. Plus, look how pretty the sesame seeds look!


I have a small collection of chocolate bars that I have been amassing for a number of months because they come in such wonderful and unusual flavor combinations. Chocolate, of course, with orange, mint, sea salt, black currant, crunchy caramel, salted caramel, blueberry, passionfruit, cherry, chili, coconut, dark lemon and pepper, just to name a few! My master plan is to do a muffin series based on the chocolates. Doesn't that sounds like a fun idea? I finally got around to baking the first one today. And, before you ask, let me say that I have no affiliation with any of the chocolate makers and I have bought all the chocolates myself.

I was extremely pleased with this first batch, using Lindt Dark Chocolate Roasted Sesame and my usual Monday morning taste testers enjoyed them too.

Ingredients 

1/2 cup or 70g sesame seeds
2 cups or 250g flour
3/4 cup or 150g sugar
1/4 cup or 20g cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup or 240ml milk
1/4 cup or 60ml toasted pure sesame oil
1 Lindt dark chocolate and roasted sesame bar (3 1/2 oz or 100g)

Method
Toast your sesame seeds in a nonstick skillet over a medium flame. Stir or toss them often to keep them from scorching. This takes just a few minutes. Set them aside to cool.

Chop your chocolate bar with a knife and put aside a small handful for decorating the tops of the muffins.



Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and either grease a 12-cup muffin tin or line it with paper muffin cups.

In a large bowl, stir together your flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt and half of the toasted sesame seeds. No need to measure. Just eyeball it.



In another smaller bowl, whisk together your eggs, milk, and toasted sesame oil.

The toasted sesame oil is a rich, golden brown.



Fold your wet ingredients into your dry ones.  Stop when there is still quite a bit of flour still unmixed.

Add in the larger pile of the chopped chocolate bar and stir again until the batter is just mixed.



Divide the batter between your prepared muffin cups.



Sprinkle on the remainder of the toasted sesame seeds then add a few little pieces of the reserved chocolate bar to each muffin.



Bake in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick stuck in the middle comes out clean.




Allow to cool for a few minutes in the tin and then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.



Enjoy!







The Candy Bar Series

2. Pecan Caramel Chocolate Muffins using Frey Pecan & Caramel



3. White Chocolate Lemon Muffins using Movenpick Swiss Chocolate White Lemon

.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Glazed Chocolate Macaroon Bundt Cake #BundtBakers

As if deep dark chocolate cake with coconut macaroon filling wasn’t rich enough, I poured on a dark chocolate ganache and topped it with more sweet coconut.


Sometimes when I have a few minutes to spare, I troll the interwebs doing random searches. Once upon a time, a search on my surname led me to an old 1932 MG-D Tourer that was for sale, and according to the original sales receipt, it was a gift, brand new, from my husband’s grandmother to his grandfather! So, of course, we had to buy it.

Another time I located the father of my long lost best friend in third grade (Campo Alegre – Caracas, Venezuela 1971-1972) on a genealogy site and wrote the webmaster to please pass on my desire to reconnect. He wrote Stella’s dad and the next thing I knew, we were chatting away a mile a minute on Skype and I was being introduced to her adorable girls. The internet is awesome in the truest sense of the word.

But I must admit that most of my web searches center around food or recipes or ingredients. While searching for information about National Bundt Day last fall, I came across the blog of a baker who for several years challenged herself to bake a Bundt a day for the month leading up to that great day.  Can you even imagine! Thirty Bundts in 30 days! And she, in turn, led me to other bloggers who love Bundts through her National Bundt Day round ups. Sadly, she doesn’t seem to be blogging anymore but I hope that somehow, somewhere, she’s still baking.

The cake I am sharing with you today was a link in one of those round ups and that blogger, Tracey by name, doesn’t seem to be active any more either. In fact, I’d love to find out what happened to her because her very last post (and tweet) more than a year ago is the announcement that she finally got a blog design revamp. And that’s it. No more posts. No tweets. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Weird, right?

This glazed chocolate macaroon Bundt cake, however, is great consolation and fits our Bundt Bakers coconut theme perfectly, with coconut on the inside and coconut on the outside, so I hope Tracey doesn’t mind my sharing. She says on her post that the recipe is slightly adapted from Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. I have no idea how slight is slightly because I don’t have the book and the only other post I could find with it didn’t give the amounts but just referred back to the book.

So here we go!

Ingredients
For the meringue filling and batter:
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon salt, divided
2 cups or 400g sugar, divided
1 tablespoon vanilla extract, divided
2 cups or 230g sweetened shredded coconut
2 cups or 250g plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour, divided
1/2 cup or 40g cocoa powder
3/4 cup or 180ml hot coffee
1/2 cup or 120ml sour cream
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup or 115g unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 tablespoons canola oil

For the ganache:
1/2 cup or 120ml whipping cream
3 1/2 oz or 100g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (I just bang the chocolate bar around on the cabinet before I open it.)

More flaked coconut, for garnish, if desired

Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and prepare your 12-cup Bundt pan by greasing and flouring it or spraying it liberally with nonstick cooking spray for baking that has the flour in it already.

Crack your eggs and separate them, putting the whites in the bowl of your mixer and the yellows into two small bowls of two yolks each. You’ll use them two at a time later and this helps you keep the amounts correct in case a yolk breaks.



Add 1/2 teaspoon of the salt to the egg whites and use the whisk attachment to start beating them slowly. Gradually increase the speed until the egg whites can form soft peaks.

Then, with the mixer still running, gradually stream in 3/4 cup or 150g of the sugar and continue beating until the mixture reaches stiff peaks. Congratulations, you have made meringue!



Transfer 1 1/2 cups or 75g of this meringue to another bowl and fold in 1 teaspoon of the vanilla, the coconut, and 1 tablespoon of the flour – this is the filling for the cake.

Transfer the remaining meringue into another bowl and wash out your mixing bowl.

Whisk the cocoa powder, hot coffee, and sour cream together until smooth and lump free.


In a medium bowl, combine the remaining 2 cups of the flour with the baking powder, baking soda and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the remaining 1 1/4 cups or 250g of sugar, the butter, the oil, and the remaining 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Scrape down the sides occasionally and beat until the mixture turns pale yellow and is light and fluffy.

Add 2 of the egg yolks and beat until incorporated, then add the remaining 2 yolks, again beating until combined.

Second two, going in!


With the mixer on low, alternately add the dry ingredients in three additions and the coffee/cocoa mixture in three additions, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients and mixing just until combined.



Finally, fold in the extra meringue – not the filling! – until just combined.



Pour just slightly less than half of the batter to the prepared pan and spread in an even layer.

Use a spoon or scoop to transfer the coconut macaroon filling to the Bundt pan, making sure to keep it in the middle of the batter, never touching the sides of the pan.



Pour or scoop the rest of the batter on top of the coconut macaroon filling, making sure it’s completely covered.



Bake in your preheated oven for 45-50 minutes. Tracey says the toothpick should come out with just a few moist crumbs but I found that hard to check because of the filling.

When it’s done, take it out of the oven and put the pan on a wire rack to cool for about 15 minutes.



Gently turn the Bundt out onto the wire rack and allow it to cool completely before adding any ganache.



To make the ganache:
Warm your cream to just before boiling, either in a small pot or a microwavable bowl. Add in the dark chocolate and let it sit for a few minutes to allow the chocolate to melt.

Stir until the chocolate and cream are smooth and shiny and completely combined.

Allow to cool until your ganache is at your perfect pouring or drizzling consistency. It gets thicker and thicker as it cools. If it thickens too much, a quick zap in the microwave will loosen it back up.

Pour or drizzle over the cooled Bundt.



Sprinkle on more coconut to decorate, if desired.

Enjoy!


Many thanks to our host for this coconut Bundt Bakers challenge, Terri from Love and Confections! Check out the lovely long list of coconutty Bundts we have for you this month!






BundtBakers


#BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme.  Follow our Pinterest board right here. Links are also updated each month on the BundtBakers home page.

We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

If you are a food blogger and would like to join us, just send an email with your blog URL to foodlustpeoplelove@gmail.com.




Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Dark Chocolate Chunk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies #CreativeCookieExchange


These wonderfully soft, chewy cookies are chock full of pecans in addition to the cocoa, dark chocolate and creamy peanut butter. But there is only so much information one title can contain. A cold glass of milk is an essential accompaniment.

Comfort Food Cookies
The theme for this month’s Creative Cookie Exchange is comfort food cookies.  Hmmm, comfort cookies. There are a lot of things that I find comfort in but, I’ve got to say, as a person who doesn’t crave sweets as much as she does salt and fat, I’m more likely to go for a link of smoked sausage or a slice of cheese than a cookie. I considered baking savory cookies but, I’ll be honest with you, that didn’t really say comfort to me either since they are usually more cracker-like. So, what it came down to was, if I were to eat a cookie for comfort, what would it look like? 1. It would have to have dark chocolate - black chocolate, as the French call it, because sweet milk chocolate is for chocolate wimps. 2. It would have a salty element. I considered bacon but decided on peanut butter, which helps with the next requirement. 3. It needs to be chewy. And for good measure, 4. I was going to throw some pecans in there. Because pecans are my favorite nut. They remind me of home home and that’s a comfort.

What would a comfort cookie look like for you?

Ingredients for 2 dozen thick cookies or more thin ones
3 1/2 oz or 100g dark chocolate
1 cup or 100g pecans
1/2 cup butter or 115g butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup or 140g creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup or 100g sugar
1/2 cup, packed, or 100g dark brown sugar
1 1/2 cups or 190g all-purpose flour
1/2 cup or 40g cocoa (I used Hershey’s regular, not the dark special.)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Method
Roughly chop the chocolate and pecans with a sharp knife and set aside.



With your electric or stand mixer, cream the butter, peanut butter and two sugars together until they are light and fluffy. Scrape the bowl down a couple of times as you go.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt.

Add the egg and vanilla into the butter/sugar and beat well.



Now add the dry ingredients into the wet and mix till combined. You will have a fairly stiff dough.


Add in the chocolate and pecans. Mix again.



Turn the dough out onto a large piece of cling film and shape it into a large roll.



Cover the roll tightly with the cling film and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

When you are ready to bake, preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat.

Slice your dough into rounds and place them on the prepared pan. Neaten them up with your hands, if need be. I like my cookies thick and chewy so I sliced mine pretty thick. If you prefer a crunchy cookie, by all means slice yours thinner.


These don't spread out much so you can put them fairly close together.


Bake in the preheated oven until the cookies are done the way you like them. I baked my thick cookies for just less than 10 minutes.



Allow to cool on the pan for a few minutes then remove to a wire rack to finish cooling. Okay, go ahead and eat one!



Serve with a glass of ice-cold milk.



Enjoy!



The Creative Cookie Exchange theme this month is Comfort Food Cookies! What cookie says comfort food to you? If you are a blogger and want to join in the fun, contact Laura at thespicedlife AT gmail DOT com and she will get you added to our Facebook group, where we discuss our cookies and share links. Many thanks to Laura for all the work it takes to organize this great group each month! 

You can also just use us as a great resource for cookie recipes. Be sure to check out our Pinterest Board and our monthly posts (you can find all of them here at The Spiced Life). You will be able to find them the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month!

Also, if you are looking for inspiration to get in the kitchen and start baking, check out all the comfort cookies my fellow CCE bloggers have made this month:


Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Bacon Dark Chocolate Bourbon Cookies #BaconMonth


Sweet, salty and smoky flavors combine gorgeously in these completely unhealthy but divine cookies baked with bacon and dark chocolate and dark brown sugar. 

I’ve said it before in this space but new readers would be fooled into believing the opposite: I am not much of a sweet eater. I love making them for others and I’ll try some, just to make sure the mix is right, but I am not tempted by cookies or cakes or even ice cream unless they have something salty or bitter or strong about them. They can’t be just sweet. These cookies have it all! Dark chocolate for just a little hint of bitterness, bacon and bacon fat for the salty component and, of course, dark brown sugar and bourbon for the sweet and strong. I took them along to a dinner party the other night and even the reluctant cookie eaters were sold. To save myself from temptation, I took my empty plate home and left behind the few cookies that remained. Now I am regretting that.

Next time I am going to add some toasted pecans as well. And keep them all to myself. :) Let me just warn you that if you don't have a problem with eating raw cookie dough, this one is trouble with a capital T.

Welcome to Week Four of Bacon Month!
Many thanks, once again, to Julie of White Lights on Wednesday for organizing this celebration of my favorite food and sponsoring the giveaway of The Bacon Cookbook* this week.

These cookies are an adaptation from this recipe on Recipe Girl. I figured, why use that much butter when you can use more bacon fat? Can I get a hell yeah?


Ingredients for two dozen cookies
6 slices thick cut smoked streaky bacon (about 8 oz or 225g)
Rendered bacon fat from the bacon, topped up with butter to 1/2 cup or 120ml
1 1/2 cups 190g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup packed or 150g dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons bourbon
1 large egg
3 1/2 oz or 100g dark chocolate – I used a Lindt bar. So much better than cooking chocolate!

Method
Chop the chocolate up into little chunks and set aside.

Cut your bacon into small pieces and fry in a skillet until crispy. Scoop the bacon out with a slotted spoon, leaving behind as much bacon grease as you can in the skillet.


Drain the bacon bits on paper towels. Separate out a small handful for decorating the cookies before they bake.

Pour the warm bacon fat into a 1/2 cup or 120ml measuring cup and top up with butter until it is full. Allow to cool.

I'm guessing I had to add two to three tablespoons of butter to reach
my level as there was more than one-third a cup of rendered bacon fat from the fried bacon.



Combine the flour, baking soda and baking powder in a small bowl and set aside.



Chop your chocolate into small chunks. Separate out a small handful for decorating the cookies before they bake.

With electric beaters or in your stand mixer, beat the bacon fat/butter with the brown sugar, bourbon and salt until the mixture turns light brown.


Add in the egg and beat again.

Isn't it amazing how light the brown sugar mixture becomes? Like magic.


Now tip in the flour mixture and beat again until well combined. Add the larger piles of bacon pieces and chocolate chunks to the dough and stir until combined.



Refrigerate the dough for at least 30 minutes.

When you are almost ready to bake, preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and prepare a baking pan by greasing it or lining it with parchment or a silicone baking mat.

Drop the dough by spoonfuls on the prepared pan and press slightly with a wet spoon to flatten. I like to use a little scoop.



Top with a few of the reserved pieces of bacon and chocolate.



Bake for eight to 10 minutes or until golden brown on the bottom.



Remove from the oven and allow to cool briefly. Place cookies on a wire rack to finish cooling completely.

If you can resist eating these warm, you are a better person than I! 

Enjoy!









Are you ready for more bacon deliciousness?!


Now for the The Bacon Cookbook* giveaway! Please be aware that the book will only be shipped to US addresses. Canadian winners will receive an Amazon egift card for the price of the book. Full disclosure details can be found by clicking on Terms and Conditions on the Rafflecopter. This cookbook prize is sponsored by Julie of White Lights on Wednesday.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


*This is an Amazon affiliate link. If you buy after clicking on the link, I earn some small change for referring you to Amazon, at no extra cost to you.