Archive for the ‘Chocolate’ Category
Chiffon pies are light, airy pies that have fillings with a mousse-like consistency. They are, in fact, made much like a mousse and get most of their volume from beaten egg whites or whipped cream. They also usually have a small amount of gelatin in them that helps them keep their shape and slice easily. A chiffon pie can be a great option for a dessert that packs a lot of flavor, without feeling heavy, and this Chocolate Chiffon Pie is great example of exactly that.
The pie starts with a chocolate crumb crust and is filled with a mousselike chocolate chiffon filling. Some chiffon pies use egg whites to give them their lift, but this one uses whipped cream both for volume and for mouthfeel. The pie has a wonderful chocolate flavor to it, thanks to a generous amount of chocolate in the filling. Both dark chocolate and semisweet chocolate will work in the filling – even chocolate chips, so long as they’re good quality. It is best to choose a chocolate that you really enjoy because that will be the main flavoring of this pie. I used Guittard Bittersweet (61% cacao) chocolate in the pie pictured. Opt for a darker chocolate if you prefer a more bittersweet flavor in your pie, and semisweet if you prefer your pie to be a touch lighter.
I like a chocolate crumb crust for this pie, as the chocolate flavor goes well with the pie and it adds a nice crunchy element to the dessert. A regular graham cracker crust will also work well, and you can use a traditional pastry crust that has been prebaked and cooled, if you prefer. The pie keeps well in the refrigerator, covered, for several days after assembly. It is best when served with a little bit of lightly sweetened whipped cream and a few chocolate shavings for garnish.
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There are many flavors that pair well with chocolate. Coffee is one, and it is often included in chocolate cakes to bring out some of the darker notes of chocolate. Believe it or not, but dark stout is another. These dark beers often have an intense malty flavor and an almost chocolate-like profile to them, and they can enhance the bitter and malty notes that you find in dark chocolate, giving a cake a great chocolate flavor and a lot of character.
This Chocolate Stout Sheet Cake is made using a stout beer. I used a beer called Boatswain Chocolate Stout, which is actually brewed with cocoa to enhance the chocolate-like notes often found in stout beer (although it doesn’t have more than a subtle hint of cocoa to it). It is worth noting that any stout beer will do the trick in this recipe. The cake is very moist and tender, using butter, vegetable oil and yogurt in it. It has a great dark chocolate flavor to it thanks to both the beer and a generous amount of cocoa powder. You won’t taste the beer in the finished cake, but it definitely takes the edge off what would otherwise be a fairly sweet cake and gives it a grown up chocolate taste.
I topped this cake off with a Chocolate Stout Buttercream, adding a little bit of my chocolate stout beer to a simple chocolate buttercream. This introduced a distinct malty note to the frosting (again, giving it a grown-up flavor) and really tied it in well with the cake. You can leave out the beer and opt for a plain chocolate buttercream by simply adding milk to your frosting instead. This cake is also good with vanilla frosting, and is satisfying enough to eat plain – with a cup of coffee or even a glass of that chocolatey stout that you used to make it.
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A four leaf clover is good luck any day of the year, but a few clovers are an especially nice way of finishing off these St Patrick’s Day themed Shamrock Chocolate Peppermint Cookies. The cookies are tender, chocolate wafers that are topped with minty green shamrocks. They’re easy to make, flavorful and definitely look festive enough for any St Patrick’s Day celebration.
The cookies are tender and slightly soft, with a nice cocoa flavor. They’re slice-and-bake cookies, which means that the dough is rolled into a log and chilled, then sliced into rounds before baking. This approach is faster than using cookie cutters and gives the cookies a nice uniform size and shape. The cookies aren’t too sweet, so they do very well with that little bit of extra sweetness that the icing gives them to round out their flavor.
Peppermint can be a difficult flavor to work with because it is so strong. It goes well with chocolate, but it is easy for the mint to overwhelm the other flavors in a dessert if you’re not careful – and adding too little will leave you with something that lacks that peppermint punch. For these cookies, I left the peppermint out of the cookies entirely and concentrated it in the frosting. Those little green shamrocks are packed with mint flavor, adding a refreshing quality to the cookie as well as a little extra sweetness. It’s a good balance and definitely a nice way of introducing the peppermint here without it taking over the whole cookie.
You can pipe your shamrocks on using a small round piping tip, or just scrape your frosting into a ziploc bag and snip off the corner. I free-handed my clovers (three or four large dots and a line for the stem) and you don’t need to be a master piper to make it work. Be sure to let the icing dry for a couple of hours before storing the cookies, and store them in a single layer to ensure that the shamrocks don’t get smudged before you have a chance to eat them.
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Oreo cookies are the best selling cookies in the world for good reason: each cookie is a great combination of sweet, crispy, chocolatey and creamy flavors and textures. And they are even better when dipped in a tall, cold glass of milk. The cookies have been made more or less the same way for the past 100 years and some of the magic of the Oreo is the way that the cookies are formed and made with machines. The wafer cookies are essentially just pressed into place and aren’t held together by much, which is what makes them so deliciously tender.You just can’t get the exact same results with homemade knockoffs, but you can get something close that captures that much loved cookies n’ cream flavor and is made entirely from scratch.
My Homemade Oreo Cookies start out with a chocolate wafer cookie dough that is shaped into logs and chilled. The dough is made with a generous amount of cocoa powder to give the cookies a deep chocolate flavor and very dark color. Slicing the cookies when the dough is chilled allows you to get a uniform look and shape, keeping the cookies nice and flat during baking. The wafer cookies aren’t too sweet (so that they can handle a sweet vanilla filling) but have a strong chocolate flavor when they’re done. The dough should be sliced thinly (about 1/8-inch) so that that wafers can bake up to be nice and crispy. If you cut your dough too thick, the cookies will not get crispy all the way through and will remain slightly soft (still tasty, but not like a real Oreo!).
Regular Oreos are made without any dairy products and without eggs (yes, they’re vegan!), so I kept with that standard when creating this recipe and used shortening instead of butter in both the cookie dough and the filling. You can make the cookies with butter instead of shortening and still get good results, but if you want the most authentic Oreo creme filling, opt for shortening (trans-fat free, of course). The vanilla will stand out in a filling made with shortening, while in a filling made with butter, you’ll have a more frosting-like flavor.
These cookies are at their best when dipped in milk, but they’re tasty on their own, too. They are not quite as crumbly as a “real” Oreo, though they are crispy, chocolatey and have a filling that is as creamy as the real thing. If you don’t want to make the whole batch at once, you can keep some of the cookie dough in the freezer, well-wrapped, for a few weeks and bake off a new bunch when the mood strikes.
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These Midnight Chocolate Cupcakes are the perfect recipe to make if you’re in the mood for a very dark, chocolate cupcake. They get their name from the fact that they’re almost pitch black in color. They’re based on a much loved Betty Crocker recipe for Black Midnight Cake (which has been in dozens of Betty Crocker cookbooks over the past several decades). The cupcakes deliver as much chocolate as they promise with their dark coloring. They are moist, fluffy and pack a lot of flavor into every single bite.
The recipe has slightly more sugar than many other cupcake recipes, but that sugar helps to keep the cupcakes moist and tender, and also adds much needed sweetness to the very large amount of cocoa powder in the batter. I typically add a small amount of instant coffee to highlight the darker notes of the cocoa powder, but that can be omitted if you prefer not to have a hint of coffee in your cake. The finished cupcakes are not too sweet, even when generously spread with chocolate buttercream frosting.
These cupcakes are also made with shortening, rather than butter. Shortening is also used in the old BC recipe (in my 1950s-era cookbooks) for this type of cake. The shortening, like vegetable oil, helps the cakes to retain moisture and stay fresh and soft for several days after baking. Since it doesn’t add any flavor of it’s own to the cake, unlike butter, the chocolate flavor also seems a little more pronounced than it does in some other recipes. All that said, you can substitute butter back into this recipe with no problems whatsoever and still end up with a great chocolate cupcake.
I topped my cupcakes off with a simple chocolate buttercream and a square of star-spangled chocolate. The buttercream also has a rich chocolate flavor, even if it isn’t as dark in color as the cake. I used a chocolate transfer sheet – a sheet of acetate with a colored cocoa butter design printed on it – to make my starry night garnish. A few chocolate sprinkles would also make a lovely way to finish these off.
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