Chocolate & Walnut Sourdough Bread

Jeff made a loaf of Chocolate & Walnut Sourdough Bread using a recipe from the Pantry Mama website. 

I didn't remember to take a good photo of the loaf before we cut into it. 

Jeff followed the recipe, but he omitted the instant coffee. We don't like coffee.

The loaf was reasonably good, but a little strange. It just wasn't a flavor combo we're used to. We might make it again, but more likely we'd just make brownies because they would have enough chocolate to satisfy our need for chocolate.

Halloween Graveyard Cake

What is more thematic for Halloween than a graveyard cake? I started with a recipe Sharon found at Spooky Graveyard Cake and their recipe for chocolate buttercream frosting, though I used 1/2 tsp almond extract, 2 tsp vanilla extract, and two drops of orange essence.  For the actual cake, I used this one bowl chocolate cake recipe.

Chocolate "syrup" from scratch

Chocolate "syrup" in the mason jar

I needed some chocolate syrup to experiment with Irish cream. So I found a recipe and made a go of it. What I ended up with was tasty but in no way a "syrup". At best you would call it a paste. Still seems to work as long as it gets fully incorporated. Wouldn't work very well for chocolate milk (without heating).

Bring to boil in saucepan:

• 3/4 cup dark unsweetened cocoa
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1 dash salt
• 3/4 cup water

Boil 2-5 minutes until thick, store in fridge. 

Well, I never really got a "boil" and so I gave up and took it off the heat after 5 minutes. I had to keep stirring to keep from scorching. I glopped it into a mason jar and stored it in the fridge. It worked fine in chocolate milk as long as I processed it with the milk in my Vitamix. 

Next time: I am going to try Alton Brown's recipe. It has you make a simple syrup first, then incorporate the cocoa. It also uses a small amount of corn syrup which may help keep it from seizing up. And it calls for Dutch Process cocoa, which is probably worth trying.

Tasting as you go

I was just making chocolate pudding and hazelnut cookies. And I noticed something. 

Noticing things is an interesting aspect of cooking. I have heard that it is good to taste as you go: ingredients, mixes, etc. So you can adjust seasonings, and also so you can gather data about what things taste like at various stages. Then is something goes wrong you might be able to fix it before it is too late. 

Back to the pudding. So I was all done sieving the cooked pudding and folding in the butter and vanilla when I tasted the spatula. Wow, it was bitter. That was the moment when I realized how odd it was that the recipe didn't call for sugar. Out comes the cook book and low and behold I missed the 2/3 cup of sugar. 

This far in, all I could do was fold in the sugar and hope that there was enough residual heat that it could still mix in and not be gritty. Tasted again and this was more like I remembered. 

If I were to write a cookbook, I would demand of the publisher that ingredient lists do not span pages. This is one thing I appreciate about the GOOD EATS: The Early Years book I am working though. They have very nice page layout for the recipes. No Flipping back and forth from one page to the next. 

Chocolate Pudding from scratch

Pudding didn't used to come from a box.

I like chocolate.
I like eggs, and have a steady supply.
I like cream.

Let us combine these to make pudding, but what to do with the leftover whites ...?

The almond cookies use egg whites.
This pudding uses egg yolks.
A match made, well, in the kitchen.

Chocolate Shortbread

While we have a number of cookie recipes we like, we were in the mood to try something new: Chocolate shortbread.

It was fine for what it was. But it basically seemed like brownies for people without chickens (or some other access to eggs).

If you get a hankering for chewy-free brownies, give the Bob's Red Mill recipe a try. But why not make some nice chewy brownies instead?

They were a little better with some peach caramel sauce over them.

Better than Store Bought Cookies

Here is a rather detailed account of my adaptation of the "Good as Store Bought Cookie" recipe from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion cookbook that Sharon calls "Better than Store Bought Cookies".

Chocolate Crinkles

From The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

I've had pretty good responses from tasters of my Chocolate Crinkles. I mostly follow the recipe (gasp) except I use 1 cup of white whole wheat flower and 1/2 cup of whole wheat pastry flour rather than all purpose.
The last time I made them I made a double batch which worked ok, except I ended up with a lot of left over powdered sugar. Making these makes me want to get some of those little ice cream scoops that you can use for cookie dough.
I bake them on a half sheet with a Silpat mat that I have become quite fond of. It makes cleanup easy and the cookies release nicely. The one hitch is that we haven't figured out how to dry them since they are so floppy.
I tend to cook them on the short end of the time range so they end up almost like individual chewy brownies. If you cook them longer they allegedly crisp up. This might make for a better dunking cookie, though these do fine with a side of milk.