It’s rhubarb season, and I shall now present to you the best way to use rhubarb. I kid you not, this stuff is better than anything you can bake with rhubarb, and this coming from a lover of all things baked. Rhubarb vodka is amazingly delicious, and works both as a shot and as a punch or cocktail ingredient. It’s also so simple to make that you really have no excuses not to try it! I originally found the recipe on Food.com, posted by spicyspiral. It’s the only recipe they’ve posted, but when you post a recipe this good, there’s no need for more, really. Man, I love this stuff.

My one caution with this recipe is this: only make it with the crisp, tender, fragrant stalks of early summer. They will give you the tastiest vodka with a vibrant, red colour. Last year, we made a batch with the woodier late harvest stalks… which resulted in an orangey, dull and slightly bitter-tasting drink, and we are still trying to figure out ways to turn it into something usable!! (Hints welcome!) So: do it now! Put some rhubarb and sugar into vodka!

Rhubarb Vodka

600 g rhubarb stalks, rinsed, dried, chopped

300 g caster sugar

1 litre vodka

Take two 2-litre jars with tight-fitting lids.

Divide chopped rhubarb and sugar between the two jars.

Pour 500 ml of vodka into each jar. Close lids tightly, and give the jars a good shake.

Store the jars in a cool, dark place for at least 2 months (we do 3), and shake them a few times a week.

Strain into a one-litre bottle. Enjoy. Swoon.

Ah, fudge. Sweet creamy goodness. I love eating it, and I love making it – it’s always a wonderful thrill of success when you cut into it and it turned out the way it should. Hurrah! For the longest time, I routinely ruined my fudge and it never set (but was still perfectly wonderful to eat – you just needed a spoon). Turned out my problem was impatience: you cannot bring the mixture into boil quickly, nor can you boil at it full heat. Slow and easy, at medium heat, does it!

Anyway! I chose this particular recipe because it contains honey – which is the special ingredient of this month’s We Should Cocoa challenge by Choclette and Chele, hosted this time by Choclette at the Chocolate Log Blog. Honey does add a special something to the taste of this chocolate fudge, and you can taste it even through all that sugar! Because the recipe is so sugar-heavy (it’s fudge, after all), I would definitely recommend a very dark, high cocoa chocolate for this. I found the recipe online, but it reportedly comes from The Complete Home Confectioner by Hilary Walden.

Chocolate & Honey Fudge

450 g sugar
150 ml milk
100 g chocolate, chopped (high quality & high cocoa – I used 85% Lindt)
150 g unsalted butter, chopped
50 g clear honey
3 -5 drops vanilla extract

Butter or oil a 7″ or 8″ square pan. This size is not critical to the recipe, but will determine how thick and deep your fudge will be.

Place milk and sugar in a heavy, large saucepan (it must be able to contain 4 times the volume of the original ingredients to avoid boiling over).  Stir over medium heat with a wooden spoon until the sugar has dissolved.

Add chopped chocolate, chopped butter and honey. Stir the mixture until fully melted and blended together.

Bring slowly to a boil. Cover and boil for 3 minutes (this helps wash down the sugar crystals from the sides of the saucepan).

Uncover and insert a prewarmed sugar thermometer. Boil until soft ball stage (116C/240F).

Once the mixture has reached the soft ball stage, remove the saucepan from heat and plunge the base of the pan into an ice water bath. Wait for the temperature to reach 50C/122°F.

Add vanilla essence (and any additions you like – nuts, dried fruit…) and beat the mixture with a wooden spoon until it becomes thick, creamy and lighter in colour.

Pour mixture into prepared pan and leave until almost set. Mark out squares with an oiled knife and leave to set.

Keeps, theoretically speaking, 3-4 weeks.

Lovely, stuffed bread rolls that I’ve been making for over a decade, but never posted the recipe anywhere, because I find it so difficult to put into words how the bread rolls are to be slit!! It’s not complicated in the least, but for me, the 3D world and its representations are apparently very challenging…. Anyway, these are delicious. I’m forever grateful to the friend of a friend who served these to my friend, who in turn introduced me to them. All clear? Good. Now onto explaining how to stuff part baked bread rolls with Mediterranean goodness.

Pesto, Sun-Dried Tomato and Mozzarella Rolls

4 part baked bread rolls
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 teaspoons pesto
2 sun-dried tomatoes, packed in oil
125 g fresh mozzarella
(All ingredient amounts are subject to personal taste)

Combine olive oil and minced garlic. Chop sun-dried tomatoes. Slice mozzarella.
Preheat oven to the temperature specified on your bread roll package.
Place bread rolls on a cookie sheet and slit the tops open lengthwise, about halfway through each roll. (Okay? Hmm. I hope the picture helps.)
Bake bread rolls for about half of the time indicated on the package – the rolls I use need to be baked for 8-10 minutes, so I bake them for 4 minutes at this stage.
Take the rolls out of the oven and work quickly to stuff them: first, brush the insides of the rolls with garlic oil, then fill the rolls with pesto, chopped sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella slices. The rolls are not overly hot yet, so you should be able to do all this with your bare hands, even if you don’t have hands of the asbestos variety (like Nigella).
Return rolls into the oven and bake for however long is left (4-6 minutes for me).
Eat. Be happy.

Ah, tosca, that glorious almond praline that beautifully tops almost every baked sweet you can think of! Tosca Cake, in all its simplicity, is one of the most delicious things I know, and I really don’t make it often enough. This time, however, it’s tosca sticky buns and yeasty wheaty goodness!

Tosca Sticky Buns

16 buns

Dough:
250 ml milk
25 g fresh yeast
75 ml sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon cardamom
500-700 ml all-purpose flour
100 g soft butter

Filling:
40 g soft butter
75 ml sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar

Tosca topping:
100 g butter
75 ml sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
50 ml milk
100 g flaked almonds

To do list:
Crumble yeast into a bowl; add sugar, salt and cardamom.
Heat milk gently to 37 C and pour into the bowl, whisking until the yeast has dissolved.
Add flour, a little at a time, and knead until the dough begins to pull away from the sides of the bowl and no longer sticks to your hand. Knead in butter. Cover the bowl and let rise until the dough has doubled.
Preheat oven to 225 C. Line two 12-hole muffin tins with 16 liners.
Roll dough out to a rectangular (30 x 50 cm or so). Spread with butter and sprinkle on the sugars. Roll the dough up, starting from the longer side of the rectangular.
Cut the roll in 16 pieces. Place the pieces into the muffin tins, cover, and let rise for about 15 minutes.
Bake the buns in the preheated oven for 4-5 minutes – while they are baking, prepare the topping:
Combine all topping ingredients in a saucepan. Bring gently to boil, stirring every now and then; remove from heat as soon as the first few boiling bubbles appear!
Take out the half-baked buns, quickly spread the topping on top, and return to the oven. Continue to bake 6-8 minutes, or until the topping is beginning to turn golden.

Another We Should Cocoa challenge, courtesy of Chocolate Teapot and Chocolate Log Blog. This month’s challenge is hosted by Jen of Blue Kitchen Bakes and February’s ingredient is ginger. Which is lovely, as I’ve had a hankering for chocolate chip cookies all month, and adding a ginger kick to them can only make them better. I also added a dash of cayenne pepper to spice things up a notch! The cookies look sort of… boring – I was hoping for chunky, crinkle-type of cookie, but got a smooth one instead. But, they taste great, so we shall not judge a cookie by its cover.

Ginger Chocolate Chip Cookies

175 g butter, at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/5 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
175 g dark chocolate, chopped
50 g crystallised ginger, chopped

1/4 cup brown cane sugar (for rolling the cookies; optional)

Preheat oven to 180 C. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Cream butter, brown sugar and molasses with an electric mixer until thoroughly combined and fluffy.
Add egg and vanilla extract, mix well.
Combine flour, ginger, cayenne, baking powder, baking soda and salt; add to the butter-egg mixture and mix.
Fold in chopped chocolate and crystallised ginger.
Shape dough into 1-inch balls and roll the balls in brown cane sugar. Place on the cookie sheet, leaving a few inches between the balls.
Bake in the preheated oven for 8-10 minutes.

Makes 36-40 cookies.

Next time I’ll either cut down the amount of brown sugar in the dough to ¾ cup or omit the brown cane sugar: these turned out pret-ty sweet (not that it’s a bad thing, of course!). I also meant to use 2 teaspoons of baking soda instead of a baking powder & baking soda combo, but ran out of baking soda and had to improvise – so that’s the explanation to that weirditude. Not scientific, not baking chemistry related, just bad planning.

For when you have a hankering for just a little bit of sweet! The recipe makes 6 coconutty chocolate balls; you can share up to three with a friend if you’re feeling very generous. These contain no oats (most recipes like this seem to) and they take about two minutes to make – but you do need to wait for a while for them to set. You can do it!!

As a side note: I can never wrap my brain around the fact that these are considered “cookies” in English, as to me they should clearly be filed under “candy”.

Coconut Poodles (makes 6)

50 ml sugar

20 g butter

1 tablespoon cocoa powder

1 tablespoon milk

1-2 tablespoons peanut butter

50 ml desiccated coconut

Combine sugar, butter, cocoa powder and milk in a saucepan.

Bring gently to boil and simmer for 1 minute.

Add peanut butter and coconut; stir until well combined.

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto wax paper and allow to set for about an hour.

This month’s We Should Cocoa challenge (Hi there, Chocolate Teapot and Chocolate Log Blog!) is sugar free. At first I thought I’d skip it – the only recipe that came to my mind was one for berry & date chocolate truffles, and I’m a bit truffled out from the Christmas season (even though I only made three kinds of truffles and only ate about 80% of them myself). Also, TLSO is on a diet and asked me if I could maybe, perhaps, bake a little less so that there aren’t constant temptations around – I complied. However, two weeks into my baking strike I was developing severe withdrawal symptoms and started coming up with various cunning plans. Upon googling sugar free, low fat, low calorie etc. healthful-stuff recipes online, I came across the Paleo Diet, as well as a bunch of resourceful people who have come up with Paleo baking recipes! So, I asked TLSO: was it ok to bake a cake that had no sugar, no dairy and no flour in it, but plenty of good for you fruit? It was. Ta-da, I had both a diet-friendly and a cocoa challenge applicable chocolate cake recipe in my hands.

The recipe comes from the Paleo Spirit blog, which has plenty of information on the Paleo diet and a lot of damn fine looking recipes. The cake is free of a whole bunch of things, like dairy, gluten, sugar, nut, and soy, but it is chock full of complex flavours that combine in your mouth to give you the sweet satisfaction of chocolate cake. The texture is dense and moist (because of the fruit), yet fragile (because of the heavy and sturdy coconut flour). Absolutely worth trying!

Paleo Diet Chocolate Cake (10-12 pieces)

225 g dates, pitted
1 cup of unsweetened applesauce
3 eggs
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup strong brewed coffee
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

Preheat oven to 175 C. Line the bottom of a 9” round cake pan with parchment paper and grease pan with coconut oil.
Place the dates in a food processor and pulse until completely pureed (scrape the sides a few times to make sure there are no bits hiding from the blade!).
Add applesauce and continue to pulse until combined with the dates.
Transfer the fruit purée to a bowl, add the eggs, vanilla, coconut oil and coffee, and mix with an electric mixer until well combined.
Combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl.
Slowly add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix on low-speed, scraping down the sides, until you have a smooth batter.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth it with the back of a spatula (the batter does not settle like regular cake batters, so the pattern you make now is more or less the pattern that comes out of the oven).
Bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick stuck in the middle comes out clean.

Serve with whipped (coconut) cream or frosting of your choice. We had this with last summer’s strawberries (thawed from the freezer), which complemented the cake beautifully.

A wonderful frozen, make-ahead dessert for chocolate lovers. This recipe was developed by Ms. Henna Ström and it won 1st prize in a chocolate recipe competition organised by Kodin Kuvalehti magazine, almost a decade ago. I’ve had the recipe in my collection ever since and was reminded of it by this month’s We Should Cocoa challenge (by Choclette of Choc Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot) where this year’s Christmas theme is chocolate & cinnamon. The recipe is delectable, and really quite elegant! Next time I will make more layers though: I had to wait a while before I could dig through into the cinnamon layer and I would prefer to get a bit of both flavours with every spoonful.

Chocolate Cinnamon Parfait (4 servings)

300 ml whipping cream
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg yolk
75 ml sugar
50 ml water
50 g semisweet chocolate
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 egg yolk

Whip cream until stiff peaks form.
Transfer 1/3 of the whipped cream into another bowl, add cinnamon (to the 1/3) and stir to combine.
Beat one egg yolk well.
Measure sugar and water into a small saucepan and bring the mixture slowly to a boil, stirring. As soon as the mixture begins to boil, remove from heat.
Slowly pour half of the hot sugar syrup on the beaten egg yolk, stirring constantly.
Allow the mixture to cool.
Add egg-sugar mixture to the cinnamon-flavoured whipped cream, stir to combine.
Melt chocolate in a water bath or microwave.
Beat the remaining egg yolk well.
Reheat the remaining sugar syrup, and slowly add it to the egg yolk, stirring constantly.
Allow to cool.
Add cocoa powder and melted chocolate to the mixture, stir.
Add the remaining whipped cream, stir to combine.

Layer the two mixtures into four small drinking glasses (or other freezer-safe vessels of your choice) and place in the freezer until frozen. Do not keep in the freezer for days – the texture will suffer.
Bring to room temperature some 15 minutes before digging in (longer if the parfaits have been in the freezer all day).

You can, of course, multitask and make the two flavours simultaneously: melt the chocolate while making the sugar syrup, and mix the syrup/yolk mixtures at the same time (but in separate bowls, of course! ). I’ve listed the directions separately to make it (hopefully!) clearer to see which ingredient goes where.