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.




It’s another We Should Cocoa challenge courtesy of Chocolate Teapot and Chocolate Log Blog! This month’s theme (hosted by Nazima of Franglais Kitchen) is chocolate and bread, and it’s one of those combos that makes me go “erm”. The first thing that came to my mind is chocolate cinnamon rolls, and I don’t care for chocolate cinnamon rolls. It’s like chocolate and ice cream: love chocolate, love ice cream, really don’t care for chocolate ice cream.  The same goes for idea #2, bread pudding: I will certainly eat chocolate bread pudding (let’s not kid ourselves here: I will eat most anything with sugar in it), but it’s not a favourite. So, what else is there?




At this point, I found myself deep in semantics. What is bread, anyway? Muffins are often filed under “quick bread” and many a cake gets called a loaf or a bread (“banana bread”. I mean really.) but I suspected that these clever cop-outs wouldn’t fly. So, how about doughnuts? Yeast dough, but deep-fried: bread or not? A thorough Googling session on the question “are doughnuts bread?” gave me the following answer: “not really”. Well, shoot.




So, I was back at the basic idea of the cinnamon roll, and decided to try and make a roll that would be very little like a cinnamon roll. Like so:




Chocolate Rolls with Almond Paste (24 rolls)




Dough:

60 g butter
250 ml milk
25 g fresh yeast
1/4 teaspoon salt
120 ml sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
75 ml cocoa powder
700-750 ml all-purpose flour




Filling:

50 g butter, softened
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
100 g almond paste, chopped
100 g chocolate, chopped (I used milk chocolate with fudge bits)




Crumble yeast into a bowl.
Melt butter, add milk and gently heat the mixture to 37°C (if you add cold milk to the melted butter, the mixture is usually pretty close to 37 C as is).
Pour over yeast and whisk until yeast has dissolved.
Add salt and sugar and stir; add about 200 ml of the flour, the cocoa powder and stir.
Add most of the remaining flour and knead dough by hand, adding flour if needed, until the dough is smooth and elastic. The cocoa powder makes the dough a bit less sticky so you can work with a slightly wetter dough.
Sprinkle some flour on top and cover: let rise for about 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 200°C. Line two 12-cup muffin pans with cupcake liners.
Lightly flour the baking board (use cocoa powder if you want to make sure not to end up with white floury blotches on the rolls) and turn the dough on it.
Roll dough out to a ~20 x 50 cm rectangle.
Spread the softened butter on the dough, and sprinkle sugar, vanilla sugar and the chopped almond paste & chocolate over the butter.
Roll the dough up tightly and cut into 24 slices. Place rolls in the muffin tins, cover and let rise for 15 minutes.
Bake for 10-15 minutes. Cover the rolls while cooling.




A chocolate glaze wouldn’t go amiss on these, I’m sure. I didn’t make a glaze as I ate the milk chocolate I had bought for the purpose. What can I say, I can’t resist chocolate sitting in my cupboard for longer than a day.




TLSO has a thing for skulls so I was quite giddy to find a skull cake tin, by the good people at Wilton. The tin came with a recipe for a pumpkin cake, because, you know, of course you would be using this to bake a cake for your Halloween celebration. No. Instead, I baked TLSO’s birthday cake in it – hence the rather fetching candle stuck into the skull! So, off I went … looking for new recipes for a chocolate cake. Lo and behold: “Mccall’s Cooking School’s Perfect Chocolate Cake” seemed to fit the bill, and the tin. You can find the recipe posted on various places online; I, as per usual, located it on Food.com. The cake recipe is actually for a layer cake and comes complete with filling and frosting recipes, but I only used the cake part, for I had other cunning plans.




Chocolate Cake:




1 cup unsweetened cocoa

2 cups boiling water

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup butter, softened

2 1/2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla




Preheat oven to 170 C.

Grease and flour the skull cake tin. Do this with utmost care: you don’t want it to get stuck and break and ruin the whole look. The skull is in the details! (Trust me, I know. I made three of what-were-supposed-to-be-skulls last week using metal clay and a silicon mould: two of them ended up looking like monkeys and not like skulls at all.)

In a medium bowl, whisk cocoa with boiling water until smooth. Cool completely.

Sift flour with baking soda, salt and baking powder.

In a large bowl, using an electric mixer at high speed, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, beat well.

At low speed, beat in flour mixture, alternately with cocoa mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Do not overbeat.

Divide batter evenly into the pan; smooth top. Bake for about 45 minutes or until surface springs back when gently pressed with fingertip.

Let cool a little before turning the cakes out, then allow the cakes to cool completely. Wash the cake tin and place the cake halves back into it. Dig out the insides of the skull with a knife and a spoon, to make room for the strawberry mousse brain.




For the strawberry brain, I used this recipe for strawberry and lime mousse cake; only the mousse part, omitting all traces of lime, and adding two gelatine leaves to ensure a firm mousse. Note that the recipe makes way too much mousse: you could easily halve the recipe and probably still have quite a bit left over. I didn’t want to try and figure out what to make with half a package of each of the ingredients, so I made the whole recipe. I turned the leftover mousse into cupcakes, using the cake I’d dug out of the skull halves as a cake base for them.




Strawberry Mousse




500 g strawberries (frozen are fine; just thaw them first!)

200 ml whippable vanilla sauce

200 g thick, plain yogurt (Greek/Turkish)

100 ml powdered sugar

200 ml whipping cream

7 gelatine leaves

2 tablespoons strawberry juice or water




Puree the (thawed) strawberries using a hand-held mixer.

Whip the vanilla sauce until thickened. Add plain yogurt, strawberry puree and powdered sugar, mix.

In a separate bowl, whip the whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Add to the vanilla sauce mixture, mix well.

Soak gelatine leaves in plenty of water for 5 minutes. Heat two tablespoons of strawberry juice/water in a saucepan or in the microwave. Squeeze out the gelatine leaves and dissolve in the hot juice/water. Allow to cool for a while and mix the liquid into the strawberry cream mixture.

Pour the mousse into the skull halves, cover, and transfer to the fridge; allow to set overnight.




Carefully turn the cakes out of the pan and assemble cake. I used a simple cocoa, powdered sugar and milk mixture as “glue” for attaching the two parts of the skull together. I goofed when trying to make the two parts fit and hence my skull cake needed a chin support made out of foil to maintain its balance. I didn’t make a frosting as I didn’t want to cover any of the skull-ness (details, remember), so I just sifted plenty of powdered sugar on top, covering the eye sockets with parchment paper rounds so they remained nice and dark. I’ll have to look into fondants and frostings to see what I could use that would conform to the shape of the cake… Hmm!




… aaand then I stuck a candle into the skull’s forehead, sang happy birthday, TLSO chopped the skull’s top off, and we ate it. Good cake. 




 

TLSO and I have been prone to putting berries into vodka now that we have actual berry bushes in our possession. This year, one of the things we wanted to try was a strawberry liqueur (with store-bought strawberries, mind – we unfortunately do not have our own strawberry fields, forever or at the moment). But, as neither of us is actually that fond of straightforward, sickly sweet liqueurs, we felt it needed a kick too – enter red chilli pepper! The improvised recipe turned out seriously good: sweet, but not too sweet, with plenty of strawberry flavour and lovely lingering heat from the red chilli. Dangerously delectable stuff, this.

 

The process is utterly simple:

 

Strawberry Chilli Liqueur

 

500 g strawberries, hulled and halved. Red, juicy strawberries with flavour, please: none of those hastily grown, fist-sized things that are white inside and completely bland.

1 red chile pepper, seeded and sliced

250 g caster sugar

500 ml vodka

 

Here’s what you do: Combine all ingredients in a 2-litre jar with a tight fitting lid, give the jar a good shake, and put it down on the table. That’s it. Now you just wait for 4 weeks, shaking the jar every now and then, and watch the strawberries lose their colour and the sugar dissolve.

After 4 weeks, sieve the contents of the jar; press the strawberries slightly to get as much liquid out of them as possible. (You can line the sieve with cheesecloth if you want a clearer liqueur) Bottle the gloriously red liquid – of which you will get about 750 ml. It’s pretty darn good as it is, but letting it mature a little in the bottle will only improve it.

 

You can use the soaked strawberries and chilli pepper bits in baking. I made one of my favourite quick-fix coffee cakes: French Yogurt Cake, sans rosewater. It totally looks like a salami pie – especially with the red chilli pieces! -  but tasted good.