Rose Levy Beranbaum's Perfect All-American Chocolate Butter Cake

"Someone I loved once gave me 

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand 

that this, too, was a gift" 

The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver

I have a hard time saying goodbye. But I'm not sad that 2012 has reached its bittersweet end.

It was a challenging year, on the personal front, for both the husband and myself: a bad year for friendships, a year of some very tough trials and of facing harsh truths about certain loved ones . . . focusing on the positives I'd say I may have lost a few illusions but I gained a lot of perspective. It was a year of testing my limits and finding that I still do okay. That things may overwhelm me at times but I stand strong enough to see them through. I learned a lot this past year.

Life tends to be wonderful and infuriating at the same time. A lot of great things have happened too: it was a rewarding year as parents, a year of big (and good) changes, being blessed with new friendships and many, many wonderful moments . Through all the tumultuousness food has been constant and consistent in its ability to make me feel calm and grounded. Whether I'm standing in my kitchen chopping vegetables to add to a steaming pot of soup, coercing egg-whites into shiny whiteness to make the perfect meringue cookies, rolling out discs of dough that sizzle on a hot, oiled griddle, or breathing in the aromas from the tray of warm, freshly baked banana muffins that I've just placed on a cooling rack: the soothing repetition of these rituals I perform as I move around my kitchen is a healing balm.

Increasingly, baking and cooking are the only things I really, really love to do. I can't always get in the kitchen for baking marathons any more but I'm trying to carve out the time to do so whenever I can - and to end the long silences on this blog. I have been hanging out on Instagram recently and some of the baking I do makes its way into my newsfeed there. Two of my blogger friends from the BWD group and I decided we would pick a random cookbook each month and bake/cook as many things as we wanted from it throughout that month. Whoever decides to blog about the experience is welcome to do so, but there is no compulsion. There are no other rules and the only requirement is that we post photos on instagram using the hashtag #inspiredkitchen . This challenge provides the perfect opportunity for me to go through my vast and ever-increasing collection of cookbooks. For December we picked 'Baking With Julia' by Dorie Greenspan. But more on that later.

For now I want to wish you a year full of  inspiring, wonderful, happy times. And I want to leave you with this chocolatey, airy but fudgy cake from The Cake Bible. It's the perfect cake to ring in the new year. I found a recipe link for you here. Happy 2013!

Homemade Oreos

A chocolate cookie is like a warm hug. It can say "I love you" like nothing else. And so I left the house last night with a big box of I love you's in my suitcase and a song in my heart. I'm seeing my best friends after more than two years and going back home after well over one year. . . Not even a 3.5 hour flight day and the ensuing 6 hours spent at the airport have dampened my spirit. I'm beyond excited to see them and elated at the prospect of getting a brief break from expatriate life.

In the years that we haven't met each other new babies have been born, older ones have grown and lives have really evolved. I still have a hard time imagining them in their new mommy roles because we've spent such pitifully little time together since we all had children and, in my case, went to live on a different continent altogether. There is so much to catch up on despite daily chats on whatsapp and frequent photo exchanges. "Friends for twenty-five years" sounds awesome and truly is. .. More sisters than friends, these two are my best critics, strongest supporters and confidantes. There's nothing I can't talk to them about and can always expect them to give me the best advice, soothe my aching soul. I love them more than words can describe.

I could catch a nap on the plane but am looking at the clock instead, and writing this post, too excited to sleep. An hour away. Tick, tock. And our brief interlude will begin.

One sleepy evening this past week I was browsing through my Instagram newsfeed and came across a photo of TKOs (Thomas Keller Oreo Cookies). Intrigued, I looked up the recipe online and was completely sold when I saw that these homemade 'oreos' consist of a white chocolate ganache sandwiched between two sablé cookies. There could not be a better homemade treat to take along for my friends. So I got started on a batch right away. As soon as the dough was ready I knew I finally nailed it - several frustrating attempts at making World Peace Cookies (my dough is invariably always crumbly and the logs fall apart when I slice them) had made me lose faith in myself when it came to sablés. Not any more! These cookies had the perfect, formerly elusive, sandy texture and the intense chocolate flavor I was looking for. Unfortunately I cannot eat dairy at present so dared only a small bite of the sablé with a hint of ganache so I cannot tell you how perfectly paired they are. But from the aromas in my kitchen and the stamp of approval from my little (almost) 5-yr old gourmande-in-training tells me these cookies are pretty awesome. And I can tell you, based on the tiny bite I took, that they are better than Oreos. Now if these aren't the embodiment of love, what is? You can find the recipe here.

Sunday Sweets: Almond and Chocolate Chunk Biscotti

There can never be such a thing as too much chocolate. And this choc-almond studded biscotti found no lack of contenders in my house. This was my very first attempt at making biscotti and is also the first recipe I've tried from the newest addition to my collection of cookbooks: Ready for Dessert by David Lebovitz. 

Ryan, a fellow-baker from BWD, suggested we start baking our way through another book and after much deliberation we decided on this new collection of recipes by David Lebovitz. We'll slowly go through each recipe in the book and anyone is welcome to join in. Details can be found here. 

Baking this biscotti turned out to be deceptively simple. I prepared ingredients for half the recipe, shaped the dough into one log and then placed it in the oven to bake for the first twenty minutes. It came out looking perfect. So far so good. But then, given the 90F+ heat, my hot kitchen and the concentration of chocolate in this recipe, I was faced with a gooey mess each time I cut into the log. There was melted chocolate all over the place and it made it completely impossible to get the thinner slices I was aiming for. 

Skeptical, and a little frustrated, I popped the slices in the oven for another 20 minutes and mentally prepared myself for the alternatively titled 'disasters in baking' blog post I was going to write about the whole experience. I needn't have worried because whatever they lacked in appearance was more than compensated by flavor. They were a tad bit sweet for me so I would either cut down the amount of sugar in the recipe or simply use bittersweet chocolate. I never expected my kids to care for biscotti so they surprised me by going through the whole batch pretty quickly and, like DL, taking some along to snack on during our very long flight the next day. 

This first recipe was chosen by Ryan and can be found on Page 216 of Ready for Dessert. Please hop over to Ryans' blog to check out her take on the biscotti. Next up we'll make Orange Cardamom Flan chosen by me. If you'd like to be part of our baking challenges, please drop us an email at sundayssweets at gmail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along!

Chocolate Fudgesicles

My kids' idea of summer vacation involves endless supplies of food and entertainment around the clock. Since I try to keep their snacks homemade, I've spent the past several days whipping up simple treats that will last them all week long. 

Making ice-cream is a lot of fun even though it gets a little labor-intensive without an ice-cream maker. These fudgesicles, though, were very easy to make and as chocolaty as promised. I found the recipe while browsing on Babble and made a test-batch with half the recipe. They were so well-received that I had to immediately make a second, larger, batch. 

I can kiss my diet goodbye because I do not understand the meaning of moderation lately & have had these for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yup, they're that good. 

Homemade Fudgesicles

barely adapted from the recipe on Babble.com

makes 6

1.5 cups heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp strong, brewed coffee (I used decaf)

a pinch of salt

8 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips

2 tsp vanilla extract 

Place the chocolate chips in a medium, heat-proof bowl. 

In a medium saucepan, heat the milk and cream over medium-low heat. Whisk in the cocoa, sugar, salt and coffee. Once the mixture starts steaming, remove it from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. 

Pour the mixture over the chocolate chips. Wait a minute for the chocolate to melt, then whisk till smooth. Pour into popsicle molds and freeze at least 4 hours. 

Baking With Dorie: Quintuple Chocolate Brownies

Five kinds of chocolate in a fudgelicious brownie. 

This is the gooiest, most chocolatey treat I've made in a while. Dense and so fudgy you need to chase these brownies down with a glass of cold milk. But I'll be honest. I don't like the white chocolate frosting and wish I had paid attention to my instincts and left it out. Maybe it's the quality of the white chocolate I used. Or maybe it's the fact that we're not a white-chocolate-loving family. 

But don't let me dissuade you. These brownies are good. Very, very good. Chewy & packed with chocolate flavor. I don't think I need to say a lot more to convince you what a great idea it is to bake these. 

For the recipe, please head over to Shahieda's blog Decadent Delectables, or to page 99 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan. Please visit the blogroll here to check out everyone else's posts. 

Next up, we're baking Rhubarb Cherry Cobbler, picked by Ryan. If you'd like to join our baking challenges, please drop me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us! 

Devils Food Cake with Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting

My sons' evolving preferences over the years have me confronting increasingly challenging trials in birthday cake-decorating. In fact this is the first year that I completely failed him on that account. It would have been so much easier to just pick up a cake from a bakery but I take birthday cakes very seriously and what I lack in decorating talent as well as punctuality, I make up for with the sheer determination to make my kids birthday cakes that they will remember throughout the year.

But despite my best intentions, I just couldn't deliver this time: there I was at 4 a.m., just having finished frosting a 2-layer 9x13" cake, struggling to 'draw' Ben 10 with tinted buttercream, and failing. Miserably. An hour, and several errors later, I gave up and scraped the offensive Ben 10 figure off, replacing it with candy cake decorations. I then dropped it off at the school, sending up a prayer that the cake itself would appeal to my picky sons' taste buds.

Once he got home from school, I was rewarded with the very rare compliment that 'everything about the cake was so, so delicious' as well as a request to make it again over the weekend. The second time around, I decided to keep it simple and made a 2-layer 9-inch cake. It took us a couple of days to eat through it, and it seemed that the flavors just intensified the longer this cake sat around in the fridge.

The cake recipe can be found on Gourmet here.

The brown sugar cream cheese frosting is a twist on the classic cream cheese frosting and is one of my favorites ways to frost cupcakes. It comes from Joy the Baker and it paired so well with the chocolate in the cake, that I may never use any other kind of frosting ever again!

Baking With Dorie: Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake

It is impossible to look through Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan and not stop to drool over the photos of this cake. A brownie base with salted peanuts and sticky, gooey, dripping caramel . . . it had my name all over it & so I was very happy to be able to pick the recipe for this weeks' Baking With Dorie challenge. 

It takes hardly any time to make the cake and it came out looking perfect, but it was cakier than the  super-moist, fudgy brownie I had been envisioning all along. It caved in while cooling, but Dorie already tells us to expect that it will. So, no surprises or panic attacks there.

Next up was the tricky part: making the Caramel. Needless to say, I've never made it from scratch before. Since I made this cake in a frightful hurry, at the eleventh hour, I completely forgot that I could have referred to David Lebovitz's post on how to make Caramel. And Elizabeth of Gluten-Free Baking 101 has added a wonderful step-by-step tutorial within her post this week - just in case you want to get some great visual tips on how to get it right.

Otherwise, Dorie's directions are very clear and guide you right through the process. The only thing was, my caramel took longer to cook than the 10 minutes she said it would. But that has mostly to do with the size of saucepan I used and how much heat I gave it. I really didn't want to burn the caramel since I had very little time to start from scratch all over again, so I watched it like a hawk for maybe 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I had fun doing the 'white plate test' every couple of minutes:

The fun part came next - mixing in the nuts and then pouring everything over the cake. Dorie recommends waiting till the caramel is completely cool before releasing the sides of the springform pan. But I just couldn't wait, because: 

a) I'm highly impatient

b) my kids were hovering around me like flies, wanting to poke their fingers into the cake that they just couldn't wait to eat (now I wonder where they get that from?)

c) I'm highly impatient. 

And this is what happens to impatient people who not only remove their cake from the pan but also slice it right away: 

Yup. Caramel Explosion. Never mind that it looks mouthwatering. 

Next time I'm going to have to listen to the wiser, saner Dorie and let things be. The wisdom in that would have been that the caramel would have set up a little, and some of it would have soaked through and made the cake very moist - almost fudgy. The next morning, this tasted somewhat like a chocolate-peanut version of a sticky-toffee pudding. Do I really need to say it was scrumptious!

One tip: Dorie suggests we don't dump the entire quantity of caramel over the cake and that we should be left with a lot more than we actually need. As usual she's spot on, so, don't be tempted. Less is definitely more as it will make your cake exceedingly sweet.

To check out what the other bakers did with this weeks' recipe, please check the blogroll here and here. Our next challenge, coming up on July 19, is the Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie, chosen by Elizabeth of Gluten-Free Baking 101. If you'd like to join the challenge, please drop me an email. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

You can find the recipe for this cake on pages 264-5 of Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Or you can find it right here after the jump:

Scooby Snacks - an experiment

Meet my 2-yr old daughter: She's loves "Soogie-Doogie" (Scooby Doo) & is crazy about our next door neighbors' dog, Charlie. 

Charlie deserves a special mention here because he is the stuff all bedtime stories, bribes and disciplinarian actions are made of: "finish your dinner & Charlie will come sit with you on the swing" or "Charlie thinks you look so pretty in that dress, please don't take it off" .. and "Ssh! Keep it down, Charlie's napping and we can't disturb him". 

Other than constantly trying to appease "Charlie-Doggie", much like Scooby & Shaggy, my little girl will do anything when bribed with food - especially the sweet kind. 

I try to keep the tendency in check, but a treat once in a while is okay. This week I wanted to do something fun so I searched online for ideas for a  'Scooby Snack'. All searches pointed to the recipe here.

I couldn't be sure if this recipe was actually for kids or meant for dogs. Walnut extract and ground herbal medicine? In a cookie? For kids? 

I don't think so. 

The base recipe sounded mostly like any other recipe for oatmeal cookies and so I decided to play around with it a little create my own version of a Scooby Snack. 

I have lost my sense of smell and taste (again!) so  had to rely on feedback from my 5-yr old. I followed the original recipe - substituting applesauce for the butter and adding hazelnut concentrated flavoring instead of walnut extract. The recipe didn't ask for any baking powder, but I added half a teaspoon, and added 1/4 cup of semi-sweet mini morsels. 

We made a test-batch of 5 cookies. The end result: So-so. 

My son said he could not taste any chocolate. So we went back, chopped up a bar of dark chocolate and mixed that into the batter. The second test batch received better reviews because of the additional chocolate. But I'm guessing, at best - these cookies are just okay. Not really outstanding in any way.

I will re-visit this recipe when I have more time. I'm sure there must be a way to improve it and don't regret having made it - it was a good way to divert the kids with a fun indoor activity while it rained this morning and they weren't able to go out to play. 

The next time around, I want to make a crispier cookie since that is how I always imagined Scooby's snacks to be. 

For now, here's the recipe (adapted from the original here):

Scooby Snack

2 cups, all purpose flour

1 cup quick cooking oatmeal

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup applesauce

2 eggs

1 tbsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp hazelnut flavoring (concentrated)

approx. 1/2 cup chocolate chips (I used 1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate mini morsels and a 100 g bar of dark chocolate, chopped )

Beat the applesauce, eggs, sugars and flavorings for a few minutes to blend. 

Add in the dry ingredients and blend well. This batter is very, very thick and you might want to add a tbsp or 2 of milk for ease in blending. I didn't, but I will try that next time. 

I scooped out and rolled 1/2 tbsp-sized balls, flattened a little and baked them for 6 minutes in my Bakery Express cookie mould (which is so good that it deserves a blog post dedicated to its review - I've been meaning to get to it and will soon). 

When baking in a regular oven, preheat to 350 and bake for 12  mins.

Dark Chocolate Dipped Apples (Magazine Mondays #1)

This is a really good twist on your regular candy apple. 

I made these for my kids several weeks ago, right before we moved. And since it was meant to be a submission for 'Magazine Mondays', I needed to locate the Heart Healthy magazine I got the inspiration for these apples from in the first place.  

No such luck. I packed the magazine away or threw it out? some time before we moved and, as of yet, I've been unable to find it. I finally located the recipe online on the Heart Healthy Living website.



I didn't add the nuts or cranberries because I didn't have any almonds and these were meant for the kids so I was pretty sure they would not at all like the addition of cranberries. I was glad I stuck to plain chocolate because the kids loved these apples and I can see many, many chocolate-and-chopped-almond-covered Gala apples in their future (and mine). 

The original recipe can be found here. 

If you want to go with plain chocolate: 

Wash and dry the apples and insert a wooden Popsicle stick into each after removing the stem. 

Melt dark chocolate in a double boiler. Dip the bottom of the apples in the chocolate, set on wax paper to cool for at least 20 mins in the refrigerator. 

Meanwhile, melt white chocolate in a small pan. Place in a small zipper bag (corner snipped off). Hold the apple upside down with the stick, drizzle  white chocolate over the dark chocolate. Place back on wax paper and let cool in the refrigerator for half an hour, or until the white chocolate sets.

Split Level Pudding: Baking with Dorie

This week's Baking With Dorie challenge was selected by Susi of Susi's Kochen und Backen. She chose Split Level Pudding which is a vanilla pudding that has been layered over ganache.  

I have never made pudding from scratch before, and I honestly expected something to go horribly wrong. Amongst many other doom-filled scenarios; I envisioned myself whisking away at a lumpy, stubborn mess that would refuse to relent. Or a slippery, slimy one that wouldn't set up after hours of refrigeration.

But my pudding was almost perfect. I am saying 'almost' only because, for the Ganache layer, I used Lindt's dark chocolate with 70% cocoa and somehow, the bitterness from the chocolate really stood out and didn't blend well with the flavor of the pudding itself.  

But that being said, this pudding does taste dreamy. Had I used semi-sweet chocolate chips instead; the pudding might have tasted even better.  

It is a little labor intensive because you first make the pudding in a saucepan and then blend it in a food-processor, returning to the saucepan yet again to cook the pudding till it thickens. Dorie recommends processing it one last time to ensure a uniformly smooth texture.

And the texture is smooth, though it firms up a little after refrigeration. The ganache layer didn't harden at all while the pudding was cooling in the fridge (I had assumed that it would), but you do have to work at digging it out. 

I still can't believe I made this wonderful pudding and am secretly very impressed with myself! I would make this again & again with other variations suggested by Dorie Greenspan and a twist that I've thought of myself. 

The recipe can be found on Pages 384-385 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home To Yours. Or on Susi's blog. If you would like to join the challenge, please email me at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us.

Brownie Love

I know I said just earlier today that I don't do the valentine thing. 

And I don't. 

I guess I've been bitten by the bug. Or maybe I simply needed an excuse to whip up some fudgy, chocolate  goodness. 

Either way, it's all good. 

Like my 5 yr old said this morning, "I know why you're always making stuff Mama - because it makes your hands happy". He's right. It makes my hands happy.
  

Cake Balls/Pops - Tips & Tricks

The tutorial by Pioneer Woman doesn't leave any gaps and is an excellent guide for making cake balls/cake pops. 

However, here are some things that I learned along the way which helped me: 

- If you use a recipe for a very moist cake, you don't need the equivalent of a can of frosting like Bakerella suggests. She uses a cake mix + 1 can of frosting. I didn't use either a mix or ready made frosting so all I needed was a couple of tablespoons of frosting per 9"x13" cake. 

Start by adding 2 tbsp of frosting at a time. Stop when it feels right: the cake should just come together in a moist (but not wet) dough-like ball. There shouldn't be any loose crumbs and it shouldn't fall apart. It should hold well together. 

- Use a melon-baller to get bite-sized cake pops. (I thought of this after I was done hand-rolling all of my not-quite-identically-sized 400 cake balls :P )

- It helps to refrigerate the cake balls overnight.Or at least a couple of hours.

- If you can't get candy melts or, quite simply, don't like the taste - use either ganache or melted chocolate for dipping. Both will work fine. Candy melts might give a smoother look, though.

- I am not as patient as Bakerella and so, even though she recommends dipping one cake ball at a time into a small bowl of melted, warm candy melts, I had to make 400 and needed to work faster. So I dipped 4-5 at a time in a large metal bowl. 

- I kept boiling up some water in a saucepan, taking it off the heat and placing my metal bowl on top of it while I worked. The steam from the hot water ensured that the chocolate wouldn't cool or thicken quickly while I worked. Therefore decreasing the number of times I had to heat it up between uses.

- Bakerella's technique of tapping the spoon against the side of the bowl is excellent - you get rid of any extra chocolate; ensuring a smoother cake ball. I started out doing it her way but then what I found easier was to use a tablespoon to take the cake ball out after dipping using my left hand, swirling it back and forth in the tablespoon (drips all the extra chocolate off) and then dropping it into a teaspoon (held in my right hand). I would then tap the teaspoon on the back of the tablespoon several times and plop the ball onto waxed paper. 

Does that sound confusing? I wish I could have taken photos to do a tutorial but seeing that both my hands were occupied, it wasn't really possible. 

I hope that helped. 

Now go ahead, give it a try and indulge yourself! 

Kenyan Chocolate Tea

I was 16 when I first discovered a box of this loose tea in a store and bought it on a whim, imagining that when I'd make it, it would taste very chocolaty; like a cross between hot chocolate and tea.  

Wrong.

It's just plain black tea with a very mild but definite hint of chocolate. I had no idea back then, how to brew this tea. And I still don't - I just wing it. But it didn't stop me from brewing a pot now and then, buying it each time I saw it on a shelf in a store and even begging a Kenyan colleague, years later, to send me a tin through anyone coming back from Kenya! 

 

It isn't that addictive. Seriously. I don't even know why I like it so much. And I've never known anyone (other than my Kenyan friend) who has even heard of it, let alone anyone who buys it. [btw, it never occurred to me to ask this person how to make this tea :P ]

Pain au Chocolat

I love pain au chocolat. 

It reminds me of solitary walks on cold winter days.

I love just walking around on my own. I do it less for fitness and more because it makes me feel good. In my early 20's when I lived away from home for a year, I used to walk out of necessity. I had to get to places and so I did a lot of walking which invariably led to a lot of thinking and self-analysis. Walking always clears my head and helps me stay calm and focused. 

In the course of all that walking, I used to stop over at a small bakery not far from where I lived. If I got there early enough in the morning, I could get myself some still-warm-and-fresh-from-the-oven heavenly smelling pain au chocolat. Flaky and crispy on the outside, soft in the middle with a center of warm, gooey chocolate. Such a rich treat, but so light and airy, you are deceived into believing otherwise.

It was the best I have ever had. Maybe because it was freshly baked. Maybe it was the kind of chocolate filling they used. Maybe because I was 21 and every experience, culinary or otherwise, seems awesome or exaggerated in hindsight. 

 

Recently watching Meryl Streep making chocolate croissants in 'It's complicated' has had me thinking about that pain au chocolat all week. Then  this blog post I came across here finally compelled me to give it a try and make my own.

Happy Anniversary

Ever since I came across the recipe for Cheesecake with salted butter caramel sauce on Tartelette's blog, I have been dreaming delicious dreams of this cake. And with an anniversary coming up, it seemed I had found the perfect moment to indulge my craving for what sounded and looked like a truly decadent dessert. 

But since I went and completely lost my sense of smell and taste (and no way was I going to make that cheesecake and not enjoy it), I had to settle for making something else. 

I didn't want to make anything too labor intensive since I'm not really up to it like I mentioned in my earlier post today. So, it had to be something simple ... and chocolaty - there's no such thing as too much chocolate, right? Maybe with a hint of orange in the frosting or otherwise...