From the category archives:

chocolate

Chocolate Brownie

March 2, 2011

Chocolate Brownies
Rich. Chocolate. Brownies.

I bet you’re smiling already.

I haven’t met a person who didn’t get happy at the very thought of brownies. You don’t need me to tell you that they’re made with dark chocolate, heaps of cocoa, and are supremely addictive. Just the fact that they’re brownies gives them a ticket to your bookmark folder.

These brownies are Nigel Slater’s rather modestly titled ‘My Very Good Chocolate Brownies’ from his book the Kitchen Diaries. I’ve had this book for a while, but didn’t bake from it until today. Every time I pulled it out, I’d get distracted by his conversational commentary, and the baking took a backseat. These also popularly known as 24-carat brownies, simply because there are no nuts or flavourings of any kind, just pure muddy brownies.

Chocolate Brownies

My verdict: I’d expected a shiny crust, but I didn’t get that, and they left me greasy-fingered, but not in a bad way. They taste even better after a day. But then, I think that all brownies do. Gooey, with a brittle crust, they are rather dark with all that cocoa powder.

I do love the brownies from Baked, but I think my brownie preference is changing. I can’t decide if I like the gooey kind or the cakey kind. Not the kind that’s cakey, dry, and rubbery with a million air pockets like the kind you get in most pastry shops in the city, just the kind that is cakey owing to being lighter in texture. Maybe you can help me by pointing me to your favourite brownie recipe?

Chocolate Brownies

Muddy Chocolate Brownie Recipe

Adapted from: Kitchen Diaries, Nigel Slater (USA | UK | India)
Yield: 16 big pieces.

Ingredients:

200g dark chocolate
60g flour
60g cocoa powder
½ tsp baking powder
250g butter
300g caster sugar
3 eggs + 1 egg yolk

Equipment:
9 inch/23cm square baking tin

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Line the baking tray with parchment.
In a small bowl, melt the chocolate over simmering water. Set aside.
Sift the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder together. Set aside.
In a bowl, mix the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, then add the eggs.
Stir in the melted chocolate until thoroughly incorporated, and then finally, fold in the flour, making sure that you don’t over mix the batter.
Pour it into the pan, and bake for 20-25 minutes. Test with a skewer- it should come out sticky with brownie clumped up in places, and not look like smooth, raw batter. If still underdone, switch off the oven, and pop it back in for another five minutes. Anything more than that will ruin it, because brownies continue to cook in all that trapped heat even after they’re pulled out of the oven.
Let it cool for at least an hour to get well defined pieces, or dive in with your spoon if patience isn’t one of your strongest points.

{ 35 comments }

Taking Snickers to the Next Level

February 26, 2011

Better than Snickers Squares

Buttery shortbread. Caramelised cashews. Dulce de leche. 70% dark chocolate.

Each, delicious on its own. But can you imagine what it’d be like when they all came together, layered one on top of another on top of another on top of another? You cannot. Even if you know the distinct taste of each of them, you cannot. Because what you’re going to taste when you bite into a bar of this layered goodness, is going to beat the sum of the parts. Like me, you will be left wondering why you didn’t double the recipe.

But you are lucky. You’ve already been warned.

Every now and then, I sit down and thumb through my cookbooks. Gawk at the beautiful photos, stick post-it notes, leave bookmarks between pages, and diligently note down in my planner the recipes I’m going to try that month. This recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s book (my baking bible) is one such recipe.

While the original recipe calls for peanuts, I used cashews because I like them a lot more. I also toasted them a little before caramelizing, to have a well-rounded, nutty flavour coming through. It’s important to use chocolate with high cacao content so that it balances the sugary sweet dulce de leche.

Want to still take it up a notch? Serve it with homemade vanilla ice cream.

Recipe for Homemade Snickers from scratch (with cashews!)

Yeild: 16 squares

Adapted from: Baking From My Home to Yours (USA | UK | India)

Shortbread

1 cup / 120g. flour

1/4th cup / 50g. caster sugar

2 tbsp icing sugar

1/2cup / 100g. butter

1 large egg yolk, beaten

Filling (caramelised nuts + dulce de leche)

1/3rd cup / 67g caster sugar

3 tbsp water

150g / 5 oz. roasted salted cashews (or peanuts, if you like)

1 – 1½ cups dulce de leche (making your own is SO easy)

Topping

7oz. / 200g dark chocolate

2 oz/ 60g butter

Equipment:

8 inch square pan
Silpat

Directions:

Butter an 8 inch square pan and preheat the oven to 350F/175C.
To make the shortcrust: mix all the dry ingredients of the shortcrust together, then add in the pieces of cold butter and combine together until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs. Pour the yolk over the mixture and bring the dough together, until it clumps to form a ball.
Press the dough into the baking pan and prick the dough with a fork. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until slightly golden on the edges. Let it cool completely before filling.
For the filling: Have a baking tray lined with parchment or a silpat ready on the side. In a saucepan, heat the sugar and water together until the sugar dissolves and begins to colour slightly. Toss the cashews and keep stirring to coat the nuts. Once it’s an amber colour, turn it out on the silpat and spread it to single layer. Cool the nuts to room temperature, and then break it up to smaller pieces for the filling. Keep some for sprinkling on the finished squares (but my dad gobbled them all down thinking they were leftovers). Once cool mix together the dulce de leche with the candied nuts and spread on the cooled shortbread.
For the chocolate topping: Melt the chocolate and butter together and pour it over the dulce de leche filling. Smoothen with a spatula. Refrigerate for 3 hours before slicing. It’s hard, but you gotta do it for those perfect squares.
At the end of the long three hour wait, cut it into 16 squares and wolf down.

{ 25 comments }

Passion Fruit Truffles

January 14, 2011

Passion Fruit Truffles

Passion fruit truffles.

Surely, when I talk about these you’re going to forget about the fact that I have posted after what seems like eons. Or, the fact that my replies to your emails have been slow and spotty. These passion fruit truffles have grown to become my latest obsession. And why not, it’s based on a Pierre Hermé recipe, no less. Only difference being, I used dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate.

I’ve made these truffles in the past few weeks more times than I can count. In fact, when I know I’m the only one eating it, I don’t even bother with shaping the truffles. I simply stick my spoon into the bowl of cold ganache and scrape it clean. They’re pretty fantastic with sliced strawberries, too.

Passion Fruit Truffles

In other news, I’m headed out to Italy this weekend. Italy! Pizza. Pasta. Parma ham. Olive oil tasting. Provolone cheese production. Cooking classes. Cheese tasting. Visit to the cheese farms. Gelato. And the icing on the cake – a room overlooking the famous courtyard from Romeo and Juliet in Verona! (Wheeeeeeee!) It’s a food and wine training program for a bunch of food writers organised by the European Union and the Italian Government, and I’m so thrilled to be a part of this contingent. If you have any recommendations, must-dos, must-eats in Italy, please let me know! Personal goal: Gain at least 5 kgs. pigging out.

Passion Fruit Truffles

Based on Recipe from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé (US | UK | India)

Yield: 24 truffles

200g dark chocolate (you can use milk chocolate or a combination of milk and dark, whatever you prefer)
80g passion fruit pulp, deseeded
10g cream
10g honey
15g butter
Cocoa powder for coating.

Add the chocolate to a steel mixing bowl and set aside.
In a saucepan, add the passion fruit pulp, cream and honey and bring it to a gentle simmer.
Pour this over the chocolate and stir it, until it all comes together – there should be no pieces of chocolate and the ganache should look thick and shiny.
Add the butter while still warm, and stir it until it has melted into the ganache, making it even shinier.
Refrigerate the ganache for 20-30 minutes.
Line a tray with foil and then spoon a teaspoon of the chilled ganache on it. Now, roll the irregular mass of chocolate ganache into a ball. Not too much, just enough for it to have a smooth surface area. Refrigerate it again for 10 minutes.
Next, sift a tablespoon of cocoa powder in a plate and roll the truffle balls in the cocoa powder. Toss the truffles in a sieve and shake of the excess cocoa powder.
Pop them into your mouth.

{ 24 comments }

Homemade Nutella with Nibs

November 29, 2010

Homemade Nutella with Nibs

Whats better than Nutella?
Homemade Nutella.

What’s better than Homemade Nutella?
Nutella make with additions of dark chocolate, Valrhona cocoa powder and roasted cacao nibs. Oh, yes.

Homemade Nutella with Nibs

I remember eating Nutella from the jar in college when I needed to study late into the night, hoping that the sugar will work its magic. While I still adore Nutella (clearly, because I have even categorised recipes on this blog based on that), I find them a tad too sweet to eat off the spoon. Not willing to give up that pleasure, I resorted to make Nutella at home with dark chocolate to balance the milk chocolate that goes into the jarred Nutella and did not add any additional sugar. This, my friends, must be heaven on a spoon.

Homemade Nutella with Nibs

When I was reading up recipes for homemade Nutella on the internet, I came across a bunch of them that has way too much icing sugar or used honey (and I’m pretty sure would taste nothing like Nutella!) so I just sat down and put together recipes starting with the ingredients I’d like to use. It tasted absolutely fantastic, but if I’m going to be calling it Nutella, I need to work a little more to attain that smooth texture.

Also, these make such wonderful gifts for the season in little jars!

Homemade Nutella with Nibs

Homemade Nutella

½ cup / 100g (approx.) hazelnuts, skinned and toasted
50g / 2oz. dark chocolate
50g / 2oz. milk chocolate
1 tbsp cocoa powder
½ a vanilla bean, split and scraped
1 tbsp cacao nibs
1 tbsp hazelnut oil (you could use any flavourless oil if you don’t have this at hand)

Grind the toasted hazelnuts in a food processor until thoroughly pulverised.
In a bowl set over simmering water, melt the dark chocolate and milk chocolate. Add the cocoa powder and vanilla bean innards. Mix until evenly incorporated.
Stir in the ground hazelnuts and cacao nibs.
Add a tablespoon of hazelnut oil to bring it all together.
Transfer to a sterilised jar and lick off the rest of the bowl when no one’s watching.

{ 24 comments }

3 years and Double Chocolate Truffle Brownies

September 23, 2010

Double Chocolate Truffle Brownies

Three years today. Three years of sugar, flour and oodles of butter.

Three years ago, I sat in front of a blank page typing my first words. There might be someone who’d probably want to listen to what I have to say, right? For the first few weeks the only comments I got were from friends and family. And then it happened. A stranger! Someone from the other side of the world! I was ecstatic. Since then a lot has happened. I quit my day job in an IT company, I worked at a bakery, I started my own catering service, and began writing and photographing freelance. I thank you for being with me to share the fun and calories. Thank you for your emails, and notes and surprises with the postman. You guys make the loveliest bunch of people.

I made some double chocolate truffle brownies today to give myself a pat on the back. It’s intensely chocolatey, it’s gooey and it has beautiful bits of white chocolate peeking through. But more importantly, it’s such an easy recipe. Everything’s ready in 30 minutes from start to finish (not counting the excruciating time spent waiting for it to cool). Just look at the glossy, gooey inside!

And now, for the fun part! I’m giving away a copy of a cute little book I adore called P opina Book of Baking and bunch of vanilla beans.

This is what you can get!

Popina + Vanilla

Just like the previous giveaway this one is open to readers from all over until the end of this month. Here is how you can enter:

Comment below letting me know something about you – your favourite spice and how you use it, what you’re baking next, your biggest baking disaster (mine was last week when I dropped a cake on the floor, minutes before it has to be sent out –boohoo), anything! I like stories.
Tweet about the giveaway (I just entered @purplefoodie’s giveaway for Popina book of Baking and Vanilla beans http://bit.ly/bV23m7 !)
Subscribe to the blog via email. (Those who are already subscribed by email, you’re entered!)

Note: Each give you an additional entry for the giveaway. Use all three ways, and you increase your chances of winning.

Double Chocolate Truffle Brownies

Adapted from: Popina Book of Baking (USA | UK | India)

Yield: 9 squares

Ingredients:

240g / 8.5oz dark chocolate
100g /3.5oz butter
3 eggs
125g / 4.5oz sugar
55g / 2o flour
70g /2.5oz white chocolate, chopped
cocoa powder, to dust

Equipment: A 7 inch square pan

Method:

Line the pan with parchment paper and preheat the oven to 150C/300F.
Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl set over simmering water. Stir until melted. Set aside.
In another bowl whisk together the eggs and sugar until light and frothy. Sift in the flour and fold into the mixture, making sure to incorporate all the flour (it loves to sink to the bottom and you might just miss it). Stir in the melted chocolate mixture, and then finally the chopped white chocolate.
Pour the batter in the prepared pan and bake for 15-17 minutes. The brownie should have a slight jiggle in the centre. It will continue to cook even after you’ve pulled it out of the oven. Keep an eye on your watch, overbaked brownies are a pretty bad thing.
Leave to cool completely. Dust with cocoa powder and cut into 9 squares.

{ 123 comments }

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