Double Chocolate Pudding

The first dessert I ever made entirely on my own when I was little was Jell-O Instant Chocolate Pudding. I used to mix the powder and milk together in a giant plastic lemonade pitcher, for some reason. This is the first time I have ever made “real” pudding from scratch — it is not much more difficult, and takes ten minutes max. Heat sugar, cocoa powder, cornstarch, and milk together until the mixture thickens and boils, add a bit of chopped chocolate and vanilla, and chill. As with my childhood instant pudding, the most difficult part is waiting three hours for it to chill! And pouring it evenly into the serving dish so there are no drips on the top, something I clearly failed at.

Presentation-wise, I decided it was time to apply the trend of serving cocktails in mason jars to desserts!

Vegan Cookies

I wanted to bring a dessert to a dinner party hosted by my fabulous vegan friend Katie last night, so yesterday I made my first foray into the world of vegan baking (except for one unintentional time, when I was dying to make chocolate chip cookies but realized I had neither butter nor eggs!). There were no vegan dessert recipes in any of the “regular” cookbooks I own. Many of the vegan dessert recipes I found online contained margarine and other processed dairy substitute ingredients that I wanted to try to avoid, but I ultimately found two recipes from the book Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar where the only “specialty” ingredient was almond milk (and I ended up using soy milk instead).

(1) Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows

The magical combination of chocolate and peanut butter immediately sold me on this recipe. It requires making the chocolate cookie batter and peanut butter filling separately. Then I spread out a large sheet of wax paper and rolled the peanut butter filling and the chocolate batter each into twenty-four small balls.

To assemble the cookies, I took a chocolate ball in my palm and pressed my thumb into the center to make an indentation. I filled the indentation with the peanut butter ball, pinched together the chocolate to close the seam around the peanut butter, and then re-rolled the ball to make it smooth on all sides. After I put the balls on a parchment-covered baking sheet, I gently flattened each into a disk with the bottom of a glass.

Just before they went into the oven

They taste almost like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!

(2) Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles

These cookies contain cayenne pepper and a lot of cinnamon, so they have a pleasant spicy kick without being overwhelming. The cookies are formed by rolling the dough into walnut-sized balls, and then pressing the ball into a small disk in a plate of sugar-cinnamon topping.

I love the professional-looking cracking on the tops. I realized from trial and error during the course of making these that the cracking only occurs if the disks are sufficiently thick. I pressed a few disks too thin, and they came out ugly and smooth on top, and were also too hard and crunchy, rather than chewy like the others.

I did notice that the vegan dough is very oily, which gets all over your hands, and doesn’t have quite the same consistency as dough made with butter and eggs. This is a small price to pay, however. Taste-wise, I don’t think you’d be able to tell that either of these cookies were dairy-free, and I would definitely make them again, even for a non-vegan crowd.

Homemade Granola

Because I eat yogurt with granola and fruit for breakfast almost every morning, I try to make my own yogurt and granola to minimize the amount of processed food I am eating. We make our own yogurt with organic 1% milk, and I have recently switched over to making my own granola. I use this recipe that I found online, and buy the necessary ingredients from the bulk bins at Rainbow Grocery. The recipe makes enough granola to last me about three weeks.

I make 2 changes to the cooking process: (1) I follow the suggestion of one of the commenters, and I bake at 275 degrees, stirring every seven minutes; and (2) I line the baking sheet with parchment paper, and then I simply slide the parchment sheet off of the pan and onto the cooling rack in order to allow the granola to cool. The parchment paper trick works very well to minimize the mess and prevent the granola from sticking to anything as it dries.

My other secret weapon is that I used delicious honey harvested by my uncle John from bees that he raises on his property. It is amazing!

Birthday Cupcakes

Manav’s birthday was last Monday. Because we were traveling on his actual birthday, I decided to make cupcakes a few days early. I bought a cake decorating set from Williams-Sonoma that contains reusable pastry bags and several different shaped tips, and was excited to try it out!

Pastry Bag! If only I knew how to use it...

I made 2 batches of different cupcakes in order to play around with piping on the frosting: devil’s food cupcakes with a chocolate fudgy frosting, and vanilla cupcakes with a classic vanilla buttercream frosting. I halved both recipes so I didn’t end up with one million cupcakes at the end.

Baking the cupcakes themselves was fairly simple. I followed a few tips that I found online when I poured the batter into the cups: I measured out the amount that I was putting in to at least make sure there was an equal amount of batter in each cup. I used my tablespoon measuring spoon and ended up using about 4 tablespoons per cupcake. I wiped off any batter that dripped on the baking pan so it wouldn’t burn, and I put a bit of water into each of the unused cups so they wouldn’t smoke.

Then I made both frostings. I used a mix of milk chocolate and bittersweet chocolate to make a fudgy chocolate frosting. The recipe said not to exceed 61% cacao, but I only had 70% Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate, so it turned out to be dark chocolate frosting, but still tasty. Then I made the vanilla buttercream frosting, and used the “writing” tip with the pastry bag to pipe words onto the chocolate-frosted cupcakes.

I have never used a pastry bag before, so the only “technique” I had was to hold the end of the bag with my right hand and try to squeeze evenly and use my left hand near the tip to direct the writing (I am left-handed). I think in the future, I could do a better job squeezing evenly.

With the vanilla cupcakes, I tried to experiment with using the different pastry tips. Some of them I couldn’t figure out how to use at all, like the flower petal one.

My favorite vanilla cupcake came from a suggestion from Bon Appetit to use the writing tip and pipe little dots all over the top:

I also liked this swirly one (“swirly” is, of course, the technical culinary term):

I had a lot of fun and can’t wait to do more decoration, but now realize that I probably need actual instruction to learn how to use all of the different tips. A YouTube video tutorial may have to suffice for now, but I am going to look into trying to find some kind of cake decorating class in the near future.

Happy Birthday, Manav! Thanks for giving me an excuse to try my hand at decoration!

Sisterly Baking: Banana-Oatmeal Bars with Chocolate Chunks and Pecans

My sister is in town visiting this week, so I roped her into doing some baking with me. She’s a natural, except when I asked her if she could butter and flour the pan, she asked me five minutes later how to “sugar” the pan. The bars would have been even sweeter!

We made banana-oatmeal bars with chocolate chunks, though which chocolate chips, rather than chocolate chunks. I think using chips rather than chunks was a good call, because bigger hunks of chocolate might have been a bit too much. The cookbook suggested these could also be eaten for breakfast. I was suspicious. Their health value is dubious: there are two sticks of butter, two and a half cups of sugar, and a bunch of chocolate chips in them. I have to say, however, the combination of the banana and oatmeal does lend them a breakfasty taste and the even illusion of healthfulness. Very tricky.

Unfortunately, these didn’t come out very visually appealing. I tried the sharp-knife-in-hot-water trick, but the edges are still all rough and torn up. I’m not sure if it’s because of the oats and pecans, or if I was too impatient and cut them too quickly or too soon. Only future trial and error will tell.

Old Fashioned Brownies: Almost a Disaster, But You Can’t Go Wrong with Chocolate, Butter & Eggs

I had planned on a baking an Apricot Crisp tonight with the several pounds of fresh apricots that I got at the farmer’s market this weekend, but the recipe called for quick cooking tapioca, which is not something I just have lying around. Unfortunately by the time we got around to going to the small grocery store downstairs from our apartment, it was closed! So I figured I would go with something my pantry could handle: classic brownies.

This is why true chefs cook mise en place. Upon starting, I realized that the recipe called for unsweetened chocolate, but I only had bittersweet chocolate. Okay, I thought, I will just reduce the amount of sugar by half a cup. This turned out to be a good thing, as when I went to put the sugar in, I realized I didn’t have enough sugar! I made up the difference with brown sugar. Finally, Bon Appetit also suggests that you line the brownie pan with aluminum foil, so when the brownies are cool, you can pick up the whole piece of foil and easily lift them from the pan. Of course, when I opened our box of aluminum foil, I saw that we didn’t have enough left to line the pan. While the brownies were cooking I was despairing that as of only my third attempt, I had already created a complete baking fail! I paced around the apartment and peeked into the oven every three minutes to see whether they were still rising despite my incompetence.

But then the timer dinged, and the magic of chocolate, butter, and eggs became apparent.

Who knows how they would have tasted with all the correct ingredients and correct proportions, but we ate them with milk, hot and gooey right out of the oven and I cannot complain. Manav kept saying he loved them because they tasted like flourless chocolate cake. I wasn’t sure how to take that because they do in fact contain flour, but I decided to roll with it.

One final useful tip from Bon Appetit: To get nice clean lines when cutting brownies, use a sharp, non-serrated knife, and dip the knife into hot water before each cut. It works very well, the edges of my cuts were smooth and precise.

Look at the clean lines!

Starting Out: Pound Cake Two Ways

I thought it made sense to begin my self-training at the very start, so I opened my Bon Appetit Desserts Cookbook to the very first recipe and made a classic pound cake.

I forgot to take a picture until Manav and I had already eaten half the loaf for breakfast! (A well-balanced meal to start out the day).

The next day, I tried a double chocolate pound cake, which turned out even better. I thought the crust of the classic pound cake turned out a little too thick and dry, so I cut about ten minutes off of the baking time for the double chocolate pound cake, and the crust turned out perfectly.

We brought both cakes to a party in Berkeley on Friday night and they were a big hit!

The only substitution I made to the recipes was using 1% milk instead of whole milk. I also use an electric whisk instead of an electric paddle mixer out of necessity, because I only have the former. I think that using the whisk instead of the regular mixer improved upon the recipe–I was pleased to get a few compliments that the cakes were particularly light and airy!