Triple Dark Chocolate Cookies

Let me just say from the beginning that these are the chocolatiest (most chocolate-y?) cookies that I’ve ever baked. That alone should get you excited. But they’re also easy to make (no creaming butter required) and– for me at least– use standard pantry ingredients. And did I mention they use three kinds of chocolate?

I adapted the recipe slightly from Smitten Kitchen, just because I never have unsweetened chocolate on hand but *always* have a Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bar of 72% bittersweet chocolate. Also, because my cookie scoop was slightly larger than her recommended cookie size, mine ended up bigger than hers– something I can only approve of!

These are rich, delicious, and packed full of chocolate– perfect for eating with a cold glass of milk. I am absolutely adding them to my “make again whenever possible” list!

Dark Chocolate Bread Pudding

During a recent visit to the King Arthur Flour bakery in Vermont I purchased a loaf of challah, fully intending to pull pieces off of it for the next several hours and devour most of the loaf that way. Isn’t that the best way to eat fresh bread? Sadly, I ended up getting distracted and by the time I got back to my loaf it was partly stale and didn’t lend itself well to nibbling on.

However, stale bread is still good for plenty of things– not least of which is bread pudding. Not just any bread pudding– chocolate bread pudding. DARK chocolate bread pudding, which makes it that much more decadent. I pulled this recipe from King Arthur Flour’s own website and have been eating the results for breakfast for the past week. Superb.

Dark Chocolate Bread Pudding (from King Arthur Flour)

• 6 1/2 cups bread cubes from a 1-lb loaf of challah or brioche
• 1 1/2 cups dark chocolate, chopped or in chips
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 3 cups milk or half & half
• 6 large eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. In a lightly buttered 9×13″ pan, combine bread cubes with 1 cup of the chopped chocolate.

2. In a small saucepan, combine remaining chocolate with sugar, cocoa, and 1 1/2 cups of the milk or half and half. Cook over low heat until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth.

3. Remove from heat and add remaining dairy. Then whisk in eggs, salt, and vanilla.

4. Pour the mixture over the bread cubes and let it soak in for about 30 minutes.

5. In the meantime, preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

6. When the custard has soaked in, bake for 45-50 minutes. Remove from oven and let it cool for about 10 minutes before serving.

 

Chocolate Peanut Butter Stuffed Cookies

So the first time I made these, it was a snowy day. A very snowy day, as evidenced by the closing of schools and offices everywhere and the piles of snow accumulating on all windows, roofs, and visible scenery (not to mention blowing horizontally through the air). And what does one do on a snow day? Bake, of course!

I know that I often re-post Smitten Kitchen’s recipes, mostly only slightly revised, but this time I’m just going to refer you to her page directly for the recipe for these fabulous cookies. Why, you ask? Because I didn’t really change the recipe much, plus my photos turned out terribly and didn’t add anything to the explanatory process that wasn’t already clearly set out in her photos. It hardly seems worth it when the only thing I did to alter the recipe was use extra-crunchy peanut butter instead of creamy. To be fair, I had to use a bit *more* peanut butter and a splash of milk to make up for the lack of moisture caused by the inclusion of peanut chunks, but that was about it.

I got 24 cookies out of this recipe, using a level mini-cookie-scoop (just over a teaspoon) to scoop the peanut butter filling, and then dividing up the chocolate dough into 24 pieces of about 30g each. I baked them for exactly 10 minutes and they came out perfectly– don’t worry about underbaking!

Anyway, these are good. Very good. My peanut butter/chocolate loving husband proclaimed them to be excellent. They’re best slightly warm, but straight out of the freezer is a close second. Either way, you’ll want a tall glass of milk to go along with them.

Mocha Macarons

I had a bunch of egg whites left over from my almond cake adventures, so rather than let them go to waste I decided to make a batch of macarons. After considering a few flavor options based on my pantry contents, I settled on coffee– partly because I had instant espresso powder on hand, and partly because I also had all the ingredients for a basic buttercream filling, which would lend itself well to the flavor profile (as opposed to needing specialty fruit preserves or making a caramel sauce from scratch).

Luckily for me, my local Target recently started carrying King Arthur Flour almond meal at a very reasonable price, so I didn’t have to settle for the Trader Joe’s stuff (which isn’t blanched and so has tiny bits of almond skin in it) or go searching for sliced blanched almonds to pulverize on my own. Despite the rainy weather, my tried-and-true macaron recipe didn’t fail me and I didn’t get cracked tops or misshapen macarons– I love this recipe.

While the shells were cooling I whipped up a coffee-flavored buttercream, but decided at the last minute to beat in some melted semisweet chocolate, both for flavor and for a slightly firmer texture. To finish off the macarons in style, I dusted cocoa over the tops, covering half of the macaron with a sheet of paper to get a nice sharp line. The cocoa mostly stayed put, though I had to be careful not to stack the macarons and mess up the design. They looked very impressive when I was done.

The result was delicious, and this recipe will definitely go into my “save” box at home!

Creamy Chocolate Frosting

This frosting really is fantastic– it’s light and creamy, silky and smooth, and it has a nicely chocolate-y flavor without being cloying.

Unlike my favorite Vanilla Frosting, which has a thickened flour/cornstarch base sweetened with granulated sugar, this frosting uses powdered sugar for sweetness; however, it avoids the underlying grittiness of powdered sugar frostings by dissolving the powdered sugar in a cocoa slurry made with boiling water. The result is a perfectly smooth frosting without a trace of grit– plus, the water itself cuts the butteriness of the frosting and allows it to whip up into a light and fluffy mass that’s perfect for spreading over a cake. I really just can’t say enough wonderful things about this frosting, so go ahead and make it for your next cake– I promise you won’t be sorry.

Chocolate-Orange Ricotta Cupcakes

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about these before– these are some of my very favorite cupcakes. Cupcakes that are soft and warm and full of chocolate; cupcakes that contrast the rich creaminess of ricotta with the slight bitterness of good marmalade; cupcakes that one of my coworkers has dubbed “the best cupcakes in the world.” And you can have them out of the oven and ready to eat in an hour.

The base of the recipe is from a lovely blog I read, Orangette, but I’ve tweaked it just a bit to make it a little more decadent (though you’ll still need to go out and buy ricotta). The result is fantastic– if you’ve ever daydreamed about crossing a fresh cannoli with warm chocolate cake, this is what you’d get. They’re wonderful as-is, but if you ever wanted to gild the lily, you could top them with a thin drizzle of chocolate ganache, and watch your dinner guests go into a chocolate coma!

Chocolate Orange Crinkle Cookies

For Christmas this year I promised my daughter that we would bake cookies for Santa Claus. Of course she wanted to get really hands-on about it, so I had to choose a recipe that was easy to make and easy to handle, even for kids. Enter the chocolate crinkle cookie. I’d never made them before, but I’d eaten plenty and they were delicious– and the “rolling in sugar” step looked like something kids would really enjoy!

However, recipes seemed to fall into two categories– those with butter and those with oil. How to choose? Ordinarily I would be butter all the way, because it just tastes better in a cookie. On the other hand, oil would make the dough a lot easier to make (no softening and creaming of butter), and the cookies would likely stay moist longer. I decided to go for an oil-based recipe.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Icebox Cake

Since my husband is a huge fan of peanut butter and chocolate, I always try to make him a peanut butter and chocolate cake for his birthday. So when I saw this one on Smitten Kitchen, especially once I realized it used my favorite chocolate cookie recipe as a base, I had to make it.

I really followed Deb’s recipe almost exactly (I increased the peanut butter cream recipe to use a whole pint of cream instead of 1 1/2 cups), so I’m not going to bother reproducing it here– just follow this link! But here are some photos of the process so you can see how it works!

The finished cake is wonderful– light and creamy, yet still rich and decadent. And there’s something particularly indulgent about sliding your fork down through each distinct layer and feeling just the slightest resistance before the softened wafers give way, one by one. The peanut butter works nicely with the dark chocolate, though I still think this would be amazing using whipped cream spiked with Kahlua. I’ll have to give it a try sometime.

Planet Cookies

I recently co-hosted a baby shower for a friend of mine, who was expecting a baby boy. Seeing as she and her husband are huge Star Wars fans, we decided to make the shower space-themed. Of course I was in charge of desserts, and one of my contributions was this batch of planet cookies.

I started off with my favorite chocolate cutout cookie recipe, which I cut into circles of varying sizes and baked. Then I made a batch of my cream cheese fondant and tinted it yellow, blue, green, and red.

Chocolate Blueberry Pudding

It’s become kind of a family tradition to go peach picking every summer, since my preschooler is fully capable of devouring up to four peaches a day and adores picking fruit of all kinds. However, due to an early frost this year the entire local peach crop was destroyed, so we decided to go blueberry picking instead. She had a great time, eating them right off the bush and “looking out for bears.” (because we’ve read Blueberries for Sal)

Once we arrived home with our giant 5-lb bucket of blueberries, I was informed by my daughter that we would be making pudding. Blueberry pudding. With chocolate. I’d never really heard of a chocolate blueberry pudding before, but hey, we had five pounds of berries, we could afford to give it a shot. I decided to go really simple, with a basic cornstarch-thickened pudding poured over whole blueberries– I could’ve made an egg-yolk-thickened custard with real chocolate and a berry coulis, but we’re talking about a four-year-old here, she wasn’t going to appreciate the finer details and would probably prefer the basic dessert.