Throwback Post: Muse, Thy Name is Chocolate

Hello all! Time for a Christmas special throwback post! I got about 90% through writing this post back in June so I finished it up and now you get to enjoy a somewhat harrowing kitchen adventure. This time, we return to an oldie but a goodie: the Death by Chocolate cookbook. Do you even remember the last time I made a recipe from that cookbook? I can't either! But I know it was delicious! In fact, I've never made a bad recipe from that book. So, to reground my baking efforts, I return to my tried and true love: chocolate.

Ok, maybe it wasn't an effort to reground my baking efforts. Maybe it was more like I had to bake a birthday cake for my husband's birthday dinner and I stupidly handed him a random cookbook and said "Pick a cake!" So I suppose it's my own fault that he picked the Chocolate Espresso Fudge Cake from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. So there I was, the morning of the dinner with both our families and I had to a) bake a cake b) prepare for a chicken parm dinner for seven people and c) clean my house because it was a complete disaster mess. Oh yeah, did I mention that my husband picked a cake that takes around five hours to make? Ready, Set, Go!

At about 7:30 in the morning, I headed to my friendly neighborhood Big Y to pick up the ingredients. I checked my supplies in advance so I only needed a few things. Or so I thought. I started out with melting a bunch of chocolate in my double boiler. This cookbook always recommends covering the top of the double boiler with plastic wrap to melt the chocolate, which is a nice trick that I usually forget. Only problem is that sometimes the edges of the plastic wrap sort of melt onto the double boiler itself. Oops. Not too big a deal though - just a burn-y smell and a bigger pain to clean. While that was melting, I commenced creaming the butter and brown sugar. One problem. My brown sugar hardened. Like, a lot. I keep it in a big container with a brown sugar terra cotta bear that usually keeps it soft so I didn't even think about it. But there it was, in a hardened brick in my container. It was so hard, I couldn't even chip at it with a knife. Hmm.

Creative solution time! I wasn't about to go out to the store because that's nonsense. Instead, I covered my plastic container back up and started to run hot water over the sides to try to soften it away. While this was happening, I prepared my baking pans for the cake. The recipe wanted me to use melted butter to grease the pans and then flour the pans with cake flour. I was so pissed about the brown sugar that I was already ready to defy the recipe and just used Crisco. It took probably half the time to do that and I doubt it made any difference. So for the next half hour, I alternated heating the brown sugar and chipping pieces away with a spoon. When I finally got what I thought was enough brown sugar for the recipe, I put it in a plastic bag with a damp paper towel and microwaved it for about 30 seconds. This softened it up perfectly. Except I had totally only gotten enough for half of the brown sugar I needed. UGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! Recommencing heating brown sugar container.

So things didn't start well. But after I got all my brown sugar (and a sore hand), I creamed the sugar and butter, added the eggs, then added the melted chocolate and vanilla. Not too hard. I then had to boil a cup of water to add to the recipe (that's another pot to clean, fyi) and add the cake flour and other dry ingredients. Oh yeah, and sour cream. Can't forget that. That's the secret to moist cakes, after all! Put in pans, put in oven, bing, bang, boom. Wash tools and get to work on the next phase.

The next phase includes making a chocolate espresso buttercream and an espresso ganache. Halfway through making this recipe, I decided to read the margin notes. My, how I love this cookbook and the author who waxes poetic about everything. Here are some excerpts from the margin notes for this recipe: "My olfactory senses have been put in high gear by walking by espresso bars in Auckland, Berkeley, Paris, and especially in tiny alcoves on crowded streets in Florence and Palermo. It would be over-romanticizing to say that the best espresso is made in Italy [when has that ever stopped him from over-romanticizing???], but then again the Italians are known for romance....This is the buttercream from hell if you have to prepare it - but buttercream from heaven when you eat it!" I'm so glad I read this when I was halfway through making the buttercream.

The ganache part was super easy with the exception of the instant espresso powder. Because I didn't have any. I did however have instant coffee powder so I just used that and called it a day. The buttercream on the other hand, was a bit of a pain. Heat chocolate, easy. By the way, it's worth pointing out at this point that there was an awful lot of chocolate in this cake. 22 ounces. That's kind of crazy. Again, no espresso powder here so I had to substitute instant coffee powder. I feel a bit bad about that. Next step, beat a pound of butter in the mixer. Yes, a pound. Yes, butter was flying out of my mixer. Really wish I had gotten that bigger mixer. After beating the pound of butter, I transferred it to a bowl. Wait, really? I just dirtied my KitchenAid to beat butter? I didn't even add anything to it? This recipe is nonsense.

Then I had to heat egg whites and sugar in a double boiler. For those keeping track, this is now the fourth time I'm using my double boiler in this recipe. Then I had to gently whisk until the egg whites reached a temperature of 120 degrees. No, I didn't check. I just went with 3-5 minutes. Then I had to transfer to my KitchenAid bowl (which I had to clean the butter out of) and whip those egg whites into a frenzy before folding the butter, egg whites, and chocolate together. What a pain. But fine, whatever, time to assemble!

I was starting to feel the time pressure now but the assembly wasn't too bad. I was directed to assemble the cake inside a springform pan and to slice each cake in half so I would have four layers. Assembly was easy and I tossed the cake back into the fridge to chill.

Now the finishing touches. I had to frost the cake with the remaining buttercream and then pipe decoration with the remaining ganache and buttercream. It recommended alternating buttercream and ganache rings on the top of the cake which looked quite lovely. And then, drama. I had a nice cake stand that I put the cake on but in the process, the bottom of the springform pan (and hence the whole cake) nearly slid off the stand! I balanced it just in time though so we didn't have a smashed cake. (I'll tell you now though, the next day when I took the cake out of the fridge to cut another slice, the base of the stand actually cracked off and the cake went flying. Amazingly enough, I actually caught the cake. But I was really pissed that my cake stand broke.)

Anyway, this cake was very tasty and very rich and not too shabby in terms of decoration. But it sure was a headache. Next time, I pick the birthday dessert!

Oh, and I'm not going to blog about this one, but I made panda birthday cupcakes for my sister. Here's a few pictures because they're adorable.

Special and exciting Christmas desserts post coming soon! Merry Christmas everyone!

A Disney Moment: Meet the Robinsons

I did not care for this movie. Halfway through it, I had no idea what was going on. Since I'm writing this so late, I don't really remember anything about it (unfortunately) but I do remember it was my least favorite in this group. There's a time machine and a bowler hat and if I recall correctly, things get timey-wimey but in general, it just wasn't for me. Eh, nuff said. We all know we're just waiting for the final verdict on what the best Disney movie of all is so we'll just move it along. It's clearly not this one. 5/5.

A Disney Moment: Bolt
Ah, my love of cartoon dogs. It ends here with Bolt. I didn't like Bolt. This was my first time seeing Bolt and it was largely forgettable. I remember that Bolt thought he had super powers and I remember Penny missed Bolt and there was a big fire and a superbark. After that, I'm out. I remember thinking that it felt like a strange cross between Oliver and Company and Homeward Bound but lacked some of the charm. It just felt very predictable in terms of plot. I think that's why I liked Chicken Little better. But maybe I'm not really remembering correctly. Who knows? This one earned a 4/5 and thank goodness, we're coming to actual good movies again!

Team Truffle

Welcome back friends! I was a little slow on this blog post since I’ve already started my brand new, shiny, awesome job that currently comes with a 1.5 hour commute each way. In case you were wondering, that commute makes you very tired when you get home and you just don’t want to blog. But here I am because this was a super fun one. Before my grand departure from UConn, I decided that I wanted to make a treat to give my advisor. So, I decided that truffles would be perfect (mostly because I’ve been wanting to make truffles again) and I invited my friend over to help me with the truffles. Because it’s fun. Now, I could have just made one type of truffle and called it a day. But that’s not fun, nor is it insane. Instead we decided to make four types of truffles: Ebony and Ivory (which you may recall from the last time I made them), Oreo, Caramel, and Cookie Dough (which was my very first baking adventure that I blogged about!). Two repeats, two newbies, and a whole lot of chocolate! 

We started bright and early and spent a fair amount of time trying to decide on a good strategy. Then we gave up and just dove right in. Now it’s been a while so I may get the timeline wrong but I’ll give it a shot. I believe we started with the cookie dough ones so we could eat some cookie dough. Always a good plan. Plus they had to refrigerate for a while before being dipped in chocolate. I love how easy those cookie dough ones are. The only downside, of course, being the process of can opening. The recipe calls for condensed milk and I always forget how thick that is and try to use the poke-a-hole type of can opener instead of a legit one because I’m lazy. So yeah, it made a bit of a mess. But otherwise, it was super duper easy. We got our hands nice and dirty rolling them into balls but it was delicious so who cares? We threw them in the fridge and were amazed that with two people, the process only took about half an hour.

Oh! Now I remember how this actually went down! Ok, you see how I painted this lovely picture of us doing one thing at a time? That’s TOTALLY not how that happened. Before we started anything, we attacked the caramels. We had to unwrap about 26 of them and caramels (in case you didn’t already know) are kinda sticky. So that took a while. But the reason we did this first was because for the caramel truffles, we had to melt the caramels together with the chocolate, pour into a pan, refrigerate, then slice and roll into balls, and refrigerate again. Once all those suckers were unwrapped, I got to melting them on the stove while my friend started the cookie dough truffles. It sort of feels like we were both doing everything though because she needed help finding things in my kitchen (which is not organized logically at all) and I needed help with things like noticing that the caramels were practically boiling. Whoops. I get easily distracted. So the cookie dough and caramel ones wrapped at almost the same time. I have to compliment the author of the caramel recipe for the cool trick of lining a pan with plastic wrap, pouring the caramel mixture in and then just flipping them out after they cool for cutting and rolling. It was actually easy. Oh, I should mention that this recipe comes from my very first baking book, the Taste of Home Best Recipes 2010 cookbook. I missed using that book. It’s got such cute ideas.

For round two, we decided to divide and conquer. My friend was in charge of the Oreo truffles so I can’t really comment on those besides saying that they’re super delicious. I was in charge of the Ebony and Ivory truffles from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. If you recall, the last time I tried that one, my kitchen ended up covered in chocolate, I used the wrong chocolate, and I broke a whisk. I was endeavoring to avoid that this time. I was moderately successful. The first thing was that I actually used the correct type of chocolate. Then I did the whole boiling cream and using it to melt chocolate thing. This time I actually had metal bowls and didn’t have to use Pyrex bowls (which kinda don’t conduct heat). The cream melted the chocolate much better than last time but still needed a little help so I just put the bowls on top of the still-hot burners. I have an electric stove so the residual heat was just enough to finish the melting. I won’t get into the details of the timing of stirring, sitting, refrigerating, and all that because I already discussed that last time but suffice it to say that I set timers and was very careful to not screw it up. It went much better than last time but there was still the issue that on the last stir, the ebony part of the chocolate truffle got pretty hard and tried to break my whisk. I think the timing is just slightly off and maybe the last refrigeration period should be eliminated.

Anyway, at this point, my friend was done with her Oreo things for a bit so she helped me with rolling the truffles. Alas, same problem as last time. The white chocolate is still super oily and sticky and it made our hands a mess and made slightly deformed truffles. But we got it done pretty quickly and once they were rolled, we chucked them in cocoa so that hid the ugliness. Voila! Complete.

After this, there was more chocolate melting but it was all a bit of a blur. I was in charge of cutting the caramel truffles and rolling them into balls. However, I noticed that if I was moving too slowly, the balls started to flatten out. So I rushed through rolling them and tossed them in the fridge thinking that the coldness would slow the process. A few minutes later, I checked on them and they were all pretty flattened. My friend and I tried to reroll and fix them but we were just not quite fast enough and they ended up as disc-like truffles. Bad physics. Very bad physics.

The final step was dipping the cookie dough balls in chocolate. I was tired of melting chocolate so I pulled some ultimate ganache out of the freezer and melted that and dipped the cookie dough balls in that. And by “I”, I totally mean my friend who got really good at using spoons to dip the balls so that they looked neat and tidy and didn’t make a big mess.

So there we were, looking at four pans of truffles. They looked depressingly ugly to be honest. But we were proud that we made four types of truffles within about 3 hours.  The truffles still had some more refrigerating to go and my friend had to leave so I was in charge of packing them up and delivering the next day.

 Never underestimate the power of a good candy tin.

As ugly as these looked on the pans, they looked downright professional once they were put into candy tins in an assorted fashion. We could probably sell these for at least ten bucks a tin. So I put together a bunch of tins of truffles and they look lovely:

As far as the taste, shame on the baker because I still haven’t tried them all. I ate several of the Oreo ones (which are fantastic) and a few of the cookie dough ones (which are also pretty darn good but too sweet to eat more than one at a time). I just tonight tried one of the Ebony and Ivory ones. They're super delicious on the inside but I think that the cocoa on the outside is just a little bit too bitter. It'd be better with a thin milk chocolate coating I think. The inside is just top notch though. I haven’t touched the caramel ones. They’re still in my fridge. My fiancé tried them and informed me that the caramel ones are good but very hard because, duh, caramel. Shrug. I just haven’t been craving chocolate lately. I’ve been pawning them off to anyone I can think of including my chiropractor and friends that invited us over to dinner. Oh well. The moral of the story is this: Baking with friends is much easier and much more fun and you don’t have to be a professional to make some pretty professional-looking treats.

No Disney Moment this week. My sister and I are still trying to summon the will to watch Brother Bear. Once we do, I’ll have enough material for rankings I think. By the way, be on the lookout for another post really soon. It’ll be my last time baking in my kitchen before I move! Madness!

Piece of [Cheese]Cake

I finally had a good excuse to make a cheesecake! Yay! Last weekend, in celebration of my aunt's birthday, I decided to make a recipe from Death By Chocolate that I've been dying to make: White Chocolate Cheesecake. This is actually a fairly simple recipe but it takes quite a long time to make. So, for the party on Saturday evening, I started making this cheesecake on Thursday.

Once again, we have a tale of substitutions. I was supposed to make Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies to use for the crust. I didn't feel like making those cookies for the fourth time. Maybe some other time, but not now. So I decided to substitute a plain old graham cracker crust instead. There ended up being two problems with that. The first was that I needed 2.5 cups of graham cracker crumbs. I ended up only having slightly less than 2 cups. Hmm. I refused to go back out to the store but I found chocolate graham crackers in the cabinet. So, I figured, mixing them couldn't be bad, right? Right. So that's what I did. Not an insurmountable problem but a hurdle nonetheless.

The second, and slightly more significant, problem was that I was following the recipe in the book for the graham cracker to butter ratio. I suppose that crushed cookies have a very different quality compared to graham crackers because the recipe called for 3 tablespoons of butter. After melting the butter and mixing it in, the crumbs should have been able to be molded. Not a chance. I ended up using a whole stick of butter for my crust. Ultimately, I really should have looked for a different recipe for a crust instead of just guessing but it worked out fine in the end and I was too lazy to look up a recipe.

So, the crust goes into the freezer to chill while I make the filling. The filling is basically a ton of cream cheese, white chocolate, and eggs. After measuring out 1 3/4 lbs of cream cheese (and mixing it a little to soften it up better), I set up the chocolate in the double boiler to melt. A bit of heavy cream and EIGHTEEN ounces of white chocolate. That's a lot of chocolate. And, I learned my lesson about using good white chocolate instead of crappy white chocolate so I got some nice Ghirardelli's for the occasion. While that melted, I mixed up the cream cheese, sugar, and salt, followed by a half dozen eggs. Literally. I should point out that during all of this, I was trying to work as quickly as possible because it was already about 4 pm and the cheesecake takes about 7 hours to bake and cool. As it was, by my calculations, I'd still be dealing with this cheesecake at midnight. My calculations were correct.

Anyway, I poured in the melted chocolate and some vanilla extract and voila! That was all the ingredients. I poured the mixture into the springform pan and was ready to bake. Now check out these baking instructions: "Place a baking sheet with sides partially filled with 4 cups of hot water on the bottom rack of the oven. Place the springform pan on the center rack of the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 250° and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 225° and bake for 15 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 200°, and bake the cheesecake until the internal temperature of the cheesecake filling reaches 170°, about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Turn off the oven and allow the cheesecake to remain in the oven undisturbed for an additional 2 hours. Remove from the oven and cool at room temperature for 1 hour. Refrigerate the cheesecake for 12 hours (do not remove the cake from the pan)." Do you understand now why I was in such a hurry? I wanted this cheesecake to be perfect and it had to be pretty constantly monitored.

Sometime around midnight, I moved the cheesecake into the fridge to chill. My boyfriend and I both worriedly noted that the cake still seemed well, not liquidy, but definitely not as solid as one would expect from a cheesecake. I figured that maybe it would firm up in the fridge (since it would be hanging out in there for at least twelve hours).

It chilled longer than twelve hours because on Friday I went to the 2012 USA Curling National Tournament in Pennsylvania. Yes, that's right. I went to watch curling for a full day. And it was awesome. Don't judge.

On Saturday morning, there was one final step to complete. I had to coat the cake with some ganache. I had a ton of Ultimate Ganache in my freezer so I figured that I would substitute the Ultimate for the plain old Chocolate Ganache that the recipe called for. Plus, my crust was a lot less chocolatey than the recipe had specified so it couldn't hurt, right? So, I just have to re-melt my ultimate ganache and...oh yeah, crap, I left it in Connecticut. And I'm in New Jersey. Score. So what does the baker do? She makes more, of course! That process went smoothly so there wasn't much to tell.

Finally, it was time to cut and eat the cake. Sadly, I forgot to bring candles so we had to make do with a tealight placed on top of the cake. Nevertheless, we cut into it and...horror. You could see the fear in everyone's eyes. It did not, in fact, firm up as it chilled. The cheesecake ended up being more like a pudding in the middle than a cake. We passed slices around anyway and I dove right in for a taste. And it was delicious. I mean, really heavenly good. I ate two slices. And you all know that I don't really have a sweet tooth. So pudding or not, the cake was a hit because the taste was so good. My theories on the consistency include a) the huge amount of melted white chocolate just makes it that way and b) my mom's oven temperatures aren't correct. But here's a couple pictures:

A couple of notes: First, I could have used some more graham cracker crust because (as you can see) it didn't make it all the way up the sides of the whole cake. Second, I was supposed to top the cake with white chocolate curls. That didn't happen because I'm lazy and because I didn't have a block of white chocolate with which to make the white chocolate curls. Lastly, on some of my more recent projects: my mom and great aunt adored the pignoli cookies and said they were perfect. That's good because I hated them. There was consensus that the Martha snickerdoodles were better, though the JoC ones weren't bad. And, the highlight of my week: after eating a couple of snickerdoodles at pre-colloquium tea, one of the professors exclaimed that the cookies were not i.i.d. and discussed with another professor whether they were mixture normal or stratified cookies. If you get that, you're a nerd, and you have my pity.

A Disney Moment: The Rescuers
Here we go with a couple of awful movies. The Rescuers had a couple of fundamental flaws and generally was just sort of...there. Nothing exceptional. Nothing to make you remember it. Certainly nothing to warrant a sequel (unless the purpose of the sequel is to give the protagonists a second chance to get it right). The premise isn't bad: a UN of mice rescuing kids. The main problem though, is that you don't even really see the girl they're rescuing until over halfway through the movie. So you can never develop an emotional attachment to her. And then, when you do see her, she comes up with her own plan for her rescue. She doesn't even need the mice! She did everything herself and she was occasionally just really dumb.

Also, why are all the animals the same size??? The mouse, rabbit, owl, turtle, and mole are all exactly the same size! That doesn't make any sense! That fact annoyed me quite a bit so this movie ranks a 4/5.

Double Chocolate Chip Showdown

Welcome back! Today I continued powering through the Baking with the Cake Boss cookbook. The second recipe in the book is for Double Chocolate Chip cookies. I was excited to try these and compare them to the Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies in the Death By Chocolate cookbook. Those cookies were basically magic so I was having trouble imagining a cookie being any better than those. So let's begin and find out, shall we? 

Step one was the usual creaming of butter, sugar, and brown sugar. Have I ever mentioned how much I love the smell of brown sugar? Seriously, the second I open the bag, I start to smile. It's pretty much like crack to me. Happy happy brown sugar. Yes, I know I'm crazy, moving on. Step two was adding the cocoa, extra-large egg, and vanilla extract. Buddy mentions the importance of using good cocoa in recipes. He specifies a couple brands I've never heard of but said that it's really where you should spend your money to get good quality. So, I decided to splurge and get Ghirardelli cocoa (which was the only option in the store besides Hershey's). I also now have extra-large eggs so I didn't even need to substitute for those. So far so good.  There was a slight glitch with the vanilla today. I used up the last of one of those tiny bottles of vanilla extract so I had to open up the big bottle that I have. I'm not sure why but it didn't pour nicely. I was holding it upside down and it was barely drizzling out. It was very odd. And yes, I did remove the protective paper stuff from the top of the bottle. This may continue to be a mystery to be explored further at a later date. 

Oh! I totally forgot to mention something super important! Santa brought me a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas!!! So this was my first chance to use my brand new, super shiny, totally awesome KitchenAid mixer. The MixMaster has been retired to the basement. It served me admirably these past few months but it was time for something more advanced for some more advanced baking. I was especially excited that the KitchenAid has a big whisk for whipping egg whites and a dough hook. The possibilities are endless! 

Ok, geekout over. The next step was to add two tablespoons of whole milk. Yeah, I definitely don't have whole milk. I'm more of a skim milk sort of person. However, here is what Buddy has to say on the subject: "If you have a preference for low- or reduced-fat milk, I respect that, but I encourage you to use whole milk in your baking if at all possible. The final product will taste better, and that fat helps bind the ingredients." Duly noted. That does make some sense so maybe in the future I'll consider buying some whole milk for my baking. Any thoughts from my readers on that one? Is it like the difference between salted and unsalted butter where I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter? 

Next step was adding the flour and baking powder which was uneventful. Finally, just added some semisweet chocolate chips and was ready to go with the baking. I was instructed to break the dough into small pieces and roll them in my hands to make meatball-size balls. Really? Meatball size? Big meatballs or little meatballs? What are non-Italians supposed to do with such a direction? Additionally, is it really necessary to roll them into balls so that my hands are a mess? Couldn't I have just used a spoon to measure out the cookies? So many questions! Now, the recipe was supposed to yield 24 cookies. I strongly disagreed with that assessment. I made 37 cookies instead. If I had made 24 cookies, they would have been gigantic and that would have been silly. 

Bake until flat and hot. Wait, really? Bake until HOT? That is perhaps one of the stupidest directions I've ever read in a cookbook besides "Do not overbake." Of course they're going to be hot, they're in an oven! Also, the cookies did not entirely flatten out. Which makes me wonder how they would have cooked if I had them made them the prescribed size. Plus, I was instructed to "not leave in the oven for more than 15 minutes, no matter what." Cake Boss is a little bossy. Anywho, I tried one and I think they were actually a little bit underbaked (so I left the second batch in more than 15 minutes and screw the directions!). I'm going to declare that they're not quite as good as the Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies. They're a bit more cakey and are pretty sweet whereas the Deep Dark cookies were more, well, deep and dark in flavor. As far as looks go, they look like Double Chocolate Chip cookies. See for yourself: 

Critical Reception: 

I haven't gotten a lot of feedback on the butter cookies. I still think they're delicious. Not that many people ate them. One person said that these were good but the butterscotch cookies were still the best cookies he has ever had. Ever. Which I consider to be a high compliment so happy!

A Disney Moment: Sleeping Beauty

Onward to the next group of 5 films! This grouping includes Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats. In a somewhat controversial decision, I will be ranking Sleeping Beauty as a 2/5. However, I will say that Sleeping Beauty ranks a 1/5 in beauty of animation. It really is a beautiful film. Here's some of my other random thoughts: 

The fairies are not the brightest. Seriously, hide the princess through all of her birthday! Lie about when her birthday is so that you don't have to use magic to make a birthday cake! Don't let her wander off alone on her birthday! Anything! Yes, yes, I know that without these poor choices, we wouldn't have a movie but it still bugged me. My sister and I (but mostly my sister) were also bothered by the prince's disproportionate hands. Otherwise, the prince was much better animated than other princes but his hands were way too big for his tiny arms. I also didn't really care for the time that was spent on the kings of the two kingdoms chatting. Ok, those were the negatives. 

There were many positives though. I like the personalities of the faires. I think that for the brief times that we see Aurora and the prince, they are good characters. The music is awesome. I like Once Upon a Dream, the other choral pieces were kind of forgettable, and the adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty score fits well and is beautiful. Tchaikovsky is the shit. I could listen to his music all day. Let's see, what else? Oh, Maleficient is absolutely fantastic. She is terrifying to an epic proportion, and not just when she's a dragon either. I love her character design. She puts the evil queen in Snow White to shame in terms of pure evil. So overall, an excellent movie and very very close to a number one ranking but the couple of negatives brought it down just a hair. 

A Foray Into Creativity

This week's double dose of baking is brought to you by wanting to share cookies with friends (and, of course, viewers like you). I'm going to visit a friend this weekend and wanted to bring him some cookies that I made but it seems that I have none left at all in my possession. Also, my office is out of emergency "My God, why are my students' Minitab answers so wrong?" cookies. So I wanted to make something easy but delicious and at the same time not make the same thing twice. Well, the Death By Chocolate cookbook comes to my rescue again. Recall I made the Absolutely Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies a few weeks ago. They were delicious, beloved by all, and are a good traveling cookie. But obviously, I couldn't make the same thing again. So I decided to add some twists to the original recipe. The first twist is that I've had about two cups of dark chocolate chips in my cupboard for a few weeks and want to get rid of them. The recipe calls for 3 cups of semi sweet chocolate chips (which I totally skimped on last time) so I will substitute two of those cups with dark chocolate chips. I literally have no idea how this will turn out but I figure more chocolate can't be a bad thing, right?

Speaking of more chocolate, the second modification I'm making actually involves a separate recipe. The cookie recipe notes that if you're feeling ambitious, you can dip the cookies in some chocolate ganache. Hmm, apparently this blog doesn't recognize ganache as a real word. That's annoying. Well, ganache is real (is properly spelled) and is delicious. The cookbook points out that there are "several ganache recipes to choose from" but when I checked there were only two. Liars. Two doesn't qualify as several. Everybody knows that several is generally more than three! Regardless, I needed to decide between the Semi-Sweet Chocolate Ganache and the Ultimate Chocolate Ganache. I'm still laughing at the fact that I just presented that as if there was a choice to be made. I'm already making Absolutely Extra Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies (the Extra because of the dark chocolate chips which should make the cookies even more deep dark) so I might as well take the next logical step to make them the ULTIMATE ABSOLUTELY EXTRA DEEP DARK CHOCOLATE FUDGE cookies. Or maybe we'll just call them Chocolate Coma Cookies. Or how about Chocolate Insanity Cookies? Perhaps Friggin' Chocolately Cookies? I'll keep thinking on what to call these things.

So, this being the 2nd time that I'm making this basic recipe, I got a little lazy. But only lazy in the most practical of senses, I promise. For instance, I did not sift together the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda like last time. Way too silly. I also knew that I should get the chocolate melting first so that I wouldn't be stalled halfway through the recipe waiting for chocolate to melt. I'm learning! This was a very smooth recipe with one (hopefully) small exception. I kinda ran out of brown sugar. I was only about a tablespoon short in a recipe that calls for a cup and a half of brown sugar so I'm hoping it's not too big a deal. I know baking is an exact science and I even googled brown sugar substitutes but as I don't have any molasses, I was kinda stuck. And there was no way I was going out in the pouring rain to get ingredients. No way. So, let's all hope they turn out ok, shall we?

As I was baking the cookies (they take quite a while), I got started on the Ultimate Chocolate Ganache. By that, I just mean that I measured out all the ingredients and got stuff ready to go because ganache takes approximately 5 minutes to make. I did take a moment to marvel though at all of the chocolate going into this recipe. I decided to cut the recipe in half since I don't really think I need a quart of ganache in my life at the particular moment in time. After some super difficult division, the recipe called for 3 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, 2 ounces of white chocolate, and 6 ounces of semisweet chocolate. It just looked like so much chocolate.

Oh, and while I'm waiting for the cookies to bake, allow me to share this gem from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. "Why an ultimate ganache? Why drive an automobile capable of going 120 miles per hour when the speed limit does not exceed 65 miles per hour? The answer is that when you need it -- it's there. Quite simply, this is a supernal food. Just imagine a mountain cabin, a mellow fire, chilled Iron Horse Blanc de Blancs, and great big California strawberries to dip into a bowl of slightly warm ultimate ganache." Ummmm...what? The first time I read that it just boggled my mind. I want to make fun of it so badly but the words won't quite come. No wait, yes they will. There is never a need to go 120 miles per hour. Ever. It's unsafe, you crazy drivers. Next, while I'm loving the idea of strawberries dipped in ultimate ganache, the author seems to have an oddly specific scenario in mind that seems to imply that there is someone else in that mountain cabin. Or at least I hope so. Otherwise, it just feels kinda sad. All of these recipes have little "chef's touch" sections that are filled with practical and helpful tips and occasional anecdotes about where the recipe comes from but I'm pretty surprised that this particular chef's touch made it past the editor. That's all I wanted to say on that but dear readers, feel free to jump in with your own thoughts on this mysterious passage in a cookbook.

Woot! Ganache time! Ganache is actually quite easy. It's just boiling sugar, butter, and heavy cream and then pouring the boiling mixture over the three types of chocolate I have in a bowl. Although, the recipe did recommend a stainless steel bowl which, of course, I did not have. I figured Pyrex would suffice. Considering I haven't heard any glass explode yet, I think we're good. After letting it sit for 5 minutes I stirred until smooth and now I have to let it cool to room temperature before dipping the cookies. I guess I could've planned this a little better but I was watching Big Bang Theory. Which is NOT crappy tv and I'm only now starting to get into the show. Which is odd because I'm a huge dork. And I get almost all of their nerd jokes. See why I needed a hobby?

Ok, so the ganache is cool enough now and I began methodically dipping the cookies into the ganache. I figured that covering half the cookie would be most reasonable and would look cute. So I got into a nice rhythm of moving the cookies from the cooling rack to the wax paper covered cooling rack by way of bowl of ganache. At one point I got a little ganache on my knuckle and gave it a taste. Oh. My. God. I just wanted to curl up and die because nothing could possibly ever taste that good again. Anyway, I got so into the rhythm of this that I actually missed the first 10 minutes of Grey's Anatomy (there's your bad tv!) which isn't exactly a disaster but it was more that I found the whole process so relaxing that I completely lost track of time. Not a bad way to spend an evening. Now I'm just waiting for the ganache to harden before I can taste one. Waiting is painful. Oh, and I had way too much ganache, of course, so now the extra is sitting in a plastic container in my fridge just waiting for a rainy day.

I grabbed a cookie out of the fridge before the ganache even really finished hardening because it's getting close to my bedtime and I really wanted to try one of these cookies tonight. Holy. Crap. It's the most amazing cookie I've ever tasted. The ganache works perfectly with the extremely ultimately chocolatey whatever cookie and I don't even quite know how to describe it. Maybe I'm just a chocolate fiend but these cookies are incredible. I actually want another one but I know I probably shouldn't since I have to sleep in order to teach my students how to do statistics tomorrow but wow. I know my gushing over these cookies is probably getting annoying so I'll wrap it up. Here's a picture of the Incredible Amazing Ultimately Absolutely Deepest Dark Chocolate Fudge Cookies:

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any residual drooling that may or may not land on readers' keyboards.


Critical Reception:
Well. Apparently nobody had the same objections to the cheesecake triangles that I did. I brought the triangles to the stat dept, stored them in the fridge because I was there a bit early, went to my office to do some work, and almost immediately was asked where the cheesecake triangles were. Not that I minded being interrupted, mind you, because my probability homework is way hard this week but I was impressed that someone discovered what treat I had made within a couple hours of my blog post going up. So when it was colloquium tea time, I took the cheesecake triangles out of the fridge and people immediately jumped on them. I estimate I brought about 50 triangles with me (they were somewhat small). Even with a smaller than usual pre-colloquium socializing group, I'd estimate about 20 of the triangles were gone by the time the talk actually started. By the way, that means people were eating more than one. I saw someone eat 4 of them. Which is fine, I'm happy people were enjoying them. After the talk, I walked back to the conference room thinking there'd be at least 20 or so left and I'd have to put them in the fridge with a sign telling people to eat them or something. I walked in and my jaw actually dropped as I looked at a completely empty plate. I believe I actually exclaimed "No way!" and made the couple of people working in the conference room stare at me like I was crazy (which I'm not denying). So I'm going to go ahead and assume that people liked them because they're gone now! A+ for the cheesecake triangles.

So. Much. Chocolate.

So, after an almost chocolate-less week of baking, I decided it was time to delve into the Death By Chocolate cookbook.  This book is home to the recipe for the Death By Chocolate cake (on a week when I'm too busy to bake you'll get a whole post recapping that experience) but it also has several other delicious confections available for consumption.  This week I decided to make the "Absolutely Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge Cookies".  Hang on, let me wipe the drool off my keyboard.

The recipe itself is for Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies but the "absolutely" part comes in when you add chocolate chips to the cookies. This cookbook is excellent and extremely specific which is good for a person like me.  However, I needed to disregard some of the instructions out of necessity.  For example, the recipe recommended using a paddle attachment for my mixer.  Silly cookbook thinking I have tools. Alas, I have no paddle attachment so I just mixed the good ol' fashioned way.  With an electric mixer. Moving on...

The recipe also called for Nestle's Unsweetened Cocoa. The author even goes so far as to add a note saying "I have specified Nestle cocoa for this recipe because it delivers the deep dark chocolate flavor implied by the name of the cookie." Wow. Apparently using any other cocoa will not deliver the deep dark chocolate flavor! So I went to my friendly neighborhood Big Y and surprise, surprise, they did not carry Nestle's Unsweetened Cocoa.  I had to settle for Hershey's and make sub par cookies that do not deliver the deep dark chocolate flavor. Sigh.

The Death By Chocolate cookbook also had some precious instructions that included sifting the flour, salt, baking soda, and cocoa onto wax paper.  Fortunately, my lovely mother bought me a sifter when she came to visit last weekend so I was able to successfully sift.  I also learned that there is apparently a difference when a recipe specifies "sifted flour" vs. "flour, sifted" (it has to do with when you measure the flour).  So, being the good cookbook minion that I am, I sifted those ingredients onto wax paper and you know what? I don't think it changed anything and it made a mess.  However, it did look kinda cool creating a white flour volcano which was then coated in cocoa and then sprinkled with the white of baking soda and salt. Also, sifting salt: completely pointless. It just goes through the sifter.

After sifting like a fiend, I had to melt a bunch of chocolate in my double boiler.  Oh, you want me to have a double boiler, Mr. Cookbook Author? Silly. I used the same technique as the last time I melted chocolate, namely, putting a few inches of water in a big bowl and microwaving it until the water is really hot and then putting a smaller bowl of chocolate inside the big bowl.  This was effective but it took a while so I think the water wasn't quite hot enough.  Oh well, the chocolate melted eventually. After that, things were fairly uneventful. The recipe did call for 3 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips (for the "absolutely" part, remember) but all I had left was about 1 cup of semi-sweet mini morsels.  Whoops.  So I suppose I didn't fully achieve the "absolutely" part and maybe just came as far as "almost surely".  That was a math/stat joke for anyone who's as big a nerd as me. I'm going to go hang my head in shame for a moment.

::shame::

Ok, I'm back. The last step after combining the ingredients is (obviously) baking. I was supposed to drop 2 level tablespoons of batter per cookie onto the baking sheet.  I obediently did that and realized that only about 9 cookies were going to fit on the pan.  Which meant I'd be baking for the next 4 hours or so. Also, those cookies were huge.  Methinks one shouldn't consume that much chocolate in one cookie so after the first batch I made normal people sized cookies.  Following about 2 and a half hours of baking (each batch took 18 minutes and I only have one baking sheet), I got to consume my creation.  So. Freaking. Good. I love these cookies.  I will probably love them more heated up with a little vanilla ice cream on top (something I plan on enjoying later) but I highly recommend this cookie recipe to anyone who loves chocolate. Yay! So here's a picture of my completed cookies:

Critical Reception:
The opinions on my watermelon slice cookies from last time were as I expected. People thought they were adorable but weren't really inclined to eat more than one.  They definitely needed more flavor but nobody seemed to dislike them and I got compliments on the cookies.  I also got asked by some professors if I need to be given more work to do. Whoops.