St. Patrick's Day Desserts

I was hoping to have a new St. Patrick’s Day-themed recipe for you before the 17th.  However, with a quick-yet-outrageous trip to Los Angeles earlier this week in addition to furiously cranking out a round of CocoaRoar truffles for St. Paddy’s Day, I haven’t had time to explore anything new in the kitchen. My chocolate tempering machine is purring away in the background as I type, and as I wait for it to melt a pound of chocolate into a beautiful glossy pool so I can dip the last few hundred truffles, I thought I’d re-share a few St. Patrick’s Day ideas from previous entries.  Of course you may just want to spend tomorrow in your favorite Irish pub drinking Guinness or green beer.  But here are a few fun holiday-themed dessert ideas, should you need to balance out your beer and pub food intake.

This Black&White Guinness Float tastes like the most sophisticated milkshake you could ever hope to have. Despite its velvety dark appearance, Guinness stout is surprisingly light and frothy, making it a natural pairing with ice cream, and this beer float plays up both the deep chocolate notes and the creamy quality of the Guinness.  Sign me up, please.

The Guinness Gingerbread Cake is still one of the best cakes to ever come out of my kitchen, which I originally made for Sylvia’s birthday bash two years ago. (Happy birthday, Syl!) The cake is fragrant with spices (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, and even a little dry mustard for heat!), deepened with Guinness for complexity, and the flavors all come together beautifully with a vanilla cream cheese frosting.  

 

Ottolenghi's Clementine and Almond Syrup Cake With Chocolate Glaze

Today is my beloved grandmother’s 100th birthday!!!  Yes, you read that correctly, and while I’ve never had the opportunity to wish anyone a “happy 100th” before, I couldn’t be more delighted to say it to my extraordinary grandma today.  In honor of this major milestone, I’m sharing the Clementine Almond Cake with Chocolate Glaze I recently made for her.

On my family visit in California last month, we had an early celebration exactly one month before Grandma hit this remarkable triple-digit age.  I needed an easy but special cake recipe for her, for I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could on that last day of my trip.  I wanted to talk with her, looking at photos together and playing my violin for her rather than slaving away in the kitchen making some elaborate creation.  This Clementine Almond Cake from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook perfectly fit the bill.

As Grandma herself described it after the first bite, “It’s worth living to nearly one hundred to have a cake like this!” This cake may be only a single layer in form, but you definitely taste multiple layers of flavor with each bite.  Grated clementine zest infuses the almond-flour cake with fragrant citrus, while clementine syrup poured over the still-warm cake adds another level of edible sunshine. 

Chile-Cinnamon Hot Chocolate

Happy New Year!  Well, technically it’s January 4^th, so allow me to wish you a Happy 1/4/14!  I really like the symmetry of that number and I’ve been writing it all day in as many forms as I can. I’m happy to be home at Kitchen Fiddler again, as it’s been an extremely eventful three months since my last entry here, but that will be for another post. I’ve just come off an intense round of CocoaRoar truffles so you’d think I’d be sick of chocolate by now, but astonishingly, I’m not.  In fact, I’m here to talk about hot chocolate—Chile-Cinnamon Hot Chocolate, to be exact.

The new year promptly started off with several inches of snow, and I was glad to hibernate at home those two days.  There is nothing more comforting than being safely tucked inside during a snowstorm, wrapped in a blanket while watching favorite movies and drinking huge mugs of steaming hot chocolate topped with floating islands of whipped cream.  When that hot chocolate has an extra kick from the spicy addition of chile powder and the whipped cream is flecked with cinnamon, so much the better.

I rarely find myself making regular B-flat hot chocolate.  I almost always doctor it up in some way, either by spiking it with various liqueurs or infusing the whipped cream with flavors beyond the norm.  Sometimes I transpose my favorite truffle flavors to hot chocolate form, as in my Cardamom Hot Chocolate with Rose-infused Whipped Cream.  Tonight’s chile-cinnamon hot chocolate is also a riff on my popular spicy truffle, one I haven’t made in a while but have been craving recently.

Heavenly Flourless Chocolate Cake With Rose Whipped Cream and Raspberries

It takes very little to prompt me into celebration mode with my friends.  In addition to birthday festivities, I am always ready to rejoice over creative milestones, finding new jobs and fantastic new apartments, not to mention new loves in one’s life.  Whether it happened to me or to one of my friends, I’ll also happily mark the anniversaries of any of these events with an appropriate beverage, no matter how many years ago the original event was.  A bottle of bubbly lends a particularly festive note to any occasion, but the more significant celebrations call for cake.  Especially when we're talking about a four-layer Flourless Chocolate Cake with Rose Whipped Cream and Fresh Raspberries.

I’m salivating again just looking at this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I made this heavenly chocolate beauty last week for my 17-year anniversary of moving to New York City.  June Fourth was the very significant day in 1996 when I arrived in town with nothing but a violin, a suitcase of clothes, less than $300 in my bank account, and the invitation to crash on a friend’s couch for the summer. (Thank you forever for that, Lara!) I knew very few people and had no employment prospects lined up, but I knew that I had to stay no matter what it took.  I felt I was truly HOME for the first time in my life. 

New York is undeniably an amazing city, pulsing with a vibrant energy all its own.  I have had creative opportunities while living here that I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined once upon a time, and I am forever grateful. But it is the amazing friends who have come into my orbit throughout these past 17 years who have truly made my life so indelibly rich.  This colorful cast of characters has filled my heart with laughter and great joy, and how could I not throw a party for at least a handful of them each June 4th?

Matcha Green Tea Truffles

My Cocoa Roar truffle kitchen closes up shop after Valentine’s Day until Thanksgiving each year. It makes sense to go on hiatus during the warmer months, not only for a whole slew of practical purposes but also in the interest of the chocolatier’s sanity. However, the response to this year’s Valentine’s truffles was so overwhelmingly positive that I decided to ride that momentum with a round of St. Patrick’s Day truffles.   How could I possibly deny my chocoholic customers, after all?

Many enthusiastically put in their two cents about which flavors I should do, and it was unanimously agreed that several flavors should be appropriately boozy. Guinness! Jameson! A green crème de menthe! Guinness again! Bailey’s! One friend said quite frankly, “I think you should just make whatever you want, and we’ll buy them!” 

Mini trial batches: Guinness bittersweet ganache and
swirly green tea&white chocolate ganache

I couldn’t resist doing the obvious flavors such as Bailey’s and Guinness for St Patrick’s, but I also wanted to do a token green truffle for the occasion. I figured that matcha green tea powder would fit the bill, naturally tinting the white chocolate a beautiful green without any artificial coloring. And it worked like a dream.

Salt-and-Pepper Cocoa Shortbread Cookies

I’ve been very excited to share these Salt-and-Pepper Cocoa Shortbread Cookies with you. I meant to post this in time for Valentine’s Day, knowing it would be a fabulous treat to make for your loved ones. However, I was up to my eyeballs making Valentine’s truffles for all of my CocoaRoar customers, so I’m only getting around to this now. I’m sorry. But these cookies are so marvelous that I think you’ll want to make them year-round anyway.

I have a confession to make. By the time I got through making the recipe to photograph it for the blog, there almost weren’t any cookies left to show for my efforts. I don’t mean that I snarfed most of the cookies as soon as they came out of the oven. They nearly didn’t get BAKED, for the raw dough was that good.

(Another confession: this is certainly not the first time I’ve had this happen with a batch of shortbread cookie dough. I admit I have a problem.) 

Buttery with a fine sandy texture, these tender cookies melt in your mouth. Velvety cocoa makes these shortbreads dark as midnight while a generous hit of sea salt intensifies the chocolate flavor, creating the ideal juxtaposition of salty-and-sweet. And don’t be shy about adding the freshly ground pepper, for it adds a beguiling flavor note that makes your taste buds sit up and pay attention. 

The Black Pearl Cake

Allow me to introduce you to The Black Pearl Cake. Isn’t it a beauty?

I was not a kid who wanted the same cake for her birthday each year. From the age of ten, I began using my birthday as an opportunity to try out the most elaborate and decadent new dessert to catch my eye in the previous months, but I have people in my life who make the same annual request when it comes to their birthday cake. Jorge has eyes only for my Frozen Ginger Key Lime Pie every year since he first encountered it several years ago, and Rob will have no other birthday carrot cake than mine. Cenovia, who appreciates a great black-and-white in all forms (cake, cookie, milkshake, cat, etc.), has proven consistent in asking for my Black Pearl Cake for several years in a row. I was more than happy to oblige this request for her birthday dinner last week.

This particular study in black-and-white is inspired by one of the exotic chocolate bars from Vosges Chocolates. Their popular Black Pearl Bar is 55% bittersweet chocolate that gets its kick from both ginger and wasabi plus a little crunch from black sesame seeds. This flavor combination doesn’t strike me as unusual now, having experienced chocolate paired with all sorts of wild ingredients over the years, but it seemed very daring when I first made its acquaintance in 2003.

Monkey Cake, No Joke

When you have a friend who has devoted an entire wall of his living room to photos and postcards of monkeys and apes of every variety—not to mention a hanging display of more stuffed chimps and gorillas than you could possibly count—it only makes sense that you should make him a birthday cake like this:

I personally have a thing for lions myself, but my dear friend Jorge truly loves all creatures in the simian family. In fact, he is the only person I know who, in all honesty, has claimed a serious need to “finally organize my monkeys this year.” No joke. His monkey wall is truly beyond the scope of what my camera lens could capture without switching it to a panorama setting. However, this photo does give you a slight indication of what’s going on.

I mean, really. With a wall like this, how could I NOT make him a banana cake with chocolate frosting, complete with cutout little ears and a sweet monkey face? Come on.

Birthday Cake Week

It’s Birthday Week for the Little Chef and me, and it should surprise nobody that I have spent a lot of this birthday week baking decadent cakes. But lest you think that everything that comes out of this fiddler’s kitchen is a starry-eyed triumph, I must disabuse you of that notion. I do try to share my most successful dishes with you on this blog, presenting them at their most photogenic whenever possible, but sometimes my best efforts are a total flop. While my baking efforts haven’t been exactly unmitigated disasters this week, I do know that my kitchen rhythm is just OFF. I’ve been making stupid mistakes in my baking, such as forgetting to add key ingredients to the batter, only to realize the omission after the pans are in the oven. The perfectionist in me is smacking her head against the wall, but the chocolate/whipped cream/caramel-loving side of me is still pretty happy.

The Little Chef’s birthday was first, and we got very excited looking through some of the hilarious posts on Cake Wrecks, the website devoted to professionally decorated cakes gone horribly wrong. We were inspired to try our hand at decorating, and with two little Wilton cake decorating tips and some disposable icing bags, we were ready for action. I made a basic buttercream and we practiced on a piece of waxed paper while the cake was in the oven.

Writing with icing is harder than I thought it would be, but we both started to get the hang of it. I was impressed with Mac’s icing-printing, and I found that my icing-cursive resembles my good little 5th grade schoolgirl handwriting.

We both enjoyed making icing dots. I created a small lattice, and then we played tic-tac-toe. (The Little Chef won.)

Chocolate-Raspberry Bars To Blow Your Mind

Today is your lucky day for I am about to share one of my all-time favorite recipes with you. These Chocolate-Raspberry Bars are nothing short of divine, and you’ll be grateful to have a trick like this up your culinary sleeve. To give you an idea of the powerful effect this dessert can have, a magician friend of mine was once so blown away by this that he actually divulged the secret to one of his card tricks in exchange for this recipe. Since magicians never reveal their secrets, you have to appreciate the enormity of this.

They are ridiculously easy to make but the pay-off is huge. Chocolate and butter are melted together and blended with raspberry jam. Eggs and sugar are whipped into a billowy cloud, and the tiniest bit of sifted flour and baking powder give more structure to the batter. The chocolate-raspberry goodness is gently folded into the egg mixture before being baked in a square pan for 45 minutes. The final texture is somewhere in between that of a dense flourless chocolate cake and a fudgy brownie, and you could certainly enjoy it straight from the pan without any embellishment. But when the finished cake is covered with a raspberry-laced chocolate glaze and topped with fresh berries, you may be tempted to reveal your deepest secrets to the person who serves this to you.

 

 

Chocolate Chunk Cookies With The Little Chef

A Recipe For A Very Happy Afternoon With A Little Chef

Step One: When your 8-year-old nephew Mac (aka The Little Chef) is staying with you all week and keeps begging you to bake something together, it helps if you have a great recipe to start with. The chocolate chip cookie recipe in David Lebovitz’s mouth-watering new book, Ready For Dessert, became our new BFF this week.

Step Two: Make sure you have all the ingredients on hand and at the correct temperature. The butter will be pliable once it softens to room temperature, though you can quickly get the eggs to room temp by placing them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes. Your brown sugar should also be the soft consistency of warm sand so that you can easily pack it into the measuring cup.

However, our brown sugar was spectacularly rock-hard and might have done serious damage had we thrown it at something. If I were a microwave-owner, I could have easily softened the block of sugar by nuking it for a few seconds. But since I am not, the Little Chef and I employed a series of questionable techniques to get that sugar to the right consistency and packed into the measuring cup. We grated the sugar-rock on a box grater (not very efficient), and we placed it in a Ziploc bag and swung it against the edge of the counter (fun, but also not so efficient). We also smashed it into larger bits with a hammer (getting better) and finally resorted to pulverizing those rocky bits in a food processor. By the time we finally ended up with a packed cup of light brown sugar, we might as well have run out to the corner deli for a fresh box, but Mac and I laughed a lot more by doing it this way. (We also avoided having to take twelve flights of stairs on a day the elevator was being repaired in my building!)

Step Three: Give your Little Chef a chance to show off his measuring and whisking skills. Bribe him with extra chocolate pieces if he can keep most of the dry ingredients in the bowl and off the counter, especially if he tends to whisk dry ingredients together quite vigorously as a rule.

Black Magic Cake

Today is my mom’s birthday, and if I were in California today, I would most likely be baking her a chocolate cake right now. Most of the time I can't imagine living anywhere outside of New York, but it always feels weird to me not being there to celebrate my parents' birthdays with them in person, especially since I love birthdays so much and have always been the cake-baker in the family. Since we’re on opposite coasts right now, the least I can do is post a recipe for Black Magic Cake in my mom's honor.

Black Magic Cake is a simple two-bowl affair, so easy that even a kid could make it, which is why this recipe came to be one of the very first cakes in my repertoire years ago. You sift all the dry ingredients together into one bowl, mix the wet ingredients in another bowl, then combine everything and bake the batter in a greased 13-x-9-inch pan. That’s it. The recipe only calls for cocoa powder, not melted chocolate, and the addition of brewed coffee intensifies the chocolate flavor. This foolproof cake was a great way to start my baking career once upon a time.

The 2009 CocoaRoar Report

Whew...

After a whirlwind December, I am now sitting in my quiet clean apartment, taking stock of the past month. The CocoaRoar factory has been dismantled, my cleaning angels have worked their magic, and I’m daydreaming about all the savory dishes I’m going to enjoy cooking in these next weeks. But before that happens, I wanted to thank you all for your great support and chocolate enthusiasm this month!

Last year I enjoyed typing up the CocoaRoar Report for you, and I felt compelled to do the same thing this year. Here are a few photos from these past weeks, and once again, I present to you The Twelve Days of Christmas a la CocoaRoar.

TWELVE Favorite Movies Playing In The Background. I had fun raiding my own personal movie collection and picking out a dozen fun films to keep me going as I truffled my way through the month: L.A. Story, Chicago, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Victor/Victoria, What’s Up Doc?, Quiz Show, Hannah and Her Sisters, Little Miss Sunshine, Cabaret, Waking Ned Devine, The Graduate, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, of course.

ELEVEN Meyer Lemons. I love taking advantage of these seasonal smooth-skinned beauties, finely grating their floral peel and squeezing their juices into a luxurious white chocolate ganache. This irresistible citrus-flecked truffle has beguiled even the most hardcore white-chocolate haters, and some have even gone so far as to proclaim it their favorite of the six flavors!

TEN-Times-Thirty Pieces of Golden Raffia Ribbon. I did everything I could to prepare the packaging materials, including lining all the boxes with leopard tissue paper and precutting 300 pieces of ribbon to the exact length required. This was definitely a time-saver once I was in the middle of the chocolate trenches.

On The Chocolate Homestretch

Greetings from the CocoaRoar factory!  I must apologize for neglecting my dear Kitchen Fiddler readers in these past two weeks, but I'm finding it difficult to do much as my hands are semi-permanently covered in chocolate these days.  That can actually be a lot of fun, but I don't recommend blogging or doing anything else near your computer if you happen to find yourself in a similar chocolatey state.

  

It makes sense that my hands would be perpetually chocolate-covered this month since i had to fill all of these red boxes with my homemade truffles before Christmas.  The boxes were stacked 4-deep on my shelf two weeks ago, about 300 boxes total.  But as that stack has diminished considerably, I'm racing towards the finish line of the CocoaRoar Christmas '09 season with only five dozen more orders to fill in the next two days.  I think I'm going to make it.

Louise and Her Chocolate Factory

It should surprise no one that my favorite childhood book was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Right from my very first reading of it at age six, I was transported into a magical world, one where a chocolate river churned by waterfall ran through the heart of it while chocolate delights beyond my wildest dreams waited at every turn. I was always disappointed in the Halloween loot I collected each year, thinking that none of it ever held a candle to the scrumdiddliumptious chocolate I imagined that Mr. Wonka created for children and adults all over. I used to have dreams about winning a golden ticket to that chocolate factory, as well as dreams in which I was capable of creating chocolate wonders of my own that made people swoon.

Sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. In my 17 years of serious cocoa-based experimentation, I can say with confidence that I’ve made more than a few swoon-worthy chocolate creations by now. My apartment is certainly not big, and my kitchen lacks adequate storage and counter space. But I’ve managed to create my own little chocolate factory in here, regardless, and I’ve just begun my third Christmas season of CocoaRoar truffles.

You can create your own chocolate factory too. First of all, you’ll need some chocolate. Lots of it. I happen to have FIFTY-SIX pounds worth of Valrhona bittersweet chocolate in varying percentages of cocoa in my kitchen right now, as well as some Callebaut white chocolate too. (I hope that will be enough to get me through this month.)

Amaretto Truffles For A New Season

I’m very happy that the new concert season has finally swung into full tilt. After a quiet summer, it’s been a treat to reconnect and make music again with so many friends and colleagues whom I hadn’t seen since May. What cracks me up is how many times I’ve been asked the same three questions in rapid succession: “How was your summer? How’s CocoaRoar? When will you make more truffles?!” I guess I’m not the only person who often has chocolate on the brain!

Since chocolate is highly temperature-sensitive which makes it too difficult to work with in warm weather, I take an extended break from chocolate-making in the summers, but I think it’s time for me to spend some consistent time in the CocoaRoar kitchen again. (Okay, you all know I don’t have a separate kitchen for my little chocolate truffle side business, but a girl can dream, right?) Granted, I only make truffles around specific holidays—partly in order to avoid burn-out and also because I need time to be a violinist—but CocoaRoar has been on hiatus ever since February and I’ve missed it. 

If You Don't Have An Ice Cream Maker

I am having serious ice cream cravings lately. It is summer after all, and while I can certainly appreciate what Haagen-Dazs or Ciao Bella have to offer, even the best store-bought ice cream pales in comparison to that which is freshly homemade. It is probably a very good thing that I don’t have an ice cream maker, for I would be tempted to make ice cream all the time, in which case I might as well just tape it straight to my hips.

I also don’t have room for such a contraption. My baking sheets live in the broiler when I’m not using them, while my stock pots and grill pan have taken up residence directly above in the oven. My cupboards are chock-a-block full, and I store many of my specialty baking items in the living room closet, a space which is surprisingly well organized, if not stuffed to within an inch of its life. I do make room in my kitchen for a chocolate tempering machine for CocoaRoar purposes, but I can't justify the real estate required for an ice cream maker, no matter how much I'd love to have one.

Rococo Variations

I have a few swoon-inducing bars of Rococo chocolate in my possession right now. I’m afraid this may make you horribly jealous of me, for if you’ve ever had the good fortune to experience this exquisite chocolate from London, you definitely would be green with envy and might actually come banging on my door, shamelessly begging me to share my chocolate with you. This is some of the finest chocolate I have ever known, and I give Rococo major credit for deepening my understanding of how magical chocolate can be.

I had my first personal encounter with Rococo Chocolate in the fall of 2006, although I had heard about these organic artisan chocolate bars long before that. Apparently Rococo used to sell their beautiful chocolate at Saks Fifth Avenue here in New York, which is how several of my friends had been able to meet their chocolate needs in the past. But for some inexplicable reason, Rococo terminated their account with Saks by the time I was lusting after their chocolates flavored with such exotic ingredients as sea salt, pink peppercorns and geranium. Nowadays it isn’t so unusual to encounter chocolate infused with herbs and spices or other floral flavors, but this was nearly ten years ago before the esoteric chocolate explosion had hit the States. The London shop wouldn’t export their wares, so short of flying across the pond and descending upon the shop myself, there were years when I had no way to get my hands on this legendary chocolate.

But it is a great thing to make friends with Londoners who frequently make the journey to and from New York, and when my friend Rob was visiting his parents in London three summers ago, I gave him a hundred bucks and asked him to buy as much Rococo chocolate as he could with it. He came through for me big-time, returning with a substantial supply of these elegantly packaged bars, each wrapped in what resembled a tobacco pouch. The first bar I opened was the Caramelized Almond, and what an experience it was!

Tiger Cake And The Little Chef

The Little Chef is back in town for the weekend, much to our mutual great delight. In many ways, my 7-year-old nephew Mac and I are kindred spirits, sharing a similar focus and enthusiasm for whatever projects we throw ourselves into. As much as I love cooking for my friends and family, Mac takes great pride in his position as my "Little Chef". One of the first things he asked me upon arriving at my apartment was, "Louise, what are we going to make while I'm here?" There was no question in his mind that we'd be spending some quality time in the kitchen together, and he launched into a whole recital of chocolate treats that he was eager to create with me. But when I told him that I had a special recipe called Tiger Cake that I'd been saving to make with him, he quickly abandoned his previous ideas about cupcakes or peanut butter truffles, totally hopping on board with my plan.

Mac, a.k.a. the Little Chef, and I have had a blast in the kitchen together ever since he was three years old when he insisted on helping me make his chocolate birthday cake. I still crack up when I imagine that tiny boy standing on a chair next to me at the kitchen counter with a little flour sack towel tied around his waist as an apron, so eager to help. He always wanted to measure the dry ingredients by himself, especially when cocoa powder was involved, even though he would usually end up wearing a lot of that cocoa himself as he determinedly scooped it out of the box! 

This weekend I realized that my Little Chef is now tall enough to help me without the aid of standing on a chair. (Gulp.) He buttered the Bundt pan quite vigorously and we laughed hard when we both ended up with flour all over our shirts as he attempted to 'gently' coat the buttered pan with flour!

 

"Why is it called Tiger Cake?" my Little Chef asked, as he helped me measure and sift flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl, being a little more careful with this step. I explained that we were going to divide our cake batter and add chocolate to only half of it. The way we layered the two batters in the pan was going to create a "tiger stripe" effect.