Chocolate « More Cheese More Chocolate

Apr 27 2010

Chocolate Cupcakes with Nutella Frosting

I love cupcakes, but I’m not much of a cupcake maker. I don’t really see the point of baking them when I can buy a delicious cupcake from Yum whenever I want. My craving is satisfied, and I’m not left with eleven little treats sitting around. Sometimes, however, I do get the urge to bake a batch. It’s usually for a birthday or some other special occasion, but this time it was due in part to my desire to avoid studying and in part to the fact that I clicked on a link to a website called Ming Makes Cupcakes and I simply could not control myself. There were several varieties that I wanted to try, but I chose the Sour Cream Chocolate Cupcakes with Nutella Frosting because I already had most of the ingredients. The only thing that I did not have was sour cream, so I used plain yogurt instead. It was a success.

Click on the link for the recipe, but be warned, you might lose all self-control: Ming Makes Cupcakes

You might be wondering what could possibly be better than a half cup of Nutella.

Nutella mixed with powdered sugar and cream, of course! OH MAN is this good. And sweet. Very sweet. I licked the spoon about six times, and my stomach began to ache. But some things are worth the pain, and this is certainly one of them.

The only thing I would consider doing differently next time would be doubling the frosting recipe, or at least increasing it by 1/2. This amount was certainly enough to frost all of the cupcakes, but if you’re into frosting like my mom is, you will need about twice as much.

Thick chocolate cake batter.

WOW.

Fill me with sweet sugary goodness.

Note: The original recipe tells you to bake these for 30 minutes. Not sure if that’s a typo or not as most of the other recipes only have a 20 minute baking time. Whatever the case may be, mine only took about 20 minutes.

Who wants one?

Seriously. I need to get rid of these. Who wants one?

Tagged Chocolate, Dessert

Mar 09 2010

2 Comments

Chocolate, Cookies

Warning: May Contain Bacon

When I bake sweet treats I usually only eat one or two servings before getting bored with whatever it is and end up doing one of three things: sticking the remainder in the freezer, pawning them off on friends, or letting them sit around until they get stale and throwing them away. Because of the guilt I feel for wasting baked goods, I don’t make them all that often. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t spend half my day clicking through food websites and finding tasty treats that I want to try.

Enter the Women’s Law Student Association annual bake sale, a three day event with the proceeds benefitting a very good cause. Now that I have an excuse to try out recipes and not have to eat all of the results, I’ve been baking up a storm. I wish we could have bake sales every week.

At the top of my list of things I wanted to bake were these Compost Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar, which I found on The Amateur Gourmet. They’re called Compost Cookies because you can dump in ingredients of your choosing from around the kitchen – baking items and snack foods. Some of the suggested snack foods are potato chips, pretzels, and goldfish crackers, and it was the potato chips that really sold me. Salty and sweet in cookie form? I’m in!

You get to add in 3 cups total of baking items and snack foods, so I added pretty much equal parts chocolate chips, caramels, pistachios, potato chips, cheez-its, and bacon. The bacon was kind of unnecessary, but once I had the idea in my head it would not go away and I had to go for it. To avoid upsetting any vegetarians at the bake sale I made labels warning of the possible presence of bacon. It’s unfortunate that they had to miss out on some great cookies.

Compost Cookies

From Momofuku Milk Bar, recipe available here

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup light brown sugar

1 tbsp corn syrup (I skipped this)

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

1 3/4 cup flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups baking ingredients (chocolate chips, candies, pb chips, caramels, nuts)

1 1/2 cups snack items (potato chips, pretzels, crackers, bacon – that’s a snack food, right?)

Cream the butter and sugars for a couple minutes until fluffy and pale. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add the eggs and vanilla and mix to combine. Turn the speed up to medium-high, set a timer for 10 minutes, and let it go.

It will get even lighter and fluffier after the 10 minutes and look similar to this.

During the 10 minutes of whipping, you can get the other ingredients ready.

I had some salted caramels laying around that I chopped up into smaller pieces.

The baking ingredients: chocolate chips, caramels, pistachios.

Plus chips and cheez-its.

Plus about 1/4 cup bacon. I used more potato chips to fill up the measuring cup to hit the 1 1/2 cups mark.

Snacking + baking goodness.

When the 10 minutes have gone by and the mixture is light and fluffy, add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Beat for 45-60 seconds until all of the dry ingredients have been incorporated, but don’t overmix.

Add the baking and snack items, and beat on low speed until just incorporated.

Use an ice cream scoop or a big spoon to scoop the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. The original recipe tells you to use a 6-oz ice cream scoop, and I have no idea what size that is so I just scoop out portions that were about the size of a kiwi. A kiwi? I’m not very good with coming up with comparison sizes.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate for anywhere between 1 hour and 1 week. Do not bake immediately!

When the dough has chilled, preheat the oven to 400. Arrange the balls of dough so they’re 4″ apart on the baking sheets. Bake for 9-11 minutes, browned on the edges and starting to brown on the center. The cookies pictured above and below? Not quite done. I had to throw them back in for a minute or two.

These cookies are really, really, really good. They’re wonderfully chewy and full of exciting treasures. Remember those candles they sold in the 90s with charms and doo-dads that revealed themselves as the candle melted? These are those candles in cookie form. Next time I will probably skip out on the bacon and use pretzels or crackers, but experimenting by throwing in random ingredients from the cupboard is half the fun of it.

Tagged Bacon, Chocolate, Cookies

Feb 25 2010

6 Comments

Chocolate, Cookies

Oatmeal Raisin + Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Enough of the filler posts, it’s time for some food! I was on a big baking kick a couple weeks ago, and one of the things I made were these chewy oatmeal cookies. I divided the dough and did half oatmeal raisin and half oatmeal chocolate chip. While they weren’t quite as good as the oatmeal chocolate chip cookies they have at Potbelly, they were probably the best oatmeal cookies I’ve ever made. They’re more on the chewy side, and they have the perfect amount of spice to give them a little something without overpowering the raisins/chocolate chips.

Oatmeal Cookies

From Better Homes & Gardens

3/4 cup butter, softened

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups rolled oats

1-1/2 cups raisins, chocolate chips, chopped nuts, or any other add-ins (I split the dough in half and used 3/4 cup raisins and 3/4 cup chocolate chips)

Preheat the oven to 375.

In a small bowl cover the raisins with hot or boiling water.

Pour off the water after 10 or 15 minutes and you should have a bowl of plump, juicy raisins. Far superior to dry, stuck-in-your-teeth raisins. You might need to dry them off a little more with paper towels before adding them to the cookie dough.

Beat the butter on medium to high speed for about 30 seconds.

Add the sugars, cinnamon, cloves, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

Beat until it’s all combined into this sugary mixture.

Add the eggs and vanilla.

Beat until combined.

Add the flour, and beat until combined.

Using a spoon and a little muscle, stir in the oats.

I split the dough in half at this point, mixing raisins in with half of it…

…and chocolate chips with the other half.

Yum.

Drop by the spoonful onto an ungreased cookie sheet. A rounded-teaspoon drop of dough will make about 48 cookies. I used a regular spoon and ended up with somewhere between 24 and 30.

Bake for 8-10 minutes (slightly longer for larger cookies) until the edges are golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

The oatmeal chocolate chips are best eaten warm, while the chocolate is melted.

Tagged Chocolate, Cookies

Feb 18 2010

1 Comment

Beef, Cheese, Chocolate, Dessert, Holiday, Sides

Valentine’s Dinner

For Valentine’s Day I really, really wanted to make nachos for dinner. I’m not joking. I had some spicy chorizo, a couple of ripe avocados, and, as you might expect, a huge stash of cheese, and aren’t holidays an excuse to splurge and eat unhealthy things that you wouldn’t normally eat? I think so. Unfortunately my valentine wasn’t down with the nachos idea, so I ended up going a little more traditional and made steak. It worked out for the best, as Matt told me that it was the best meal I’ve made in a very long time. A compliment like that is the best Valentine’s gift a girl could get. At least I think. Now that I’m repeating it it sounds a little backhanded, but I can assure you that he meant it in the nicest possible way.

The menu:

Homemade rye bread

Roasted broccolini

Blue cheese mashed potatoes

Rib eyes with chimichurri

Chocolate mousse with freshly whipped cream

The bread recipe is from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I recommend both the book and the bread.

I bought these gigantic rib eyes because they were on sale at Whole Foods for something like $10.99/lb, far cheaper than the $23.99/lb. filets I was planning on buying. Between the two of us we didn’t even eat one, which means steak salads all week for me! Just as I started to get nervous about how my pesky fire alarm was going to react to me cooking a steak on the stovetop I saw Matt’s friend Sarah’s tweet about Bittman’s method for pan-cooking a steak in a poorly ventilated apartment with no smoke. Miraculous!

Speaking of Bittman, I used his recipe for chimichurri to top off the steak. It was so good that I used it top off the potatoes and the broccolini as well. Then I used my bread to sop up every last drop. You can find a recipe here, and I would recommend making it in a food processor as he suggests in his book rather than chopping it by hand.

I had some red potatoes that I’d boiled earlier in the week for a salad that I turned into blue cheese mashed potatoes. Simply mash up some boiled potatoes and add any combination of milk, cream, sour cream, cream cheese, and butter, season with salt and pepper, and crumble in a generous amount of blue cheese.

Since my potatoes were cold I transferred them to a baking dish, topped them with some pats of butter, and baked them with the broccolini until they were heated through.

Oh yeah, the broccolini. Toss it with a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt & pepper, and bake on a cookie sheet at 375 or so for maybe 10 minutes. It’s to die for. I may be exaggerating, but only slightly.

This meal was incredibly delicious and very easy to whip together. The chocolate mousse was the only thing that took more than about 15 minutes to make, but it was far from difficult. For as delicious as it is, it’s totally worth the effort. If it weren’t for the sinfulness of the mashed potatoes and the fact that I don’t eat much steak I would make this meal all the time.

All of that chocolate is proof that this dessert is worth making. And check out my reflection in the double boiler. Hello, me!

The chocolate mousse recipe I used was from Orangette. You can follow the link to her recipe; I’ll just show you some pretty pictures of the process. The only change I made was the addition of a little cinnamon to give it a little Mexican flavor. It was my consolation prize for not having nachos, I guess.