Salted Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

Chocolate chocolate chip cookies are always good, but add Reese's Pieces and Maldon sea salt and you've got something really quite special.

Chocolate Chocolate Breakfast Muffins

These simple buttermilk mini muffins are kicked up with some cocoa powder and chocolate chips. Simple and not overly sweet, these dense but tender muffins are perfect for breakfast with a strong cup of coffee and perhaps some berries. Or have one (or two) in the afternoon with a cup of tea. But they really aren't dessert-y enough to be a full on dessert!

Flourless Chocolate Cake

Whoops, I forgot to post this after the other Passover cake, so I may not have entirely retained the details. But really, a nut free, gluten free, chocolate cake. Rich, dense, moist--almost brownie like. What more is there to say?

Topped with whipped cream, it is a decadent treat for Passover or any time of year.

Chocolate, chocolate chip, fudge muffins

These are very good. These are rich, moist, chocolate muffins with mini chocolate chips tossed in. These are topped with a fudgy chocolate glaze. That's it. Chocolate, chocolate chip, fudge muffins.

Need I say more?

Chocolate Peanut Butter Birthday Cake

My mom made me my birthday cake as she always does. This year it was chocolate cake--Thomas Keller's recipe. It was good. Very moist and chocolatey but not too heavy and dense. 

Cookies for Passover

The thing about baking for Passover is that it makes you think a bit more about what you are baking. But past thinking a bit harder when you choose your recipes, it doesn't really change things. Okay, yes, no flour unless it's matzo meal, but how hard is that? It's rather like keeping gluten-free (assuming you aren't using matzo meal). In fact the coconut macaroons and the chocolate walnut cookies are staples of my year round gluten-free repertoire. The third cookie, a nutty and floral macaron, will definitely be added to that repertoire--but more on it in a minute.

Crumb cakes and quickbreads

I could have sworn I posted these two cakes, but apparently I didn't because the photos were still in my "to post" folder. So here goes:

The cake above, a raspberry sour cream crumb cake, is a really excellent and rather large crumb cake from the Williams Sonoma cookbook Muffins. It is dense, moist, great with coffee (or tea if you prefer), and has a crumb layer on top. What is really special about this cake are the fresh raspberries nestled between the cake batter and the crumble layer. The sour cream makes the cake moist, tender, and ever so slightly tangy. I'm all for substituting fat free yogurt for sour cream, but I'd hesitate to do it here--it does alter the texture and flavor slightly and I'm not sure it would be for the better in this case. On the same line, use full fat sour cream; the fat is what makes the cake tender and without oil or butter this cake is light enough already.

Strawberry, White Chocolate, Pistachio Scones

These were delicious. I used a basic scone recipe and snazzed it up with white chocolate and pistachios. But I decided that, as much as I like the combination of pistachios and white chocolate, it wasn't quite flavorful enough. I happened to have some delicious dried strawberries, so I chopped them up and tossed them in. The tangyness of the dried berries complemented the sweet white chocolate and the nutty goodness of the pistachios perfectly.

Rice Crispy S'more Scones

These scones come by way of the Alice's Tea Cup cookbook. Their recipe is for rice crispy treat scones. I know that sounds a bit odd, but the cookbook acknowledges it and swears that they are good. Well right off the bat, I decided that they would be better with chocolate--a rice crispy treat crossed with a s'more crossed with a scone. All I did was toss in some mini chocolate chips at the end, other than that it was Alice's recipe. And the cookbook was right; they are great scones. The Rice Krispies give the scones a light and slightly crispy texture but they don't add too much crunch. The mini marshmallows get melted and the ones on the edges get caramelized in the oven giving the whole thing a sweet, gooey texture. The scone itself was tender and sweet, but not overly sweet. The chocolate, of course, was delicious with the marshmallows and the scone as a whole. Probably not my favorite scone, but it's up there near the top!

Simple Chocolate Truffles

These chocolate truffles are so simple to make. They are a relatively thick ganache, chilled and rolled into balls. The balls are then rolled in various toppings without the traditional double layer of tempered chocolate applied first. This makes them much easier to make. Of course it also makes them significantly more delicate and prone to melting/smushing, but when you really want truffles it can be worth the tradeoff.

The truffles are rolled in various toppings, as I said above. Some were rolled in cacao powder, to give the appearance of a traditional truffle. Others were rolled in cinnamon sugar (these were my friend Sophie's favorite). I also rolled a few in some of the (very strong by now) bourbon sugar from the bourbon balls I made at Christmas. Those are all pictured above. I also made, but did not photograph, some cacao ones with a few flakes of pink Himalayan sea salt on top (perfect color scheme for Valentine's Day, hint hint). They were my favorite, although the bourbon sugar ones were a close second.

Peppermint Chocolate Bundt

Just because it's after Christmas doesn't mean I can't still use peppermint. I like peppermint! This moist bundt was nicely minty but not as richly chocolaty as the deep color indicates; it's made with high quality cocoa, you see, rather than melted chocolate, so it looks chocolaty but could be richer. That's why I made a nice chocolate glaze to kick up the flavor a bit. Then I just sprinkled on some crunched up candy canes. Yum!

Brownies with Citrus Salad

I tried the brownie recipe from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc. It's not the simplest brownie recipe, but it's well worth the extra effort. They were perfect. Richly chocolaty, tender, fudgy but still extraordinarily light. Oh gosh.

Caramelized Waffles and Chocolate-Hazelnut Ice Cream

I bought myself a small Breville waffle maker for the holidays. It's a great waffle maker! So great that I have made far too many waffles. So I froze some. To heat them up I coated them with cinnamon sugar and fried them. They got all nice and caramelized and toasty warm. I served them with homemade ice cream.

The ice cream was amazing. It's a creamy chocolate and sour cream ice cream base (from the New York Times food section) with some toasted hazelnuts and a dash of Frangelico added in for good measure. I didn't add much liqueur because it can interfere with the freezing point of the ice cream, but with Frangelico on top of the hazelnuts, a little went a long way. This was, hands down, the best batch of ice cream I've ever made, and I've made some good ones. I think it was the sour cream. You couldn't taste it at all (which was good, sour cream would have been all wrong with the hazelnuts) but it made the texture unbeatable.

Plated all together, the warm, crisp waffles and the cold, creamy ice cream were just perfect! (Happy New Year, by the way.)

Thanksgiving Desserts (Number Two)

I also made an excellent trifle because, well, I always make a trifle for Thanksgiving. This year I made a chocolate, chestnut, tiramisu trifle. Let me say that again: chocolate, chestnut, tiramisu trifle. Or as my mom called it, a trifle-misu. It was so good, it was ridiculous. It's layers of chocolate-chestnut mousse, Marsala mascarpone sabayon, and lady fingers soaked with espresso and amaretto and dusted with cocoa powder. The latter two layers are, basically, tiramisu. But with extra mascarpone to thicken up the sabayon and, of course, the chocolate-chestnut mousse between the layers. Also the layer of whipped cream and dusting of cocoa looks like a tiramisu but is more trifle like in flavor.

British Birthday Cake

Since I recently posted my aunt's old birthday cake I thought I'd put this on as well. I have a close family friend exactly 10 years younger than me. She's very sophisticated for her age so I made her this elegant (but still a little bit girly) cake for her 14th birthday. It's white cake with two layers of raspberry buttercream and one of chocolate; she's not quite as much of a chocolate fan as I am, so I limited the chocolate. It's topped with lovely shell pink fondant and a scalloped chocolate fondant polka dot border (it worked so well on the anniversary cake I made, after all.) It's pretty, I think. And she enjoyed it.

By the way I call this a British birthday cake because it's very common to use fondant on birthday cakes in England, unlike the traditional buttercream cakes we tend to consume in the US.

Chocolate Chip Brownie Cookies~With Recipe!

These aren't quite as brownie-ish in texture as the name implies, but the flavor is quite like a brownie. A brownie with chocolate chips. Who doesn't like that? I hope you like that because below is the recipe for these moist chocolate cookies.

Birthday Cake with Kahlua Ganache

I made this ages ago. Seriously it's been a couple of years, but I didn't really have the blog going then so I didn't post it. It's just too good not to post here, so here goes. This was magnolia bakery white cake, filled with layers of chocolate ganache flavored with plenty of kahlua. The cake was decorated with vanilla buttercream and a couple of roses--gumpaste and modeling chocolate. I wish I'd done a thicker coating of buttercream (you can see the ganache layers through the buttercream) but I was running low on it and I wanted to practice my piping skills. Ah well, it was still delicious and my aunt (it was for her birthday) loved it!

Coconut Fudge

It's been years since I made my very popular almond joy fudge. This is a nut free version. Just dark chocolate fudge with plenty of toasted desiccated coconut (not sweetened shredded; it's too sweet and the pieces are too large). Delicious!

Chocolate Cake with Pumpkin Frosting

Apparently I've been on a pumpkin kick lately. Here's a lovely chocolate cake I made topped (and filled) with pumpkin, cream cheese, white chocolate frosting. It's a bit like a simpler version of the pumpkin spice mocha cake I made last year. Simple but still delicious. And pretty too--I like the color that the pumpkin gives the frosting.

Chocolate, Blackberry, Coconut Cake

Every year, my mom asks for a chocolate birthday cake. Past that, I get to do what I want. So I decided to try an idea I'd seen on the food network: using jam to flavor buttercream. In this case I used a high quality blackberry jam. For the filling I made a coconut buttercream by adding creamed coconut to the buttercream. Two delicious, flavored buttercreams with minimal effort.