Chocolate Ganache

Not the most glamorous picture, but it will have to do. For my darling, chocolate-addict friend (who is also a huge fan of this! and this!) I made this little birthday dessert I like to call "Chocolate Never Dies."

Fudge cupcakes with dark chocolate chips (60% cacao) topped with dark chocolate ganache. Did you swoon? If not, re-read that last sentence.

Glad you're back.

Ganache can be used as a filling, a glaze, or a "frosting" and is just sinfully good in any of its forms. To get the ganache thick enough to pipe out of a piping bag onto cupcakes, I read about six recipes and came up with this. (Most recipes are pretty much the same, so if you already know how to make ganache, prepare to not be surprised by my recipe.)

Ganache

Here's What You Need:

1 T Butter
1 Scant Cup of Heavy Cream
1 Cup of Chocolate Chips, or roughly chopped chocolate. I used the Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips and it turned out amazingly dark and delicious.

Here's What You Do:

1. Chop your chocolate, or open your bag of chocolate chips. Measure it out into a medium bowl.
2. In a small saucepan bring the heavy cream and butter to a boil.
3. Pour the heavy cream over the chocolate.
4. Slowly mix the chocolate and the cream until they become one dark chocolately liquid.
5. Once all the cream is incorporated, you can put the ganache in the fridge if you want it to thicken a little faster (takes about 45 mins if your fridge is quite cold), or you can leave it on the counter. I like to give it a stir every 10-15 mins to make sure it's cooling evenly.
6. Enjoy.

*Note, for runnier ganache, add a little more heavy cream. This would be fantastic poured over the top of a bundt cake or as the coating or center of home made truffles.

Nutella and Banana Ice Cream

Okay, so I saw this recipe on Pinterest and I was reeeallly skeptical -- there seem to be a lot of really too-good-to-be-true pins. Like the one about how Quinoa has more protein than meat. Or the Alan Rickman "All this time" quote, which apparently he never said. The pin said nutella + bananas = life changed.

So...overstatement? Yes. Life changed? Not entirely. But is this pretty dang good and easy to make? Absolutely. Okay, write this down: 5-6 medium bananas and 1/3 Cup of Nutella. Blend. Freeze. That's it.

This dessert meets nearly all of my criteria for awesomeness:
1. Easy
2. Easy
3. Chocolatey.

(We'll get to my other criteria later...)

Okay, so seriously try this and let me know if you love it and/or if your life is completely changed.

k.

My Little Strawwwwbery!

This post is brought to you by the lovely and talented Nicole. If you're alive and you know where a grocery store is, you've probably realized that strawberries are craaaazy in season.  And having so many strawberries requires an easy way to make a whole bunch of them into something awesome. I give you: the do-it-yourself chocolate covered strawberry:

I have to apologize to Nicole at this point -- I took all of the pictures of the process and final product with a vintage camera app that doesn't really do justice to how pretty (and delicious!) her chocolate covered strawberries are.  Just imagine a perfectly ripe strawberry wrapped in Guittard Chocolate. 

[FYI, did you know that Guittard provides the chocolate for Sees Candies? Nicole says Sees acutally covers their chocolate truffles with Guittard chocolate! Wikipedia says it's true, so I'm going to believe. 

It's so good. I mean, it's so good.]

Ahoy!

In honor of Halloween, of no longer being sick (after ten days in bed), and of Lito going back to work (despite the fact that he still has a very mean esophagus that hurts him), I give you: Pirate Cupcakes.

Oh Martha.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cupcakes. Sounds good, right?

So yesterday my husband, Lito, was like, Heeyyy.... you haven't made cupcakes for a while...and the guys at work have heard a lot about how awesome they are.... The gauntlet was thrown. Cupcakes had to be made. So I sent a list of possible cupcake flavors I'd like to try, including PBChocolate, and that, my friends is what I made.

I returned to my perfect-bound Martha Stewart cookbook and flipped through to the loveliest picture of warm, perfect cupcakes. And I made the recipe. Here they are with frosting:

Chocolate Cupcakes

Last Thursday was my darling friend, President Susan's, birthday. I sent her a ridiculous one-liner email, "Do you like chocolate?" And this is what resulted. Happy day.



So instead of doing what normal people do, which is call before you randomly show up at someone's house, I just loaded up the cupcakes and drove over to where I thought her house was. Don't worry that I'd never been there before. Or that when I got there they had a security gate. Seriously, who wouldn't let you through a security gate if you had cupcakes? Note to all would-be criminals: begin baking.

Shout Out to My Mom, Part II

Comfort food. Usually conjures up images of mashed potatoes, shepherd's pie, stroganoff... ya know. But I've found that the brownies my mom makes (and has made for years) have that same comforting appeal. So much so, that I've made them twice this month and have only managed to snap a couple of pictures of them in various states of half-eaten-ness.

Homemade Brownies with Frosting. These will kick your chocolate sweet tooth in the butt. If a sweet tooth has a butt. I'm furrowing my brow. This metaphor is all wrong.

But the brownies are so right.

Chocolate plus Dulce de Leche

I fell in love with dulce de leche last year in Chile. Lito and I spent about two months zipping around South America like we owned the place. On one fantastic occasion, our darling friend Chacha introduced us to crepes with dulce de leche, which she called pancake (pronounced pan-que-que, or something like that).

So when another amazing foodie friend forwarded me the recipe for David Lebovitz's dulce de leche brownie, how could I resist? How?

Especially when it turned out that making dulce de leche was seriously easy.

Here's what you need:

*1 can of sweetened condensed milk

*kosher salt or coarsely ground salt if you have a fancy grinder

Here's what you do:

*Pour the sweetened condensed milk into a glass pie plate, or another shallow baking dish that can fit inside another baking dish.

*Put the pie plate in the other baking dish (I used a jelly roll pan), and fill it with warm water, so your pie plate is a little island of sweet joy in the center.

*Sprinkle the milk with a little salt. I probably used 1/4 t, max. I think this is where the pros say "salt to taste," then cover the pie plate with aluminum foil.

*Bake at 425 degrees for 75 to 90 minutes. Check on it a couple times to add more water if you need to.

*Once the sweetened condensed milk has turned goldeny brown, let it cool completely and then whisk it up. Eat it on a spoon, on toast, on ice cream (more on this later) and definitely swirl it in your brownies.

Something about this swirling makes me think alternately of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, ala, swimming in chocolate, and/or tree bark. Really delicious tree bark. And when you've got one really sweet thing that's brown and tan, well, then another sweet thing isn't really out of the question. Our new little pup bore enough of a resemblance, so we named her Brownie.

One more of the chocolate, just because

These brownies, as Lebovitz himself says, are truly better the next day. They're ridiculously rich and totally worth it.

Adapted from David Lebovitz, Living the Sweet Life in Paris