It's all about the cupcake

Alright chefs-in-the-making.  Scharffen Berger's Chocolate Adventure Contest is back!  This year's theme is chocolate and cupcakes.  An award winning recipe will get you $20,000 prizes.  The contest entry period ends January 2, 2011. 

The End Result

Tada! Here is my instant chocolate custard made with Bird's Custard Powder and Venchi's cacao due vecchi from Italy. Since I am in California, my husband is enjoying this custard without me. After following the recipe, I placed the dessert in the refrigerator to firm up. By adding a some cacao to a instant recipe gave this traditional dessert a little flare. Yum!

Craving Chocolate Custard

With a craving for chocolate custard, I pulled out Venchi's cacao due vecchi (cacao powder) from Italy and Bird's Custard Powder from the pantry. I added a few teaspoons of cacao powder to the Bird's Custard Powder and proceeded to follow their directions.

I hope it tastes good!

Deviation can be good

Deviating from a recipe can occasionally create a fabulous new one. I’ve done it many times before with delicious results. This evening I decided to make chocolate chip cookies with E. Guittard Fair Trade Certified Akoma Extra Semisweet Chocolate Chips made with 55% cacao. Unfortunately, I was out of brown sugar so, I opted to use Dark Muscovado Sugar which contains 100% pure cane sugar from Mauritius. Normally, I bake with margarine (I know Paula Deen wouldn’t approve of this), but this time I actually had unsalted butter in the refrigerator. Instead of the typical pure vanilla, I used Tahitian Vanilla.

Although the changes were minor, the dough color was a little deeper and consistency thicker and chunkier than normal. The final cookie maintained it’s chunky shape and each batch came out the same. Tomorrow, I will be shipping them to some family members for their insight. We enjoyed them in our house and if all is well, I will keep the substitutes a standard in my chocolate cookie recipe.

Friends with Benefits

Being a friend of a person who owns a store dedicated to cocoa has its occasional benefits. One of them is that when it is time to clear out the “Best Due By” inventory (products that are just before or past the “Best Due By” date). I usually give family and friends all of these wonderful products. I always fell bad not donating the Best Due By inventory to a food bank. However, I feel visitors to a homeless shelter or food bank deserve the good stuff too. So, I donate overages or slow sellers to charity.

When products were donated last year to a children’s school that was collecting hot chocolate for the homeless, I received the cutest picture from the children as a thank you. The weather has been quite crazy lately and everyone, especially a homeless person could use some hot chocolate or cocoa.

For this past delivery, friends with benefits received two types of 100% Unsweetened Cacao. One was in bar form and the other in shavings. I personally prefer the shavings since it requires less work when preparing to bake or cook with it. Next on the list were two drinking chocolates and a hot chocolate from Belgium.

One of my friends used the last round of “Best Due Inventory” to create a dreamy chocolate cake. It was brought into the office today to share with the rest of the company and it was gone real quick. She used 100% cocoa to make the cake but she was disappointed when it didn’t come with a real deep, dark color. Now she wonders if certain restaurants, chefs etc use food coloring to make a chocolate cake that nearly black color you see on occasions. Personally, I could care less because that cake was @#$ good!

Hot Chocolate Souffle

After returning home from the Thanksgiving holiday. I was off to Austin, Texas for a short meeting. Our department dinner was at Roy's Restaurant. Although I should be looking for a main dinner course. I zoned in on the Hot Chocolate Souffle. Forget dinner, give me the souffle! As usual and in typical Texas style, I order a wonderful steak. Just enough for dinner, but leaves room for dessert.

Roy's Hot Chocolate Souffle was absolutely divine! It was thick with a vicious chocolate punch. Some of my co-workers were sharing their desserts...but not I. Touch my Hot Chocolate Souffle at your own risk!

The good news is that their is a Roy's back home in California so you know where I will be going this Christmas.

Granita w/Anisette Sugar

My next frozen dessert adventure was with Chocolat Vital’s Cocoa Cardamom Tango Black Tea made with cinnamon, chocolate chips (sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa powder, emulsifier lecithin) cardamom, cardamom seeds and natural flavoring. With this fragrant tea, I know I have a winning recipe on hand to make Granita.

Granita or Granite is an iced Italian dessert. Since an ice cream maker isn’t necessary, the texture of the dessert is very coarse (look at my picture). To make this simple recipe, I brewed 2 cups of H20 with 1 tablespoon of tea and added ¾ cup of Anisette Sugar.

Unfortunately, Granite is not supposed to be very sweet, so I blew this recipe in theory. However, I think ½ cup sugar would be better since Anisette Sugar is very flavorful. To me, Anisette Sugar tastes like black licorice. Outside of this recipe or making an actual cup of hot chocolate, I wouldn’t touch this sugar but it added such a nice taste….

SerendipiTea ChocolaTea Sorbet

Now that I’ve recovered from a crashed hard drive and my recent work related travel, I am back on the blog! My frozen dessert rampage continues… This time I was busy creating a sorbet and granite with cocoa infused teas.

Sorbets are basically a frozen mixture of flavored ice usually enhanced with a fruit puree and sugar. A lot lighter than ice cream, sorbets are really great for those that are lactose intolerant since water is usually used vs. milk

After brewing up 3–½ cups of H20 with 3 tablespoons of serendipiTea’s ChocolaTea made with Chocolate, Vanilla, Rooibos and Black Tea, I added 1-½ cups of Demerara Sugar and ½ cup of cocoa nibs from Scharffen Berger. With the Ice Cream/Sorbet maker ready to go, I added the water mixture to the machine and hit the on button. Please make sure you let the tea get room temperature!!! What should have been an evening event turned into two days because I was too impatience to let the tea cool.

Twenty five minutes later, I had a yummy dessert. I must warn those not familiar with cocoa nibs they test nothing like chocolate chips (which is what they look like in the picture). These are definitely not sweet….they have a nutty robust flavor and are very crunchy. A cocoa nib is a roasted cacao bean separated from it’s shell and husk.

Normally, I am not a fan of cocoa nibs. But the contract of sweet and a little bitter was nice.