Chocolate Sauce

To make your own fab chocolate sauce:

2/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder

1/2 cup milk

2 tbsp butter

1. Mix the sugar and cocoa, making sure to sift though any lumps.
2. Add milk and butter and put it in a pot.
3. Bring to boil and then allow to simmer for 5 -10 minutes. The longer it simmers the thicker it gets and personally I’m more of a 10 minute person, because I like it thick and creamy, but it’s a matter of taste.

Enjoy with anything that needs chocolate!

Peanut & Strawberry Chocolate Treats

I had great plans for Christmas and had planned to post a few recipes I’ve made, but instead I’ve spent the last few days trying to cope with Christmas AND the worst cold in the history of humanity. If I don’t make an astonishing recovery I probably won’t be able to tell what any of the food tastes like. Which quite frankly sucks. But at least the others will be able to enjoy the stuff I made.

Before I was hit by Killer Cold I made a batch of Swedish TV-chef Leila Lindholm’s Rocky Road, which you can find in English over at Anne’s Food. And because it was yummy and I wanted more yummy I improvised a variation (and I didn’t measure anything so sorry for the inexact recipe):

100 g milk chocolate

2 handfuls of salted peanuts

50 g of dried strawberries

1. Cut the strawberries into halves (or if they’re big, in even smaller pieces).
2. Melt the chocolate. There is a thousand ways to do this, and most people seem to prefer the microwave, but I don’t feel I have enough control that way. I prefer the way my mother used to do it – boil some water in a pan, turn it down so it simmers and put a plate on top. Put the chocolate on the plate, a little at a time until it’s soft and completely smooth.
3. Stir in the peanuts and the strawberries.
4. Pour in a lined tin of appropriate size and if like me, you live in a country with proper Christmas weather, put it outside to settle. Otherwise, use the fridge.
5. Cut it into pieces and enjoy.

It’s best to keep this in the fridge, because they melt pretty easily. And as candy goes, it’s quite sweet, but the salty peanuts keeps it from being too sweet. Salt and milk chocolate is actually an awesome combination!

Merry Christmas!

Mint Chocolate Cookies

These are really a friend’s fault. A while back, she talked about making cookies with peppermint candy in and the idea sounded so lovely I immediately decided I wanted to make some too. She made chocolate chip cookies with crushed candy canes, which came out looking very seasonal due to the pieces of red, white and green candies in them. You can see them and read her recipe here (while you’re over there, take the opportunity to check out her adorable Squires of Dimness).

Because of a variety of reasons (mostly lack of life management skills on my part) it’s taken me some time to follow her example, but this Saturday I celebrated the first quiet evening at home for a very long time by listening to Tori Amos and baking cookies. Sometimes I really do suspect I’m a girl after all…

Since I live in Sweden, the choice of candy was pretty easy. See, here, we have the traditional “polka pigs” (or “polkagrisar” in Swedish) which are supposed to be made in Gränna, Småland. Polka Pigs are recognized by their stripes and they come in various shapes, but this is the traditional one:

Please note that as these were a cheap brand, the stripes are more pink than red as they are supposed to be, but they tasted OK. Crushing them, however, was quite a task… Pheew.

Anyway, I didn’t want to downright imitate Anne, so I decided to make some chocolate cookies instead. Because I didn’t quite find the perfect recipe and my local store doesn’t carry baking soda or chocolate chips I sort of invented a recipe of my own. The cookies came out perfect, with just the right texture (due to the large amount of baking powder) and loaded with chocolate and chunks of mint. I used some rather exclusive chocolate (86 % cocoa) to make up for the cheap mints, and it turned out to be a good bet – since the mints were so very sweet, the rather bitter chunks of dark chocolate balanced that up a bit.

I can’t say exactly how many cookies this recipe yields, but I ended up with 32 (which rapidly diminished to 30). I think somewhere between 30 – 35 would be reasonable to expect.

Here goes:

110 g butter (1 stick) at room temperature

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1 tbsp vanilla sugar (may be replaced with 1 tsp vanilla essence)

1 egg

2 tsp baking powder

1 cup all purpose flour

1 tsp instant coffee

3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa

100 g dark chocolate, chopped

about 1/3 cup peppermint candy, crushed

1. Cream the butter and sugar until smooth and fluffy, preferably using a mixer.
2. Add the egg, the coffee and the cocoa and the vanilla and make sure the color is an even dark brown.
3. Sift together the flour and the baking powder and add it to the butter mix, a little at a time until you have a smooth and evenly colored dough.
4. Crush the peppermint candy into tiny pieces and chop the chocolate. carefully work them into the dough until they are evenly distributed.
5. Drop about 1 tbsp of dough on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and press into a cookie. Repeat until the sheet is full. The cookies will swell quite considerably during the baking so don’t put them too close to each other (speaking as one who made that mistake herself).
6. Bake in a preheated oven at 175 °C (325 °F) for 15 minutes.

Note that when they’re done, the cookies are very soft and the chocolate chunks runny so don’t try to move them right away – let them cool a bit first.

Choco Toffee Coffee

This is something I invented when I had some condensed milk the other day. It was perfect considering it was on of those days when icy autumn storms roared outside the windows and I felt I deserved something sweet.

For you and a friend:

Two shots of espresso

3 tbsp sweetened condensed milk

3 tbsp milk

a lump of dark chocolate (I had these special chocolate dippers for dipping in coffee, but even though that’s pretty snazzy, it’s certainly not necessary)

Blend the milks and heat them (in the microwave, preferably). Add the coffee, pour into cups and add some chocolate to each cup.

Yum!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

One of my friends is amazed how I can have chocolate around the house and not eat all of it. I don’t know, I always have chocolate at home but somehow I’m rarely in the mood for it. So today, when I felt like baking, I found some dark Lindt chocolate I’d forgotten about. Further investigation revealed some organic peanut butter, so I decided to make something using those two ingredients.

Since I didn’t have a recipe to match, I improvised by combining a few different recipes. They were made in sort of a hurry and they’ll never win any awards for good looks, but they were, well, to put it mildly, very good.

about 25 cookies:

50 g butter (at room temperature)

1 1/5 dl ( 2/3 cup) crunchy peanut butter

1 1/5 dl ( 2/3 cup) brown sugar (I used light brown muscovado)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla sugar/vanilla essence

3 dl (1 1/4 cup) flour

1 tsp baking powder

chopped chocolate or chocolate chips (I used 100 g of Lindt’s 65 % Madagascar Dark Chocolate)

1. Put the butter, the peanut butter, the sugar, the vanilla and the egg in a food processor and mix it until smooth.
2. Add the flour and baking powder.
3. Put in the chocolate bits/chips and form little knobs, about an inch in size.
4. Put them on a greased baking sheet and press them flat.
5. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 °C (400 °F) for about 10 minutes.
6. Remove from baking sheet to cool on wire racks.

Enjoy!

Mint Chocolate Cupcakes

I’m going through a phase of frantic baking right now. Tonight, I made these because a friend talked about making something like this once and I thought the idea sounded very tasty. It was. Dangerously so.

To make ten cupcakes you’ll need:

150 g butter

2 dl (4/5 cup) sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tsp of vanilla essence/vanilla sugar (I make my own vanilla sugar, by putting a vanilla pod in a jar with sugar)

1/2 dl (3 1/2 tbsp) milk

3 dl (1 1/4 cup) flour

1 tsp baking powder

10 + 10 After Eights

1. Beat the eggs with sugar and add the eggs, one by one.
2. Add vanilla and milk.
3. Mix with flour, cocoa powder, and baking powder.
4. Put some of the cake mixture in every muffin cup and then put one After Eight in every cup. Like this
5. Then cover the chocolate with the remaining mixture and put them in the oven for about 15 minutes at 200 °C.
6. When they’re done, put one (but of course, two or three will be even better) After Eight on every muffin and put them back into the hot oven for about a minute, just so that the After Eights will melt.
7. Quickly smooth the chocolate over the muffin so that it gets a layer of After Eight frosting.

Let cool.

Enjoy!