chocolate covered strawberries

So, Ed's not a huge fan of my chocolate covered strawberries, because apparently I need to temper the chocolate more. I, however, think they're delicious and amazing, and given that I make chocolate covered strawberries on MY birthday, I'll make them how I want them. This whole chocolate covered strawberries thing is quickly becoming a tradition for my birthday, I like it. Anyway, it's dead simple, and quite delicious.

Melt ~4oz of chocolate in a double boiler. Make sure it's tasty chocolate that you'd like to eat, because you're not sweetening it or anything, let's not get complicated. I think I used 70% dark ghiradelli, and it was delicious. Rinse and dry your strawberries. Stir the chocolate occasionally as it melts, you don't want to overcook it. Once the chocolate is melted, turn the heat down to a level that will just maintain the runny-ness of the chocolate, and start dipping your strawberries. Once they're chocolate covered, put them on a wax-paper-covered plate. If you run out of strawberries but have leftover chocolate, you can pour it onto the wax paper in a little puddle, and stud with any available nuts or dried fruit. Makes an instant chocolate bar.

Put the strawberries in the fridge for ~20min, and the chocolate will harden up nicely. Enjoy! Don't eat them all at once, because you'll get a stomach ache. Not like I'd know this from experience.

Chocolate soufflé

The dessert from my birthday dinner was a chocolate soufflé. And my birthday present was four soufflé ramekins! Yum. I promise not to try and eat the porcelain. I've never made a soufflé before, but Ed made it look easy. I should mention that all he let me do was watch him make me things and drink beer. I live a rough life.

Chocolate soufflé

1-3/4oz chocolate, melted

1.5tbs butter

add seeds from one vanilla bean

beat 1 egg yolk with 1tbs water and 1tbs sugar until strings form

fold egg yolk into chocolate mixture

ramekins coated with soft butter, then granulated sugar, then stuck in the freezer

Take ramekins out of freezer once egg yolks go into chocolate.

3 egg whites + 1/6C sugar + squeeze of lemon juice, beat to stiff peaks.

fold 1/3 of that into chocolate mixture, then fold in the rest, until relatively consistent.

Ladle into ramikins

400F

15-18min, once grown 1.5", golden brown and delicious.

I recommend sprinkling the sugar on top, it just makes it look prettier.

yummm. We had enough for three ramekins, you can probably guess who the glutton was who ate two...

Chocolate lava cake

I wanted to make a chocolate lava cake the other day, but we don't have little soufflé moulds, so I just made one cake, in our smallest pyrex bowl. It was really delicious, and got a full-star Ed-rating. As pictured below.

Luckily, I saved the cake from Ed before he actually took a bite out. I highly recommend making this.

• Chocolate lava cake
• The recipe is from here, the NYT molten chocolate magic. I cut it in half.
• 
  
• 1/4C butter (half a stick)
• 2 ounces bittersweet chocolate
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2Tbs sugar
• 1tsp flour

Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler. As it melts, beat together the egg and egg yolk and sugar. Let the chocolate cool just enough so it won't cook the eggs, and then mix it in. Beat in the flour, until just combined.

Butter the mold, and dust it with cocoa powder. Pour in the batter. Cook at 450 for 8 minutes, until it is just set.

Invert the mold, dump the cake on a plate, and dust with powdered sugar. Feel free to garnish with raspberries and whipped cream =)

Chocolate snickerdoodles

I had a real chocolate craving the other day, and I don't have any chocolate hanging around. For sort of the same reasons I don't have any ice cream sitting around. That stuff disappears too quickly; I have no idea where it goes to. So I just don't buy it. But, what to do when you really want chocolate??!? Turned out I did have cocoa powder, so I looked up a recipe for chocolate crinkle cookies, and I was all set to make them, when I realized that I didn't have any powdered sugar to roll them in. But then I came up with an even better idea! Roll them in cinnamon and sugar! I don't know if this is the only definition of a snickerdoodle, but it seemed like a damn good idea to me.

They got a pretty high Ed-rating, too, so clearly, the idea wasn't completely whacko.

Chocolate Snickerdoodles
Made 26 cookies

1 stick of butter (1/2C), room temperature
3/4C sugar
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1-2/3C flour
1/2C unsweetened cocoa powder
1-1/2tsp baking powder
1/2tsp salt

2 tbs cinnamon
1/4C sugar

Cream the butter and the sugar. Once it's soft and homogenous, add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until the mixture is smooth between each one. Then add the vanilla. Then dump all the dry stuff (except the cinnamon and sugar) on top of the batter, mix together the dry stuff lightly, and then stir it into the batter. It may feel a little dry, that's ok, just get it all incorporated.

Preheat your oven to 325F. Grease two cookie sheets. Roll the cookie dough into small, bite-sized balls, using your hands.

In a small bowl, mix together the sugar and cinnamon. Roll each cookie in the cinnamon mixture, and place on the greased cookie sheet. Bake for 10-15min, until the tops of the cookies are a little cracked. Don't overbake the cookies! Chewy cookies > crunchy cookies, always.




(Rolling the cookies in cinnamon and sugar)

Anna's applesauce cake

I can't believe I've never made this, or put it on the blog, yet. Anna Mcloon makes a mean chocolate applesauce cake, and apparently I asked her for the recipe once, back in 2007. It took some digging through old emails to find it, but Ed has been going nuts at making applesauce again this year, so I figured it was the appropriate baked dessert for the day. It also fits the budget pretty well, as I had everything on hand already. Cheap, tasty, sorta-healthy (I mean, it has applesauce, that's a fruit!), and easy to make. Good times! This one's for you, Anna, I'm missing you already.

Chocolate applesauce cake from 1,000 Jewish recipes by Faye Levy, with assorted comments, etc by Anna.

1.5C flour
1/3C unsweetened cocoa
1-1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking soda
3 tbs vegetable oil
1C sugar
1 large egg
1-1/3C applesauce (unsweetened, 'cause that's what I prefer to eat)

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour a 9" square baking pan. I used a round one, and I think it was only 8" diameter. Anna mentions that if you use cocoa instead of flour, you don't get the cake all white on the bottom.

Mix all the wet stuff together in one bowl, and all the dry stuff in another bowl. Combine, but don't overmix.

Dump the batter in the pan, and sprinkle some chocolate chips on top. Bake 25-30 minutes or until the tester comes out clean. Lastly, the most important instructions: "Bring to party!" Except we ate it at home. Whatevs, it's still tasty!

Hurricane mousse

While Hurricane Irene was hammering New England, I was making mousse at Ali's house. We actually made two kinds of mousse, but I only took a picture of the white chocolate one. It was really good, I liked the texture. It was just chocolate and cream; I don't know if that even counts as mousse, but it was delicious. The recipe was on the back of a chocolate wrapper that I'd gotten in France, intending to give the chocolate away, as a gift. Unfortunately, the chocolate got sampled at some point along the way, making it more difficult to give the chocolate away as a gift. The only action remaining was to make the mousse, obviously, and then eat it.

White chocolate mousse
1 bar white chocolate (one that tastes good to you - this one was Nestlé)
200mL whipping cream. I think we determined that is just about 1 cup, but use the google for exact conversions.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Whip the cream to stiff peaks. Transfer about 1/3 of the whipped cream to the chocolate, and stir it around, just to lighten up the chocolate. Add another third of the whipped cream, and fold to combine. Finally, add the last third and fold it in. Put the mousse into pretty glasses, and refrigerate for >2hrs. The wrapper said overnight, but we found it was firm enough for good eating after two hours.

Enjoy!

Chocolate mint brownies

I wanted to bring Neil something baked and delicious as a thank you for all the work he put into setting team trials, mostly single handedly, but it is supposed to be five gazillion degrees this weekend, and humid. That is not good weather for wanting to eat baked goods. But I wanted something rich and chocolatey (hey, a cook's gotta taste stuff...), so I settled on mint chocolate chip brownies. Because mint always tastes cool, and brownies go down well any time. There are a lot of recipes out there for chocolate mint brownies, but I ended up mostly using this one. With lots of modifications, mostly due to what I did or didn't have in my kitchen. The end result was delicious, but I've only eaten them frozen so far. They're so good that way, I don't think I'll bother thawing them, although they'll probably thaw by the time I get them to Neil.

Chocolate Mint Brownies
Made one 9x13" pan... cut into however many pieces you want.

Brownie base:
3/4C flour
2 tbs dutch process cocoa powder
1 tsp espresso powder
1/2tsp salt
~1C chocolate (in this case, a mix of 100% dark ghiradelli, some chocolate chips, and the last of my KAF burgundy bites)
1 stick butter, cut into chunks
1C brown sugar (I don't have any white sugar right now)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract

Mint layer:
1/2 stick butter
1C confectioner's sugar
1/2 tsp mint extract
1 tsp water

Chocolate topping:
~1C chocolate (chocolate chips would do... I was scrounging for anything chocolate, and found something labeled "ooey gooey chocolate sauce (2009)" in my fridge, and it was hard, like chocolate should be, so I mostly used that. I am now out of chocolate. This is a situation that really should be remedied).
1 tbs butter

For the brownies, melt the butter and chocolate in a double boiler. Remove from heat and add the sugar, whisk to combine. Add the vanilla, and then the eggs. For the eggs, first beat them together (not a lot of beating, just enough so that they're not separate whites and yolks) in a separate bowl, then temper them with the hot chocolate, or let the chocolate cool to room temp before you add the eggs. Then sift all the dry stuff on top, and fold to combine. Don't beat or whisk, as that'll cause the eggs to work magic and turn your brownies into chocolate cake.


Preheat the oven to 325, and bake for 12-15 min, in a greased 9x13" pan. I had to cook mine for the full 15 min. Cool the brownies. I put mine on a piece of parchment paper (greased both sides), and that let me pull them out of the pan and onto another pan, for faster cooling.


For the filling, beat the sugar and butter and flavor together, until it makes frosting. Spread on the cooled brownies, and then put in the freezer so it can set up before you put on the chocolate layer. Green food coloring is optional at this point.




In the microwave, melt the chocolate and butter for the topping. Be very careful not to burn the chocolate. Use a flexible spatula to spread the chocolate on top of the green frosting. Put the brownies back in the freezer to set up before you cut them.


Cut them into squares, and eat immediately, or keep them in the freezer and eat them one at a time. They're pretty yummy.

Chocolate Mousse

I've eaten my fair share of chocolate mousse, but I'd never actually made it on my own before. We were wandering the aisles of the Londonderry IGA, wondering what to make for dinner, and Ed suggested chocolate mousse for dessert. Sounds good! Neither of us knew what went into it, but we figured chocolate chips and cream would be a good start. Turns out all you really need is chocolate and eggs, but we whipped some cream to put on top, anyway. Luckily, there is a cookbook at the Upper Camp (from like 1950), which, while having useful recipes for things like chocolate mousse, also has recipes for things that include jello, and recipes for "exotic" salads, basically that means anything that isn't iceberg lettuce. At least it wasn't like the 1001 Muffins book, which has recipes for liver-and-onions-muffins, fudge-sauerkraut-muffins, and lettuce-muffins. Why oh why would you want to make a lettuce muffin? I think I need to try some of these recipes, just to see how they turn out...

I think it was a Good Housekeeping cookbook, either way, what I can remember of the recipe is below.

Chocolate Mousse
Made enough for three, although we divided it between the two of us

1/2C semisweet chocolate chips
3 eggs, divided
1 tsp vanilla
Heavy cream for whipping, for topping, if you want.




Divide the eggs, and whip the whites to stiff peaks. I used a hand beater thing. An electric one would have been easier.

Melt the chocolate chips. You can either do this over a double boiler, or in the microwave. I used the microwave, the trick is to take the chocolate chips out of the microwave when they're still shiny, but not yet melted. Then you stir them around, until they melt. Add the egg yolks to the chocolate all at once, and stir vigorously. Add the vanilla. I think espresso powder would be wonderful here, too, but we didn't have any.

Fold the egg whites into the chocolate. I generally do this in three installations - the first third of the egg whites, I just stir into the chocolate, to lighten it up. The next third, I fold in, and the last third, I fold in.

Using a rubber spatula, pour the mousse into serving dishes. I was able to fit it all in two wine glasses, but 3-4 of them would be ideal.

Supposedly, you have to chill the mousse for 4 hours in the fridge. I stuck it in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and then removed it to the fridge while we were eating dinner, so it wouldn't be frozen. Although frozen mousse wouldn't be so bad. Top with whipped cream, and serve. The freezer-method seemed to work just fine, because the mousse was delicious. I suppose you should be worried about where you get your eggs for stuff like this, but so far so good, no salmonella.

Chocolate covered strawberries

Every year on my birthday, I buy strawberries. Having a birthday in February means I feel a little silly buying my favorite fruit in the middle of winter, but I figure, its my birthday, I can buy strawberries if I want. I don't know if I have a healthy relationship with buying food... I like to eat it, but not to spend money on it. Anyway, I have strawberries, and I have been enjoying them. Since it's my birthday, and I'm in Amherst but Ed's in Boston, he suggested that I bake myself a cake. That seemed like far too much work, but chocolate-covered strawberries was just the right amount of work. And far more delicious than a cake, anyway. It's true, there is a way to improve strawberries - dip them in good chocolate!


This took about five minutes, start to finish, thanks to a microwave. I used some of the KAF burgundy chocolate chunks, about a third of a cup, and put them into a pyrex measuring cup. I think in the future, a wider bowl would be better. Anyway, I microwaved the chocolate for one minute, but it wasn't starting to melt yet, so I did another 15 seconds. After that, I could stir it around, and it was beginning to melt, but it took another 15 seconds to really get gooey.

The strawberries were washed and dried and sitting on a towel ready for use. Since I didn't have any wax paper, I buttered a plate, and used that. I had meant to only dip 7 strawberries (I'm just one person, after all), but I had enough chocolate to do 12. And you can't let good chocolate go to waste!


Once the chocolate was all gooey, I stirred it up with a spoon some more, then removed the spoon, and commenced dipping.


The dipping was a fairly messy process, and involved a lot of finger-licking. I found if I rolled the strawberry through the chocolate, that worked best, although near the end, I was just using my index finger to paint the chocolate onto the berry.

After dipping, I put them on the plate, and the chocolate had hardened up pretty well before I was even done dipping the last berries. I've heard you can put them in the fridge, but clearly the house was cold enough they didn't need it.


End result: perfection. The perfect mix of sweet and bitter and sour, chewy and crunchy and soft and toothy. So good. So worth it. Happy birthday, me.

Ribs and mousse

I've never made ribs before, and neither has Ed, but we were thinking it was about time to use up the ribs that have been living in our freezer all fall. We took them over to Ross and Sam's place, and after a long day of playing in the snow, they were an excellent thing to have for dinner. I don't remember exactly what we put in the pot, but I don't think it actually matters that much. Ed chopped the ribs into rib segments, or maybe it was two-rib segments, and put them in the dutch oven. We covered them with a container of turkey stock (from thanksgiving, good stuff), a can of tomatoes, and a whole slew of other spices, including cayenne and bay leaves (and other stuff I don't remember). I think we also had an onion and some garlic in there, and a good bit of cumin.

After that simmered away for about two hours, maybe three, the meat was basically falling off the bone. Delicious.

Ed made a bbq sauce, and I have no idea what he put in that but it was quite tasty, and I'm sure you could use something store-bought to the same effect, more or less. He slathered the ribs with bbq sauce, and then broiled them in the oven until the sauce started to caramelize. I don't know if he flipped them, I don't think he did. Anyway, the end result was delicious. I highly recommend it.

We also took the leftover turkey stock juice stuff and used it as liquid for the rice, like a dirty rice sort of thing. That was also delicious.



Also, Ross and Sam fed us mousse. It was utterly delicious, and they used this recipe. They actually follow recipes, so you can just use the same one. So good. I seem to have it backwards, though, and I'm trying to eat the glass, rather than the mousse. Don't worry, eventually I figured it out. Turns out a spoon was easier.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Muffins

I suppose these are muffins, but they certainly have enough chocolate to qualify as a cupcake. Where is the line between cupcake and muffin, anyway? These are loosely based on a chocolate applesauce cake of Anna's, but then I tweaked stuff, for no good reason other than not having the full 1-1/3C applesauce. I put in regular chocolate chips and white chocolate chips, I think nuts would have been good, too, but I wanted to be able to share these with Ali on our way to Canada, and she can't do nuts, under penalty of death. So, no nuts.



Chocolate chocolate chip muffins
Made 12 huge muffins

1C white flour
1/2C whole wheat flour
1/3C cocoa (I used the special dark variety)
1C applesauce
1/3C oil
1/3C greek yogurt
1 egg
3/4C sugar
1/2C chocolate chips
1/2C white chocolate chips
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda

Preheat oven to 350F. In a big bowl, mix the dry goods. In another bowl, mix together the wet stuff. Add wet to dry, and don't overmix. Line the muffin pan with muffin liners, or just grease each cup, and load 'em up. I found I had to fill the cups above the top, but they didn't explode or anything, they just made big muffins.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until a testing stick comes out clean, and the top rebounds when you poke it with a finger. Don't overbake, because these guys are deliciously moist. And dark, holy cow that's a hit of chocolate.

Chocolate tofu mousse

We bought some soft tofu the other day, wanted to try it in a salad dressing. I think we'd meant to buy silken tofu, but that only came in ginormous containers, and the soft tofu came in smaller containers. So, soft tofu it was. It made an ok salad dressing, nothing special, but then we had a whole bunch (a block and a half, I think 9oz blocks?) left over. Apparently, soft tofu makes a good chocolate pudding, so I tried out a recipe for chocolate tofu mousse I found on the interwebs. It was actually quite good, maybe that has to do with how much chocolate I added, but it got pretty solid once it chilled. Even Ed liked it, although we agreed that to call itself mousse, it would have to be a little fluffier. The other issue was that because it was soft tofu, the food processor didn't quite do the trick in completely pureeing the tofu, so there were a couple little bits of tofu skin in there. They weren't bad, just... interesting.

The following recipe is about what I put in - I think the overall ingredients are the same as whatever recipe I'd found online, but the amounts are from our version.

Chocolate Tofu Mousse
Serves 4

1 block of tofu (~9oz)
~1/4C chocolate chips (two handfuls)
3 squares Ghiradelli 100% dark baking chocolate
1-2 tbs maple syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
dash of salt
Strawberries or raspberries for serving

In a food processor, puree the tofu. Put the tofu in a saucepan, and add everything else. Heat on medium-low heat until the chocolate dissolves. This makes a very dark chocolate flavor, if you prefer more milk chocolate or less bitter, add more maple syrup and less dark chocolate, or more chocolate chips. You could do this with only chocolate chips, but we happened to have dark chocolate.

Once the chocolate is melted, stir it around, and then chill until you're ready to serve it. It will solidify quite a bit.

Put it all in the saucepan.

Melt.

Ed and I have different opinions on chocolate - for him, the darker, the better. I like milk chocolate. This was a very dark-chocolate-tasting dessert, so he really liked it. I thought it should have been sweeter. He thought we needed to add some espresso powder, which actually would have been quite nice. But with more sweetness. Either way, taste it often as you melt the chocolate to determine how chocolate-y you want your dessert. The bitter flavor of dark chocolate went really well with strawberries. Raspberries would work well, too. I might have to make more of this stuff with the rest of our soft tofu...

Chocolate-walnut chewy clifbar knockoffs

Another of my favorite nectar bars is the dark chocolate walnut one. I made some modifications to this, adding some salt and some instant espresso powder, but they were darn close to the original - I think the melted chocolate and the cocoa really did the trick.

I searched around online for recipes first, and found this and this, so sort of combined them/did my own thing. I also only had 1.25C of dates left, and I think I could have gone with more. Oh well, next time.



1.25C dates (I'd recommend at least 1.5C for a sweeter bar)
1C walnuts
2oz dark chocolate
2 tbs cocoa
1/2tsp instant espresso powder
1 tsp vanilla
a hefty sprinkling of salt

Grind the dates up in a food processor until you have little bits of date. Toast the walnuts in a 350F oven for 8 minutes, until they're just toasty-tasting. Grind those up in the food processor, too, but not too small. Melt the chocolate with the vanilla in the microwave, and then stir in the cocoa, salt, espresso powder, dates and walnuts. Use your hands to really mush everything together and get it all mixed up well. Form the dough into 7 even balls, and then roll those into logs and flatten. Wrap in plastic wrap to store.

Chocolate raspberry truffles

I tried really hard to follow a recipe here. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough butter. But that was pretty much all I changed. The original recipe looks fantastic, and next time I have a full four sticks of butter in my house I'll be trying it, but these were pretty good as is, too. I ended up bringing about half the batch (and I'd made a half batch as it was) to work, because they're just too rich and delicious to leave sitting around at home.

I'll post my "recipe" below, although I would recommend the King Arthur one first, since the brownies would have benefited from more butter and I messed up the topping... but this version is good, too.

Chocolate Raspberry Truffles
Made ~36 squares

1.5 sticks of butter (2 would be preferable, but I only had 1.5)
1/2C raspberry jam to make up for the lack of butter (I'm not sure it works this way, actually... but I also didn't have any raspberry flavor, so I figured this was killing two birds with one stone, or something)
3oz bittersweet chocolate
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp instant espresso powder
2 eggs
3/4C flour

Topping:
1/3C chocolate chips
1/4C heavy cream
1/4C raspberry jam

Garnish:
1 pint raspberries

Melt the butter in a pot, add the jam, add the sugar, mix it around. Remove the pot from the heat, let it cool a bit, then add the chocolate and stir until its melted. Add the flavorings and the eggs, stir that around. Then add the flour.

I cooked these in a 9x5" pan and a small heart-shaped pan (~8" diameter). (this is what I had available to me after halving the recipe). Preheat the oven to 400F. Bake for 30min.

This is where I stopped reading the recipe and made up my own topping. Whoops. In a double boiler, melt the chocolate chips and add the cream. Once its all melted, stir in the raspberry jam, and spread this over the bars. Add a raspberry over where you think each square will be, and cool in the fridge (or the freezer, if you want to eat them sooner). Don't try to cut the bars while they're still warm. Frankly, I think the KAF way of doing the topping looks better, but my way made a gooey raspberry-chocolate sauce-y topping, which held the fresh raspberry quite nicely. I kept the bars in the fridge, so they never got too goopy, and they were deliciously rich. I recommend making them.

Chewy Chocolate Walnut Cookies

I had some leftover egg whites from when I made the lemon curd tart, and I remembered seeing these flourless cookies in Epicurious a while back and being intrigued, so I looked them up and tried them out. I have to say, although they weren't the prettiest thing ever, since they didn't hold cookie-shapes, they were DAMN good. Although Ed would have liked fewer walnuts. I just smoothed them out into a big brownie since they weren't acting like cookies. Turns out, King Arthur has a recipe for a similar cookie, and they say to chill the batter first, which might help with my cookie-spreading problem. They're light and chewy at the same time, and they taste like toasted walnuts and chocolate, which is one of my favorite combos.



I didn't follow the recipe exactly, since some of the recipe reviews said they thought there was too much sugar, so the recipe I used is below.

Chewy Chocolate Walnut Cookies
Made ~3/4 of a small cookie sheet's worth of brownies - I imagine a 9x9" pyrex pan would be perfect for brownies, or chill them and make drop cookies

1.25C walnuts
1C confectioner sugar
2 egg whites
2 tbs cocoa (It was all I had left... I'd recommend using at least 1/4C)
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 tsp espresso powder
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4C chocolate chips

Toast the walnuts - chop them up, spread them on a cookie sheet and bake for 5-10min. Make sure to watch them carefully, because they go from perfect to browned in like fifteen seconds.

Mix together all the dry stuff, and then add the egg whites and vanilla. Stir it together for a while (you don't have to worry about over mixing since there is no flour), and then dump it all in a brownie pan. Or, chill it and make drop cookies.

Bake at 350F for 15 minutes, until the tops are cracked and shiny.

Then do your best to not eat the entire pan at once!

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread

I realized the other day, I've made a lot of zucchini cake, but I've never made zucchini bread. Specifically, with chocolate chips. I perused the internets for a while, and while I found a bunch of interesting looking recipes, I really wanted something pretty standard. And something that would only use 2 eggs and 1 zucchini's-worth of zucchini, since those were the limits on my proportions. I eventually settled on this one, but made some changes anyway. I'm astounded that I managed to actually make this into a loaf of quickbread and not turn it into muffins... wow.

I don't have an Ed-rating for this, because it has zucchini in it, and its a moist, dense, bready-cake-thing, which is something he's scared of. Maybe he'll taste this and like it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

In case it isn't obvious from the picture of the whole loaf, my oven has decided that the upper burner is going to go on super-duper-high, and the lower burner didn't turn on. Or something. The bottom and sides of the bread didn't get crunchy and crispy like most things do when I cook them in bread pans, and the top has a burned image of the burner above it. I hope this doesn't mean we need a new oven...


Next time, I'm tweaking this recipe so that its muffins. I mean, this stuff is good as slices, but it would be better as a muffin.

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread
Makes 1 9x5x3" loaf

1.5C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4tsp baking powder
3/4C sugar
1/4tsp salt
1 tsp espresso powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
1 zucchini
1/2C applesauce
1/4C + 2 tbs oil
1/2C toasted walnuts
1/2C chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350F and grease a 9x5x3" pan.

In a big bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, espresso powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

In another bowl, mix the eggs, vanilla, oil, and applesauce. Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, and mix just until everything is combined. Fold in the nuts and chocolate chips. Plop the batter into the pan and bake for an hour.

Future Changes (coming soon to a blog near you)
It tasted a little too baking-soda-ish. I'm going to add some yogurt, so that it reacts with the baking soda, and take out the applesauce. That wasn't adding anything anyway. I'll probably take out the +2tbs of oil, too, because why get a quarter cup measure dirty and then a tablespoon measure dirty too? And I'm definitely making these as muffins next time. I think they need more nuts and maybe fewer chocolate chips, as you can see below, there are a lot of chocolate chips studding this loaf. Luckily, its "dry" enough that they don't all sink to the bottom. Hence my belief that it really wants to be a muffin.

It was delicious, though. Moist, with a crunchy top. and chocolate chips inside. What more could you ask for?

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Read this first. Testament to how awesome this cake really is.

This recipe is another one taken straight from King Arthur Flour, which I had tried before but forgotten to take pictures. It was so good that I decided to do it a second time, and it was well worth it, as always. The original recipe is here, but I didn't put any chocolate chips in it or on it this time, because I didn't have any. The cake was fine without them, but would have been even better with more chocolate.



In case the King Arthur website ever goes down, I am reprinting the recipe (please don't sue me):

1/2 cup (1 stick, 4 ounces) butter*
1/2 cup (3 1/2 ounces) vegetable oil
1 3/4 cups (12 1/4 ounces) granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1/2 cup (4 ounces) sour cream or yogurt (I used yogurt this time, last time I used sour cream)
2 1/2 cups (10 1/2 ounces) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
3/4 cup (2 1/4 ounce) Dutch-process cocoa
2 teaspoons espresso powder, optional but tasty
2 cups shredded zucchini (about one 10" zucchini, about 12 ounces)
1/2 cup (3 ounces) chocolate chips (didn't use these this time)
1 cup (6 ounces) chocolate chips, for icing (didn't use these this time)

*being lazy, I only used oil.

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Lighlty grease a 9" x 13" pan. (I also made half the recipe with the full amount of zucchini, because I only have a 8x8" pan)

In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, oil, sugar, vanilla, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Beat in the eggs.

Stir in the sour cream or yogurt alternately with the flour. Then add the cocoa and espresso powder, mixing till smooth. Finally, fold in the zucchini and 1/2 cup chocolate chips.

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the cake for 30 to 35 minutes, till the top springs back lightly when touched, and it seems set. Slide the cake out of the oven, sprinkle it evenly with the 1 cup chocolate chips, and return it to the oven for 5 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven, and use a cake spatula or rubber spatula to spread the chocolate chips into a smooth glaze. Cool on a rack. Yield: 24 servings.