Category Archives: chocolate

Mexican hot chocolate brownies – chewy v. cake-y

Posted on by
4

Mexican hot chocolate brownies

Here at the test kitchens of The Ordinary, we do the hard work so you don’t have to. I made two big trays of brownies in as many days, and then I forced my poor beleaguered family to try both and decide which they liked better. It was an arduous job, I tell you! Why did we do this? In an attempt to determine why some brownies turn out chewy, and some turn out cakey. And why some have that crackly, dried mud looking top, which is so oddly appealing.

These particular brownies were inspired by Mexican hot chocolate, that completely perfect combination of chocolate, vanilla and cinnamon. More than that – they contain Mexican hot chocolate. That’s right, we didn’t just add vanilla and cinnamon, we melted one of the hot chocolate tablets with the butter, and stirred it right into the brownies. And then we added vanilla and cinnamon! And then we ate them with cream whipped with vanilla and cinnamon! These smell so ridiculously good when you’re cooking them that it will make you dizzy.

The results of our fiendish experiments were inconclusive, because everybody liked all of them. However, we have gathered a small amount of data. If you use white sugar, you will get a crackly top. If you use brown sugar, you will have a smooth and placid surface. If you add two eggs, you will have a cake-y brownie. If you use only one egg, you will have a chewy fudgy brownie. If you want a cake-y brownie, you should add a bit more baking powder – 1/2 t. as opposed to 1/4. I can’t guarantee the scientific reliability of these facts. You might have to make several trays yourself, purely for the noble cause of verifying this experiment.

Brownies are incredibly easy to make, which is a good thing when you’re making tray after tray of them, day after day. You simply melt some butter, stir some stuff in, put them in a tray and cook them for a while. The Mexican hot chocolate tablet I used was made by chocolate Ibarra. It contains cocoa nibs, sugar and cinnamon. It melted quite nicely in a few tablespoons of water, and then mixed well with the melting butter. I think you could probably use any brand, but you may have to experiment to find out! Oh, and I should add that, in my book, brownies have to have chocolate chips in them. It’s required!

Here’s Chocolate Caliente by Mike Laure
Continue reading →

Bakewell tart with cherries, cassis and bittersweet chocolate

Posted on by
5

bakewell tart

My love of black currants is the legendary stuff of legend. Unfortunately, they’re not readily available in America, and my tiny black currant bush doesn’t produce very much in the summer, let alone in January. What bad luck! But black currant jam and creme de cassis are readily available in America. What good luck! For a while now, I’ve been wanting to make a bakewell tart…a tart with a pate sucree crust, a layer of jam, and a layer of almond-cake-like frangipane. I have such fond memories of eating them as a child, when we lived in England, out of a little box, with fondant and a cherry. Mine would be a little different, though. Of course I wanted to use black currant jam. And then I decided to add dried tart cherries and chocolate chips, for a balance of deliciousness. I soaked the cherries in cassis, then mixed them with the jam and the chocolate, and, I must say, the combination is killer! Especially together with the crispy cookie-like crust and the soft fragrant almond topping. A wonderful combination of crunchy, chewy, sweet and tart.

Bakewell tart

Here’s Ska Jam by Tommy McCook and the Supersonics

Continue reading →

Pumpkin chocolate chip spiral cookies

Posted on by
1

Pumpkin chocolate chip spirals

These cookies are oddly addictive. Well – chocolate and cinnamon – I guess it’s not that odd. But it’s more than that, I tell you! There’s something about the subtly sweet pumpkin cookie part, which shines through the more assertive flavors of cinnamon and chocolate, that makes you want more. That, and, they’re spirals! With gooey cinnamon-y chocolate-y bits that you get to when you peel them apart. What could be more fun to eat than that? I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, I accidentally added too much pumpkin purée, which meant that I had to compensate by adding too much flour, which ultimately produced a very dense cookie. This recipe is adjusted to make a slightly lighter cookie, but it will still have that pumpkin pie-tenderness.
Here’s The Great Pumpkin Waltz performed by the Vince Guaraldi trio.
Continue reading →

Oatmeal chocolate-covered-ginger cookies

Posted on by
2

These might not be the most colorful cookies on your holiday tray, but they’ll be among the most flavorful! Spicy oatmeal cookies are crispy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside, and contain the irresistible surprise of chocolate-covered ginger! There’s just something cheerfully salubrious about them, as well. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that chocolate and oatmeal are natural anti-depressants. Ginger is good for everything. Molasses has lots of iron. So grab yourself a plate of these, a bottle of red wine and a big warm blanket, and head into hibernation for the winter!

I liked to half-dip them in melted dark chocolate. Because more chocolate is always better, they look pretty, and they reminded me of chocolate covered hob nobs, which is surely the most comforting cookie on the planet! They’re good without that extra touch, though, if you’re not in the mood to play with melted chocolate.

Here’s Michigan and Smiley with Little Drummer Boy. Rappa pom pom, eh!!
Continue reading →

Hazelnut/raspberry/dark chocolate bar cookies

Posted on by
3

Hazelnut/raspberry/dark chocolate!

Oh, the tasty trinity of deliciousity that is hazelnuts, raspberries, and dark chocolate! I’ve combined it here in the easiest way possible…a soft hazelnut shortbread, covered with a layer of raspberry jam, and coated with dark chocolate. I think bar cookies are the simplest to make, because you don’t have to fiddle with each individual cookie, and they’re nice because you get the full effect of each individual flavor in each bite. A good cookie to make when you realize it’s December 21st and you haven’t made batches and batches of cookies, yet. I used seedless raspberry jam, but you could use any kind of jam you like. Apricot, strawberry, blackberry – even marmalade! All would taste good here. And I baked mine in a 8 X 12 inch brownie pan, but you could use something larger, or even a baking sheet, if you want your shortbread layer to be thinner. And you can omit the egg and add more flour if you want it to be crispier.
Here’s Fats Waller with Black Raspberry Jam
Continue reading →

Spiced cider cake with chocolate-covered ginger

Posted on by
1

Spiced Cider cake

Chocolate-covered ginger? Chocolate-covered ginger! I saw this at my extremely ordinary grocery store in the bulk food section. Of course I had to try it! Of course I had to put it in a cake! After feverishly running through various options in my head (a lemon ginger cake? A dark molasses-y cake?) I decided on a light but very spicy cake, with apple cider in it. To remind you of fall walks with fresh cider and cider donuts and apple butter… It smells wonderful while it’s cooking, and tastes just as good. If you can’t find dark chocolate-covered ginger, I would recommend using candied ginger and dark chocolate chips. I cut a snowflake out of paper and dusted powder sugar over the cake (and myself!) to make the pattern. Once again proving that cooking is all about the games you played when you were little.

Here’s James Yorkston’s beautiful Woozy with Cider (I used regular American cider, but I think you could use hard cider, too. Hmmm…I’ll have to try that!)
Continue reading →

Chocolate cayenne cutout cookies

Posted on by
4

Chocolate cayenne cutout cookies


As I was making these, I said to myself, “Claire, you’re crazy!” Why? Because I made nearly the same cookie less than a week ago! And wrote about it here! Those were my spicy-hot dark chocolate cookies. As I mentioned at the time, they were like little cakes. Diabolical little cakes. Because they were a bit soft and had jam in the middle. I lay awake one night thinking these would also make good cookies to roll out and cut in cool shapes. And then coat with melted bittersweet chocolate. So I came up with this alternative recipe. The taste is very nearly the same – chocolate-y chocolate-i-ness with a spicy cayenne-ginger bite that sneaks up on you. But they’re a little harder and crunchier. And they hold the shape of your cookie cutters.

Here’s MF DOOM with Cayenne Pepper.
Continue reading →

Dark, spicy-hot chocolate cookies

Posted on by
4

dark chocolate cayenne cookies


I have to come up with a better name for these cookies – but how to describe them? They’re made with extra dark cocoa, and flavored with cayenne, black pepper and ginger for a surprising little bite. They’re filled with tart/sweet unbelievably delicious black currant jam, and they’re topped with dark dark 60% chocolate. All together they’re surprising and addictive. I’d originally thought of this as a cake, and these are like little cakes. The cookies are quite soft, a little crispy and chewy, and the chocolate adds a pleasing crunch. But a soft crunch, if that makes sense? The cayenne is subtle, it sneaks up on you, and gives you a little kick moments after you’ve first tasted the cookie. And it makes the cookies extra-good with either coffee or red wine.

If you want cookies that taste like this but are a little crunchier and harder, try this recipe.

I love the flavor of black currants. (See my ravings in the quince post). I have a small bush in my backyard, but it’s only produced about 20 berries at a time. They’re pretty berries, though! The birds like to eat them right off the bush, which is a pretty sight as well. Did you ever wonder why black currant products, which are plentiful all over europe, are not as common in America? Apparently it’s because black currants, which used to be native, shared a disease with some kind of tree (I can’t remember which one!) so they were outlawed!! So sad. But they’ve come up with disease-resistant stains, now, so maybe they’ll make a comeback.

Here’s Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Pepper Stomp. I love stomps!!
Continue reading →

Supreme cinnamon buns with bittersweet chocolate

Posted on by
Reply

Best cinnamon buns EVER

I LOVE cinnamon buns. Love and love and love them. Is there anything more fun to eat than a pastry that you can unfold to find more and more cinnamon-y goodness the farther you go?

But I have to tell you, I frequently find myself disappointed by the bun part of the cinnamon bun. Often it’s just white bread dough. It’s the thing you set aside to get to the tasty insides.

So I decided to make a cinnamon bun with a pastry element you’d like to eat by itself. And I decided to add bittersweet chocolate chips, because everything is better with chocolate chips. Especially on a cold and rainy day, such as we’ve had lately.

The sugar and cinnamon and chocolate got all melty together in the best possible way.

The reviews are in…little Isaac said he felt like it was so good that he would ask for another as soon as he had finished the first one. And my husband said that we could be nailed into our house the whole winter as long as we had supplies of these cinnamon buns. Malcolm liked them so much he helped me name them.

For the record, I think these would be good with some orange zest in the crust, but I haven’t tried that…yet.

Here’s the Stone Roses with Sally Cinnamon
Continue reading →

Millionaire Shortbread Cake

Posted on by
4

Millionaire Shortbread Cake

When I was little we lived in England for a while, and I have vivid and fond memories of being out somewhere, a museum, maybe, and becoming very tired all of a sudden. We’d all decide to stop for “tea and a sweetie” as my dad called it. And we’d all be instantly restored, and I remember talking about how remarkable it was that we all felt more lively. The restorative powers of tea are not to be underestimated! On these occasions, as I recall, my mother used to love millionaire’s shortbread, which (as I recall it) was a perfect combination of shortbread, caramel, and chocolate. And then there were variations – some had a digestive crust, some had milk chocolate, some had dark, one (my mother’s favorite) had lemon curd and dark chocolate.

Yesterday when faced with the delightful conundrum of what kind of cake to make for my mother’s birthday, I decided to make a cakey version of millionaire’s shortbread – combining different elements of my memories of the sweetie. So I made a cake very loosely based on a digestive biscuit (well, it had a tiny bit of oats and whole wheat flour in it, and I used brown sugar), a lemon caramel coating (turned out really tasty! I ate it by the spoonful as I was cleaning up) and a bittersweet chocolate ganache on top of that. My mom said it was the best cake ever! Result!

Here’s Barbara Dane’s It isn’t Nice. A song my mom likes, and I love, too.
Continue reading →