... a spirited celebration of regional food and culinary craft, season by season, with original recipes by Susan S. Bradley
Is there anything better in the world than a scoop of the richest vanilla bean ice cream you can get your hands on and a generous topping of an equally rich dark chocolate sauce? Okay, maybe add a couple of perfect strawberries to that picture. And then, since we’re talking perfection here, how about a small handful of toasted almonds as well?
Whether you call them beignet, zeppoli, bunuelos, crullers, Indian frybread, elephant ears, fritters, funnel cakes, churros, or simply donuts, there is something absolutely magical about freshly fried sweet dough, whether plain, encasing a bit of fruit or chocolate, topped with sugar, or dipped into a creamy, dreamy sauce.
Folks sometimes ask what inspires my recipes. Such a hard question. Anything and everything is my truthful response. I am almost always thinking about food.
This brownie recipe, for instance, was inspired by the following nearly concurrent events:
•Sampling goat’s milk cajita in a Mexican grocery store in Portland.
•Making cajita myself.
•The All Chocolate! All Month! celebration at LunaCafe.
•Plan to work cajita into a brownie recipe for the celebration.
•A Brownie Throw Down on The Food Network, which the Vermont Brownie Company won with their chevre brownie.
What I really love about baking is that even if you don’t get the exact result you are going for, you sometimes get a nonetheless marvelous different result. That’s what happened with these brownies, which I intended to be the epitome of chewy chocolate YUM.
With this post, we kick off the second annual Love Rules! All Chocolate! All Month! celebration at LunaCafe OtherWorldly Kitchen. To check out the wonderful chocolate creations we debuted last February, be sure to visit the All Chocolate! recipe archive.
Beginning now, every post until the end of February will feature, you guessed it, CHOCOLATE. In fact, I’ve been covered in unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate, as well as cocoa, for many weeks now, trying to come up with the world’s best, truly CHEWY (not fudgy, not cakey) brownie. And finally, after many attempts, I succeeded. In all the testing, I also serendipitously hit upon a wonderfully silky, light, and luscious fudgy brownie that turned me, the swamp boogie queen of chewy brownie lovers, into a fudgy brownie convert.
I want to wrap up LunaCafe’s February 2009 Love Rules! All Chocolate! All Month! celebration with a really special dessert. If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been covered in cocoa powder and melted chocolate all month. I discovered and perfected the world’s most delectable cookie, Bittersweet Chocolate & Toasted Walnut Cookies Perfecta [...]
After weeks of research, this elegantly simple chocolate pudding formula, developed over several testing sessions, acheives a perfect balance. It is not extreme in any direction, yet has a multi-dimensional, vibrant flavor and luxurious mouth feel.
A little over a year ago, I decided to do a whirlwind tour of Northwest restaurant desserts. Then about a minute after that decision was bathed in golden light, I decided to narrow the exploration to chocolate desserts.
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