... a spirited celebration of regional food and culinary craft, season by season, with original recipes by Susan S. Bradley
I know, I know! Molten Chocolate Cake, or Lava Cake, as it is sometimes called, is so YESTERDAY. I am almost perturbed today when I see one on a dessert menu.
I mean, really, can’t the pastry chef think of SOMETHING ELSE? Haven’t we moved beyond warm, fragrant, oozing, fudgy chocolate soufflé cakes and their requisite ice cream accompaniments?
I have a confession to make. This is not a new cake. I created it at the tail end of LAST YEAR’S All Chocolate! All Month! celebration, and then in the excitement of planning a slew of new spring recipes, forgot to post it. In fact, I forgot it altogether. Until yesterday.
It’s All Chocolate! All Month! in the LunaCafe OtherWorldly Kitchen. As usual during the Month of Love, I am covered in chocolate: milk chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, white chocolate, and unsweetened cocoa powder. All in an effort to come up with the most delectable, memorable Valentine’s Day dessert ever.
The first time I bit into the airy pillow of dough known as ebelskiver (pronounced ay bil skee ver), I could not quite categorize it. Was it donut, beignet, popover? Or something else entirely? The only thing I knew for sure was that I loved them—whatever they were.
I was flipping through my well-worn copy of The Great Book of Chocolate by David Lebovitz, flagging the pages of interest, when I saw a recipe for something called a Congo Bar and realized that I didn’t know what a Congo Bar was.
Then, as I read through the recipe, it started to coalesce in my head as a Blondie loaded with chocolate chips and chopped nuts. And as good as I’m sure David’s recipe is (which came to him courtesy of the Goddess of Baked Goodness, Flo Braker), I couldn’t help remembering that I created the Best Blondie in the Universe last year around this time and even suggested loading it with chocolate chips, chopped nuts, coconut, chopped peanut butter cups and anything else you can think of. For the post, I made a Peanut Butter Caramel Sauce and dolloped that throughout the batter. So was that creation actually a Congo Bar?
I have been dreaming of creating a chocolate and almond paste pound cake for some time now and have finally done it. The impetus was Valentine’s Day of course but maybe even more this gorgeous, nonstick Nordic Ware quilted heart cake pan.
When I’m creating chocolate desserts, one of the first flavor pairings that pops into my mind is chocolate and peanut butter. I mean, does it get any better than that? And if I’m trying to please my man on Valentine’s Day, well chocolate and peanut butter are surely going to do the trick.
Recipes can be inspiring, but there is nothing as satisfying as truly understanding the underlying formula and technique of a particular dish. Once you’ve got those under your belt, you OWN that dish and can riff it successfully and endlessly. That’s when the real fun begins.
Take the concept of dessert crepes (pronounced kr?ps in French or kr?pes in English) for instance, which are a type of very thin pancake. You can go straight to a comprehensive French cookbook, grab the basic dessert crepe recipe and process, and rely on that forever. Or, if you are more curious, you can gather 10-20 solid resources, compare the formulas and processes, and then hit the kitchen and test your way through them. When you are done, the entire world of desert crepes will open up for you and reveal its secrets. You will become the Zen master of dessert crepes.
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