Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'chocolate'
How To Make a Chocolate Souffle
One of the highlights of making our Amateur Gourmet show for Food2.com, was the day we got to visit the kitchen of Le Bernardin--one of the nation's, if not the world's, great restaurants--to learn how to make a chocolate souffle from revered pastry chef (and blogger!) Michael Laiskonis. What follows is the video we made, with step-by-step instructions that result in a chocolatey souffle that's as ethereal as it is delicious. Hope you enjoy! [For the full typed-out recipe, click here.] Previous Episodes: How To Cook Fish (A Musical) How To Make Pasta From Scratch How To Make the Perfect Steak How To Cook an Omelet...
Barcelona, A Reflection
Before I left for Barcelona, two weeks ago, I created a three-ring binder of essential information. The first tab said "Hotels" and there I printed out the confirmations for the Hotel Banys Orientals, where we'd stay for most of the trip, and Hotel Coral Playa, where we'd stay when we went to Roses for dinner at El Bulli. (Note: both hotels were great choices, thank you all for your tips.) The second tab said "E-mails" and there I kept all the direct e-mails I received about where to go and eat in Barcelona. Tab three was "Comments" and I printed out all your comments from this post, highlighting the most commonly reoccurring restaurant suggestions, and then, in Tab Four "NYT," I printed out profiles of those highlighted restaurants from the New York Times Barcelona page. Suffice it to say, I arrived in Barcelona fully prepped and ready....
Bespoke Chocolates
Food people are my kind of people. That's why so many of the people I've met since I started food blogging have become good friends: they're generous, they're insightful, they're creative, they're smart and they have good taste. So friendship was clearly in the stars when a longtime reader named Rachel Zoe Insler informed me that she'd opened up a chocolate shop in New York called Bespoke Chocolates. I promised Rachel that I'd be in right away to sample her wares and then totally flaked out; I did include Bespoke in my NY Scavenger Hunt, but I never scavenged there myself because, frankly, I didn't understand where it was!...
Chocolate Mousse
There is only one dessert to eat after Coq au Vin and that dessert is chocolate mousse. Now, if you're anything like me and you love the movie "Rosemary's Baby" you won't pronounce that chocolate mousse, you'll pronounce it "chocolate mouse" employing your best Ruth Gordon voice. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, get thee to a video store STAT)....
The Cake Makers
Look at all the happy people who took my advice and made Ina Garten's chocolate cake this weekend: Those of you who missed the deadline, worry not: the Amateur Gourmet photo pool is still open, so if you make the cake this week, upload your pictures there and I'll see them. Actually, if you make anything you want to share with other Amateur Gourmet readers post it to the Flickr pool--we want to know what you're cooking....
Chocolate Cake
Ladies and gentleman, this has been a rough week. My flu mutated into a cold and then back into a flu again. I hardly have the energy to type these words, I'm rapidly fading. Yet, I am filled with hope as I harken back to two weeks ago when I made the chocolate cake you see above. It comes from The Barefoot Contessa (click here for the recipe) and it's the Platonic ideal of a chocolate cake. It's moist and rich and complex (with hidden coffee flavors); I ate way more of it than I should have. Perhaps my flu is punishment for gluttony? The startling thing about making a chocolate cake is how many people inevitably come over to eat it. Let's call it my Field of Dreams theory about baking: "If you bake it, they will come." Before I knew it: Patty, Lauren, Stella, and James were there eating chocolate cake during the Vice-Presidential debate; then Lisa and a choreographer and dancers and my friend Josh were eating it too. This chocolate cake is like a people magnet, which is why I'm posting it today: Friday. If you make this cake this weekend, I bet you'll have a better weekend than if you don't make this cake. In fact, I'll make you a deal: make this cake and keep a camera handy. When the people come to eat your chocolate cake, take a picture of yourself with your friends and your cake and upload it to The Amateur Gourmet group on Flickr (click here). Anyone who uploads a picture, will be featured on the main page next week. You'll be a chocolate cake star! As for me, I plan to curl up on the couch and dream of chocolate cakes past, present and future. Perhaps one day I'll have the energy to make another one; until then, I'll be dreaming of yours. Happy weekend baking....
Chocolate Covered Matzos
Passover is over, but I'd like to belatedly submit my review of the Dark Chocolate Egg Matzos I bought at Citarella a few weeks ago. Here's my review: I didn't really like it. Sometimes the combination of dry, crackly, salty bread-like substance (pretzels, for example) with creamy, bitter, unctuous chocolate is a winner, but not so with matzoh. Whereas pretzels have that salty edge, matzoh is pretty bland and chocolate can't redeem it. It's like on American Idol when Randy says, "If you can sing, you can sing anything." Matzoh can't really sing--it's just a nice vehicle for other foods like that apple stuff I really like. Haroset. Give me matzoh and haroset any day, but keep the chocolate away....
Neil The Intern Makes Fudge
We haven't really heard yet from Neil the Intern (remember our interns?) and so please enjoy his debut post; a post on making fudge. Fudge is wonderful. It's creamy, crystalline, firm, and smooth all at the same time. It's a treat whenever I eat it, but is especially good when it starts to get cold, and yesterday my father and I made fudge for a post-Thanksgiving treat....
A Cookie Trick
As much as I miss Diana for her winning personality, I mostly miss her for her cookie sheets. It was with her cookie sheets that we first made the greatest cookies of our lives--you can read the recipe here. Meg of Megnut rejected these cookies when she tried them and called them "too thin," but I still think they're the best. Yesterday I was all set to make them when I made a painful discovery: Diana, despite my efforts to thwart her, remembered to take her cookie sheets. Her cookie sheets, unlike mine, are flat with no sides and the cookies made on them came out perfect every time. The ones made on mine often got burnt around the edges or black underneath--my cookie sheets have sides. I was almost ready to give up, when I had a "eureka" moment. "What's wrong?" asked Craig. "I'm having a eurkea moment," I answered. The eureka was this: I could bake cookies on the BACK of my cookie sheets. Flip them upside down. Lay parchment across them and bake them that way. Look: See what I mean? So I made the batter as usual and, as I revealed in a previous post, I used an ice cream scoop to get the batter on to the sheets: I also flattened them with a wet hand, a trick I learned from one of my regular TV shows (Barefoot Contessa)? They went into the 350 degree oven and I was going to switch the sheets after 9 minutes to cook another 9 minutes more, but at that point they were already a perfect golden brown and the edges were dark. So I made the executive decision to take them out 9 minutes early and guess what? They were fantastic. I mean you saw that picture above, look at this one: What more could you want from a cookie? And you can recreate these at home this weekend using my trick. Who needs Diana and her stinkin' cookie sheets? From now on I will use her for her personality and nothing more....
A Piece of
Finally made Clotilde's signature cake. Can you see the zucchini? You can't? That's because it sort of melts as it cooks. That's important to note because when I first shredded the zucchini, using the food processor, it came out in long strands. I was worried there'd be long strands of zucchini in the finished product so I put in the blade and chopped them all up. But Clotilde assures me that, "size doesn't matter. The zucchini blends into the texture of the cake, so they can be short or long, whatever's easiest with the tools you have." This is a perfect dessert to make right now with zucchini still so abundant. You can trick yourself into thinking it's healthy too and justify the giant piece that you cut for yourself, like the piece you see above. Just more proof that Chocolate & Zucchini is a book worth having....
