Truffling

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Chelsea

At our house, a box of See’s chocolates was standard holiday fare. They were special – the white box, the ruffled, rustling brown wraps that made it all but impossible to sneak a selection without someone overhearing – and all too quickly gone. But they were special for good and for bad reasons. As Forrest Gump so wisely told us, you never knew what you were going to get. It might be a luscious square of soft, fudgy dark chocolate studded with walnuts, or it might be the dreaded maple nougat. My cousin J. loves caramel, and when she was little she developed a surefire way to determine which mysterious See’s square to choose: bite the bottoms off, and if you don’t like the filling inside, put it back in the box. No one could see the intrusion, at least not until that piece was selected again.

For the past few years, I’ve made truffles for my officemates at the end of the term. Squares of ganache flavored with fruits, nuts, and liqueurs, robed lovingly in melted chocolate and stuffed carefully into pretty little boxes make excellent, always well-received holiday gifts. I’ve experimented with ginger, apricots, amaretto, peppermint, almond butter, dark, white, and bittersweet chocolate. To my delight, Bittman has a truffle (or at least a truffle-like) recipe among his 101. With no officemates to share with this year, I decided to make a selection of truffles for my husband to give his department at his school.

I went a little overboard.

“Cranberry Truffles: Heat ½ cup simple syrup and ½ cup bourbon or water; add 2 cups dried cranberries and steep until soft, 10 to 15 minutes. Drain, reserving the liquid. Pulse the fruit in a food processor, adding just enough liquid so the mixture comes together. Roll spoonfuls of the cranberry filling into balls, then roll them in cocoa, mixed with pulverized nuts if you like.”

This sounded decadent and very adult – an excellent addition to truffle flavor combinations I was planning like Chambord with dried raspberries and Grand Marnier with candied orange peel. I used:

½ cup bourbon (I used Knob Creek)

½ cup simple syrup (I had some ginger syrup kicking around, so why not?)

2 cups dried cranberries (use reduced sugar, if you can find them)

½ cup cocoa powder

½ cup hazelnuts (optional)

I was pleased to find reduced sugar Craisins to use here – the bourbon has its own kind of sweetness, and the ginger syrup I was using instead of a simple syrup was tooth-twingingly sweet. I heated the liquids together in a small pot over medium heat until they came to the barest simmer.

As Bittman directs, I steeped the Craisins in the bourbon and syrup for fifteen minutes or so. I wasn’t sure what temperature “steeping” actually is, so I decided on a barely bubbling simmer. The syrup seeped into the cranberries, giving them a slightly fleshy texture. The bourbon wafted headily through my kitchen, making me think 10am might have been on the early side to take on this project so clearly meant for a Friday evening.

Fifteen minutes of simmering down, and I dumped my swelling craisins into a strainer over a pot to catch the liquid. Don’t lose all the liquid; you’re going to need a tablespoon or two of it later. Let the craisins drain and cool for at least ten or fifteen minutes. While they cooled, I put half a cup of hazelnuts in my food processor and let it rip until they were almost all pulverized into a powder.

When they were cool and had (emitted) plenty of bourbon infused syrup, I moved the craisins to the clean-scraped food processor and let it run. The little ruby jewels came together into a whirring relish of red, and as the bits began to clump in the bowl of my food processor, I added a tablespoon of the bourbon syrup, and then another. The cranberry bits now clung stickily together and I decided they were stable enough to scoop.

I mixed my powdered hazelnuts with cocoa powder in a shallow bowl, then laid out a piece of wax paper for the finished balls. I spooned out rounds slightly smaller than ping-pong balls and rolled them gently in the nut and cocoa mixture, then set them gently on the wax paper to set or firm up or whatever it was they were going to decide to do.

When I let myself taste one (I waited until after lunch, out of respect for the bourbon), I was glad to have waited. These, folks, are strong. They are utterly delicious, but extremely intense. The cranberries absorb all the flavor and warmth and musty floral overtones of the alcohol, and the cocoa adds just the right hint of matte bitterness to combat the sweetness and tartness of the cranberries. I set them gently in mini cupcake wrappers.

Once completed, the bourbon balls joined the rest of the bejeweled collection, which consisted of:

Apricot and almond bits in white chocolate, spiked with amaretto and then dipped in dark chocolate.

Bittersweet ganache with orange liqueur, threaded with candied orange peel, dunked in white chocolate and garnished with a piece of sugared rind.

Dark chocolate with candied ginger and ginger syrup, dressed with semi-sweet chocolate and topped with a piece of ginger.

Chocolate ganache flavored with chambord and studded with freeze dried raspberries, which contributed a really intriguing crunchy intensity.

Crunchy flaxseed and almond butter cups, topped with a sprinkle of sea salt.

Happy Holidays!

Starstruck

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Chelsea

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it hasn’t fully sunk in yet that I live in Los Angeles now. Funny little happenstances keep reminding me, and I’m stunned into bemused awareness. This didn’t happen when I lived in Orange County as a teenager. We were far enough from the big city with its food, music and fame scene, and I was distant enough in age to care, or even be aware of, what living near LA could mean.

Now that I’m a bit closer physically and chronologically, what it mostly means to me is food. Yesterday as I sat cloistered in my home office, commenting on what seemed like an endless stream of papers, my phone gave that delightfully insistent buzz that means someone from the outside world has contacted me. It was our friend J., asking if we wanted to go and grab burgers with him and one of his local friends. Dinner out? On a Friday? Meaning I wouldn’t have to tackle the embarrassing state of my kitchen just yet? Not to mention another culinary and – what would be the right word, perhaps libationary? – joyride around our new city? Yes, please.

J. showed up at our house around six and whisked us off to Plan Check Kitchen and Bar, a new-ish little burger and brew style gastropub in the Little Osaka area of West LA, where we would have dinner with him and his friend T. They have a short menu, mostly meat, but with interesting Asian flavor accents – wasabi, yuzu, and dashi creeping up in unexpected places.

I ordered the Bleuprint Burger, a patty of wagyu beef piled with smoked bleu cheese, brown sugar baked bacon they call, perfectly, “pig candy,” fried onions, roasted garlic steak sauce, and peppercress. My dining mates all got the standard: the Plan Check Burger, featuring a curious substance Plan Check calls “ketchup leather,” and a dashi-infused “Americanized” cheese, which I think meant cheddar mixed with garlic and some fish stock to smooth it out and add extra umami flavor. On the side, the table shared sweet potato fries cooked in beef tallow, served with a sweet peach ketchup, and veggie chips – perfectly crispy wafer thin slices of yam and yucca and who knows what else, paired with a slightly spicy, velvet smooth avocado cream.

Dinner was fantastic. I haven’t had a really good, moist burger cooked at an actual medium (the temperature I requested) in a long time. I drank a tangerine wheat beer with it (the name of the brewery escapes me, but somewhere in California), and it was a nice accompaniment.

While I was away from the table for a moment, somehow the conversation changed from food to, well, food. But virtual food. In fact, televised food. T., through a previous job, knows one of the guys from the company and food truck project Seoul Sausage, currently being featured on The Great Food Truck Race.

“I think they are opening a storefront,” he said, while my eyes bugged out of my head. “It’s just on Mississippi. We should go see if they’re open.”

Bye-bye, burger. It’s sausage time.

We ambled the blocks along Sawtelle separating us from Mississippi. T. pointed out which restaurants along the way were worth checking out which, as it turns out, is most of them. I tried to make mental notes but I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of delicious knowledge I was receiving. N. and I will just have to go back. Many times.

We turned the corner onto Mississippi and there, at the end of a short collection of shops, was Seoul Sausage Co. And it was open. Without knowing it, we had stumbled across a secret mini launch they had announced only on their website and on Twitter, and there were all three of the boys behind the counter, and suddenly I was being introduced and ordering one of the flaming fried balls they developed on the show.

I know I should be talking about the food here, but I was so starstruck I couldn’t stop grinning my way around the little space. The guys were, as I had imagined but never even hoped to find out, super friendly and happy to see us – and everyone else who stopped in – and being very properly and apologetically closed-mouthed about the results of the show (the finale is tomorrow – Sunday, at 9pm). N. chatted them up about beer, encouraging them to carry Ninkasi if it ever appeared on their radars. I couldn’t help but mumble something about how I hoped they would/had/did/whatever-it-is-taped-tv-is-so-confusing win before I gave into the beautiful, sizzling-hot fried riceball they handed me.

It was delightful. Delicate rice in the middle mixed with cheese, spices, and who knows what else. Crisp breaded crust around the outside, and a slightly spicy sauce squeezed over the top. It reminded me of the kind of sauce you get on certain spicy sushi rolls, and it paired so nicely with the rice. This is an excellent late night snack, and N. and I assured them we would be back again after their official opening next week. I was halfway through my little after-dinner snack before I remember that, despite my unwise choice to venture out on a Los Angeles food adventure without my camera, I do have a smart phone fully capable of capturing an image.

Flaming fried balls conquered, and me still in some disbelief that we had just been to Seoul Sausage and met the guys in charge (I wanted to know everything but asked nothing: what was Tyler Florence like? Were you getting all those truck stop phone calls at once, or did he call each truck one at a time? What did you think of Nonna’s Kitchenette? Did you win? Did you win? Did you win?) we stepped back out into the night (which we were surprised to learn was still so young – only 8pm yet) and resurfaced at the Formosa Café in West Hollywood to share a round of drinks. I asked for a lemon drop, but the bartender mixed me a vodka daisy instead because he likes the flavor better, and so did I. Vodka daisy with a sugared rim is apparently my new cocktail of choice.

As we belted ourselves into J.’s car again, he asked if we minded swinging by Canter’s delicatessen on Fairfax. He wanted a pastrami sandwich for the road back to Orange County, and of course we obliged. Once inside, I was attracted not to the sandwiches, but to the bakery counter, where my taste buds immediately performed their own version of the honey bee’s waggle dance to communicate a single word: éclair. N. wandered up behind me and asked if I was going to get anything, and as I gazed at the shelves packed with donuts, cookies, babka, danishes, chocolate studded croissants, cheesecakes, a big layer cake with the word “rum” frosted in chocolate across the top, all I could think about was an éclair.

And there they were. On the bottom shelf. Thick, ganache-glossed masterpieces. My eyes were bugging out again, I could feel it. With my new little treasure safely enclosed in a pink bakery box and tucked under my arm, all was right with the world. When I dug in, gentle fork pressure forcing the thick, sweet pastry cream out across my plate, the world was more than right. The dough was tender-crisp, and if I’m honest it may have been moving a bit toward staleness after a day on the shelf, but the flavor of the custard and the ganache more than made up for it. It was a stellar dessert for a starstruck evening.

Milestones. And Cake. And Salad.

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Chelsea

This September has been a big one for me. New home (okay, so we technically moved in July), new job (okay, so school started in August), and new decade! I’ve finally hit my 30s, and I like what I see so far (though admittedly I’ve only been stationed in this new world for two weeks).

Given my fanciful proclivities for putting food in my mouth, then, N. knows that my birthday must involve a restaurant in some form. Since we are only just beginning to explore our new culinary surroundings, this was a perfect opportunity to embark on our adventures. I started with Culver City which, delightfully, has a whole webpage devoted to its downtown restaurants, including (in most cases) links to each restaurant’s website. This was almost too much. I spent the better part of an evening cruising through online menus, imagining what kind of mood I might be in on the big day and what I might want to order and what, if the restaurant I ultimately chose should happen to be out of my top choice, I would order instead.

Based on menus and Yelp reviews, I decided on Fords Filling Station (FFS), whose upscale comfort food and wide range of offerings sounded promising. I tend to like mid-range restaurants: not too fancy, where a prix fixe menu or outstandingly high prices make me feel like a grubby graduate student out of place (I know, I’m not anymore. But it’s a hard habit to break in this new world of adulthood and employment), but not too casual either, where the food is sub-par or inconsistent and the wait staff makes no pretense of caring about our presence. A gastropub – a self-proclaimed innovative collection of food, decor, and atmosphere – seemed like the right fit.

FFS is a fun spot. It’s centrally located downtown, and the dining room is a big open space with a bar to one side, traditional tables, and long narrow two-tops where the couple sits on a bench next to one another looking out at the other diners, rather than across from each other. N. and I were seated at one of these bench seats, and it was fun to sit side by side for a change in a restaurant setting. Brick walls, big barrels, and warm colors make it inviting and, I thought, pretty unpretentious.

Our server, who was the perfect balance of informative and attentive, sold me on one of the night’s cocktail specials: citrus vodka, house made lemonade, and a little float of chambord. It was nice – punchy and bright and sweet-tart, but oddly similar to a Rennie’s Lemonade from our erstwhile happy hour hangout in Eugene, and therefore it felt drastically overpriced at $12.

We opted to share entrees so we could order a few things, and got a Cuban flatbread with smoked pork pieces, cilantro, mozzarella, and some kicky little red chilis; grilled asparagus blanketed in shaved parmesan,; and a flattened half chicken with amazing garlic mashed potatoes and succotash.

N. was most attracted to the chicken (as is often the case when we dine out), and here he was clearly right to be. Flattened, the bones were gone, the meat was compressed, flavorful, and intensely juicy, and the skin was crunchy and buttery and tender and perfectly unctuous. Because he is fonder of white meat, it was also a perfect dish for us to share, because N. left me the thigh, with its dark, meatiness pleasantly encased in a crisp layer of fatty crunch. Beside the chicken, the mashed potatoes swam in a sauce of garlic confit, which was rich and intense: the best gravy I’ve had in a long time.

The flatbread, which would have been just delightful on its own, paled a bit in comparison to this chicken. The crust was cracker-like in texture, and the pork pieces paired nicely with the pepper and cilantro, but together the dish was a little bit dry. It needed – perhaps – some herb oil drizzled over the top, or maybe 45 seconds less in the oven. Tasty, but not the star of the show by any means.

The asparagus was excellent: nicely flavorful and light, well cooked and, aside from the piece I dropped on myself (grace embodied, truly), a nice vegetal accompaniment to our meal.

Since I didn’t get any dessert that night (I was full but not overstuffed, and didn’t want to tempt myself by even glancing at a dessert menu), I was still longing for birthday cake a few days later. Fortunately for me A., who blogs from the other side of the world at Over and Under, had told me about Porto’s – a Cuban bakery in Burbank that turns out to be right on my route to and from work. I had to drive up to the school for a Friday meeting, and as I headed toward the freeway to come home, I decided to stop in and treat myself.

Inspired by the flatbread we’d shared at FFS, and because I thought it would be a good benchmark for a Cuban bakery, I got the Cubano. Then, because it was still my birthweek (I’m big on extending the celebration as long as seems rationally possible), I picked out two tiny cakes to share with N.: flourless chocolate, and tres leches.

The sandwich was good. Ham and pork packed tightly onto a fresh bakery roll with cheese, sharp mustard, and a pickle. A simple sandwich, but a delicious one.

My dessert selections, though, were fantastic. The tres leches was rich and light at once, not overly sweet but dripping with cream, like a well soaked angelfood cake topped with toasted marshmallow cream. The flourless chocolate selection was less cake than a giant chocolate truffle: impossibly rich solidified ganache inside a thin shell of cake-like crumb. N. was only able to eat two or three bites before declaring it too rich for his tummy. I had no such trouble, but did talk myself into enjoying only half at that sitting, and saving the other half for another night when chocolate felt mandatory.

Indulgent? Certainly. But (at least in the case of the desserts) at $2-3 each, a reasonable indulgence. Still, when one is a responsible adult (as I suppose some might now imagine me), one must temper such indulgences. In this case, that means salad.

80. Trim and coarsely chop chard (rainbow makes for a gorgeous salad) and combine with white beans and chopped scallions. Dressing is minced ginger, a suspicion of garlic, olive oil and cider vinegar.

I collected:

½ huge bunch red chard, thick stems removed

1 15 oz. can white kidney beans

5 green onions, finely sliced

1/2 inch knob of ginger

2 garlic cloves

1/4 tsp coarse salt

1/4 cup each cider vinegar and olive oil

1 TB honey

I tossed together the chard, beans, and green onions and set them aside in a big salad bowl. To make sure the ginger and garlic were fine enough, I minced them by hand, then sprinkled them with coarse salt and dragged the flat of my knife across them until they turned into a thick, aromatic paste. I scraped the paste into a glass measuring cup and whisked it up with cider vinegar and olive oil. A taste of this was a cheek puckering revelation, so I added a healthy squeeze of honey to make it less astringent.

Aside from spinach, raw bitter greens are not always N.’s cup of tea. Because I feared this might be the case with this combination, I decided to treat this more like a slaw than a salad. I combined the main ingredients early and doused them in dressing a good fifteen minutes before dinnertime. This would, I hoped, give the acidic dressing time to wilt the chard a bit, much like the vinegar in coleslaw dressing does for the cabbage.

It worked well. By the time we ate (grilled chicken breasts sauced with equal parts whole grain mustard and apricot jam), the chard had lost just a bit of its aggressive bite but its freshness was not compromised. The beans, sometimes bland customers, had soaked up a bit of flavor from the tangy bright dressing, and so while they were a steady, creamy counterpoint to the earthy-fresh chard, they weren’t at all boring. We were both surprised by how well we liked this simple little salad.

Success, then, and balance: excitement and indulgence followed and tempered by stability. If this is what the 30s are like, I’m ready. Bring it on. I’ll just be 30 forever.

Candyland

Posted on December 29, 2010 by Chelsea

My two favorite board games when I was a kidlet were Chutes & Ladders, and Candyland. I liked the first, but found it slightly stressful, since it seemed I inevitably ended up sliding down the longest possible slide and having to restart the game from the beginning. Looking back, I wonder whether the primary design of this game was to keep children occupied with it for as long as possible, to give exhausted parents a chance to rest. Having no siblings at that point in my life, if this was the goal of the game it backfired in my family.

But Candyland? Candyland I loved. And I loved it not so much for the gameplay itself, but for the fantastical characters and decorated board, and for the outrageously wonderful idea that a whole kingdom could be made out of and based around candy. It was like “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” but better. Because it was candy. My favorite figure in the game was Queen Frostine. She had blueish silver hair that came down to her waist, and a sparkling rock candy scepter. I still remember the first sentence or two provided about her in the game description: “Peacefully adrift on an ice cream float in an ice cream sea…” Pretty, powerful, royal, and living in ice cream. It was everything I thought I had ever wanted.

When Candyland was at last boxed up for good and covered in an inch or two of dust in our attic, I retained a love for both miniatures and candy. Thus, truffles were like little boulders, or tree stumps, and gingerbread houses were the most romantic, creative way of celebrating the desserts of the holiday season.

Now, as an adult but also a student, my holiday budget is somewhat limited. But I know, since I share my life and most of my friendships with other graduate students, that food – especially a special, out of the ordinary sort of food – makes a good gift. So, with the holiday season approaching and the term ending, early in December I celebrated my extraordinarily timely submission of my first dissertation chapter by hiding books, pencils, and papers from myself and instead filling my kitchen with bags and boxes of chocolate. I submerged myself back into Candyland. Not as Queen Frostine this time, but as a new character: the Empress of Truffletown, perhaps. I wrote some time ago about my first experience with truffle production, and this time I wanted to explore some new flavors – add my own sweet twists to the basic recipe.

The basic procedure is to coat squares of ganache in melted chocolate. It seems to me after some experimentation that the right ratio in a ganache is 6-8 tablespoons of liquid for each 8 oz. of melted chocolate. At least 6 of these liquid tablespoons should be heavy cream. But the really exciting part lies in the possibilities for the other 2 tablespoons…

I made three varieties: Amaretto White Chocolate Truffles, Gingerbread Truffles, and Peppermint Truffle, and popped them into some pretty, festive boxes I found. Then, just for fun, I also whipped up some Almond Butter cups. My willing taste testers declared the Amaretto and the Almond Butter cups the best selections.

Amaretto White Chocolate Truffles:

To make this flavor, I melted 6 TB of heavy cream with 8 oz. white chocolate over a double boiler. When the mixture was almost completely melted, I carefully stirred in 2 TB amaretto. When it was completely smooth, I added a few tablespoons each finely chopped dried apricots, and finely minced, toasted almonds. I stirred the whole thing together quickly, poured it into a plastic wrap lined loaf pan, and stowed it in the fridge to harden.

The following day, I pried the block of creamy white goodness, studded with precious gems of flavor, out onto a board, cut it in squares, and dunked each in melted semi-sweet chocolate. After letting these harden on parchment paper, I added a white chocolate drizzle to the top for a little flair. They were incredible. The white chocolate was delicately flavored by the amaretto, which is one of my favorite liqueur varieties. Nutty and rich and sweet, and here punctuated by the soft crunch of almonds and the slight chew of apricot chunks. This variety is definitely one for the recipe books. I will absolutely be making it again and again.

Gingerbread Truffles:

I followed the same basic procedure for these as for the Amaretto version, though I used dark chocolate as my base for the ganache. Lacking a ginger flavored liqueur, I melted the chocolate with only 6 TB heavy cream, and stirred in about a ¼ cup finely chopped candied ginger. Again, I refrigerated, again, I removed, sliced, and dipped. Then, while the outer layer of chocolate was still glossy and wet, I sprinkled a good teaspoon or two of powdered gingersnap cookie crumbs atop each truffle. Spicy and warm in the back of the throat, with a pleasing crispy crunch from the cookie powder. I did find, with these, that the ganache was a bit crumbly after it hardened, perhaps because it was made with less liquid. I would up the amount of heavy cream in the mixture to 7 or a full 8 tablespoons to try and combat this issue.

Peppermint Truffles:

For these, I combined 8 oz. of milk chocolate with 6 tablespoons of heavy cream and 2 tablespoons of peppermint schnapps we had kicking around in the back of our liquor cabinet. This time, instead of pouring into a loaf pan, I just left the ganache in the glass bowl I was using as the top portion of my homemade double boiler. While I waited for it to cool and solidify into that glorious fudgy paste ganache becomes, I broke up and crunched several candy canes into bits. The bottom of the peppermint schnapps bottle proved an excellent tool for this project. A rolling pin would probably also work well for this. As I scooped out each tablespoon of ganache, I rolled it into a ball with my hands and then rolled it through the candy cane flakes, creating a pinkish minty snowball to add to the collection. I wasn’t as thrilled with the flavor of these; the schnapps came through more as the harsh grate of alcohol rather than the spicy-cool flavor of peppermint, but my taste testers didn’t complain. They were Christmas-y in appearance, which no doubt leant to their appeal. If I do this flavor again, I might use only one tablespoon of schnapps, rather than 2.

Almond Butter Cups:

I was much less exact with these, working mostly for flavor rather than creating a recipe. Again, I melted 8 oz. of chocolate – semi-sweet this time. Then, I mixed a few tablespoons of powdered sugar into a cup or so of almond butter. Trader Joe’s makes a really good crunchy variety with roasted flax seeds, so that is what I was using. When the sugar and the butter were well combined, I scooped it into my chocolate and let them melt together into smooth, thick ribbons. Then I poured a tablespoonful or so directly into candy papers. I found that setting each paper into the depressions in a mini muffin tin made them stand up straight and not collapse when the hot chocolate mixture was added. I refrigerated my muffin-tin-full to let them set up. Imagine taking a bite of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Now imagine it tastes of almonds instead of peanuts. Now imagine that nutty flavor is mixed evenly through the chocolate, rather than sitting in the center, and that it is interspersed by the crispy, deep, roasty-ness of golden flax seeds.

Presenting boxes of these collected divinities to my officemates, a few close friends, our neighbors, and finally our families, I felt like a benevolent ruler. Sure, it’s only my little kitchen where I rule with a chocolate-daubed fist, but my offerings were wide and sweet. Move over, Candyland. This is Truffletown.

Frankenbrownies

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Chelsea

I love Halloween. We always have a party, and I always go overboard with the variety and quantity of treats I make. I get nervous about whether we will have enough food, and then I get anxious about whether I’ll be able to pull everything together in time. It can be a little scary…

I also loved the pumpkin enchiladas I posted about here. I never would have expected the flavors of rich, fruity pumpkin, mild creamy goat cheese, and the deep roasty chocolate of mole sauce to go together well. But they did, and it got me thinking of other ways of combining this trio. Spurred by a statement of dessert desire by a sick friend, the project became brownies. Pumpkin cream cheese brownies: could such a thing be?

There are a million recipes for brownies, but I went with Dave Lebovitz’s Cheesecake Brownies, which turned out to be a really good idea. Though I was at first thrown off by and nervous about the complete lack of leavening products, I fought back my temptation to add some baking powder and mixed the ingredients exactly as written. It was the right choice.

Rather than simply swirling the cream cheese dollops with the thick, shiny chocolate batter, I also added about a cup of pumpkin puree mixed with a teaspoon or two of pumpkin pie spice. I swirled. I swirled and swirled and swirled, and still no chocolate came to the surface. I scooped and plopped and swirled some more, and finally a few rich brown slivers came to the surface. It was kind of a monster. But keeping in mind that at its Latin roots, a “monster” bears in its etymology the idea of showing us something, I decided that was good enough, and I’d have to wait and see what it had to show me. I deposited my weighty, ugly baby into the oven for almost an hour.

Fifteen minutes or so into the cooking process, I started to smell that incredible, mouthwatering aroma of chocolate cooking. Half an hour in, a delicate curl of cheesecake inserted itself into the scented air. I couldn’t smell the pumpkin much, but suddenly there was chocolate-cheesecake-spiciness, and I wanted to pull the whole thing out and just eat the whole thing with a spoon.

I resisted, and when the collection of smells had solidified into a… well… a thing from which an inserted toothpick came out clean, I set it aside on the counter to cool. It was truly a frankensteinian creation. The brownie layer was dark and rich and barely disturbed, while the top was a delicate whipped pale orange that cut like a harvest-flavored mousse.

The taste was so good. The brownie was dark and rich; it was definitely of the fudgy brownie ilk rather than the cakey, flakey brownie. The pumpkin and the cream cheese read like a pumpkin cheesecake, with all the creamy smoothness of a cheesecake and all the spongy custard-y quality of pumpkin pie. They were delicious together, just as the same flavors – with considerably less sweetness – melded in my pumpkin enchiladas.

While the flavor was great, it did read more like a layered dessert than a brownie. I think this is because I used the full amount of cream cheese mix Dave Lebovitz calls for PLUS a cup of pumpkin puree. There was just too much goodness to swirl evenly. My proposed solution to this is to layer half the chocolate, then dollop on the cream cheese and pumpkin, then top it with the other half of the chocolate batter before mixing. It seems it will be easier to swirl together the much denser, thicker chocolate with the delicate creaminess of the additional flavors if the chocolate is divided up.

This was truly a Frankenstein creation, but it was certainly not a monster, except perhaps in the sense that it demonstrated deliciousness. It will make its debut at our Halloween party this year, swirled and sliced and dressed to impress, in orange and “black.” Its trio of components all vying to be the star means I won’t have to make as many kinds of treats, because here’s the trick: this is a three-in-one.

See, trick-or-treat’s not so scary…

Candy Girl

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Chelsea

Sometimes, it’s not enough to just cook beautiful, delicious food (she said modestly). Sometimes, you have to make something really special, just because.

Something like this:

Yes, these are chocolate truffles. Yes, I made them by hand. I did not make them by imagination, though. They were created thanks to the February issue of Cuisine at Home magazine, and an unintended modification to Elana’s Pantry’s nut butter balls.

I won’t go into a step-by-step written process, but here’s how it went:

First you have to make two kinds of chocolate ganache. One contains bittersweet chocolate, heavy cream, and crème de cassis. It gets poured into a plastic-wrap-lined loaf pan and refrigerated for an hour or so, just until firm enough to maintain a solid top surface. The other contains white chocolate, heavy cream, and almond extract. I didn’t have almond extract, so mine contained amaretto.

This gets layered on top of the dark chocolate and chilled. I left it in the fridge overnight. Then, when everything is firm and solid (as solid as ganache gets, anyway), you pull it out of the loaf pan by the overhanging edges of plastic wrap and cut the block into truffle sized squares.

While you are releasing and unwrapping and cutting, melt some additional chocolate, dark or semisweet this time. Just pure chocolate this time. When it was smooth and luscious and liquid, I used two forks to quickly dunk and coat each ganache square before transferring them to parchment paper.

This was a pretty systematic process, so I got thinking while I was working. I had some crunchy almond butter from Trader Joe’s, and a few weeks before I had drooled over Elana’s nut butter balls. Why not make some myself? On a suggestion from her comments thread, I mixed the almond butter with a few tablespoons of powdered sugar in hopes of firming it up a bit. Then I stuck it in the refrigerator to chill it and maybe make it easier to form into individual pieces. While that was chilling down, I finished the first set of truffles. I melted some white chocolate chips in the microwave, scooped the sweet goo into a plastic bag with one bottom corner cut off, and squeezed out a nice drizzle over the tops of my little soldiers. Just to change it up a little, I rolled some of the smaller squares in shredded coconut.

Isn’t that gorgeous? Now, I’m no Bakerella, but that looks pretty darn impressive to me!

After encasing each little chocolate triumph in mini muffin papers, I stowed them gently in Tupperware and took out the nut butter. I rolled five balls. It was decidedly not firm. I decided to freeze the individual pieces on a plastic cutting board to solidify them before dipping them in warm melted chocolate. I pushed the board onto what looked like an empty shelf in the freezer. It was not empty. The almond butter mashed all over a gallon freezer bag full of salmon. I sat down on the floor and just stared at the delicious mess I had created. How to fix this? I scraped off as much of the nut butter as I could salvage and, in a moment of minor genius, added it to the bowl of melting semisweet chocolate chips I already had on the stove, ready to receive its next set of victims. The almond butter melted in nicely, and I was able to pour my little disaster in a bread pan to cool and cut. Remembering Elana’s suggestion, I sprinkled the top with coarse sea salt. Brilliant. Cut into squares, it was a perfect mixture of texture and sweet-salty contrast.

And the truffles weren’t bad either.

The tuxedo colored layers of ganache inside the slightly crunchy chocolate shell are visually stunning, and have a very subtle liqueur flavor that somehow enhances their chocolate-y richness. They are impressive to look at, mouth-coating-ly opulent to eat, and better than anything you will find in a See’s candy box. I brought small plate offerings to my officemates as thank yous for how supportive they have been toward me as I studied for my exam. I read about and admire those people who can make mixed platters of sweets for holidays. My Nana was always one of them. Now, it would appear, I am fast amassing the skills and recipes necessary to do the same. Maybe I should start taking orders.

"blackberry-eating in late September"

food, in so many words.

Category Archives: chocolate