Posts tagged as:

chocolate

Chocolate Stout Pie

by Megan K on June 7, 2010 · 3 comments

What was it that John said about not basing too many posts off of Thisiswhyyourefat?  Well: this totally started as a This Is Why You’re Fat post about Guinness Pudding, which then led me over to Sprinklebakes (who is so brilliant!) and a fantastic explanation on how to make it happen.  But… this is me, this is Epic Portions, and I wanted to make it my own. (Also: I’m from St Louis once-upon-a-time, and I don’t really enjoy that that company that owns Guinness is kind of taking over, and I wanted to support the home team.)  So, I eliminated the Guinness, replaced it with Schlafly’s Oatmeal Stout, added a chocolate graham crust, and voila: Chocolate Stout Pie.  Delicious!

Chocolate Stout Pie (makes two 8in pies)
1.5 cups chocolate graham crumbs
6 tblspn melted butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tablespoon salt

11 egg yolks
1 1/3 cup sugar
20 oz stout
4 cups heavy whipping cream
10 oz high-quality chocolate

First, make your crusts. Melt the butter, crumble your graham crackers, and combine them with the sugar and salt.  Press firmly into your pie pans, and bake for 15 minutes in a 350F over.

Now, for your pudding: in a metal bowl, beat together the egg yolks and the sugar.  Slowly pour the stout into a large glass, pouring down the side so that you don’t get foam.  Foam = bad for baking.  Now, take a heavy-bottomed saucepan and pour half of the stout into it.  Add 3 cups of the heavy cream, and slowly heat until bubbles begin to form at the edges.  Meanwhile, melt your chocolate in a double-boiler.  Once the bubbles are forming over in cream-stout world, pour the hot liquid into the melted chocolate and beat until combined.  Slowly pour that mixture into the egg mixture, beating constantly to prevent it from curdling.  (No, spell check, I did not mean cuddling. Curdling.)  Pour the entire mix back into your saucepan and cook over medium heat for about 20 min, until it thickens to coat the back of a spoon.  Pour the cooked mixture into a blender and blend on high for about two minutes, then pour into your baked crusts.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until cooled.

In the meantime, pour the other half of the stout into a small saucepan and bring to a boil.  Reduce to medium heat and simmer for a good long time until you have a syrup.  Just don’t burn it – it’ll smell really bad and taste even worse.  When you have a nice thick delicious stouty syrup, pour it into a small bowl and refrigerate until cool.  Once your syrup is cool and your pudding is set, beat the remaining cup of heavy cream into soft peaks, then add the syrup and beat until combined.  Divide between your pies, refrigerate for an hour or so to set everything, and serve.

Trust me, you’ll be glad it makes two!

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Soccer Ball Birfday Cake!

by Megan K on June 2, 2010 · 1 comment

My friend Jamie loves soccer – I mean, really loves soccer – so there was hardly any other choice for his birthday a few weeks ago than a 3-D soccer cake.

It ended up as an ice-cream-filled chocolate cake with two kind of icing, and since that’s a little much even for me, I had some MUCH-appreciated help on this one from Jamie’s girlfriend Julia. This was really more about the idea than the recipe, so we went with some tried and true favorites:

First, I baked Martha’s Ultimate Chocolate Cake, only instead of using a normal old traditional cake pan I made it in a 5.5qt stainless steel bowl. And I baked it… well, for awhile. One hour and forty-five minutes awhile. Seriously, just leave it in there and just keep checking it. It’s going to take forever.

Once it’s done, you need to cool it down.  Having taken nearly two hours to bake, it’s gonna take a long time to cool. I stuck it in the freezer; it didn’t actually help that much.  But, in my case, Julia was over so we used this time to make some tasty cream cheese frosting.  If you need a refresher on that, it’s pretty much the easiest thing ever: beat together a package of cream cheese and a stick of unsalted butter until fluffy, then add powdered sugar to taste.

Also, soccer balls are black and white by nature, so we needed to make some black frosting.  Since Jamie’s favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip, we made mint chocolate frosting and colored it black, but any dark-colored frosting would work. Definitely start with something already dark, though; we used an entire little pot of black Wilton’s dye and it still looked a little grey, so I can’t imagine the food coloring you would need to turn white icing really black. Ugh.  I unabashedly stole borrowed the frosting recipe from this Southern Living Mint Chocolate Frosting recipe, except I used a lot more of the mint-chocolate morsels and I certainly did not use a microwave instead of a double-boiler, thank you very much.

Now: the fun part.  Once you have two kinds of yummy frosting made, you need to hollow out the inside of your cake-bowl.  Turn the cake upside down, so that the flat part is on the bottom, and use a sharp bread knife to hollow out the center.  Save the bits you are taking out, becuase you will need them to make a cake cap on top of the ice cream.  Once you have it hollowed out – to your taste of course, maybe you want a thick layer of cake, maybe you only want a little – fill the inside with ice cream.  We took the easy route here and bought mint chocolate chip ice cream… if you have an ice cream maker and you want to add another hour of cooking onto your day, then go for it! (Homemade ice cream is inevitably better, but honestly – we filled a cake with it and then covered it with two kinds of frosting.  You couldn’t really tell.)

Once your cake is filled with ice cream, use the cake bits you hollowed out (and plenty of your imagination) to fashion a top to it that makes it round enough to pass for a ball. Slather it in cream cheese icing, all over, and stick it in the freezer for ten minutes or so to firm up before you continue to decorate.  Once it’s nice and solid, put your black icing into a piping bag and draw the pentagons. If you are really artistic and smart you might be able to wing this; we had a med student and a graphic design student in the kitchen and we needed to make a mold. We made a little pentagon out of tin-foil, and carved the pentagons into the cream cheese icing, then piped the black icing over and into the shapes.  Connect them with thin lines of icing, and you have your soccer ball!

The last finishing touch here was the grass – we just colored some of the cream cheese icing green, and piped it around the base of the cake, then used wooden skewers and a fork to pull it up around the cake so it looked like blades of grass.

Voila! Yummm…

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Cheating Choco-Cherry Cupcakes

by Megan K on April 28, 2010 · 1 comment

What do you do when you are meant to be at a friend’s surprise birthday dinner – complete with a homemade birthday treat – in a little less than an hour?!  You cheat.  Plain and simple: Cheating Choco-Cherry Cupcakes. I topped these with cherry-mascarpone frosting, but I’ve gone with cream cheese icing before and it works well, too.  You can make these little gems in well under an hour’s time start to finish, and they taste just as good or better than any other recipe I have.  Promise!

Cheating Choco-Cherry Cupcakes (w/ Cherry-Mascarpone Frosting)
1 chocolate cake box mix
2 cans cherry pie filling (21oz each)
3 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
8oz mascarpone
1 stick butter (softened is nice, nuked works too)
1.5 cups powder sugar

Preheat your oven to 350F.  While it’s heating, put the cake mix, one and a half cans of pie filling, the eggs, and the oil in a large bowl. Beat until combined with a hand mixer – the cherries in the pie filling will get beaten into smaller pieces in the process, and that’s good.  Pour batter into lined cupcake tins and bake for 25 minutes or until the toothpick trick works.

While baking, place the mascarpone, sugar, and butter into a separate bowl and beat with clean beaters until smooth.  Gradually beat in the other half can of pie filling until you reach a consistency and cherry-ness that you like.  Again, the hand mixing action will turn the cherries into small pieces, which makes for a very pretty frosting.  Place the frosting in the freezer to get it really cold.

When your cupcakes are done, remove from the oven and place immediately into your refrigerator to get them cooled down quickly. When you think they are cool enough, or when you’ve run out of time, frost with the frosting.  Enjoy!

The best thing about this recipe: choco-cherry is totally just a suggestion! Grab a box mix, grab some pie filling, and experiment. Lemon strawberry? Delicious! Choco-pumpkin? Weird, but good.  And if you are at all like me, and the moment someone mentions anything even remotely worth celebrating you think, “I should make some cake for that!” it’s a good practice to keep a box mix and some pie filling on hand. Voila, cupcakes!

Also, in my rush, I failed to get any pictures of the cupcakes themselves. But, I did get a good picture of the b-day boy about to be lit on fire by his own treat. Happy birthday, An-Phong!

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Chocolate-Strawberry Cheesecake

by Megan K on April 24, 2010 · 0 comments

I’d been trying to get one of my co-workers, Chris, to come to a cake party ever since I started writing here. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t come because he just wasn’t that enthused about sweets or because he thought my friends were weird, but when he told me his favorite dessert was cheesecake, I took it as a challenge!

Of course, this being Epic Portions, I wanted it to be more than just cheesecake.  Chris, who sits next to me at work, got a first-hand taste of why cake party came to be in the first place, when over my lunch break I was trolling recipes for ideas and said repeatedly, “what do you think would happen if I used ___ instead of ___? (His response? “I just like cheesecake! Plain old cheesecake!” Silly boy.)

The result was chocolate- strawberry cheesecake. It was heavenly. I think I ate my weight in batter from the bowl alone. Mine was a little under-done… my oven tends to run hot and I wanted to keep it low to be on the safe side, but ended up keeping it a little TOO low… but even so, it was great.  I took two Martha Stewart recipes and used elements from both, along with some sage advice from my own mum and a serious personal aversion to corn syrup (love of marshmallow aside, if I don’t have to use it, I don’t use it), and the proof is in the pudding (er, the cheesecake) that you really can trust Martha. Her recipes may be complicated and difficult, but they sure are tasty.

I should note, this recipe really isn’t very hard at all, but it’s bloody time consuming. You have to roast the berries for an hour an a half, bake the cheesecake for an hour or more, let it slowly cool in a turned-off, unopened oven for another hour, and chill it for at least four hours. It’s a lot of “down-time,” but you can’t really go run errands while your oven is on, so plan on staying home and babysitting this one for a significant amount of time.

Chocolate- Strawberry Cheesecake
1 lb fresh strawberries
2 cups white sugar
1 cup water

9 oz chocolate graham crackers
one stick (8 tblspn) unsalted butter
32 oz (4 pckgs) cream cheese
1.5 cups white sugar
1 tspn salt
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
11 oz good-quality baking chocolate, as dark as you like
additional strawberries, washed, hulled and sliced, for garnish.

Begin with your berries: With the 2 cups sugar and the 1 cup water, make simple syrup by bringing the mixture to boil in a saucepan until dissolved and combined. Hull and half the washed 1lb of berries, and toss in the simple syrup. Arrange on a lined baking sheet, and roast at 300F for an hour and a half. Try not to eat them straight from the oven. Cool in the fridge for about an hour, then puree them – I used my mini-chopper but a blender would probably actually work better.

Meanwhile, raise your oven temp to 325F and monitor it for awhile to make sure it holds a steady temp.  Take your graham crackers, and turn them into graham crumbs (as I have previously mentioned, I like beating them into submission with a rolling pin, but a mini-chop or food processor also works.) Melt your butter over LOW heat in a saucepan, and mix it into the crumbs until just moistened.  Press the mixture into an even, condensed, crust-like layer in the bottom of a 9-in springform pan, and bake at 325F for about 10 min.  Remove from oven and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the cream cheese, 1.5 cup sugar, and salt until combined and smooth. (Martha calls for a food processor, but I don’t have one. Stand mixers are also popular, but I don’t have one of those either. I used a hand mixer, and in addition to it working fine, I also got a nice upper-arm workout.) Meanwhile, in a double boiler, melt your chocolate until smooth.  Beat eggs and sour cream into cream cheese mixture.  Beat in melted chocolate, and continue to beat until thoroughly mixed and smooth, scraping the sides of the bowl with a spatula to get all the stubborn bits.

Pour the mixture onto the crust in the springform pan. With a spatula, or a spoon, or really whatever you think will make the prettiest designs and least mess, spiral the strawberry puree into the batter in the pan, making swirls and patterns and whatnot.

Bake until just set, at 325F, without opening the door too much because that will make the cake crack on top, about 1 hour, maybe a little more.  Turn your oven off, and allow the cheesecake to slowly cool in the oven, without opening the door or messing with it, for another hour. Remove from oven and cool to room temp on a wire rack, then transfer to the fridge and chill for at least four hours.

Top with hulled, washed, sliced fresh strawberries for a pretty and fruity touch.

Enjoy!

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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Bacon S’mores.

March 9, 2010

Yeah, that’s right: Bacon S’mores.  Chocolate-covered candied bacon smothered in marshmallow in a graham cracker crust. I can’t take credit for this idea, and actually I’m not sure I would want to.  A friend tweeted about The Complete Sale of Selma Lee posting about Chewbacca Bars, which they also call ...

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Lumpy Bumpy Toffee Cake

February 9, 2010

My friends were pretty excited when I announced that I’d be blogging here – not just because they’re supportive and stuff, but because I also announced that I’d be hosting regular dessert parties in order to have something to write about. This past Sunday was our first: I made Lumpy ...

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Chocolate Banana Ice Cream Cups

July 13, 2009
banana

edit: this was Varta’s doing, not John.  John could never even imagine making something as delicious as this.  most apologies. Bananas. Like the flavor, hate the fruit, why’d they have to be so mushy? So browsing through World Market on Saturday, where I made a beeline for the food stuff ...

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