Tiffin!

I always have to say it like Timmy from the Simpsons says Timmy!

Tiffin!Tiffin!

It looks boring as hell. I can't remember what made me look up a recipe, and once I made some I didn't even want to take a picture of it. It has such a loyal following that I thought well whattahell, it can't be all that great.

But it kinda is. It's like if a Kit Kat bar was really as good as the TV ads say it is. But more like the graham cracker pie crust of the gods. With chocolate. It's definitely not cake, or a cookie, and you wouldn't say it was candy either.

8 oz TJ's lemon wafer cookies, the ones with chocolate drizzles
1/3 cup yellow raisins, optional. If you do without, add another handful of cookies.
1/3 cup butter
4 T cocoa powder
3 T syrup
2 T sugar

about 4 or 5 oz of chocolate

Smash up the cookies. Don't totally powder them, there ought to be a few pea-sized bits left. Add the cocoa powder and raisins.

In a small sauce pan, heat the butter, sugar, & syrup. Bring to a gentle boil for about 5 minutes, then pour over the rest of the ingredients. Toss everything together until thoroughly combined, then press the mix into a cake pan. Melt the chocolate. Pour it over the mix and swirl the pan around to create an even layer on top. Cool the tiffin in the fridge, then break or cut it into candy bar sized pieces.

Notes:

1. Traditionally, you are supposed to use a mild, dry, not very rich cookie for this. But i really like those lemon things.
2. Also, authentic recipes will call for 'golden syrup' which I think is very similar to pancake syrup, but I've never had any so I don't know. I used some scandinavian baking syrup I got at ikea.
3. Lastly, the recipe I based this on called for half dark and half milk chocolate, melted and mixed together. So I just used semi sweet baking chips.

Dang this stuff was good. The lemon cookies are very crispy, but not hard, and the raisins make little tart, chewy fruity spots that bring out the lemon flavor. I used only one kind of chocolate, but it now occurs to me that if I had used half dark and half milk chocolate, I could have given it a marbled top instead of mixing the two together. It would have looked fancier, and maybe I'd have taken a picture.

Chocolate Cheese Cake

  

  
Jej mades a mighty delicious chocolate cheesecake. This is not exactly the recipe she used, because she has an even harder time following a recipe than I do, but we started with the same source material, and I added cocoa powder the same as she did. You will need a springform baking pan.

Pre heat the oven to 325.

crust:

2 cups peanut butter cookie crumbs
1/4 cup butter

Grind the cookies to a powder and put them in a microwavable bowl with the butter. Zap it for about 30 seconds, then mix the butter and crumbs thoroughly.  Press the mixture into the bottom of your pan and up the sides about an inch. Set aside.

Filling:

2, 8-oz things of cream cheese
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 cups greek yogurt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
teaspoon vanilla extract

If you have a food processor that is big enough to do the whole recipe at once, put everything in it and process it until it's smooth. (I don't have such a thing, but I do have a blender, which worked but was not too happy about it. ) Pour the filling into the crust and bake for an hour. See note #1! It will be still a little jiggly when it comes out of the oven, that's ok. Let it cool at room temperature for an hour, then stick it in the fridge over night and it will set up.

1. My oven is known to cook very unevenly. To compensate for this, I baked mine for 25 minutes, turned it around, and baked it for another 25 minutes. Remember, every time you open the oven, your cooking time increases by a few minutes so take that into account if you need to do the same.
2. Heating the cookie crumbs as well as the butter softens the crumbs. You need less butter to hold them together than you would if you were using crackers because cookies already have a high fat content.
3. Use full fat yogurt if you can get it. The original recipe calls for sour cream, so stop worrying about the fat content. It's a cheesecake for crissakes.

So why do I keep putting greek yogurt in things if I'm not worried about the fat content? Because sour cream is not a multi-tasking ingredient. I make my own yogurt because it's cheap that way, so that's always what there is in the fridge. In most recipes, you can use greek yogurt and sour cream interchangeably, but I can't eat a bowl of sour cream and cereal for my breakfast. Blerg. Yogurt is more tart than sour cream (which I like), and you have to be careful adding it to hot dishes because it can curdle, but mostly it's easier for me to use that than planning ahead and buying a whole other thing that doesn't go in anything else. I'm lazy, basically.

Fallen Chocolate Souffle Cake

A number of years ago, someone gave me a subscription to Gourmet Magazine. I got tired of tripping over the stack of mags and finally clipped out the recipes that I thought I'd be likely to use within my lifetime. Now that the magazine is defunct, I sometimes wish I'd kept the whole things, until commonsense kicks in and I realize that way lies the path to an appearance on Hoarders.

Instead, I present to you, this cake. I am happy to say that I have no idea which issue this recipe came from. Oh. Haha- there  it is at the bottom of the clipping. February 2004. How serendipitous.

12 oz bittersweet chocolate. I used most of one of those Pound Plus dark chocolate bars from TJ's.
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, although I ignored the 'unsalted' part as usual, and used salted.
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar- That's 12 tablespoons, which becomes relevant during the instructions.
5 large eggs at room temperature
1/4 cup AP flour

Pre-heat oven to 350. Butter a 9-inch springform pan. The instructions say to line the bottom of the pan with a circle of buttered wax or parchment paper, but I think that's silly. I just dusted the buttered pan with cocoa powder, since the bottom of the pan comes out and makes a perfectly good thing to serve with.

Melt the chocolate & butter in a double boiler over barely simmering water. You could do this in a microwave, but you risk over-heating the chocolate and curdling the batter. I like the double boiler method, because it is a bit slow, but more controlled.

While the chocolate is melting, separate the eggs. Put the whites and the salt into a fairly big mixing bowl and whisk the bejebus out of them until they make soft mounds around the whisk. Add 6 Tablespoons of sugar, whisking between each one to prevent the eggs from deflating. Continue whisking violently until the whites form stiff shiny peaks and there is no separate liquid left in the bowl.

Keep an eye on the chocolate. Stir it a bit every once in a while. As soon as the chocolate is melted, take it off the heat. If you stick your finger in it, it should be pleasantly warm, that way you know it isn't too hot for the eggs.

Whisk the egg yolks, sugar & vanilla together, then drizzle into the chocolate. Then whisk in the flour.  Once the chocolate & yolks are combined, give the whites one last beating to take up any liquid that has separated out. Mix about a third of the whites into the chocolate to lighten the texture, then gently fold the chocolate mix into the rest of the egg whites.

The instructions say to bake it for 35 to 45 minutes, but I am suspicious of my oven's functionality. I actually raised the temperature to almost 375, and went for about 40 minutes. Since it is a souffle related thing, I can't keep opening the door to look at it, and I felt little anxious about it. I guess I should get a new bulb for my oven light. Sigh. As you can see, the point of the thing is that it poofs up quite a bit in the oven, then falls down as it cools and forms a macaroon-like crust. Let it cool for a good 10 or 15 minutes before you take the sides of the pan off.

It looks pretty good, but it came out a little dry. 5 minutes less in the oven, I think. The topping definitely is a plus.


Strueberry Glue

a cup each of frozen strawberries & blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cornstarch

Put the berries & sugar in a little saucepan on medium. As soon as it begins simmering, mix the starch with a teaspoon of water and stir it in. Wait til it thickens, and remove from heat.

I liked a number things about this recipe right off the bat. It uses the entire egg, for one thing. I am not totally against recipes that use uneven quantities of whites & yolks, but I'd rather not have leftover bits and parts in the fridge. Also, it allows you to adjust the degree of sweetness quite a bit. I didn't add quite the full amount of sugar called for. I prefer more chocolate and less sweet, the older I get. The recipe does not call for anything exotic or expensive, which is unusual for a Gourmet Mag recipe, neither does it require an unusual investment of time, technique or bizarre equipment. An electric mixer would be a nice thing to have for the egg whites, but it took me very little time to do it by hand and I got a good upper-body workout at the same time.

Chocolate Hazelnut Macaroon Cobbler

This is one of the least photogenic foods I have ever made, which is unfortunate because it is also one of the most sumptuously decadent things I can remember having eaten. I got the idea from a recipe I saw online for a chocolate peanut butter thing. I think the original has about 3 too many things going on at once. 2 kinds of chocolate, peanut butter, coffee, cinnamon... So I pared it down a little. Also, the original recipe makes a zillion of these guys, and even a half recipe is more than I know what to do with. Alas. Here's my version:

for the topping:

1 scant cup packed brown sugar
2 oz semi-sweet chocolate, chopped pretty small
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

for the dough:

1 1/4 cups AP flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
about 1/2 cup half & half
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

for the pans:

about 6 oz semisweet chocolate, broken or chopped up
about 3/4 cup hazelnut butter
about 1 to 1 1/2 cups half & half

I recommend using 8, 4 or 6-oz ramekins or oven safe teacups to cook these in. The original instructions say to use 8-oz ramekins, and I think that makes them larger than one person can reasonably eat. Not saying that I don't want to, but...sigh. Go for half-cup size servings. You can always have another if one is not enough. Also, teacups would make them look fancier.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Oil the baking dishes and set them on a cookie sheet, because the contents will overflow a bit.

Combine the topping ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.

Put about 1 oz broken chocolate and a generous tablespoon of hazelnut butter in each baking dish.

In a mixing bowl, sift the dry ingredients for the dough together. Add the liquid ingredients and mix the dough quickly until all the dry ingredients are fully incorporated. It should make a very stiff dough, about twice as thick as cake batter. Spoon even portions into each ramekin. Don't worry about pushing the dough down too much or covering the pan evenly. It's actually better if the dough has holes in it and sticks up a bit. Divide the topping over the cobblers, and add enough half & half to each one to fill the dish to within about 1/4 inch from the top.

The original recipe said to cook them for 45 minutes, but if you make them smaller like this, 30 minutes should be sufficient. They should still be a little bubbly around the edges when they're done. Let them cool for a bit before you serve them with some ice cream.

Notes-

I used these things from Trader Joe's called semi-sweet callets. They come in little ziploc baggies and very helpfully have a thing on the label that says "6 disks = 1oz". I put about 5 or 6 broken ones in the bottom of each 8 oz dish, you may have to adjust the quantity if you use smaller ramekins.

I also made my own hazelnut butter, because I couldn't find any at the store, and in any case, I suspect that if I had, it would have cost an arm and a leg to buy more than I could use. So I got a little baggie of toasted, unsalted hazelnuts from the nut man at the farmer's market, and put them in the mini-prep. Use the grind setting and process them until they achieve the texture you want. You'll probably have to stir it up a few times, and add a touch of salt. I made mine weeks ago, around the time of the spinach apple salad, and kept the hazelnut butter in the fridge.

Cookie Lesson

Two lessons, in fact.

1: It pays to follow directions
2: It pays to improvise

I had a jones for chocolate cookies. I got me a goodlookin recipe:

2 cups confectioner's sugar 
3/4 cups dutch process cocoa
3 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups butter (!)
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs

Sift all the dry ingredients together into a large bowl. Cut in softened butter until evenly combined. A few little lumps are ok. Mix eggs & vanilla and add to dry ingredients. Mix until it forms a mostly smooth ball.

Bake cookies for 8 minutes at 350.


I followed it. Wow, huh? And then the dough turned out way too gooey for rolled cookies, which is what it was supposed to be. Well, I knew that might happen, the recipe reviews said it might, but what to do next? I didn't want to sit around waiting for it to harden up in the fridge, which was the suggested fix.

But I do have a totally neato vintage cookie press. Ha-HAH! It worked beautifully. Better than I had ever gotten the darn thing to work before, in fact.

So, who wants to have a tea party?