Chocolate Crunch Torte

Proper chocolate...  Delia wrote this recipe years ago and I made it for the first time too many years ago.  Let's not get into how many years I'm talking about but it's a classic recipe.  We have a similar recipe in the family since I was a child.  It is very easy to make, simply because there is no baking.  It can be easily done the night before if you have limited time on the day.  If you take out the rum, it's a perfect cake for a kids party.   You just need to find very good quality chocolate that has about 70% cocoa solids.
However, I have to warn you, it's a very rich chocolate cake so you may want to have small slices.

Chocolate Crunch Torte
(Serves about 12)

400 g dark chocolate with about 70-75% cocoa solids - broken into little pieces

150 g chopped or sliced almonds

100 g tinned sour cherries

60 g raisin- soaked in water a day before

1 tablespoon of rum

100 g butter

250 ml double cream - lightly whipped

250 g oat biscuits chopped

1 teaspoon vanilla sugar

about 1-2 tablespoons of cocoa powder to dust

In a non-stick pan, roast the almonds for few minutes over medium heat.  Stir them often, otherwise they will burn really quickly.  When they are done, leave them to cool.

Start melting the chocolate and butter in a bowl that sits over a saucepan filled with simmering water.  Melt the chocolate with the butter until it's smooth. After that remove the chocolate bowl and set it aside to cool down for few minutes.  If the chocolate starts to get hard and not so glossy anymore, don't worry.  Next step will make it smooth again. 

Add the double cream, rum and vanilla sugar to the melted chocolate-butter mix and stir very well. 

Next, add the raisins, cherries, chopped biscuits and almonds into the mixture.

The best is to use a cake tin with a loose base (20 cm - 8''), that is lightly greased with butter.  Pour the cake mixture into the cake tin as evenly as possible.  

Cover it with a folio and put it in the fridge to chill for at least 4 hours, preferable over the night. 

Take it out 15-20 minutes before you serve.  Dust over it with some cocoa powder.  

This rich cake is even more delicious when served with whipped cream.

Enjoy!

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Bars

It seems to be a food blogger tradition.  If you go and read any food blog, you will most likely see a recipe for one of these or something similar.  I love the taste of peanut butter and chocolate combination, but I don't normally have peanut butter at home.  I just saw too many delicious photos of peanut butter bars in many food blogs recently and then I decided to make these.  After going through few recipes I came up with below.  I used the McVitie's Digestives, because they just taste great and I wanted the peanut butter to be a little bit crunchy.  Next time I may try to use some cornflakes or another kind of breakfast cereal instead.  They were very delicious and very rich.  Kids loved it but they are dangerous for adults as we can easily get addicted to them.  It is very easy to make these and you don't need to bake anything, which is great.  The peanut butter layer was softer than the chocolate layer so I recommend to take it out from the fridge 15 minutes earlier before you serve.  It will be also easier to slice.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Bars

(Makes about 16 bars)

Peanut Butter Layer:

1 cup dark brown sugar

75 g (about 5 tablespoons) butter- melted

350 g (1.5 cup) of creamy peanut butter

1 pack of McVities Digestives biscuits (250 g pack) - crumbled

Chocolate Layer:

300 g (2 cups) of dark chocolate broken into smaller bits (70% cocoa solids) or chocolate chips

1 teaspoon of vanilla sugar

1 tablespoon of butter

You will need a rectangular or square shaped brownie or baking tin for this.  Start with preparing the peanut butter layer.  First whisk the sugar and butter together to form a creamy mixture.  Stir in the peanut butter and then the biscuits.  Spread the mixture to the bottom of the baking tin and try to make it an even layer as much as possible.  Next, melt the chocolate in a bowl, that is sitting on a saucepan of simmering water.  Add in the butter and vanilla sugar and stir until the mixture is smooth.  Last step is to spread the chocolate mixture on top of the peanut butter layer.  Put the tin in the fridge until the chocolate is set.
I made this the night before and it was perfect the next day.  Don't forget to take it out of the fridge about 15 minutes before you serve.  Slice it with a sharp knife and enjoy your peanut butter bars.  

Chocolate Rolls

I can't believe I never thought of this before.  It's the combination of chocolate and yufka, which is the Turkish phyllo pastry for making börek.  I love chocolate, as you can probably tell by now.  I always have some cooking chocolate in my kitchen somewhere, if I haven't eat them at some point.  The phyllo pastry is something, I could never find in the supermarkets here in Switzerland, until few years ago.  I used to buy them once in a while from a Turkish food shop or in some gourmet stores in Zurich.  In the last few years, they started showing up in the big supermarkets first and now I can find them almost in any food stores.  However, I still think like that I find gold when I see them, so I generally end up buying 3-4 packs and then put them in the freezer at home.  If I want to make a börek, I just take the pastry out of the freezer couple of hours before I have to prepare (until now I didn't attempt to make baklava as it seemed too complicated but I will for sure let you know about my experiences if I do).  This came up only because I took out two packs of pastry out of my freezer, but then decided two of them will be too much to make a börek so I made this.  It's the idea of the cigarette börek (a famous Turkish recipe), but instead of cheese, I put chocolate and some other things.  I wasn't sure what to call it.  Chocolate heaven, chocolate baklava, chocolate börek... chocolate rolls was the winner in the end. These things are super delicious.  Believe me, you won't regret it if you try them.

Chocolate Rolls

(Makes 25) 

8 Turkish (or Greek) phyllo pastry (Yufka) - The sizes of these pastries are generally different everywhere.  I used 20x30cm rectangular ones and cut them into triangle shapes (see photo below).  In some shops you can even find triangle shaped ones in packs. 

200 g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)

115 ml half fat cream (1/2 cup)

2 tablespoons of coconut flakes

2 tablespoons of crushed almonds

1 teaspoon of vanilla sugar

50 g butter

1 tablespoon of milk

1 tablespoon of water

Put the cream in a sauce pan and bring it to boil over medium heat.  Take the cream off the heat once it's boiling.  Break your chocolate into little pieces and stir them into the hot cream to melt.  Add the coconut flakes, crushed almonds and vanilla sugar to the chocolate-cream mixture, then set it aside.  Melt the butter in a separate pan and add the milk and water in it after it's melted.  Prepare your pastries in triangles as in the picture above.  Once your pastry is ready, brush the melted butter mixture all over the pastry.  Put a tablespoon of the chocolate mixture on the long side of the pastry as pictured above and spread it a little bit.  First fold the ends from outside to the inside, so that the chocolate will not leak outside when you roll it.  After that, roll the pastry up.  Place the rolled pastry on a baking sheet and brush it over with the butter mixture.  This will give them a golden color once they are baked.  Repeat the same until you use all the pastry.  Bake them in a preheated oven at 180° C(356° F) for about 15 minutes.  Once they are done leave them to cool for a while.  I found them more delicious after they were really cooled down.  Enjoy your chocolate treat.

Fudge Brownies with Pears

After all the birthdays and Easter, basically after all the cakes and the chocolates, I thought I shouldn't cook anything sweet or with chocolate for a while and just cook very healthy things like salads and vegetables.  Then I decided to have a look at my long time ago purchased low fat cookbook.  I bought this book, not only because it looked like a healthy food book, also because I really liked the simple recipes and yummy photos in it.  The season being spring and the urge to eat something light and healthy, made me want to make one of those light salads or pasta or soup or noodles.  When I was looking through the book, I came across something I couldn't resist and it was non of those above.  It was a very delicious looking fudge brownies recipe. The fact that it was in a low-fat book made me wonder if it was really this good, so I decided to try it.  As usual, some of the ingredients were replaced with what I had in my kitchen.  It's hard to find self-raising flour here so I never use it even if the recipe calls for it.  I ended up making something quite different than the one in the book but I managed to keep the oil bit more or less the same.  The brownie turned out to be a very moist and a very light one.  The kind that you can eat more than one slice at a time which kind of cancels the low fat factor.

Fudge Brownies with Pears

( Makes about 16 pieces)

1 cup of flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

4 tablespoons of cocoa powder

3/4 cup of brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tablespoon of vanilla sugar

2 tablespoons of butter or margarine - melted

250 g of quark (you can use fromage frais instead)

1 peeled and grated medium size pear

icing sugar for dusting

Preheat your oven to to 180° C(356° F).  Put the first three ingredients (flour, baking powder and cocoa) in a bowl and mix them well.  In another bowl mix eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla sugar and quark. 

Add both mixtures together and stir them well.  Finally, add the grated pears into the mixture.  Put the mixture in a baking tin and bake about 25-30 minutes.  Check if it's cooked by inserting a knife in the middle and see if it comes out clean.  If it's done then take it out and leave it to cool for five minutes. Slice it up and dust it with icing sugar before you serve.  

Chocolate Fudge Cake

So here is why I almost didn't sleep this past week.  I had to bake, bake and bake. There wasn't much cooking other than fixing some easy meals but a lot of baking.   My daughter and husband have their birthdays in the same week, so I really had to bake.  Ok, if I had to be honest, I could have just bought the stuff, but that would be too easy.  Instead, I decided to challenge myself and bake it all.  First, I had to bake some muffins for my daughter's playgroup and I have followed a muffin recipe from Delia for the muffins.  As usual, me being me, ended up changing it slightly and made it a chocolate muffin with Smarties on top.   My little girl has ordered it like that, so there had to be smarties involved.  I also had to double the amount of all the ingredients that were given in the recipe, because the original is for mini muffins.  In the end the muffins looked like these in the picture below.  I definitely recommend this recipe as it's very chocolate rich and very light at the same time.

Then I had to make a cake for my daughter's birthday.  She wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate on it and in it and over it.   My nightmare was that it would turn out to be a disaster as it happens in most of my baking cake attempts.  I looked up all my recipe books for all kinds of chocolate cake recipes.  I searched the internet for all sorts of chocolate cakes.  Although I was very determined to follow the recipe this time, I couldn't find anything that I can follow from the beginning to the end. In the end I decided to try something out by taking something from each recipe that I thought might work.  It was a little risky but well...  In the end it was probably the best cake I have ever baked.  The cake photo you see above was taken at one o'clock in the morning.  It took me almost 5 hours to do it and most of that was waiting for things to cool down, but it was all worth it in the end.

Chocolate Fudge Cake

For the cake:

4 eggs

200 g butter  ( a little less than a cup of butter)

175 g sugar (makes a little less than a cup of sugar)

a pinch of salt

3 tablespoons of cocoa powder

1 teaspoon of baking powder

300 ml milk (about 1,5 cup of milk)

350 g flour ( about 3 cups of flour)

For the frosting:

400 g dark chocolate - roughly chopped (70% cocoa chocolate) (makes about 2,5 cups)

300 g crème fraîche - (about 1,5 cups)

150 g butter (about 1/2 cup)

The cake:

Start with melting the butter in a sauce pan and leave it to cool down.  Whisk the eggs for about 2-3 minutes then add the sugar.  When the mixture gets thick and creamy, whisk in the butter very slowly, then add the milk.  In another large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt and the cocoa powder.   Afterwards add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture and stir.  Put this mixture in a 24 cm (9¨) cake pan and put it in a pre-heated oven at 180° (350° F - gas mark 4) for about 45 minutes.   Afterwards leave it to cool for a while before you slice it into 3 horizontal pieces to make your 3 layers. 

The frosting:

First, you need to melt the chocolate in a bowl, that is sitting on a saucepan of simmering water.   The bowl shouldn't touch the water.  Allow the chocolate melt slowly and once it's all melted remove it from the heat and stir in the butter.  Butter will melt with the heat of the chocolate.  When the butter is all melted, add the crème fraîche to the mixture and stir it really well.  Allow the sauce to cool down a little until it's creamy enough to spread. 

When you are ready to finish the cake, spread some of the chocolate sauce on the first layer, put the second slice of the cake then spread that one also with some of the chocolate sauce.  Finally put the last slice on top and spread the rest of the sauce on the cake with the help of a palette knife or a spatula.  

Leave it to cool for few hours before you serve.  You can also add some other decorating items on top of the chocolate sauce, such as crushed walnuts, almonds or coconuts, etc.  I had to put some candy animal figures for my daughter on this one (which are not pictured here). 

You can keep this cake in the refrigerator up to 5 days. 

Enjoy your chocolate feast.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Here I am, when I decided to put here a savory dish next, ended up making something sweet again.  It's not my fault really, although I am really fond of sweets.  It was my daughter, who all of a sudden demanded cookies yesterday afternoon.  First I thought about making my latest favorite ones, the Anzac biscuits, but then they are a little hard for the kids to bite on.  Then I remembered the chocolate chip cookie recipe I had in my cooking notebook.  It was given to me by my dear friend Misty, who was very passionate about cooking and thought me a lot about Indian food and chocolate deserts.  This is one of her recipes I believe, but I have changed it slightly as I didn't have any walnuts that was called in the recipe.  It could also be a little difficult for the kids to eat the walnuts. In addition, I put in a little bit cacao powder to make it look more chocolaty. The recipe is below, but as in all chocolate cookies you can replace some of the ingredients with other things like almonds with coconuts, hazelnuts, walnuts and chocolate chips with white ones or even with raisins.

 

This recipe makes about 16 cookies.

6 tablespoons of butter

1 cup of dark brown sugar

1/2 cup of white flour (you can use all-purpose or self-raising one, in which case you can exclude the baking powder)

1 teaspoon of baking powder

1 tablespoon of cacao powder

1 egg beaten

2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar

1/2 cup of crushed almonds

1/2 cup of chocolate chips

a pinch of salt

Start with melting the butter and leave it cool down for few minutes. Whisk the sugar and vanilla sugar in with the butter until the mixture becomes a little thick. Beat in the egg slowly. Add in the flour and the baking powder, the cacao with the salt and whisk until you have a nice creamy mixture. Then take a spoon and mix in the almonds and chocolate chips. Pre-heat your oven to 180° (350° F - gas mark 6).  Prepare your baking tray with baking sheets over them.  Put spoonfuls of the mixture on the baking sheet by leaving enough space in between. Don't try to shape the cookies cause then you'll end up having a mess. They for a round shape beautifully when they are baking. Stick them in your pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes. After they are done let them cool before you take the first bite.