Tag: Chocolate

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies

When you have found possibly the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever, it is hard to find recipes for chocolate chip cookies that still inspire you. You know what I mean? It’s like, well I found the best ones, so why not just make those? I’ll tell you why: while they are delicious, they require buying fancy chocolate (instead of just using the perfectly good chocolate chips you already have in your kitchen) and sifting. I’ll sift for Thomas Keller, but only so often.

So when I wanted to make cookies a while ago but not the fanciest best ones ever, I went to one of my favorite (food) blogs: Orangette. I have used this blog before, but I have re-fallen in love with it since reading the author’s book, A Homemade Life. Now, I feel that Molly Wizenberg and I were meant to be friends, and I am determined to make it happen. If you like reading about food, I definitely suggest it. There are also recipes in it, so if you don’t like the story, you can at least make some delicious food. Anyway, she had this recipe for whole wheat chocolate chip cookies that just looked so simple and divine… So I made them.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

3 cups whole wheat flour
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 ½ tsp. kosher salt
2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes
1 cup lightly packed dark brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped into ¼- and ½-inch pieces, or bittersweet chips

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or just butter them. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl. Set aside.

Put the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (if you’ve got it. If you don’t, I advise bringing your butter to room temperature before you mix it). Bring the mixer up to a lower speed and mix JUST until the butter and sugars are blended (this should take about 2 minutes if your butter is cold). Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after adding each one. Add the vanilla, mix. Now add the flour mixture, and mix on a low speed until it is just mixed (have you noticed a key with this recipe is not over-mixing it? Honestly, that goes for most recipes. But moving on…) Add in your chocolate and mix. This is where it gets tricky, as the dough is fairly dry. Just do the best you can.

Using a spoon, put ~3 Tbl. sized scoops of dough on the cookie sheet, leaving plenty of room between the cookies (I would say at least 2 inches, 3 to be safe). Mine didn’t spread as much as the ones on Orangette, but always better safe than sorry. Bake for 16 to 20 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through, until the cookies are evenly browned. I have found, when it comes to baking cookies, that I need to take the cookies out of the oven sooner than I think I do… I have a tendency to over-bake. Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool. Enjoy with a nice glass of cold milk.

Delicious Chocolate Cupcakes (that also happen to be gluten-free)

Roza and cupcakes

Cupcakes
Frosted Cupcakes

If you read the title, let me preface this post by saying that I am not often a baker of gluten-free food… Actually, I’m not ever really a gluten-free (GF) cook, if I have anything to do with it. The GF baked goods that I have had in my life are generally sad, deflated looking little things, and usually don’t taste super. So, I try to avoid it.

As you may know, this past year, Jonah and I were nannying for a family, and they are gluten free. I had baked some things for them before (muffins, breads, even pie) and while they were impressed because it usually was pretty good, I was not. You’re going to tell me that pie dough that I made with potato and coconut flour and butter was better than my usual flour-butter-shortening? I don’t think so. But when Roza’s birthday rolled around (see photo below), I wanted to make her the best GF cupcakes I could find. How could you not with a face like that? And I must say, If you just gave me that cupcake, I would not know that it doesn’t have any sugar or flour in it. It is perfectly fluffy and dense at the same time, perfectly chocolatey without being too sweet… It was good. So yeah, these are, by non-GF standards, good cupcakes.

Now let me tell you a bit about Roza. She is the cutest 4 year old I’ve ever met in my life. With a voice like a cartoon character and an endlessly positive attitude, she always had the ability to make me howl with laughter. She was super into Curious George at the time, and we had been reading her this story where George is home alone and finds all these party favors and decorations and cake ingredients, etc. for a party, so he decorates and makes the cake, and then it turns out the party is for him! So Roza’s mom decided to do the same thing. All week, Roza cleaned the house with her little miniature broom for a party she knew we were having, and then she and I decided to make cupcakes for said party. Then, at dinner on Friday with her parents and me and Jonah, we surprised her with the fact that this all was her own birthday party! It was the most adorable thing ever. Their family doesn’t eat sweets a whole lot, and usually sweets aren’t things like chocolate cupcakes, so she was pretty enthused by the idea of baking sweets like these. While we were making them, we had this conversation about 20 times:

Roza: Annie, do you know what is yummy?
Annie: What’s yummy, Roza.
Roza: Chocolate… (Breaks into giggles).

Have I mentioned how much I love her? I have? Ok. I’ll stop.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Cupcakes

Note: A lot of GF recipes will not use just coconut flour. In fact, when I told Roza’s parents that this recipe only had coconut flour, they didn’t think it would be very successful. But the key is using LOTS of wet ingredients. Coconut flour soaks up moisture like nothing else, so in order to balance it out, the batter will seem pretty wet. But it works, I swear.

Ingredients

Cupcakes

¼ cup coconut flour
¼ cup cocoa powder
¼ tsp sea salt
½ tsp baking soda
3 eggs
¼ cup canola oil (the recipe called for grapeseed, but I used canola because it’s what we had around)
½ cup agave nectar (we did a little bit less than this since their family is into less sweeteners)

Frosting

1 cup chocolate chips (preferably dark)
½ cup canola oil (again, the recipe called for grapeseed, but I still didn’t have any)
2 Tbl agave nectar
1 Tbl vanilla extract
a pinch of salt

Instructions

Cupcakes

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. In a mixing bowl, combine coconut flour, cacao powder, salt and baking soda and stir. In a larger mixing bowl, blend together the eggs, oil and agave. Then mix the dry into the wet, and stir until thoroughly combined. Line your cupcake tin with liners, and scoop about 1/4 cup of batter into each liner. Bake them for ~20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Frosting

In a small saucepan over very low heat (or in a double boiler, if you’re feeling that it’s necessary), melt chocolate and oil together. Stir in the agave, vanilla, and salt. Then put the frosting in the freezer for 15 minutes to chill and thicken – mine took longer than 15 minutes to thicken up, but then it was a bit difficult to spread because I think I left it in the freezer for too long… I’m sure there’s a happy medium here, I just didn’t quite hit the nail on the head my first try). After removing from the freezer, whip it with a hand blender (or transfer from the pot you used to a standing mixer and use that) until it is fluffed up. Spread over the cupcakes and enjoy! Roza definitely did.

Pistachio Butter Cups

Pistachio Butter Cups
Pistachio Butter Cups

Pistachio Butter Cups

Another recipe brought to you by food52. The same day I made that scallops dinner for Jonah, I also made him these pistachio chocolates (think Reeses cups but with pistachio filling). What can I say, I was feeling loving and ambitious. This was the first time I’ve ever made a candy/chocolate thing, so I was a little scared and often felt like “am I doing this right?” but it all worked out. And actually, now that I’ve done it, I can confidently say that it was pretty easy! But I would definitely advise reading through the whole recipe before you get started (I actually always advise that, but especially in this case).

Pistachio Butter Cups

Ingredients

1 cup shelled pistachios
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp salt
12 oz. dark chocolate, chopped

Special equipment: mini muffin liners

Instructions

I found I needed a little more chocolate than the recipe called for, but I think I used too much in the first step, which you’ll see below, and because of that the chocolate overwhelmed the pistachio filling a little bit.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave, stirring every 30 seconds until 75% of chunks are melted, and just stir to melt the rest. Set 24 mini muffin liners out (I did it on a baking sheet so they’d be easier to move and such. Add a spoonful (think maybe 1 1/2 – 2 teaspoons) of chocolate to each liner. Use the back of the spoon to push the chocolate up the sides of the liner. I pushed it up almost all the way to the top (see picture). Put the liners in the fridge for half an hour to cool until they’re solid.

While the chocolate is cooling, put the pistachios, salt, and butter into a food processor and process until smooth. Add the powdered sugar and 1-2 Tbl of water until you have a thick frosting consistency. Remove the chocolate-filled liners from the fridge. You’ll see that because you’ve pushed the chocolate up the sides, you’ve got a nice mini chocolate bowl. Add about 1/2 Tbl to each liner. How to go about this is tricky. I had to use my fingers to kind of smooth out the filling, as I wanted it to be flat (like a Reeses would be), but it stuck more to my fingers than to the chocolate. But I figured it out and it worked just fine.

Reheat the remaining chocolate (as you did above) and spoon it over the pistachio mixture until it’s thoroughly covered. You want the top layer of chocolate to meet the chocolate that was pushed up the sides of the liner so that the pistachio filling is encased in it. Allow to cool and enjoy!

World Peace Cookies (or Extremely Chocolate Cookies)

Chocolate Cookies

Chocolate Cookies
Chocolate Cookies

One of my favorite care packages that I got in college was from my dad. It arrived the week before finals, and included all kinds of stuff to help get me through the very stressful time: chocolate covered coffee beans to help with the all nighters, delicious tea to help me fight off illness, dried fruit and other healthy snacks to keep me going during the long days, etc. It made me feel so much better about all the work I had to do, and made it feel like he was there, pushing me to get everything done and do the best I could.

Anyway, so I was thinking about my baby sister, who is about to enter finals week. And she’s had a bit of a rough semester, with some health issues (she may have to haver her tonsils out this summer, ouch) and all kinds of yuck-o stuff. And I thought, you know what would make her feel better? A care package full of funny and delicious things to help her get through the toughest part of the school year. Plus, let’s face it, I’ll take any excuse I can get to make cookies. I’d been eyeing this recipe from Smitten Kitchen for these chocolate cookies called “World Peace Cookies.” Apparently the title is based on the idea that if everyone in the world had these cookies, there would be peace. And they are pretty dang good.

World Peace Cookies

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 stick plus 3 Tbl unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup (packed) light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp fleur de sel or 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chips, or a generous 3/4 cup store-bought mini chocolate chips

Instructions

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking soda together into a bowl. Set aside. In an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both the brown and granulated sugars, the salt, and the vanilla extract before beating for another couple of minutes.

Turn off the mixer. Pour in the flour/cocoa mixture and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time. (A nice trick when pulsing flour and or cocoa: cover the bowl with a dishtowel, draped over the mixer, to protect yourself from inhaling the ingredients and to protect your kitchen from a total mess.) If, after a few pulses, there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple of times more. After everything is all mixed in, continue mixing on a low speed for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough. As with anything with lots of butter, you want to work the dough as little as possible. Don’t worry, the dough will be crumbly. Toss in the chocolate pieces and mix to incorporate.

Dump the dough out onto a work surface, gather it together and divide it in half. One half at a time, shape the dough into logs about an inch and a half in diameter. Wrap them in plastic wrap and stick them in the fridge for at least 3 hours. Towards the end of the three hours, you can preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Line your baking sheets with parchment, silpats, or just grease them lightly like I did.

Pull the logs out of the fridge, unwrap, and with a sharp knife, slice them into 1/2-inch thick rounds. They may crumble: don’t worry, just squeeze the bits back together. Put the rounds on a baking sheet, leaving about an inch in between them. Bake for about 12 minutes. They won’t look that done, but they are. I promise. Allow to cool on the sheet for at least a couple minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack. Good luck letting them cool all the way before munching on a few accompanied by a glass of cold milk. Yum.