Ok, who wants to think about chocolate instead of the pandemics, lift your hands up!



I looked in the pantry and wasn't able to ignore the avalanche of xmas chocolate. Not getting any smaller. We aren't big chocolate eaters, in fact we don't eat it. I do like it in baking but I am still more of a nut, fruit pie/tart person, so I am stuck with a ton of chocolate and no really interesting, good, simple and fast recipes. This is the land of chocolate and chocolate lovers.

What do you make/bake? We got a ton of Lindt balls, Merci-s, etc. I am a bit burned out on muffins and brownies.

Any tips welcome.

Cheers,

The Chocolate Mod.

__________________
"L'homme ne peut pas remplacer son coeur avec sa tete, ni sa tete avec ses mains." J.H. Pestalozzi

“The only difference between a rut and a grave is a matter of depth.” S.P. Cadman

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." A. Einstein

Narsai David was a SF East Bay chef/personality in the 70s. His pastry chef dreamed up Chocolate Decadence, which he served at his eponymous restaurant. It's deliciously dense and a doddle to make:

Prepare a 20cm round pan with butter and paper. Set oven to 220C.

Warm 450g semi-sweet chocolate with 140g sweet butter until just melted.

Warm 4 large eggs with 15g sugar over hot water until just lukewarm. Remove from heat and whip with hand-held mixer until quadrupled in bulk. Fold in 10g flour (1 tablespoon). Stir one-quarter of eggs into melted chocolate to lighten, then fold in rest of eggs. Pour into prepared pan and bake maximum 15 minutes.

Let cool and freeze overnight, then remove from pan. Serve with raspberry coulis and whipped cream. Die.

P.S.: Lindor balls can be used in rum ball cake with rum ganache and coconut praline from this Aussie site:

https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/rum...5-b4a49a59d0f6

WTF? Do these things actually exist, or is this just a poor translation from another language? I'm cringing at the idea of butter with sugar being a product in its own right, rather than just the first step in making a cake, so I really hope this just means unsalted butter, like it would in French or Italian.

Anyway, my best chocolate recipe recommendations? Open bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk; eat. Idem for box of Belgian Pralines, preferably by Neuhaus.

Sweet butter is usually unsalted, iirc.

But not always: https://www.recipetips.com/glossary-...eet-butter.asp

In any case, there is no sugar involved.

Tom

So it's just... butter. The implication there is that some/most US butter is made from milk that's gone off, which might explain a lot about why it always tastes so awful.

I always knew this was the case for some products like Hershey's "chocolate" but never realised that it might be true for butter as well.

Well, I guess I could have said "unsalted sweet-cream butter" to differentiate it from heumilk butter or sauerrahm butter.

Don't know where you've been tasting your US butter, Ace, but there's plenty of very good butter there, and it is not made with milk that has "gone off." I used to use Plugra when I lived there. There's even some very good chocolate, such as Scharffenberger.

I used Amish butter.

And no chocolate.

Apple sauce on waffles!

Couldn't you have started a thread without bragging about your modship? It's rather off-putting.

Let's talk about real chocolate- not Hersheys/cadburys palm oil and sugar.

Chocolate contains cocoa butter ... otherwise is is not worthy of the name.

No that’s not the implication at all.

Taste is always a matter of opinion. You like dairy milk? Not much different from Hershey’s imho. But I try not to look down too much on people for their chocolate preferences. I grew up eating Hershey’s chocolate. I have other preferences now.

There’s cultured butter made from cream using active cultures, is that butter that’s gone off in your opinion? The cream does sit for a day or too with added buttermilk, yogurt, kefir. It has a bit of a tang and is delicious. I make it all the time. But again, a matter of opinion.

How about a piece of chocolate instead of sour grapes?

Chocolate covered raisins?

I hadn’t noticed that due to the enormous image and the difficulty of reading text on a tablet when there is an enormous image on the page.

What is it with people posting huge images these days? It is reallly really annoying.

Teachers here don't risk getting Hersheys nor Cadbury, I am a bit glad, tbh. But have buddies that swear by both.

I am running out ouf inspiration - bossybaby, thanks! Is it like a frozen brownie? Less dense?

In the meantime, we threw a batch of muffins in the oven, they muffinized quite well, chunks of Lindt balls in them. But I really need to figure out something new.

Rocky road fudge. All you need is butter, crushed biscuits/corn flakes/rice krispies and roughly-chopped nuts for bonus points.

Use it in cookie dough.

Drink it. Melted leftover chocolate in hot milk makes a real decadent hot chocolate.

Raisinets.

Tom

That would be red currants around these parts.

Browned butter brownies, made it once, it's worth it.