homemade Reese's butter cups: almond butter dark chocolate cups

I love making candy. There's just something about vast quantities of sugar and an attention to elegance and design I rarely get to indulge in. This isn't saying that my candies are always very pretty (more often enough they're not at all) but I like the idea that they get prettier as I go.

I found these first at a Girl Scout "Winterfest," which is several hundred adolescent girls and their troop leaders squashed into a large auditorium where they run activity booths and sell crafts. One troop specialized in plastic jars of homemade Reese's peanut butter cups and I would buy a jar each year and horde it until spring.

Turns out, however, they're fabulously easy to make; and they're fabulously easy to engineer to your own devices. These I filled with almond butter, to give friend the Snark a close-as-I-can-get taste of Reese's. (She's allergic to peanuts). I made about eighty and packaged them up for friends and family this holiday. But you can fill them with anything you want-- lemon curd, dried fruit, jam of any kind, caramel (homemade is best!), other types of chocolate; anything you want. Isn't that a lovely phrase?

Almond butter cups
about thirty cups

1 C dark chocolate
1 Tb vegetable oil

1/2 C almond butter
1/2 C sugar

You will also need mini-muffin pans and mini-muffin paper liners. You can use a normal sized muffin pan if you want big Reese's. (I have a friend who uses a pie tin.)

Line the muffin tins with the paper muffin cups.  Pour the sugar into a wide-mouthed bowl and place the almond butter next to it with a spoon or two.

Melt the dark chocolate in the microwave or over a double boiler and mix in the oil until smooth.

Spoon a little chocolate into the bottom of each muffin tin and spread evenly over the bottom and a little up the sides.

Next, drop a little almond butter into the sugar and roll small balls of almond butter coated in sugar. The almond butter is much runnier than peanut butter. The peanut butter will roll nicely into balls, but the almond butter will always be a little loose and malleable. That's okay--you're covering them with chocolate, remember? That cures all things.


1: Line each paper cup with a thin layer of chocolate. 2: Drop a sugar-rolled ball of almond butter (or filling of your choice) into center of each cup. 3: Dollop chocolate on top of each ball. 4: Shake tray (keeping it on the counter and horizontal) until the tops are smooth.

Drop each almond butter ball into the center of a chocolate-lined tin.

Spoon a dollop of chocolate over each almond butter ball. Don't worry if a little almond butter shows or the chocolate mounds up. We're about to fix that.

Shake the tin back and forth on the counter. This will settle the chocolate into a smooth top. Stash in the freezer for five minutes or until set enough to remove from the tray.



I packaged them in holiday cellophone bags and gave them out for gifts. Don't make them too far in advance, but they keep for at least a week.

fudgy brownies with sweet pumpkin topping

I made these in honor of fall--and chocolate. They are rich and delicious. I do love pumpkin so...

Chocolate Jacks

adapted from Joy of Baking's Fudgy Brownies



12 oz chocolate, dark
1/2 C pumpkin puree from a can (make sure there aren't any added spices! You don't want pumpkin pie mix, you just want straight pumpkin)
1/4 C cocoa
3 eggs
1 C brown sugar
1/2 Tb vanilla
3/4 C flour
1/2 tsp baking powder

2 C pumpkin puree (see note above)
1 C brown sugar
4 eggs
1/4 C flour
1 tsp baking powder

12 oz. chocolate chips, melted

Preheat oven to 350.

Melt chocolate, pumpkin, cocoa and butter together. In a separate bowl, beat eggs and sugar, then add cooled chocolate-butter and vanilla to the bowl. Mix in dry goods.



Beat 2 C pumpkin, 1 C brown sugar, eggs, 1/4 C flour, and baking powder together, then pour over brownie batter. Drizzle prettily with melted chocolate--or let your chocolate seize, like I did (um... on purpose? Sure, yeah, of course I did...), and drop uneven delicious little blobs down in a random pattern.



Bake 40-50 minutes. Eat warm, cold, room temperature... I have an inkling they might even be good frozen--they didn't last long enough for me to try, but maybe next time.

cocoa waffles topped with whipped cream and fresh berries, a celebration of breakfast and summer

One of the best things in my unviersity dining commons are the row of waffle makers sitting next to a big tub of waffle batter. You ladle your own in, wait 1:30 for it to cook, then load it up with butter, thin sweet syrup, cinnamon sugar, whatever you want (smuggled in almond butter and honey; the once-in-a-blue-moon excitement of defrosted blueberries or big trays of strawberries). I love that they have this and I save my DC waffle binges for special occassions.

But these are better.



Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Waffles
Adapted from Alton Brown's Buttermilk Waffle recipe
Serves seven (470 calories/60 carbs per serving)
2 C flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 C cocoa

4 Tbs melted butter
3 eggs
2 C buttermilk
3 Tb sugar
1 tsp vanilla

1/2 C chocolate chips

1 C whipping cream
1/4 C sugar
(unless you really like whipped cream. Then double it...)

optional toppings:
fresh berries and sliced fruit
chocolate syrup
peanut butter
powdered sugar

If you like, mix and sift the dry goods (flour, baking soda and powder, cocoa) in a separate bowl. I do the dishes at my house, so I don't.



Beat the butter, eggs, buttermilk, and sugar together. Dump in the sifted (or not sifted) dry goods and chocolate chips and stir to combine. Let the batter rest while you work on the rest of the operation.

Beat the 1 C whipping cream and 1/4 C sugar together until soft peaks form. Do not overbeat! You want whipped cream, not butter. This takes me about 5 minutes; it depends on the strenght of  your mixer and how high your turn it up.



Lube up your waffle iron and ladle your batter over the preheated iron. (Follow your manufacturer's instructions, etc).

Spoon soft, sweet cream onto the piping hot waffle and top with berries. Devour gleefully, perhaps with a cup of hot cocoa or a cold glass of milk.

sugar cookie cake frosted with thick chocolate buttercream

EJL: What do you want me to bake you for your birthday?
TopHatAndGoggles: Inside-Out Oreos.
EJL: ?

My friend continued in a detailed and loving description of a treat composed of Hershey's chocolate smashed between two sugar cookies. Alright, I said. But I'm making it into a cake. And changing a few other things, too. (I love chocolate. I do not particularly love Hershey's).

This was a dense treat, a lot more like a bar than a cake. We ate it by slicing off squares and picking them up like brownies. I think there are some small children out there who would enjoy this enormously. TopHatAndGoggles ate a good 3/4 of a pan all by himself, so I think I can safely call this venture successful.

 
Inside-Out Oreo Cake
This one's for Mr. TopHatAndGoggles


1 C butter, softened
1 1/2 C white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 C milk

3 C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

Preheat oven to 350.

Beat butter and sugar together until smooth. Beat in egg, milk and vanilla until fluffy. Add dry goods.

Press into two 8 x 8 cake pans. It will be sticky. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until golden. The centers will fall in.

Let cool for a few minutes and then frost while it's still warm. Ideally, the frosting will melt and meld with cake into a tasty solid bar of chocolate and cookie-cake.

My favorite cake frosting is the buttercream. I start with a very basic recipe: 1 Tb butter to 1 C powdered sugar to 1 Tb milk. With that basis I add whatever other flavorings I need (vanilla, chocolate, pomegranate, what have you) and taste test (the best part) until I have the right ratios.


Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
2 Tb butter, soft
2 C powdered sugar
3 Tb milk (extra Tb because of the chocolate)

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 C chocolate, melted

Beat all ingredients together. Taste and alter. (I made this particular batch very dense (aka didn't add very much extra milk) which I think worked very well for this cake).

Almost gone...

My buttercream frosting-tasting game plan:
if it tastes too manufactured and sweet and ick (aka there is too much powdered sugar), add more butter;
if it's too thick, add milk;
if it's not sweet enough add powdered sugar AND a little milk (the ratio between these depending on the thickness of frosting);
and almost always add a little vanilla, too, because it makes the other flavors stand up and shout.

Nothin' but crumbs.

Do you have any other desserts fashioned off nostalgic childhood favorites? I have a great desire to make a Hostess Cupcake one of these days.

intensely dense, rich, decadent chocolate brownies

I am an Alton Brown fan. I like science with my cooking, or cooking with my science, and entertainment with both of them. A lot of the recipes you see on here and a lot of any cooking science I might wax on about probably come from his show Good Eats or his baking cookbook (which I love. Best pie dough ever, by the way).

So this is an AB brownie recipe (from the show, not the book). And no, not even with AB can I cook without altering a few things. I wasn't too sure about the 300 degree oven he wanted me to bake this in, but I figure I have no idea what temperature my dorm house oven cooks at anyway, so I might as well try dialing it to 300 and seeing what happens (they turned out fine). This recipe didn't seem nearly chocolate-filled enough for me, so I added more. A cup of chocolate chips more. I'm on the far far end of the bell curve describing the population's desire for intensity of chocolate in desserts, so beware.When discussing names, The Snark volunteered (a great compliment from a traditional milk-hater) "Lactate Necessitating Brownies."

I also switched out the sugar for honey, to add a little bit of flavor and texture (and to get rid of the giant thing of honey I got for 24 Hour Comics (Almond butter and honey on ginger-orange scones? I highly recommend this). Anyway). AB didn't include any leavening, and I'm sure he has his reasons, but the brownies I had in mind definitely needed a bit more lift than the eggs alone would add, so I tossed in some baking soda.



Brownies
Adapted from Alton Brown's Brownie recipe (foodnetwork.com)
4 large eggs
1 C honey
1 cup brown sugar
8 ounces melted butter, salted
1 1/4 cups cocoa
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 C mini dark chocolate chips (I might even up this more, if, say, I was making this for my mother, who is worse than I am with chocolate. Or better)
1/4 C white chocolate chips (optional, but they're pretty. And nearly every ingredient in my recipes is optional)

Preheat the oven to 300.

Beat eggs until fluffy. Add both sugars and vanilla. Add cocoa, flour, and baking powder. Mix in chocolate chips.

Pour into greased and floured pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick poked into the center comes out clean and not goopy (it will still be moist). Let cool. Devour with a tall, cold glass of milk.