Daring Chocolate Valentino

I'm back! after months and months of not being able to join the Daring Bakers Challenge, I finally got the time to do it. To be honest I even almost forgot about it, I've been procrastinating again, which I know is a very bad habit and I'm trying to break that for several years now! Oh my!

For this month's challenge, Wendy of A Charmed Life from Arizona and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef from KL, Malaysia co-hosted this month's challenge. They both chose Chocolate Valentino as February being the month of hearts and two different types of ice cream: French Vanilla Ice Cream and Philadelphia Vanilla Ice Cream. Both styles of ice cream are great depending on your personal taste, the only difference is that Philadelphia style ice cream have no eggs in it so its much easier to do for those people afraid of doing a custard base, the only downside is that it's not as rich as the French Vanilla Ice Cream.

Living in a tropical country, I love my ice cream maker and I love making ice cream, however being the procrastinator that I am. As I was about to make the ice cream, I just realized that I'm out of cream and vanilla! Of all the .... !!! Well so no ice cream, no harm done at least I have some chocolates stashed away :D

The recipe for the Chocolate Valentino, Dharm got from Chef Wan who is a famous chef in Malaysia. The steps and ingredients are few and easy just butter, A LOT of chocolates, I used milk chocolate and eggs. How easy is that?

Errr...not quite I got too overeager and I think I over whipped my egg whites, for the life of me I can't remember what will happen but I baked it anyway what the check at least I'm gonna learn from that mistake, right? Right??? Well...I hope so

Another mistake I made is that I got scared because of the over whipped egg whites I thought it might turn out rubbery so took it out of the oven earlier than I was suppose too. Yeah you guessed it, the middle part of the cake was still gooey. Yikes!

All is not lost though, eaten cold they taste very chocolatey with all that chocolate that went in before, so use chocolate the you love to eat because you can really taste it. Hmmm...chocolates ;D

Daring Baker challenge completed! Phew! Barely got to the finished line am I so glad this is over. Till next month's challenge

Cookies the CIA Way

I'm a huge fan of CIA, Culinary Institute of America, I dream of being able to take some class there someday. As of now I learn from CIA through their expansive cookbooks. One of my favorite so far is the Baking Boot Camp. This book deals with the author's experience when she took up the Baking Boot Camp course offered by CIA. There are also recipes of what was thought within the 5 days of the boot camp, so after reading this I really really want to go there!
Though the expansive list of recipes to choose from I chose the Mudslide Cookies. It feels and taste as decadent as I thought it would be. In this case I used local chocolates, I think with higher percentage of chocolate this will taste even better. It has higher percentage of melted chocolate to flour so when it's baked it's like liquid chocolate inside your mouth. They are very delicate and definitely fudgy. Can eaten either cold out of the fridge or warm at room temp. me personally I like it at room temp so you can really taste the chocolate with in. This is definitely a must when you want to indulge and really like dark chocolates.

A Different Kind of Muffins

Living in a tropical country like the Philippines, tropical fruits like bananas are quite abundant and very much affordable. In our house there's always bananas available my mom also buys when she drops by the market. There is always 1 or 2 bananas that always get thrown away because they are very very ripe, with the skin almost black. Nobody likes to eat that! Me, personally I hate eating ripe bananas, I like my bananas barely ripe with a hint of green on the skin.

Years ago, I actually found a recipe in Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess for banana bread that I like making however, I don't always get to make it because for one, I don't like eating banana bread because of the mushy bananas inside it.

I don't know what got into me I just have to make banana bread, our over ripped bananas almost got thrown away by the helper. Luckily, I was able to retrieve them which is a good thing because as I was in search for other things to bake aside from the banana bread I stumbled upon Matt Lewis' Banana Espresso Choco Chip Muffins which can be found in Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. I was absolutely captivated with in and its a definitely a must try. Sorry Nigella...

The recipe itself is such an easy one a regular muffin method kind of thing. Mixing all the wet ingredients together and then mixing all the dry together. Everything was going great until I saw the egg sitting on the counter! OMG!!! NOOOOO!!! It took me few minutes whether to pul out the pan from inside the oven, which in the end I did. I gently scooped them out and gently mix in the egg. That's why they turn out chocolate banana muffin with chocolate chips and not banana muffins with chocolate chips. In the end I like it it turned out still soft and very chocolatey. I must admit I still don't crave for this because of the mushy bananas however given a choice I would rather have this chocolate version than plain banana muffins

Nutty Chocolate Meringues

When I was a little girl every afternoon after school while waiting for my nanny (yaya), I always go to the near by sari-sari (local mini-convenience store) and buy colorful meringues. What attracted me the most was probably all the assortment of colors like baby pink, light blue, light green, light yellow and white. Every color pretty much taste alike crisp and light but back then I didn't care for 10 pesos ($0.36), I got 6 colorful meringues that I can enjoy while watching my afternoon cartoons. As I grew up my love for meringues haven't change, from time to time I tend to ask our helper to buy some for me. I know meringues are easy to make but then I tend to get lazy specially those days when you just want something sweet to eat but don't want a bunch of them in the house.
When I saw this Nutty Chocolate Meringue from delicious magazine, I just knew I have to try it. It's primary ingredients are egg whites, hazelnuts and chocolates. Having leftover egg whites from the Green Tea Ice Cream that I made a week ago, making this recipe will be a breeze. No more messy business of separating of yolks and white.
As you can see from the picture above, I got a little impatient in mixing that I didn't fully mixed the egg white mixture till stiff peaks. The result is that the ridges created by the star tip, wasn't as pronounced as it should have been like the few others (see first picture). One thing I learned from this is when grating chocolate, it should be frozen if not at least cold or else it would clump up like what almost happened, specially when using a food processor. I had a hardtime removing the skin from each hazelnuts, I just didn't bother to skin them, just chucked it in processor with the chocolate and blitz!
The pulverized hazelnuts and chocolates where then added to the *stiff* eggwhite mixture with sifted cocoa powder. The mixture is then placed in a pastry bag and slowly piped you're meringues. Any shape are okey here I use the star tip and swirl each piece in a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Please don't use wax paper, the wax on the wax paper sometimes melts and sticks to the food! Eeek! I baked them for 45 mins in a low temperature oven. When they were manageable, each meringue got their chocolate bath and time to eat!
This special batch of Nutty Chocolate Meringues with their swirls intact was given to Ann as a token of my appreciation for keeping my stuff that I bought after the Wilton class that I took a week ago. The weird swirless ones got to have a thick chocolate sandwch between them. Hmmm... these are good. I really like them freshly made when the chocolate filling have just set, the grated chocolate are still a bit melty. YUM!