Remember the pate a choux I’ve frozen last Saturday? Well, I used it today! My first intention was to make Napoleons using this quick puff pastry recipe that I have been wanting to try for a while. But, since there is not a habit of labeling the flours in our house, I accidentally used a low gluten, whole-wheat flour, and the puff pastry didn’t puff. And I had already prepared pastry cream to make Napoleons. So, I used my frozen pate a choux and made cream puffs!

And to make things more interesting, I topped the puffs with orange chocolate and sprinkled peppermint candy! The recipe was a success, seriously everybody loved these puffs! And because of that, I suggest you to always freeze half of every dough you prepare, just in case..

Chocolate Peppermint Cream Puffs

makes 40 cream puffs

For pate a choux:

- Use the recipe here. Omit sugar pearls.

Ingredients:

For pastry cream:

• 500 ml milk
• 2 eggs
• 150 gr sugar (5.3 oz.)
• 75 gr (2.65 oz.) cornstarch

For topping:

• 80 gr dark chocolate with orange, melted
• 3-4 peppermint candies, crushed
• 1-2 tablespoons milk, hot

Directions:

Heat the milk. In a separate bowl, mix all the other ingredients. When the milk is boiled, pour 3 tablespoons of it to the egg mixture and whisk quickly, so you don’t get cooked egg clumps in your cream! Then, pour this egg mixture to boiled milk and stir for one minute and take the cream off heat.

When the pastry cream and choux puffs are completely cooled, cut the puffs into half and fill them with pastry cream.

Mix the melted chocolate and milk. Pour this over the choux puffs. Sprinkle with crushed peppermint candies.

Oh, and don’t forget the Insatgram photos:

Challenge time!! Starting from today, I will be baking everyday until December 30th. Throughout this challenge, I’ll use my old recipes as well as some new ones. So, let’s get started. First day: the best chocolate-chip cookies!! (Standard recipe: here, healthier version: here)

As for chocolate-chips, I crushed a variety of chocolate bars, including this, this and a gianduja bar from Venchi. I wish I put some white chocolate too, but the taste was nevertheless amazing. The cookies were soft, moist and full of chocolate!

I served these in a round tin covered with parchment paper. So easy, let looks so elegant!

By the way, who needs a DSLR when there is Instagram, the lazy person’s best friend!

I haven’t been around here for quite a long time.. I wasn’t that busy to write anything, though. I just couldn’t decide about the blog’s future. As I wrote before, I was thinking about opening a Turkish food blog with an emphasis on healthy eating, but couldn’t find a proper name for the blog (or couldn’t find any empty domains for candidate names). Then, after waiting endlessly for an idea to pop into my mind in bathroom or before I sleep (where creative ideas usually come to me) I decided to stop trying to be always creative and perfect, and just open the Turkish blog under kitchenimpromptu domain. So, for Turkish readers, my new blog is tr.kitchenimpromptu.com, until I find a better name.

Other than my new blog, a lot of things and a lot of cooking happened in the last couple of weeks. My cousin got engaged, and most of the food served was homemade by us! My contributions were: hummus, spinach strawberry salad, sweet and salty avocado dressing from Choosing Raw (killer!), strawberry lemonade soda adapted from here (also killer!), chocolate barks, homemade bounties, chocolate covered peanut butter and chocolate covered fudge babies. And a cute cheese plate!

Closeup on table:

Hummus (recipe will come- I promise!):

Spinach strawberry salad was so easy to make; I blended some chopped spinach with chopped strawberries and walnuts, and sprinkled with grated parmesan cheese. For balsamic vinaigrette, I blended 3 parts of olive oil with one 1 part balsamic vinegar, and drizzled over the salad. DELICIOUS:

Sweet and salty avocado dressing:

Strawberry lemonade soda raised some different comments. Some said it was good, and some said I should have used less mineral water. But I do agree that it cannot be called “lemonade”, as in Martha’s recipe, because it was more like a soda with an emphasis on strawberries. I liked the taste, though I’m planning to make a honey sweetened version. And I think the others liked it as well, because there wasn’t any left at the end of the day!:

Wait, there’s more!

Like my cute little cheese plate:

And the dessert table (Notice the baklavas?):

Chocolate barks were a big hit! And they were so easy to make. First, I melted some milk chocolate. Then I spread it onto a tray with parchment paper. After that, I topped the chocolate with chopped hazelnuts, raisins and orange zest. Orange zest is the key to great smelling chocolate barks! Then I chilled the chocolate for 5 minutes in the freezer. Finally, I put a second layer of melted chocolate and chilled for 10 minutes. When the chocolate is completely solidified, I broke them into pieces, and voila! I also made another variation with dark chocolate, pistachios and raisins.

Homemade bounties (recipe coming soon!), chocolate covered peanut butter and chocolate covered fudge babies:

Oh, we ate so much that day. So much that I wasn’t that hungry even the day after!

I also experimented with a lot of recipes. For example, I made Smitten Kitchen’s Light Brioche Burger Buns with some changes. I used honey instead of sugar, reduced the amount of butter and used whole-wheat flour; and I was very pleased! I even made kidney bean burgers with them, but the burgers looked more like bean paste (I should have used an egg and more flour to bind the burgers). And when I decided to make some burger buns for my cousin’s engagement and doubled the recipe, it didn’t work! I must have missed something, but I’ll definitely try again.

I also made Gena’s macaroons, and they were fantastic, but somehow since I used my oven instead of a dehydrator like Gena does, their shapes were not good enough to put in an engagement menu. But I’ll work on that too, because they were so easy to make, so delicious and healthy! And do you know that I made my own shredded coconuts for that recipe? Yay! I don’t know what took me so long to make them, I guess I was skeptical about breaking and shredding coconuts. But if you have a hammer, it’s easy to break the coconut, and I used food processor instead of shredding the coconuts, which made no difference. Then, all you have to do is roasting them in the oven. I strongly recommend making your own shredded coconut, it’s much much better than the things we buy from store.

I hope to write more often. We’ll see..

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/engagement-food-new-blo/feed/ 3 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/caramel-chocolates/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/caramel-chocolates/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:59:28 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=485

I swear this is my last chocolate post and I’m not going to make any chocolate recipe for a very long time! I know I’ve been obsessed with chocolate recipes recently, and it has two reasons. First of all, I have been consuming a lot of chocolate these days, and don’t know why.  Secondly, chocolate making is easy in terms of ingredients; you just melt some chocolate and pour it in molds. Actually, the reason I’m always making desserts rather than savory dishes is that. I always have sugar, flour, eggs, and milk at home, which are the basic things for pastry. Anyway, this is a recipe from Making Artisan Chocolates, which is like my artisan chocolate Bible. It’s originally “turtle tablets”, but I don’t have molds for tablets, I changed the recipe and make little molded chocolates, which have caramel filling. And I used brown sugar when making the caramel, because I didn’t have any white sugar left.

I think I’ll stop with desserts for a while, and put only savories to the blog..

Caramel Chocolates

adapted from Making Artisan Chocolates

makes 25-30 chocolates, based on mold size

Ingredients:

• 500 gr (17.5 oz.) dark chocolate, melted
• 55 gr (2 oz.) brown sugar
• 2-3 tablespoons warer
• ½ cup heavy cream, warm
• 280 gr (10 oz.) white chocolate, melted
• pinch of salt

Directions:

Put the sugar and water in a pan, and melt the sugar in medium heat. Wait until the mixture comes to boil, and the color turns darker, which takes about 10 minutes. Take the pan from heat.

Add the warm cream and salt to the mixture. Note that the cream should be warm! Otherwise, when you pour the cold liquid into a very hot sugar mixture, bad things can happen, and I don’t even want to think about that. (I’m quite afraid of boiled sugar!)

Pour the mixture into melted white chocolate, and combine until it gets creamy. Let it cool in room temperature.

Now, it’s time for molding! Take your chocolate molds. If you don’t have any, you can use little silicon cake molds. You have to coat the molds with melted dark chocolate. There are some methods for doing this, like pouring chocolate in the molds and turning them upside down to remove the excess chocolate. Well, since I am quite messy, I didn’t even want to try this method. So, I found a solution. I simply wore plastic gloves and I dip my finger to melted chocolate. Then, I smeared the chocolate to molds with my finger. Here are some shots:

When you finish coating, let the chocolates chill in the freezer for 5 minutes. You have to do this at least 3 times, or until you are sure that you get a thick enough chocolate layer.

After that, fill the molds with the caramel mixture using a piping bag, and finally cover the top of the molds with dark chocolate again. You can flatten the tops by using a spatula. Let them chill for 10 minutes.

Take the chocolates out from the molds, and keep them in the refrigerator. That’s it! And try not to mess the kitchen like I did…

Note: As you may have noticed, the chocolate filling does not look like caramel. This is because I didn’t boil the sugar enough (since I’m afraid of getting burnt!).

Last week, I was in Italy and I bough a lot of chocolate from Torino after they told me that the city is famous for its chocolate and grissini. So to finish all the chocolates (about 400 grams (14 oz.)), I decided to use them for my mother’s birthday cake. However, some of these chocolates had red pepper in it, so I made a spicy cake.The chocolate cake recipe was taken from a pastry chef, so I cannot give it, but it is very similar to a sponge cake. Anyway, you can use any chocolate cake recipe you want. After layering the cake, I poured some milk on the layers to make them moist, and spread some “crème patisserie”.

For “crème patisserie”, I used this recipe, and I added 1 cup of crushed and spiced almonds. To make them, I simply mixed the almonds with red hot pepper, salt, cumin and black pepper.

Finally I decorated the cake with chocolate ganache I made from the Torino chocolates. I heated 200 gr (7 oz.) heavy cream, and mixed it with 400 gr (14 oz.) dark chocolate, and some of them had red pepper. To make the ganache lighter, I mixed it with some whipped cream, and decorated the cake with whipped cream also.

Well, I know the eclairs in the photo do not look nice and cool, but their taste is inversely proportional to how they look.. Really.. The reason for their bad appearance is due to a little accident. After I finished making my tiny eclairs, the plate they’re on fell off to the kitchen table and their chocolate glaze was all over the place.. I think I’m never going to make some good looking food..

In fact, nothing can make me sad about these eclairs, because it’s my third trial so far, and the first two were a complete disaster. I tried to play with the “choux” pastry recipe, put whole-wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour, tried to change the amount of butter, and the dough didn’t rise. So, this time I didn’t take any risk and made my “pâte à choux” directly from here. The directions there were also very useful.

Anyway, after making my little choux pastries, I filled them with pastry cream. Well, I cannot give you the recipe, because I took it from a pastry chef, but you can use this recipe, which I used before. The tricky part is, when I was making the cream, I added 2 tablespoons of honey by decreasing the amount of sugar, and after the cream is chilled, I added 2 mashed bananas into it.

Finally, I poured chocolate glaze on them. The glaze is very simple to make, melt the chocolate and add some melted butter (If you melt 2 units of chocolate, add 1 unit of melted butter).

There are some white and dark chocolates waiting to be used in the kitchen for about a month. Actually, it’s a miracle that these chocolates can survive in the kitchen for a long time. In short, it was the time to use them. So, what I did was quite impromptu, I brushed my chocolate molds with white chocolate, and filled with some nice dark chocolate with almonds. But it was too “plain”. So what should I do to make these boring chocolates extraordinary? I simply added some red hot pepper on tops, and make these chocolates reaally hot!! Enjoy!

Spicy Chocolates

makes 12 chocolates

Ingredients:

• 100 g (3.5 oz.) white chocolate
• 100 g (3.5 oz.) 70% dark chocolate (preferably Mexican)
• 100 g  (3.5 oz.) heavy cream
• powdered red hot pepper
• chopped almonds (optional)

Directions:

In a pan, bring heavy cream to boil, and remove it from heat. Add the dark chocolate and stir until it is completely melted.

Let the ganache cool in the refrigerator. Add almonds to the ganache if you want.

Brush the chocolate molds with white chocolate, and let it chill in the freezer for 3 minutes. Continue this process a couple of times. By the way, make sure that all sides of the mold are covered with chocolate.

Fill in the molds with the dark chocolate ganache using a piping bag, while leaving some space at the top. Let the molds cool in the freezer for 15 minutes.

To the top of the molds, pour white chocolate to complete the white chocolate shell. Flatten the molds with a palette knife. Let them cool for another 10 minutes in the freezer.

Finally, sprinkle the tops with powdered red hot pepper. Keep the chocolates in the refrigerator.

Oh, no! Chocolate and orange cake again????? I know, but I think they’re the best couple ever.. Whenever I make something with chocolate and ask myself “What else can I add?”, the mantra repeats in my mind like “orange, orange, orange, orange”. Well, I know it’s not creative at all, but there is a plenty of orange on the kitchen table at this time of the year, and I just can’t resist them!

This time, I tried a recipe from “The Essence of Chocolate” by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg. It was supposed to be a “one-pot sour cream cake”, but I changed the recipe slightly, and the result was not a “moist” cake as described in the book, but a normal cake. I think if cooked it less, then I could get a moister cake. Anyways, here’s the recipe. Enjoy!

Chocolate Orange Cream Cake with Orange Sauce

adapted from The Essence of Chocolate

makes 1 big cake, 9 cupcakes

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 1 cup flour
• ½ cup sugar
• 100 g (7 oz.) butter
• 50 g (3.5 oz.) dark chocolate
• ½ cup orange juice (or juice of 1 orange)
• ¼ cup sour cream
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt

For the sauce:

• ¾ cup heavy cream
• ½ cup powdered sugar
• zest of one lemon

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F).

Melt the butter, chocolate and orange juice in a pan, and stir well.

Remove the pan from heat, add the sugar and whisk.

Add the dry ingredients and continue whisking.

Add the egg and sour cream, and mix well.

Pour the mixture into muffin cups or into a little pan.

Bake for 15 minutes for cupcakes, 20 minutes for the pan.

For the sauce, sinply mix all the ingredients in a food processor. This way, the orange zest will infuse better to the mixture.

Serve the cake with its sauce.

Being a senior year in college, I have to make my senior project (obviously). Our team is doing a “green” project for Unilever’s Heartbrand (ice-cream), and we have a project proposal meeting tomorrow. Since we are the host of this meeting, we thought it would be nice to serve some treats, other than the usual ones bought from a patisserie.

So, we decided to make some savory and sweet treats for the participants: the sweets are mini cupcakes and sugar cookies, and the savories are two types of cheesy canapés. We made all of them so improvisational that they don’t have any recipe. So, you have to enjoy the photos only..

Making Sinem’s cupcake base:

We filled the cupcakes with ready-to-use cake filling (Normally, I never use ready-to-use stuff, but we had no time!):

Decorating the cupcakes with an impromptu frosting (it has melted chocolate, whipping cream and some cake filling):

Sugar cookies from Joy of Baking:

Mozzarella, tomato and basil canapés on Wasabröd crispbread:

Herbed mild cream cheese canapés with olive & walnut topping:

And the leftovers:

You’re probably thinking right now that I’m obsessed with chocolate and orange. Well, that’s true, but in this case I used these two ingredients just because I had to. I wanted to make a cake, and searched the kitchen. There were only oranges in the fruit case, and I found some bittersweet chocolate, all-purpose flour, and one egg. I took a risk to make a cake with just one egg, but I thought the chocolate would do the same job as eggs and hold the cake. The cake was delicious, although it falls apart easily because of the lack of eggs. I think, you can get the best results by using two eggs, but I haven’t tried it.

Why hypnotic? Because there is something strange with this cake that you cannot stop eating it. It is probably because of the melted chocolate, but I named it “hypnotic” anyway!

Chocolate Orange Cake

makes 16 pieces

Ingredients:

• 1 egg (2 eggs is better for holding the cake, but I did’t try it)
• 2 cups all-purpose flour (I haven’t any left. But, use whole-wheat please!!)
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ½ cup olive oil
• 50 gr (1.75 oz) bittersweet chocolate, melted
• juice and zest of 1 orange
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 teaspoons baking powder or baking soda
• pinch of salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F).

In a bowl, beat together egg, oil, sugar, melted chocolate and orange juice.

Stir in vanilla, flour, salt and orange zest, and mix well. Finally, add the baking soda (powder) into the mixture and stir.

Pour the mixture into a cake mold and bake for 40 minutes, or until cooked.

Decorate the cakes by spreading melted white chocolate (with orange zest) on tops.

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chocolate-orange-cake/feed/ 0 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chocolate-truffles-with-orange-and-earl-grey-tea/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chocolate-truffles-with-orange-and-earl-grey-tea/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:42:36 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=134

My artisan chocolate making attempts are continued! I really liked the Earl Grey taste in my previous hand-dipped chocolates, so I used tea again in these truffles. I also added orange zest to strengthen the orangey flavor. Unfortunately, I messed up the kitchen again, but I am happy now eating my truffles and drinking my holy Early Grey tea!

Truffles with Orange and Early Grey Tea

adapted from Making Artisan Chocolates

makes 20 truffles

Ingredients:

For ganache:

• 100 gr (3.5 oz.) 60-70% bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 100 gr (3.5 oz.) heavy cream
• 2 tablespoons Earl Grey tea
• 1 orange’s zest

For dipping:

• 100 gr (3.5 oz) milk chocolate, melted
• cocoa powder

Directions:

In a saucepan, mix heavy cream and tea, and cook until it gets to medium-heat. Wait for 5 minutes to allow tea give its flavor.

Stir the mixture through a strainer into a bowl with chopped bittersweet chocolate and the orange zest, and mix until you get a smooth ganache.

Freeze the mixture for 30 minutes, or until hardened.

Using a spoon, take small pieces of ganache, and form 20 ganache-balls using your hands. Freeze for another 30 minutes.

By using a fork, dip each truffle in melted chocolate, then in cocoa and be sure all parts of the truffles are covered with cocoa. Place the truffles onto a parchment paper, and keep them in a cool place.

This is another impromptu cake I just made up and it didn’t disappoint me. I came by some ripe bananas in the kitchen the other day, and decided to use them in what I do best: muffins! I also added the chocolate chips I’ve recently bought from the coffee shop (I usually use chopped chocolate instead of chocolate-chips, but the girl in the coffee shop insisted me to buy them and I gave it a try). I didn’t want to add sugar to the cake, so I used honey. I don’t usually use honey in my cakes, but this time it really worked and the muffins were neither too sweet nor vapid. This has become one my favorite muffin recipes.

Chocolate-Chip Banana Muffins with Honey

makes 20-24 muffins

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 3-4 tablespoons honey
• 4 tablespoons yogurt
• 3 (200 gr. – 7 oz.) bananas, mashed
• 50 gr (1.7 oz.) bittersweet chocolate, chopped (or chocolate chips)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 4 teaspoons baking soda
• pinch of salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F).

Mix together eggs, honey, olive oil, yogurt and vanilla in a bowl.

Add flour, cinnamon, salt and baking soda, and mix well.

Finally add the bananas and chocolate chips, and mix until you have an even mixture.

Pour the mixture into muffin cups, and bake for about 30 minutes, or until cooked.

OK, I’ve wanted to make artisan chocolates for a long time. I even had some very-amateur chocolate trials for the past two New Year celebrations, which turned out to be not-so-bad, but I still wanted to learn some real stuff on how to make artisan chocolates. So, I ordered “Making Artisan Chocolates” by Andrew Garrison Shotts, which is a very informative book about chocolate making. After reading some introductory info and seeing the delicious photos in the book, I decided to try some recipes.

Hand-dipped chocolates are made by dipping ganache-squares into tempered chocolate*, which is an easier process than making molded chocolates, where you pour the tempered chocolate into molds, a messy job. So, I decided to make hand-dipped ones as a beginning chocolate maker. This was actually a recipe with jasmine tea, but I changed it slightly by adding my favorite chocolate-accompanies: hazelnut and raisins. I also put Earl Grey tea instead of jasmine tea to try something different and feel the bergamot in my chocolates.

(* Chocolate tempering is a process where the chocolate is heated and cooled to specific temperatures to give chocolate a shiny look, avoid cocoa butter seen on the surface, and to make the chocolates harden in much lower temperatures.)

As I am thrilled by the word “butter” (an old habit from my past diet days) and try not to use it if it’s not so necessary, I did not put butter into my ganache. But you can feel free to add 2 tablespoons for a smoother taste. (By the way, I used heavy cream and it is nearly the same as butter. But I still don’t want to use butter! Heavy cream is enough to add the desired taste I think!)

I obviously messed the whole kitchen making the chocolates, tried to temper the chocolate without a thermometer and burnt it, so my hand-dipped chocolates look really ugly, as seen from the photo. But the thing is, they taste wonderful! I am still working on making “better-looking” chocolates, but this is an easy & delish recipe, believe me!

Hand-Dipped Chocolates with Earl Grey Tea, Hazelnut and Raisins

adapted from Making Artisan Chocolates

makes 48 chocolates

Ingredients:

• 273 gr (9 ¾ ounces) 55-65% bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 2/3 cup heavy cream
• ¼ cup water
• ¼ cup Earl Grey Tea
• ½ cup hazelnuts, chopped
• ½ cup raisins
• 147 gr (5 ¼ ounces) 30-40% milk chocolate, melted (for the foot, which is to be spread onto the ganache squares to get a smoother surface)
• 906 gr (2 pounds) 30-40% milk chocolate, tempered* (for dipping)

* Make sure you use a thermometer to temper the chocolate, or you can burn the chocolate like me! So, I couldn’t temper the chocolate, and it does not affect the taste. If you are lazy to temper, just don’t!

Directions:

In a saucepan, mix the heavy cream, water and tea, and cook until it gets to medium-heat. Wait for 5 minutes to allow tea give its flavor. Stir the mixture through a strainer into a bowl with chopped bittersweet chocolate, and mix until all the chocolate is melted, and you get a smooth ganache.

Cover the bottom of a square pan (small to medium-size) with a plastic wrap, and pour your ganache into the pan. Spread the ganache with spatula, and cool it in the freezer for at least two hours.

Take out the hardened ganache-rectangle from the freezer, and remove the plastic wraps. To make the foot, spread a thin layer of melted milk chocolate over the ganache with spatula, and freeze for an hour.

With a sharp knife, cut the freezed ganache to 48 squares. Using a fork, dip each one into the tempered chocolate, and make sure that all sides of the ganache-squares are covered with the tempered chocolate.

Place the chocolates onto a parchment paper. Freeze for another two hours.

Keep your chocolates in a cool place.

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