Chocolate Truffle Tart

I seem to be posting less and less these days - but PLEASE bear with me. I am breastfeeding my nearly-three-month-old daughter and chasing around my two-year-old son and when I'm not doing either of those things I'm popping Tylenols and wishing I was in Maui.

I can no longer blame my cravings on being pregnant, but dammit, I wanted something chocolate. This brings us to today's recipe, the rich and decadent Chocolate Truffle Tart. The only thing I did differently from the recipe was I used a store-bought chocolate crust. So sue me. I used Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips, made with 60 percent cacao.

It took exactly twenty minutes to bake.

It turned out perfect! Dusted with cocoa powder, it looks lovely, in addition to tasting absolutely divine. The texture of this tart is silky smooth, like a real truffle, and the taste...oh, the taste. I absolutely recommend this recipe to ANYONE who loves chocolate. You won't regret it one bit! Unless you're on a diet, and even then you may not mind.

There's something else I wanted to write about today. When I first started this blog, I knew I wanted to be an inspiration to others who, like me, were afraid to try new things for fear of failing. I have gotten to the point where most of what I bake turns out well, but not always! This truffle tart is not the only thing I've baked this month. I also made a coconut crème pie from a recipe found on the back of a box of nonfat dry milk. Let's just say it was a failure. I have no idea what went wrong, but when I sliced into it, it had not set and was WAY too liquidy to eat. It still tasted divine, but the texture was horrible. I did not take a picture, unfortunately. I guess I forgot because I was so pre-occupied with being disappointed and trying to figure out where I messed up.

My point is, even though my coconut crème pie was a disaster, I'm not letting that deter me from pursuing my dreams of a career in baking. In the beginning, such an event would have depressed me and given me second thoughts about baking. It feels good to know that even though I'm still VERY capable of making mistakes, my confidence has grown strong enough to withstand those mistakes.

Moral of the story:  If at first you don't succeed, try - try again!

Classic Cheesecake

I can't believe it's already near the end of April, and this is only my second post this month. Having two babies really caught me off-guard, I guess (ha-ha). Hopefully by now I've gotten into the swing of things and will be able to get back to posting regularly.

A while ago a friend of my husband's asked me to bake him a cheesecake. After making his, I realized that I kind of wanted a cheesecake for myself. So I decided to look up a great recipe for just the basic, original cheesecake. I found one of Martha Stewart's that sounded good, so I went with it.

The first thing I did was, in compliance with the recipe, make the crust. I actually ended up making two crusts, because with my first I followed Martha's suggestions. It ended up being WAY too thin and crumbled from being overbaked. So when it came to Round 2, I doubled the crust recipe. This seemed to work well.

I ran out of eggs so my cheesecake had only three eggs and one egg white (made with Just Whites). I also didn't have lemon zest, so I used half a teaspoon of lemon extract instead. Finally, my cheesecake baked an hour and forty-seven minutes, two minutes longer than Martha advised. It didn't look done enough in the center, but near the edges was getting a little too brown for my comfort.

 

 

Of course, I wish it would have been perfectly white all across the top, but it turned out rather pretty. (Though my husband said it looked like a wheel of cheese.)

It tasted amazing. The texture was just a tiny bit less smooth than I'd have liked, but I suspect I might have overmixed the batter. Overall, this is a great recipe for cheesecake that I imagine can be altered fairly simply. I highly recommend this one to everyone.

Cheesecake-Filled Chocolate Eggs

Wow, it's been over a week since Easter, yet here I am just now getting to my Easter post. Shame on me!

I found these beautiful cheesecake-filled chocolate eggs a while ago, and couldn't wait to make them. I was going to make my own homemade chocolate eggs using some of the suggestions given in the recipe, but found the plastic eggs I had bought had holes (for drainage, I imagine) in each end, so I just went ahead and bought some online from See's. Each box contained six so I bought two boxes, to give me twelve.

 All I did was trim the tops of each egg and dispose of them and the white chocolate chicks from inside each egg. I tell you, this extra chocolate disposal process was a painful one, indeed.

After that was simple. I just mixed together the ingredients for the cheesecake filling, used a sandwich baggie with the corner snipped to fill in each egg, and sat them in the fridge.

Once it was time to add the "yolks", I decided to stray from the recipe and use something even better than fruit sauce. What goes better with chocolate and cheesecake than caramel?? I used Smucker's ice cream topping (the kind in the jar). It worked perfectly.

This was a great recipe and everyone was really impressed with it. The only thing I was unhappy about was that the pretty little egg cup I bought specifically to use when photographing these eggs was too big, so I couldn't use it. But hey, I'll take that kind of regret over my food being nasty/ugly any day.

St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes

It has been a while since I posted, and the reason for that is a good one - my baby girl was born! At seven pounds and one ounce, and nineteen and a half inches long, she is absolutely beautiful.

Isn't she gorgeous? So, forgive me if I took a bit of time to get back into the blogosphere. But here I am, with something cool - and easy! - for St. Patrick's Day.

 

 

I saw these on Pinterest first, and I thought they were adorable. I've been waiting for an opportunity to make them. 

I used store-bought cake mix and frosting - when I'm stopping to feed a baby every forty-five minutes, it's just easier to do it that way. So cut me some slack. The rainbows were made with Airheads Xtremes, and the "pot of gold" was a Rolo.

These are super easy, but everyone will be impressed all the same. This is a cute recipe that's sure to be a hit.

Burger Cupcakes

I am really excited about this post, so I'm going to skip the banter usually found in these introductions and get straight to it. I have seen these adorable burger cupcakes all over the internet, a million different times - and every time I see it I pester my husband for his opinion of how cute they are ("Aren't these amazing? Aren't they cool? I so need to make these. How cute are they, on a scale of one to ten?" My husband puts up with so much.)

So finally, I've found (or perhaps invented) an excuse to make my very own version of these awesome cupcakes. I used store-bought frosting, but I made my cupcakes from scratch. Oh, and instead of using brownies for the burger patties as in the original, I used chocolate cupcakes. I love brownies as much as the next person - probably more, if I'm being completely honest with myself - but I thought cake-on-cake would probably taste better and have a better consistency. Plus, I'm not a huge fan of brownies with frosting.

The recipe I used for my yellow cupcakes came from Mel's Kitchen Cafe, and the one for my chocolate cupcakes came from Taste of Home. The latter recipe was meant for making a cake but I changed the baking time to adapt to my cupcakes.

My yield ended up being 39, with about five or so others that were destroyed in the experimentation process. See, my cupcakes didn't turn out nice and even on top like in the pictures. My first ones had giant "muffin tops", and my second batch (which I made smaller after seeing how the first ones came out) had their middles rise but the edges were flat. So I had to mess around with a few before finding the right way to assemble them.

Then came the frosting. I used Wilton food colors - Leaf Green, Buttercup Yellow, and Red-Red. For the final touch, I lightly brushed the top of each "burger" and sprinkled on some gold sugar crystals for the sesame seeds.

Aren't they cool?! Not as perfect as Bakerella's of course, but I'm super happy with them.

Both cake mixes turned out well enough. The yellow cake tasted like a sweet cornbread, I thought, which was fine since there was going to be quite a bit of frosting. The chocolate cake could have been better in my opinion but seeing as it made up only a tiny part of the burger, it hardly mattered. However, if I were going to make a chocolate cake from scratch, I'd definitely opt for a different recipe.

These were a hit and tasted great, so I definitely recommend you give them a try sometime! They're a little labor-intensive, but worth it when everyone tells you again and again how cool they are.

Peanut Butter Fudge

My husband's been having a horrible week at work, so to try and cheer him up, I decided to make him one of his favorite confections:  peanut butter fudge. I've never tried to make any variation of fudge before so I knew beforehand it may have less than satisfactory results, but I decided to give it a try nonetheless. After all, you've got to start somewhere, right?

Easy recipe to follow, takes only minutes - I had my fudge in the fridge to set within fifteen minutes of beginning the whole process. According to the recipe, it only needed an hour (at least) to set, but after four hours, mine was still too soft. Not liquidy by any means, but soft to the point that I had to dig it out of the pan and almost needed a fork to eat it with. I moved it to the freezer and left it there overnight, and that seemed to help.

I think my problem was that I didn't let it come to a complete boil. I was a little paranoid about it burning on the bottom so as soon as it started to boil I pulled it off the heat.

After sitting in the freezer, it's just about the perfect consistency, though the heat from your fingers begins to soften it pretty quickly. That's hardly an issue though since it tastes so good that it's gone before it can start to thaw!

Seriously, this stuff is GOOD. My husband ate some and then proclaimed that it tasted better than his mother's. I can't lie - that made me feel pretty good.

Artisan Bread

Today, I have something a little different I'll be talking about. Since I am the possessor of a HUGE sweet tooth, everything I bake is always very sweet. But there's something I've always wanted to try, and that is baking bread.

This is very much out of my comfort zone, so I wasn't expecting spectacular results. I decided to go for simple white bread, figuring once I had the technique down, I could experiment with different flavors (two varieties on my agenda:  cheddar and cinnamon swirl!).

I used a no-knead recipe from The Italian Dish. The recipe is only slightly labor-intensive (I hesitate to say even that) and very easy to follow. I halved the recipe since this is my first time attempting bread and if it turned out disastrous, I didn't want as much carnage lying around to depress me.

My dough before letting it rise, covered.

 

My dough after letting it rise, uncovered - shortly before going into the oven.

My dough rose two hours in a bowl covered with plastic wrap before being placed in the fridge for two more hours. It rose for forty minutes uncovered while the pans preheated in the oven. Finally, I slashed it across the top and put it in the oven, fingers crossed.

That's what it looked like going into the oven. Nice, right? I was tempted to feel impressed with myself, but then I remembered how pretty my cherry danishes were before going into the oven, and I was humbled. I sat waiting anxiously as my bread baked, hoping it wouldn't be a catastrophe.

It baked for only twenty-five minutes. The color looked right ("a dark golden brown") and I didn't want to burn it.

It turned out GORGEOUS!

And not only that, but it tasted awesome. Especially with a thin layer of butter spread over its surface. Mmmm.

My family loved it and we almost ate the entire thing, since everyone had seconds and most of us went back for thirds, too. I know, we're indulgent. But it's that good. And such an easy recipe!

It's dense bread, not light fluffy sandwich bread - though I suspect a sandwich on it would be delicious. It's thick, chewy, and the flavor is phenomenal.

I can't wait to try this recipe again, but this time, with new flavors. I'm getting excited thinking about all the different things I can do with this new skill! Definitely give this one a try, if you can. You won't be disappointed!