Valentine's Day interlude

Happy Valentine's Day!

It's been a long week here at our house and Valentine's Day is a bright pink light I'm focusing on and hanging dearly to!  So I'm having a little Valentine's Day interlude here and savoring the excuse to celebrate love (of all kinds) and eat lots of chocolate today!

We'll be starting the day with some heart-shape buttermilk pancakes (recipe here).  I formed the rough heart-shapes by placing the pancake batter into a piping bag and piping out the shapes onto the griddle.  In all likelihood, these will hit the table with a heart-shaped dollop of chocolate hazelnut spread in the middle.

I plan to make pasta with lobster and shrimp for dinner at home with my fellas tonight.  For dessert, I made chocolate covered ice cream hearts (recipe and idea inspired by the Food Network).  A small word of warning...as with most ice cream projects, it's never quite as easy as it sounds or looks.  It's a reminder that ice cream melts, and melts very quickly.  In other words, it gets messy fast.

Chocolate cake for the weekend

I'm calling this a "chocolate cake for the weekend" because that's just what it was.  I made it last Friday going into the weekend.  It's always nice to kick off the weekend with a cake!  On a practical level, it was partly an effort to clean out the fridge and use up some extra ingredients.  On another level, it was just part of the ongoing effort to satisfy my insatiable chocolate cravings.

After making a few loaves of banana bread and churning a batch of ice cream, I had extra whole milk yogurt and heavy cream on hand so I decided to use those things to make this cake.  I'm actually revisiting a recipe I've made before, in a different form. In fact, my very first post featured this in cupcake form.  I've also made it as a single-layer cake years ago.  This time, it comes in the form of a double-layer 6-inch cake.

When we had afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason in London back in April, I tasted a delicious slice of chocolate ganache cake...maybe that put the idea in my head.  But to be honest, I think about chocolate and things like chocolate cake and ganache all the time.  It's amazing how much I love chocolate, and it's a love that goes way back for as long as I can remember.

But back to this little cake...make it for the chocolate lover in your life because it is all about the deep flavor of chocolate (a recurring theme here).  Thanks to yogurt and oil rather than butter in the batter, the cake is wonderfully moist and tender.  It gets a deep chocolate flavor from not only cocoa and chocolate but also freshly brewed coffee.  The chocolate ganache frosting and filling is rich and creamy, basically a chocolate-lover's delight.  This cake made this chocoholic very happy and I can say that I definitely put my leftover yogurt and heavy cream to very good use!

It's strawberry season and I've been diligently stocking up on strawberries and raspberries as much as possible.  While my fridge is overflowing with it and I'm perfectly happy snacking on it and having it with some yogurt for breakfast, I'm always still craving a little chocolate!  And in my humble opinion, the best way to eat berries just might be...with a slice of chocolate cake!  Who's with me?

Mini chocolate bundt cakes for two

It's time to get back to dessert!  Valentine's Day is a few days away and we should have more chocolate for the occasion.  You can't go wrong with a classic so let's have chocolate cake!  I put my mini bundt cake pan to use and made a couple of mini chocolate bundt cakes to share with my Valentines (that would be my husband and our rapidly-growing 9 year old).  We love simple, straight-up chocolate cake - it never gets old, it just has to be good.

These cakes themselves don't just look chocolaty, they also taste that way.  Because of that, you don't necessarily need a glaze (a pretty dusting of confectioners' sugar would do) but since it's for Valentine's Day after all, I topped the cakes with chocolate ganache.  Some of that ganache pooled into the hollow of the cakes and I told my son that was the "tunnel of love".  I know...I'm so corny!

This small-batch recipe from America's Test Kitchen makes two mini bundts so it's perfect for date night or an occasion like Valentine's Day.  Like many of you, we prefer to stay in for Valentine's Day.  More often than not, my husband and I celebrate early (on the closest Friday or Saturday night), with a relaxing dinner in the comfort of our own home.  Dessert is naturally required and a chocolate cake like this would be more than welcomed.  

Because of the small scale and since I don't have a hand-held mixer, I made this recipe the old-fashioned way with my trusty wooden spoon and spatula.  I enjoy being able to do that once in a while.  The effort it takes to make this recipe - from blooming the chocolate in a bit of boiling water to carefully transferring the batter into your two mini bundt molds - are well worth it since you end up with two adorable little chocolate cakes that are just how they should be - chocolaty.  It has the kind of tight, dense crumb I expect when I think bundt cakes; it's moist and the icing on top is just that.

I hope you have a very sweet Valentine's Day!  I hope it's cozy and involves plenty of chocolate.  

Brownie cake with ganache frosting

There's a bakery in my town that sells a small round "brownie cake" among their offerings.  It has a thin layer of chocolate frosting on top and a festive crown of sprinkles around it.  When I first saw it, I thought "what a cute idea", followed quickly by "I can do that".  So here is yet another way to enjoy brownies - one of the most satisfying chocolate desserts ever invented.  We've already done pie so now let's do cake.  This is my little "knock-off" of that bakery's brownie cake.

This is really simple and straightforward.  I'm not sure if theirs is done the same way but mine is literally a brownie.  I used a good brownie recipe and instead of the typical square baking pan, I baked it in an 8-inch round cake pan.  A springform pan would make life a lot easier but since mine measures 9 inches, I think the cake would be too thin.  Just make sure to line the bottom of your cake pan with a round of parchment and grease the sides and you should not have a problem removing the cake. 

Once the brownie is baked and cooled, I added a thin layer of dark chocolate ganache, my frosting of choice. 

And since Valentine's day is coming soon, I decided to make this an early Valentine's Day dessert with some appropriate sprinkles.  It looks a bit like a giant chocolate donut from some angles!  The thing I like about it is not only does it make the everyday brownie a little bit more special, it's also rustic and casual enough to just pick up and eat too.

I used Smitten Kitchen's favorite brownie recipe, similar to the peppermint brownies I experimented with over Christmas, and it was a good decision.  The brownie is rich, with deep chocolate flavor; it's heavenly moist and fudgy in the center, with a bit of chew and crispness all along the edges.  It actually tasted very much like those Fat Witch brownies (the ones I buy at the actual bakery) that I love so much.  Very satisfying stuff!

If you ask me, a good brownie like this one needs no adornment (except maybe vanilla ice cream) and already has plenty of chocolate flavor.  I wouldn't normally add frosting but it's appropriate here since we're going for "cake".  You won't hear any complaints about frosting from kids.  I'll never forget a playdate a couple of years ago when I offered up some brownies.  My son's friend looked at it, a little puzzled, and asked me where the frosting was?  I told him I don't usually put anything on top of brownies and he looked a little surprised and dismayed.  He told me he and his babysitter make brownies together and add frosting and sprinkles too.  Well, I think he would approve of this version...I know my son did.

Now about Valentine's Day...I just love it!  When I feel bummed that the holidays are over, I console myself with the fact that at least Valentine's day is around the corner.  I love the hearts, the chocolate, the expressions of love and sweetness.  I hope you'll do a little something sweet for yourself that day and hopefully share it with someone you adore. 

It begins with chocolate...

I realize I am by no means alone when I say I love chocolate.  But I do love chocolate and I want to make that statement right up front because there will be a lot of posts involving chocolate.  I have a picture of myself at around five years-old holding a bar of Toblerone at the airport and to this day, it's still one of my favorites but I've since added lots of other chocolate treats to that list.  And not only do I love chocolate but my husband and son do too and that means many chocolate baked treats come out of our oven. 

Today I had the urge to make some chocolate cupcakes.  Everyone loves an individual chocolate cake - they're cute, they're portable, they're all yours.  And to pair off the very chocolaty cupcakes, I used an equally chocolaty ganache frosting.  I'm going all out here. 

Just put it on a plate and I'm ready to eat...