Might I suggest for your Valentine a dozen Hot Cocoa Macarons… filled with spicy chili cinnamon chocolate ganache. OOO… La, la! 1 dozen, boxed and tied with a bow, $25. Available for pickup in Riverside California. Orders must be placed by Wednesday February 12. To order, email me: joanna@fiddleheadkitchen.com and put VALENTINE’S DAY in the title. If you have any questions, please feel free to email as well.
All ideas aren't necessarily good ones. Well, in this case that's not entirely true. I do think a rich, chocolatey brownie spiked with some chili heat is a good idea, just not this rendition. Alas, it was my bright idea when I came across the Guajillo Chili chocolate you see here (love the packaging, cute!). I had used the plain version of this brand and type of chocolate once before in class on a day that we made a particularly terrible mole. True story, it was not good, and no amount of tweaking we did improved it. There was a flaw in the recipe somewhere. That's the point of testing in recipe development. Very rarely are you going to knock it out of the park on the first version. So it went with this Guajillo Chili chocolate brownie fail.
Let's start with the chocolate tasting. This is some seriously sugar-grainy chocolate that reminded me of Freddo Frog chocolate my sister brought back from Australia. We'll just say that was a long time ago, and perhaps Freddo has changed. I do remember Freddo, in all his cute molded chocolate frogginess, being both sweeter and grainier in texture than say, a Hershey bar. The heat in the Chocolate Mexicano Guajillo Chili is decent if you eat a piece of it, it just didn't seem to survive once it was melted along with unsalted butter. I tasted the batter and noticed the lack of heat, and added some cayenne pepper, but not enough I would later discover.
Decreasing the amount of sugar in my "regular" brownie recipe was a must to account for the additional sugar in the chocolate. I should have also ditched one of the 3 eggs I normally use because the texture was just odd—not moist and chewy, but rather dense though not heavy. I know, how contradictory does that sound?! It was kind of like a souffle-meets-molten chocolate cake if both are slightly over-baked, you follow me? Just trust me, it was not the texture anyone is looking for in a brownie, except maybe someone who likes a cakeier brownie... you know, crazy people.
In the end, the chocolate taste was good, but the overall color was quite a bit lighter than my usual brownie. I'm still a little amazed that the chili, even the cayenne, didn't come through at all. By the way, that's a little Maldon Salt on top of the brownies, in case you were wondering. Back to (almost) square one I go. It's a challenge now to nail this chili-heat spiked brownie, but that's kind of the fun part, and I'll be approaching it from a bit of a different angle next time. Stay tuned.
Lee Bailey's Country Desserts is one of my very favorite dessert cookbooks of all time. It's not just that the recipes are great, which they are, it was the way he wrote, the stories and advice he shared in all his books. Friendly, approachable and real. So you're pie crust isn't picture perfect, eh, it happens, it's still going to be delicious. Besides, it seems to me that often times when something looks just so beautiful and perfect, the taste ends up being disappointing. Am I alone here? Maybe it's just me.
I've had this book for years and have looked repeatedly at the enticing photos of scoops of ice cream, ices and sherbets in pretty bowls and glasses but for some insane reason I had never made any of them. Now I've made two and I will continue making these two over and over again because they're THAT good and THAT easy. I have big plans to make some of the other ice cream recipes as well. I'm sharing these two because, well, it's nice to share and also because the book is, like all of Lee Bailey's cookbooks (I think, sadly), out of print. You can track them down used online, or if you're lucky, in a used bookstore. I found his Soup Meals cookbook by chance like that. Now, without further ramblings ...
Chocolate Nougat Ice Cream. If you love chocolate, make this now, if you don't love chocolate, make it anyway, might change your mind. The ice cream base smells and tastes so good I could actually eat it like soup. It's true, but it's even better as ice cream, so do that.
I used Valrhona Chocolate, 85% cacao, because I had the perfect amount on hand. I will be experimenting with other percentages of cacao because that's the perfect excuse to keep making this, research, all in the name of research. Little Tip: I chilled the base overnight in the fridge for both these ice cream recipes. It's so much easier than waiting, just go to bed, in the morning it'll be ready to churn.
Churned and ready for the freezer. Goes in light in color but darkens as it goes from a soft serve consistency to scoopable ice cream.
Espresso Ice Cream. This is so smooth and creamy, a real coffee lovers dream. Plus, the base is even faster to whip up than the chocolate.
There you have it. Two perfect, easy ice cream recipes to get you through the rest of summer and beyond ... because ice cream should be made and eaten often. Words to live by.