THIN MINTS!

So, I've been trying to get this right since I found the recipe before Christmas. This is now my third try, and though the chocolate coating still needs massive improvement, the cookie part is nearly perfect! As my sister will tell you, words cannot describe how happy I was when I got the cookie part right. I may or may not have done a little victory dance in our kitchen... Also, this makes roughly 5 dozen cookies, give or take, so be prepared. That may sound like a lot, but in our house, they didn't even last 12 hours. Now THAT'S impressive. And it might be why our housemates are convinced that my co-baker and I are plotting to fatten them up for some evil fate.

Ingredients:

1 cup and 3 tablespoons butter, softened

1/2 cup white sugar

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 3/4 teaspoon peppermint OIL! (Oil might be painful to find, but it's much better than extract, quality-wise. You can use extract in a pinch, but definitely up the amount used).

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 3/4 cup All-purpose flour

1/3 cup and 1 tablespoon cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

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In a large bowl, cream together butter, then the sugars, then the egg. Add in the extracts, and blend for two minutes (or more).

Sift all remaining ingredients into a medium bowl, and add gradually to the wet mixture. Blend until incorporated, scraping sides with a spatula as necessary.

Freeze dough in several (about three) large balls. This is because the dough warms up and becomes gooey very rapidly, so keep whatever you're not working with in the freezer. Your

hands will thank you.

Preheat oven to 350*.

Once dough is hardened (about an hour), take out a block at a time, and roll small, 1-inch balls on to greased cookie sheets. Place the blobs about three inches apart.

With a cup dipped in cocoa powder, flatten the balls until they're about 1/4 inch thick. Bake 15-20 minutes, until the tops look dry and the cookies are firm; turn once during baking. Let cookies cool completely.

Now this next part needs work. I won't put up my proportions because 1) I don't know them precisely and 2) my version fails, and the cookies need to be frozen to not instantly melt everywhere. Oops... The trick is to get the mixture thin enough to dip well, but thick enough to harden. Chocolate only occasionally submits to my demands, and this was not one of those times, sadly.

But here's what you'll need:

Chocolate chips (probably not semi-sweet, 'cause that's what I used, and it wasn't sweet enough. Of course, at this point, you're probably well aware of my absurd sweet-tooth, but still, be warned)

Butter/Crisco

Heavy Cream

Peppermint Oil

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Heat the cream and butter/crisco in a double boiler. Gradually add the chocolate chips, and a small amount of the peppermint. Using a fork and wooden spoon, dip the cookies and cover completely. Set on aluminum foil to cool, then move to fridge/freezer for complete setting. Beautiful:

Noms! Happy baking.

~The Baker's Apprentice/Chef A

EDIT: The chocolate coating actually did eventually set such that they don't have to be in the freezer constantly, but I still have no idea what the proportions are. Sorry!

Chocolate Cake with Strawberry Frosting

I'm going to start this one off with a picture:


Okay. So my dad was coming into town, and, having not baked in a while, I asked him if he had any requests for baked goods. Chocolate-chip cookies or chocolate cake. Okay, I can work with that. I just made cookies (still playing with the recipe, get back to you on that), so I figured I should just go for a cake. (not to mention the we just got new springform pans.)

Cake start!

So the recipe I was working off of had (according to a bunch of comments) not nearly enough chocolate, so I did what any reasonable person would do, and sextupled it. So instead of a 1/2 cup of chips, I had 3. Which meant that when I was trying to make a custard out of milk/chocolate, it needed more milk. I still don't know if I would classify it as a 'custard'. Okay, here's the recipe:

Cake:

1 1/2 cups milk
3 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup coca powder
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 eggs
Vanilla extract
3/4 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon water
2 cups cake flour
1/2 cup powdered sugar (sifted) (optional)

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a pan of an appropriate size. (This filled our 10" springform pan quite nicely) Melt the chocolate chips with the milk, add the cocoa powder, and stir until you get a nice, smooth, thick consistency.
Cream together the butter and sugar, then add eggs, vanilla and sour cream. Mix well. Dissolve the baking soda in the water, and add it to the mixture, followed by the flour. Add the melted chocolate mixture.
At this point, taste the batter. If it's too chocolate-y, too dark for your tastes (it was for mine) mix in the powdered sugar. It lightens the taste nicely, and keeps the mixture smooth.
Pour the batter into the cake pan, and stick it in the oven!
The recipe said 40 minutes to an hour, but in our oven, when it wasn't done after an hour, I turned it up to 375 and it still took another half hour. (This is, of course, the slow oven)
Which is to say -- keep an eye on this cake after you pass the 40 minute mark, but don't expect that it won't take more than an hour.

Frosting (Strawberry):

10 oz. Strawberry Jam (or some other fruit)
fruit-flavored vodka
8 oz. cream cheese
8 oz. butter
1 cup powdered sugar
Vanilla

All of these numbers are approximate. The plan was originally to make a sacher-torte -esque fruit glaze and then chocolate ganache, so we took out the jam. And then changed our minds. So thinking quickly, we threw the jam onto the stove with a little Strawberry Vodka to thin it out, and mixed it with basic frosting-ingredients. Play around with amounts to satisfy your particular tastebuds. All you need to do is cream them all together, and taste-test. It'll be a bit thin, so refrigerate/freeze before using to thicken.

Frosting (Vanilla):

Cream-cheese
Butter
Powdered sugar
Vanilla

This was just for decoration. I throw together equal parts cream cheese and butter, and then add sugar to taste.

So, once the cake was out of the oven, Chef A cut it in half, filled it with about a third of the strawberry frosting, and then reassembled the cake, using the rest of the strawberry to cover the cake.
At this point, I came back from having lunch with my dad, took a slice for me and one for him. It was only after we had eaten them that I realized I wanted to decorate the cake better. So I threw the vanilla frosting together and piped it onto the Pac-man of cake that was left.



If I haven't said it, this cake was delicious. It's just the right mix of dense flavor and light texture, and the strawberry frosting just complements it so well. The sour cream makes it nice and moist, and there's plenty of chocolate flavor to satisfy even the most hardcore of chocoholics.

My new go-to chocolate cake recipe. (Although I have a great chocolate sheet-cake recipe I should make again)

Happy baking!

~Chef G

Vegan Chocolate-Chip Cookie Bars

So, yesterday I helped out with a wonderful student-run festival at my university. I could go on about how awesome the whole event was, but since I imagine you're here for the recipes and not to hear about my life, I'll stick to the plan. For the event, I made vegan chocolate-chip cookies. I've never found a recipe online that I liked particularly, since I don't often have access to manufactured egg- or butter-replacers, so this I mostly just made up. Still no egg-replacer, since the store I went to - usually a dependable store for these things - didn't even stock anything of the sort. Also note, I made this recipe on the massive scale (roughly six times these amounts), and decreased that amount for you, so this is rougher than usual. I'll probably make it again soon and make actually cookies, and when I do, I'll be sure to post that version.

Ingredients:

1 2/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 cup nuts (I used walnuts and almonds)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon*

1 3/4 cups vegan chocolate chips* (Trader Joe's semi-sweet chips are vegan, which are what I used)

1 c turbinado sugar

1/4 cup vegan butter substitute, room temperature (I used Earth Balance original organic)

1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 teaspoons vanilla*

1/3 cup vanilla soymilk

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Preheat oven to 350*.

Put nuts in a food processor, and blend until finely ground. I found that, once they reached a certain grain-size, that they started to stick together. Add a bit of the flour to the mix, and it should stop sticking together and grind better.

Combine flour, nut powder, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in large mixing bowl. Form a well in the center, and set aside.

In a food processor, grind the sugar until fine.

In separate bowl, cream butter substitute and sugar, adding the applesauce gradually. Add in the vanilla and soymilk, mix again, and add to the dry ingredients, along with the chocolate chips. Mix until incorporated, but don't overmix.

Now, you can shape them into cookies, or, like me, you can make cookie cake. Either way, place them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake them for about 8 minutes, turn them, and bake them another 6 minutes. I warn you that our ovens bake things slowly, and these cookies will not look set when they're actually quite done. Also, these times were for the massive cookie cake, so I must apologize for how ridiculously unhelpful I am forced to be about timing. The edges should get just a little darker, and then they'll be ready to come out. If you bake them too long, they'll be quite hard and very sad.

* As usual, these are just guesstimates for how much I put in. More or less is always fine (although why you'd ever want less of tasty things is beyond me). Well, if you add too much chocolate, the bars are overwhelmed, as they were the first time I made this. Even if you love chocolate, for the love of all things holy, do not add anywhere near 3 cups of chips. Bad things happen. If you simply must, sprinkle them on top before you bake the bars.

Mmm, photo to come later.

~The Baker's Apprentice

April Fools Prank!

So, with yesterday being such a perfect day for experiment in the kitchen, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to fool around. Our housemates have become too comfortable with the offerings frequently on the dessert table, so I figured I could play on that security, and wham 'em with something completely unexpected: adorable frosted cupcakes, with a savory base and frosting.

Oh, they were quite a success. Well, I thought so, in that they looked so innocent:

My housemates were not so amused. Luckily I made them in mini-muffin tins, so that the joke was only slightly unpleasant. For me, though, knowing off-the-bat what they were going to be, they were so tasty! The cream cheese frosting was a bit overwhelming, but if you scale it back a bit, or experiment with a savory frosting of your own, they'd be just short of perfection!

For the cupcakes:

I based the batter loosely on this recipe, but not wanting to make a pesto frosting, and also not wanting any sugar in these cupcakes, I deviated a bit. Here's what I did for the base:

3/4 cup cornmeal

1 cup AP flour

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 cup parmesan cheese (we had some of the shakeable powder kind, so I opted for that)

1 teaspoon salt

2 eggs, room temperature

1 cup whole milk, room temperature

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Dash olive oil (probably 1/2 teaspoon or so, just for kicks)

Dash vanilla (courtesy of Chef G, so we could claim they were "vanilla" cupcakes honestly)

~ 1/4 teaspoon each basil and sage

1 pinch rosemary

[These last four are completely up to you. I would even suggest spicing them more heavily than I did, but I didn't want them to be too aromatic and give away the joke. Also, with how much frosting I piled on them, most of the herb flavorings were covered, sadly]

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Pre-heat oven to 350*F. Prepare 36-48 mini-muffin tins with pam, butter, oil, or whatever you so choose. I used pam, as I'm lazy.

Combine butter, milk, and eggs. Whisk well. Sift in the dry ingredients, and continue whisking. Add spices and flavorings as you'd like. Ladle batter in until they're each about 2/3 full. Bake about 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Now, on to the frosting! This is definitely the area for most improvement:

8 oz. cream cheese, softened

1/2 stick butter, softened

1/2 cup bread flour

Add milk to texture. If you're piping, go for just a little bit, but if you're spreading the frosting, it'll need to be a bit thinner.

Food coloring of choice.

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Using an electric mixer, combine the first four ingredients until they're nice and creamy. Add just a few drops (I can't stress how few drops you need. I added a bit too much, and couldn't get the right shade as a result without getting too much darker).

Let the cupcakes cool completely, and then pipe or spread the frosting on. Voila! You've got the perfect April-Fools prank.

~The Baker's Apprentice