A rustic take on chocolate brownies

How much do you love chocolate?

(Don't shout! Don't shout! Come on...it was a rhetoric question!)

I've never been a champion at munching chocolate by chunks. Well, I'd like to nibble on some flavoured chocolate or have chocolate omelette for breakfast from time to time, but a cheesecake/apple cake/another good cake will always stand above chocolate cakes in my top 10.

Regular chocolate cakes don't really attract me that much, BUT I'm momentarily sold when I see something different. It has to be different different. It has to confuse my taste buds before I've even read through the recipe. This cake, my darlings, qualified enough to spend time at the back door of my mind for a long time.

It's a brownie recipe that uses barley flour as the only flour. I wouldn't have believed it could work out so well without all the fancy gluten. But it did. It's a cake that bloody could. Barley flour's got my soul now!

Chocolate brownies with barley flour
(Estonian magazine Oma maitse )

200 g butter
150 g dark chocolate
2 dl coarsely chopped walnuts
1 dl dried cranberries or cherries
3 eggs
2 dl sugar
2 dl barley flour

1. Melt butter in a saucepan and add chocolate chunks. Stir over low heat until incorporated well. Remove from heat.
2. Beat the eggs with sugar with an electric mixer until stiff.
3. Add the chocolate mixture, whisking, then add the flour and chopped walnuts and berries (if using cherries, cut them into two). Mix carefully.
4. Bake at once in a greased baking pan at 180 for 20-30 minutes (I used a 24 cm pan).
5. Let cool before serving.

The cake is, essentially, a brownie full of deep chocolate taste, but isn't as smooth as usually, but a bit grainy inside. Barley flour gives it a more crumbly texture and an intense, a bit rustic flavour that suits so well with walnuts. Dried cherries or cranberries add sweetness, but aren't very recognizable on the whole.

I found a most suitable way for completing the taste of the cake by adding some neat slightly flavoured cream.



Cinnamon-vanilla cream topping

1 dl heavy cream
100 g cream cheese
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp sugar
vanilla
pinch of salt

1. Combine cream cheese, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and salt in a bowl, beat with an electric mixer until fluffy.
2. Add heavy cream and beat some more until you reach your desired consistency.

The cream completes the strong flavour of the cake perfectly and creates a fluffy contrast with the dense chocolate brownie. The flavour itself is kind of a shadow of a flavour, but this is the aim here - to let all the rustic delight stand out.

Right now I'd say I love chocolate pretty much!:)

Spicy chocolate truffles, if you still miss Christmas

A part of my holiday gifts were these spicy chocolate truffles. They were a bit different from truffles I'd made before because the filling was softer, silkier. With 2007 and all the Christmas mumbojumbo gone, spicy desserts still make their appearances in our kitchen. All year round, actually, all year round...

So for me any time is right for writing about a truffle with a taste of Christmas.

Spiced chocolate truffles

125 g dark chocolate
125 g milk chocolate
1/2 dl light cream
juice of one orange
75 g sugar
50 g butter

flavouring options for 1/3 of the mixture
1/4 tsp ground aniseed
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon + 1/8 tsp ground cardamom
1/2 tsp Cointreau

coating
about 250 g dark chocolate
50 g milk chocolate, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, cloves, aniseed, nuts...

1. Break chocolate to pieces
2. Bring cream, orange juice and sugar to a boil together and add to the chocolate, stirring until incorporated well.
3. Add butter and mix well.
4. Divide the mixture into 3 parts and choose a flavouring option for every one of them. Let the new mixtures stand in the fridge for some 30 minutes.
5. Make balls or other shapes (you might want to distinguish the different flavours) of the mixtures and let them harden in the fridge.
6. Melt dark chocolate over a waterbath and dip all the truffles into the chocolate, then let them harden on a non-stick surface like foil.
7. Decorate truffles with different flavour differently. You can roll them in powdered sugar or cocoa powder or decorate them with melted milk chocolate. Before hardening you can add cloves on top of clove truffles, aniseed on top of aniseed truffles or just different nuts.

I made truffles flavoured with aniseed, cloves and cardamom/cinnamon. Loved them all! The flavours came through very well and I just couldn't help but pick the aniseed ones.
I really liked the softer filling and it surprised me every time I bit into a truffle. All the superhigh gigaquality truffles that cost a lot of money are usually a lot harder to bite in, for whatever reason. Everyone needs a change, right?

But it was a bit hard to form the balls so I kept running between the stove and the freezer! I guess it's good to combine running with chocolate once in a while...

A sweet mosaic of cookies

I just couldn't resist buying the Australian cookbook Sweet Food when I first browsed through it in a bookstore (actually it was the second time, but first sounds so much more poetical). For me a big deal of the recipes inside are exotic, using ingredients that are unusual in an Estonian kitchen - macadamia nuts for example, which are quite often in the ingredient lists. Ask an average Estonian what a macadamia nut is - you'll probalby hear the answer 'Misasi?' or - in English - 'A what?'

One of the first recipes that caught my eye was of cracked cookies (the name may differ in the English version, as I'm re-translating the recipe from Estonian). Their appearance is just so...wow that I was sure I'd be making them before I'd even read through the recipe. The cool look is achieved by rolling balls of cookie dough in powdered sugar before baking - that will leave a two-coloured cracked effect.

I substituted the allspice in the recipe with a double amount of cinnamon and pecan nuts with walnuts. I do have a budget, you know.


Cracked chocolate cookies
(adapted from Sweet Food)

125 g soft butter
370 g soft brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
60 g melted chocolate
80 ml milk
340 g flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
salt
85 g chopped walnuts
powdered sugar

1. Beat together butter, sugar and vanilla until the mixture is light and creamy.
2. Add eggs one by one
3. Add chocolate and milk (I was afraid that chocoalte would turn lumpy when added to the cool mixture and mixed it with warm milk first).
4. Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, cinnamon and a pinch of salt onto the butter mixture and mix well.
   
5. Add chopped walnuts.
6. Cover the dough and place it in the fridge for at least 3 hours (you can also prepare the dough the evening before)
7. Preheat the oven to 180C and slightly grease 2 griddles.
8. Use a teaspoon for measuring and make balls out of the dough (the recipe said this technique would make about 60 cookies - I got over 80 though I scooped quite much dough every time)
9. Roll each ball in a small bowl with powdered sugar so that it's covered well and place the balls onto the griddles, leaving enough space between them
   
10. According to the recipe you should bake the cookies for 20-25 min. I baked my best batch only for 18 minutes - the edges shouldn't look very dark when you take the cookies out of the oven. Even if they don't get burnt - too much time mean rock cookies.
11. After removing from the oven, leave for about 3-4 minutes, then place on a rack and let cool.

I subconsciously tried to find the cookies I had baked for 18 minutes afterwards - they were softer inside and seemed to have more taste. The cookies were moderately sweet and had a charming scent of cinnamon. This is rather a cacao-holic cookie than a chocoholic one, if I'm allowed to say such a thing! And I do believe one can't refuse eating something that looks like a sweet mosaic. Even if he or she has accidentally used a too long baking time and it cracks under the tooth like a real one:)



I wouldn't say these were the best cookies ever, but they were good and looked like A-class celebrities. That's great enough for me!