Tag: chocolate

Bitter sweet…

Last Sunday, late afternoon, after surfing in the morning and gardening the whole afternoon I remembered that it’s been two days we have had no chocolate… well that is a HUGE problem for us, or for A.. We both do indulge in a bitter sweet treat after dinner. Indeed, unless we have guests or we celebrate we never have dessert, just a piece of chocolate… so when we forgot to refill our chocolate stock… there’s a bit of drama in the air! 😉

That’s when the magic of Instagram happen! While browsing my feed I stopped on @dans_ma_boite_a_biscuits post: a quick chocolate cream, with 4 ingredients that I always have (or almost… because her recipe uses dark chocolate, I used cacao) and that is so simple I couldn’t help trying!!! I never found it so easy to make a dessert. It takes 10min and then time to cool down, and it was so delicious that I will forget to buy chocolate more often!!! Because I slightly modified the original recipe (in French) I share mine with you… A. was so pleased with the result that he asked for more this weekend!!

Cocoa creamy pudding (4 servings)

  • 250ml of milk (vegetal or not)
  • 12g of corn starch
  • 50g of cocoa (I used cocoa from Plaq)
  • 25g of brown sugar or equivalent

In a pan, put all the ingredients, stir well, then start cooking at low heat while stirring. Increase to medium heat and stir well. It should start thickening, don’t over cook or you’ll get something too stiff. Once the consistency is creamy serve in 4 ramekins. Let cool down in the fridge for one hour or two and enjoy. I personally prefer eating them at room temperature rather than cool from the fridge…

Tarte au chocolat

Every year, for more than 20 years I have made a strawberry tart for A.’s birthday. With a birthday in the prime of spring I always thought it was a great moment to celebrate strawberries and A.. Many times waiting for the cherry trees to bloom. This year, the cherry trees are in full bloom already and I always thought traditions are meant to be changed or twisted when opportunities are there.

Two weeks ago I received a little package from France, from my childhood friend M. with a little cookbook and some bean to bar chocolate from a shop in our old neighborhood in Paris: Plaq. M. knows very well how much we love chocolate and well sourced products, together with a delicious bar of chocolate there was also some cocoa to cook. A.’s birthday strawberry tarts was all forgotten and it would be chocolate tart instead.

The plan was, and I browsed a few recipes online to get an idea of how to make the chocolate filling. The whole thing is very simple and requires fresh cream, so since the morning I had on my mind to buy some, except that we went grocery shopping we were on a rush, a bit more traffic than expected on the road, and A. was about to be late for a meeting. So fresh cream I forgot… damn… Hopefully I had some coconut cream so I decided to replace the fresh cream with it, and it added a very gentle twist in the taste, without being overwhelming. So met me share my recipe, I hope you’ll like it, we did, and it is soooo simple that I wonder why I never tried earlier!

Tarte au chocolat (makes 6 servings)

  • Flour-butter-sugar for the dough
  • 150g of chocolate, dark, for cooking or of cacao powder
  • 200ml of coconut cream
  • A bit of milk (if you use cocoa)
  • 1 egg

Prepare the sable dough the way you like it. I made mine very buttery and rather sweet as my cocoa was bitter and unsweetened. Set in individual shapes or a larger one also as you wish. With the cut parts I made sakura shaped little sablés. Cook at 180deg until just golden. Let cool a bit and remove from the pie dish if the bottom of the dish is not removable. Other with you may struggle once it if filled. Set on a baking sheet, as you’ll need to cook them again once filled.

In a pan warm the coconut cream and the chocolate or cocoa and stir until creamy. If you use cocoa you may want to add a bit of milk to make it creamier as it may bit a bit dry. But really just a bit. Stir well. Let

cool a bit and add the egg and stir again very well. Pour in the pie crust(s) you just baked. Decorate with the little sablés if you made any. Cook at 140 deg for about 15min, but this will depend on the size of your tarts. Best is to check visually: no bubbles on the side or very few, and when gently shaken it should look like an egg pudding (flan) and gently move. Serve warm or at room temperature. And enjoy!

No need to wait for Valentine for a chocolate truffle!

While there is a tradition for girls to offer chocolate for Valentine in Japan and I usually prepare chocolate truffles for that occasion for A., I recently come with a truffle recipe that is so simple that I make some almost every month or so!! So there’s no need for me to wait for Valentine anymore to make truffles!!! Not that like them much, I usually don’t touch them, but this recipe finally makes them tolerable for me so I surprised myself eating a few!

Contrarily to another truffle recipe I published that I found was simple, this one is taking simplicity to another level. It requires only three ingredients: chocolate, cocoa powder and butter and is really quick. And because of the nature of the ingredients it keeps easily 3-4 days probably more but I never manage to pass that, it’s all gone before!! So if you like chocolate, simple sweets recipes and don’t have much time, this one is really a hit!

Chocolate truffles

  • 150g of dark chocolate
  • 10g of butter (I use salted one, I like the little touch it gives)
  • Cocoa powder for rolling

In a pan heated at low heat, melt the buter and the chocolate, and stir well to obtain an homogeneous texture. This is the ganache. Let it cool down. When it has, in a little bowl put some cocoa powder, with a spoon take a bit of ganache, roll it in your hands and then in the cocoa powder. And that’s one truffle! (Upper picture) Continue with the rest. Keep at room temperature if not too hot, or refrigerated. Don’t forget to take them out 1h before eating. Isn’t that simple???

Eclairs & choux

Why while the recipe is always a lot simpler than I remember, I prepare eclair only once every 2 or 3 years???… These and millefeuilles are probably my favorite French traditional patisseries, with strawberry tart. (I don’t count simple fruit tarts, cobblers, and crumbles… they do not really count!!! 😉 What the three have in common is a delicious custard, and I love custard… with vanilla, cocoa, macha…

While my puff pastry is never really good, I have never been presumptuous enough to make an attempt at baking millefeuilles, but eclairs, choux are perfectly at the level of my abilities. And each time I am decided to make some, each time I prepare myself for a tedious task, and each time I am surprised by how quick and easy it was!!! And wonder why really I don’t make some more often!!!

I always use the same recipe that I wrote sometime ago here, beware that the custard ingredients quantities fill about 2/3 of the choux, so if you want to fill all of them, you need to multiply by 1.3 the custard quantities or use 2/3 of the pate a choux ingredients. I use these quantities because sometime a choux doesn’t bake with the perfect shape, and because A. and I like to test the choux out of the oven! And I realized it is always almost at the same time of year I make it and only when we have friends visiting!!! The recipe makes quite a lot of them actually so that may explain the second point… as it is better not to keep them more than 24h!!! They are so much better fresh!

Have a good day!

Chocolate focaccia

Yes! You read well… I told you I was back to back to baking… When I was a first year PhD student the first international conference I attended and presented at was a huge conference held in Barcelona. At that time A. had plenty of holidays and surely plenty of time to take them, so we were always traveling together. We spent one week in Barcelona and a couple of days in Sitges. And one culinary thing that stayed for ever in our mind was the dinner, or more the dessert, we had on lovely terrace nearby the museum of contemporary art. The museum was still fairly young and the surroundings all in development. Using the base of the traditional pan con tomate it was a pan con chocolate. You can imagine with bread and chocolate in the same dish we would go for it, and this has surpassed our expectations by its simplicity and its tastiness. It was simply the same as pan con tomate replacing literally the tomatoes by dark chocolate: a toasted slice of bread with melting dark chocolate topped with fragrant olive oil and salt sprinkled. Back home I remember cooking some once in a while and always enjoying it. So this time while I was making the dough for my rosemary focaccia, I decided to keep a bit of the dough to test a chocolate focaccia. And like I though it would be, it was delicious. I’m sure you’ll see some more soon, in particular the picture doesn’t give a fair idea of how delicious it was!!

Yuzu-choco cookies

Sudden rainy and chilly days, after some really warm and sunny weeks call for some sweetness… and since we’ve recently planted a yuzu (and also a lemon) tree in the garden, to broaden our range of homemade citrus fruits, I’ve started to harvest a few yuzu fruits. It’s late for the yuzu season but they are none the less delicious and juicy. That’s how the idea of making yuzu cookies came from. The recipe I used for my cookies is rater simple, and you can add whatever pleases you inside.

So here is my yuzu-cholate cookies recipe. If you cannot find fresh yuzu, you can replace by dry yuzu peels rehydrated, or orange.

Yuzu-chocolate cookies

– 110g of butter (at room temperature)

– 150g of flour

– 40g of sugar

– 1 tea spoon of baking powder

– the juice of 1/2 yuzu and the peel of 1/4 yuzu

– 50g of dark cooking chocolate

– a pinch of salt

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, add the butter and knead well. Add the yuzu juice, cut the peel in tiny pieces and add. Knead a little more. With a knife cut roughly the chocolate in chunks, add and knead. Keep refrigerated for 20min (or 10min in the freezer). Preheat the oven to 180deg. Make small balls of dough and squeeze them flat on baking paper. Bake until golden or hard enough. Cooking time should ne around 10min but it depends on the actual size and thickness of the cookies.

After baking the cookies until golden at 180 degrees I kept them in a cool dry place before eating them.

Eclair ⚡️

With this horrible rainy and cold Saturday there was nothing else to do than cook some sweets and drink hot tea. After browsing a few recipes of things I wanted to cook, the unanimous choice was chocolate eclairs! And here I am in my kitchen, preparing pate a chou and custard. Of course chocolate eclair is not just enough so I also prepared two other variations: macha and chai. Each was just perfectly delicious. So here is my recipe. Eclairs consist in three preparations: the pate a chou, the custard and the coating.

For the pate a chou:

10cl of water; 10cl of milk; 3 eggs; 70g of butter; 110g of flour; a bit of salt and a tea spoon of sugar. 

In a pan heat the milk and the water. Add the butter, the sugar and the salt. When the butter has melted add the flour all at once and stir well. Continue cooking and stirring until the dough is smooth and doesn’t stick. Cool down a bit and add one egg. Stir until the dough is smooth again. Add the second egg and do the same and then the third egg and repeat again.

Pre-heat your oven at 180 deg. Use a pipping bag to shape the eclairs. Remember they will double almost size so tiny is better. Cook for 25 to 30 minutes.  

For the custard: 

30g of flour; 50g of sugar; 2 egg yolks; 25cl of milk.

In a pan heat the milk. In a bowl mix the eggs with the sugat, add the flour all at once and mix well. Add half ofthe  milk and stir well. Add the mix to ghe rest of the milk in the pan and cook at low heat while stirring for 5min, or until it thickens. Add the flavoring of your choice: cacao powder (2 tbs); macha powder (1tsp); chai spices: cardamom, cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg… up to your liking. I personally like it with a lot of cardamom.

Cut the eclairs from the previous step in halves and fill with the custard. 

For the coating: 

I didn’t use the usual butter cream but rather a simple sugar coating made with ice sugar, water and macha or cacao powder for the coloring.  Add water little by little to obtain a rather thick mix, and apply with a spoon.

Keep refrigerated. 

Chocolate & walnuts cake

It was raining and it has gotten a bit chilly so the autumn cooking is officialy on! And I again got inspired by American cooking. I didn’t follow any specific recipe but just baked some chocolate cake with walnuts. Prunellia is a much better cook than me when it comes to brownies, chocolate cakes etc… Because she goes with the ful blast recipe of butter, dark chocolate… Of course my version is not as rich because I can’t eat that, and may seem a little dry because I don’t use a lot of butter, but for me it’s exactly how I like it. Simple and tasty to go with my tea! 

Chocolate cheesecake

For once I tried a new recipe of chocolate cheesecake but I turn it into something mine. 

For the base, you need 100g of speculos and 40-50g of salted butter. You crush the biscuit and mix with the melted butter, then put in your mold.  

For the chocolate cream, you need:

– one pack of cream cheese   

– 3 big spoons of white cheese or yogurt

 – 3 big spoons of brown sugar  

– 1 big spoon of flour  

– 180g of dark chocolate  

– 25-30cl of liquid cream

– 1 egg

Put the cream and the chocolate in a pan to melt them. At the same time mix all the other ingredients together. Add the chocolate. Stir well.

Put this mix in the mold on top of the biscuits and then into a hot oven (130) for 30-40 minutes.

Finally keep refrigerated for 4 hours. And add some cocoa on the top before serving.  

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑

Verified by MonsterInsights