The Munchies Blog

I felt like baking the other day, so I made chocolate crinkle cookies from a recipe at Anne’s Food.

It feels a bit strange to make them: most of the moisture comes from melted chocolate and butter, and they have to stand in the fridge overnight. Then you form small balls, roll them in icing sugar, and put them on a cookie sheet — almost like baking chocolate truffles…

The cookies look very good (I was actually quite impressed — I have this unfortunate tendency to mess up things that are supposed to look good, but this time things went really well). I’m not that happy with the taste though. It feels like something’s missing. Maybe it’s because they do look a bit like christmas cookies, but there isn’t even any cinnamon or something in there. I think next time I’ll try adding some chopped almonds or something.

The other day, I discovered a new chocolate brand in a shop in Bochum: shokomonk (German website, but they have an English leaflet in the download section).

Shokomonk makes chocolate bars (50g each) in quite a lot of nice varieties: white chocolate crisp, coconut, raspberry, poppyseeds, or blueberry; milk chocolate with caramel, peanuts, walnuts, or small waffle pieces; dark chocoloate with jalapeños, orange, ginger, latte macchiato or peppermint.

So far, Andreas and I have tried the white chocolate with blueberries (delicious, but too sweet for Andreas’s taste) and the milk chocolate with caramel (both of us didn’t really like it). But I like the concept and I’m quite sure I’m going to try some more of their chocolate bars :)

When I tried out the recipe for a chocolate and pear cake in Linda Collister’s “Backen mit Schokolade” (the English original is Chocolate Baking) last Christmas, I realised that a good recipe is more than just a recipe for good food. A good recipe is one that you can follow without constantly reading ahead — one that takes the planning/scheduling overhead away from you. Bad recipes tell you to do things in an order that doesn’t make sense. Or they cheat by calling for things like “4 large eggs, separated” — instead of telling you to separate the eggs at a time in the recipe “flow” where it makes sense.

The chocolate and pear cake is really nice, but the recipe… well, isn’t. I haven’t managed to optimise it yet, but I’ll post it here with the modifications I made today.

Recipe: Chocolate and Pear Cake

Base:

• 180 g all-purpose flour
• 110 g cold butter, diced
• 30 g brown sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2-4 Tbsp ice water

Sieve flour into a bowl, add the butter. Work with your fingertips (much easier than fighting with the food processor) until crumbs form. Add sugar, egg yolk and water. Now the recipe says to use a knife with a rounded tip to make the mixture into a dough. It also says to start with 1 Tbsp ice water and add a bit more if the dough stays too dry. Well, this kind of dough always stays too dry when I do it. That doesn’t really matter though. Just mix things a bit more and try to get a bit larger crumbs.

Make a ball out of the dough (well, if you can get the crumbs to stick together, that is), wrap in foil and refrigerate for some 20 minutes.

Get rid of all the stuff hiding out in the oven. Put a baking tray on the oven floor. The oven needs to be preheated to 200°C — do it now or, if you want to save energy, wait a bit with that. Find a springform, about 23 cm in diameter.

Filling:

• 125 g bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
• 125 g butter
• 90 g brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 125 g ground almonds
• 2-3 drops almond essence (I guess a little splash of Amaretto would work just as well)
• pinch of salt
• 2 ripe, medium-sized pears (preferably Williams Christ)

Put an ovenproof bowl in a saucepan with water. Put chocolate into bowl. Heat (not boil) the water so that the chocolate melts.

Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites together with the salt (hint from one of my aunts: much easier if you also add a Tbsp cold water) until soft peaks form. Set aside. (My reason for doing that now is that I only have one bowl that I can use together with the food processor. After setting aside the egg white stuff, I can clean and reuse that bowl.)

Check that nothing bad is happening with the chocolate. And if you haven’t started to preheat the oven yet, better do it now. Take the dough out of the fridge and put it into the springform. Flatten it out and stretch it a bit so that it covers the bottom and goes up at the sides, about 2-3 cm high. Now it’s probably time to take the chocolate off the stove.

Whisk the butter (which should be fairly soft — either put it in the microwave for a very (!) short time, or reuse the chocolate saucepan), add the sugar. The recipe says that this should become thick and creamy. Well, doesn’t happen when I do it. Just ignore the recipe and gradually whisk in the egg yolks. Stir in the chocolate, then add the almonds and the almond essence or amaretto. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Pour the filling onto the base and make the surface look pretty.

Peel the pears, cut them in half and get rid of all the stuff you wouldn’t want to eat (if the pears are ripe enough, a teaspoon can be very helpful for this task). Slice thinly, but don’t cut all the way through — the slices should stay connected at the top (look at the picture, that makes things much clearer). Spread out onto the filling in a decorative way.

Set the springform onto the hot baking tray and bake for 15 minutes (still at 200°C). After that time, turn down the heat to 180°C and bake for some 10 more minutes — until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Carefully get rid of the side part of the springform. Serve the cake warm or cold. The recipe suggests to serve it with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream. Whipped cream also works well (and I’m a bit sceptical about the crème fraîche).

According to the recipe, the cake tastes even better the next day (even though it won’t look as pretty).

Note: It’s important to use ripe pears. Or to equip people with knives.

Somehow it feels like Katrin is trying to get the title “the great munchies hunter” ;) A while ago, she sent in a picture of “Les Munchies”, a sandwich place in Bath, UK. When she was in Bochum the last time, she brought me a package of Munchies made by Nestlé, which she apparently found lurking around in a shop at Bristol airport (well, the Munchies were lurking, I wouldn’t know about Katrin as I wasn’t there).

They taste like, hm, well, I guess like it’s to be expected. Cheapish chocolate with caramel and a tiny biscuit. Something that probably wants to be a Twix when it grows up. Not too horrible altogether, but I don’t think I’d buy it. But thanks anyway :)
A fun thing I read somewhere on the Internet is that apparently, the message on the package side changes (in case it’s not obvious from the picture, the message on mine read “devour me” before I opened the package).

I’d seen a biscotti recipe on Cooking for Engineers a while ago, but I didn’t feel like trying it out. One problem is that it’s difficult to get hold of untreated oranges here, and in addition to that I’m not too fond of aniseed. When I stumbled over a recipe for Chocolate Biscotti a few days ago, I decided to give it a try. “Everything’s good if it’s made of chocolate”, after all ;)

I followed the recipe, with one exception: I didn’t have much time when I made them, so I baked the slices standing upright, thus saving the “flip slices over and bake for another 20 minutes” step. The biscotti were fairly nice, but I think I made the slices too thick (about 1.5 cm, should be 1 cm). As I used the food processor to mix the dough, I might have overmixed it a bit (I hadn’t seen the warning about that on Cooking for Engineers until it was too late). I’m definitely going to make them again, but then I’ll add almonds or walnuts to the dough. Chocolate is nice, but the biscotti would be even better with a bit of texture variation, I think.

One thing to visit when you’re in Cologne is, of course, its famous Cathedral.

But as this is a foodblog, even the most impressive Gothic architecture is more than slightly off-topic. What’s more interesting in this context is that Cologne also has a chocolate museum.

One part of the museum shows the process of making chocolate, from the cocoa plants to various cocoa-based products. This includes a small greenhouse (which you can safely leave out if you’ve ever been to a greenhouse before). Another part shows historic devices used for chocolate consumption — mainly mugs and bowls from the Maya, Aztecs and Olmecs and special chocolate pots (like a teapot, just for chocolate) and cups from the 18th century.

The part I personally like best is the working chocolate production area. In this area, you can watch (and smell!) chocolates being made. There also is a chocolate fountain where they hand out small waffle pieces dipped in warm chocolate. I remember that on my first visit to the museum (I must have been around 14), my best friend and I swapped jackets after getting waffle pieces for the second time whithin 5 minutes because we thought they then wouldn’t remember us when we came back for a third time…

The last time I was there, they also had a temporary exhibition on the history of associating chocolate with erotic settings (like in Baroque paintings), which was fairly interesting (and perfectly family-safe, in case you’re wondering).

Officially called "Imhoff-Stollwerck-Museum" after the chocolate manufacturer Stollwerck, a large part of the exhibition areas has a strong focus on the products and the history of this company. This includes chocolate advertisements from the 19th and 20th century and some old chocolate vending machines. While these might be interesting for some visitors, they take away space that could have been dedicated to — exactly, chocolate ;) Together with the rather high entrance fees (currently, 6 € for adults and 3.50 € for students etc.), this left me slightly disappointed. Parts of the museum just feel more like an interactive advertisement for Stollwerck than like a place to learn more about chocolate.

Even if you’re not interested in the museum itself, it might be worthwile to go there: The museum’s shop (accessible without paying entrance fees) has a nice assortment of chocolate and usually also an interesting assortment of confused tourists from various countries. Be prepared to leave some money there — the prices are normal compared to other shops, but if you’re like me, there are just so many things you want to have ;)

The chocolate museum is located on an artificial peninsula in the Rhine (map) and can easily be reached on foot from the cathedral by walking southwards along the Rhine for some 15 minutes.

(Don’t know what the “Part II” is about? Go and read Part I.) The original recipe uses

• 400g good quality dark chocolate,
• 20cl whipping cream and
• 40g butter.

I decided to use half the amount of chocolate and went for a large (250g) bar of Rausch Amazonas (60% cocoa solids) minus some six pieces. I then followed the recipe, breaking the chocolate apart (I was lazy and only broke off the pieces, which I regretted later because the chocolate took quite long to melt), bringing the cream (30% fat whipping cream) almost to a boil, pouring the cream over the chocolate and finally mixing in the diced butter.

I used crushed butter cookies (Butterkeks), chocolate granules (Schokostreusel, like these), unsweetened cocoa powder and icing sugar (Puderzucker) for the toppings.

As mentioned in Part I, I used cayenne pepper, cinnamon, a sweet masala mixture from the organic supermarket, vanilla and salt (fleur de sel, to be exact) for flavouring the ganache itself. I can’t really say anything about the amounts I used; it was pretty much “use what feels right”.

And here’s the summary:
I think the truffles would be nicer with slightly less dark chocolate. Next time I’ll try Rausch Santo Domingo with 55% cocoa solids.

Toppings:

Flavorings:

After stumbling over (and spending some hours reading) the really nice foodblog Chocolate & Zucchini yesterday, I decided to try out her recipe for Chocolate Truffles.

As usual with chocolate, I had this strong urge to play with spices. So now our fridge looks a bit like the mad scientist’s lab in a bad movie: small bowls with a little bit of chocolate in each, carefully wrapped in plastic foil, with small labels on them (”Vanilla”, “Cayenne Pepper”, “Salt”, “Sweet Masala”, “Cinnamon”).

Results tomorrow.