Chocolate Archives - Page 11 of 24

White Chocolate Mud Cake With Pineapple

11|03|2015

White Chocolate Mud Cake made extra delicious and moist by the addition of pineapple. A simple honey whipped cream completes the frosting.

Growing up in the tropics, pineapple flavored sweets were a prominent part of my childhood. I don’t think I had ever spotted canned pineapple back then. Fresh pineapple was the way to go and despite the work involved, prepping the pineapple never seemed daunting to anyone as much as it is to me today. My mum’s favorite thing to make was a fresh pineapple chutney with a generous squeeze of lime and two big dried red chillies. The blend of sweet, sour and spicy flavors would make my palate dance. Another flavoring agent was the pineapple essence. Pretty common and more popular than orange or strawberry. I would love to eat the tea cakes that were flavored with this essence and speckled with dried pineapple. I was a bit disappointed not to find the pineapple cake as popular in Australia when I came to live here.

Mud cakes however are pretty popular in Australia. Though I have never come across a white chocolate mud cake with pineapple before I made one, I could envision quite clearly how it would taste. Since mud cakes are rich and dense, I could foresee the pineapple totally blending with the texture and turning into a pineapple enriched fudge. Biting into the fudgy cake, you could taste tiny bits of crunchy pineapple. Mud cakes almost always have chocolate in them and here I’ve used white chocolate. It definitely adds to the sweetness of the cake but the primary flavor is pineapple.

Since the cake is quite rich, I chose a simple whipped cream frosting swirled with honey. With this recipe, I baked two cakes. Which means, I divided the batter between two cake pans. Then I served the first one with whipped cream while I dusted icing sugar on the other one to eat with tea. The cake on it’s own is not very sweet so I preferred the frosted one over the plain one, You could bake the cake in one pan as well but the baking time will increase. Or simply use half the recipe for the size and thickness of the cake you see in the picture. Mud cakes do take a long time to bake as they are cooked under low temperatures.

The cake keeps well for quite some time (about 4-5 days) even when stored outside the refrigerator. I find that it actually tastes better the next day. Frost the cake just before serving.

White Chocolate Mud Cake With Pineapple
Serves 8-10

350 g butter, chopped
150 g white chocolate, chopped
1 cup castor sugar
400 g can of crushed pineapple in syrup
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 eggs
2 cups plain flour, sifted
3/4 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1 cup heavy cream/whipping cream, whipped to stiff peaks.
1/4 cup honey (or more)

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C ( 140 degrees C for fan-forced) Grease two 19 cm round cake tins and line the base with baking paper..

Place butter, white chocolate, sugar and vanilla in a saucepan over low heat. Stir until smooth. Transfer to a large bowl. Leave aside for 15 minutes to cool.

Add the crushed pineapple and mix till blended. Add eggs one at a time and stir to combine. Add plain flour and self-raising flour. Stir to combine. Divide mixture equally between prepared pans. Bake for 50 minutes-1 hours or until a skewer inserted in the centre has moist crumbs clinging. Stand in pan for 10 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

Fold in the honey gently with the whipped cream. Once the cake has cooled completely, spread the honey-cream frosting over the cake. Slice and serve.

Lemon, Chocolate And Pistachio Muffins

7|03|2015

Delicious Pistachio Muffins with a lemon cake base, dipped in chocolate and topped with ground pistachios.

‘You can lift up the lids now’ the voice echoed across the large hall as anxious hands moved in unison. I said a quick prayer ‘Please let there be lemon…please..please!’ With bated breath I peered inside.
There was lemon! A whole lemon! Bright yellow, gleaming in the light. But..there was a problem! There was chocolate. As well. Now what! I was in a fix. Without a doubt Chocolate is my favorite ingredient but I wasn’t expecting it. It just seemed too unlikely to have such an easy and versatile ingredient to work with. I ran through all the chocolate recipes in my mind..cooking times, accompanying ingredients and such. I looked at the mammoth clock hanging on the wall. 50 minutes to go. How on earth was I going to make my famous chocolate ginger torte in such a limited time? Show skill..show technique..understanding of flavors..multitask…was all over my mind. Scaling down a recipe? How would I make it look pretty inside a ramekin..Oh no! Panic. I looked around. Gigantic saucepans….large baking pans. A single serve dessert was my only option but in monster baking gear..how? More panic.
’30 minutes to go’..the voice sent a chill down my spine. Nope. Sorry Chocolate! I decided to stick with Lemon. Lemon and Meringue…Yesss! Meringue spells technique. Add more elements. Lemon Curd…Lemon custard…Candied Lemon. I leaped forward and grabbed a zester.

Well, does this sound like the sets of a reality show? A cooking competition, maybe? For some of us who love cooking/baking and cooking shows, to be on one is like a dream. Except this was real. Except it was turning into a nightmare. Nothing quite I had pictured before. And every movement..every expression..helplessness being captured on what looks like a hundred professional cameras. This was many moons ago but truly the experience of a life time. Cooking in the comfort of your own kitchen is different from cooking for the first time in a commercial kitchen under the watchful eyes of professionals and celebrities. Anyway, I did put up a decent dessert that I saw the staff and crew photograph even on mobile phones. But maybe that was not enough.Maybe things would be different if I had some control on my nerves. Maybe I was always meant to be behind the lenses. The last one actually, I am sure of. I can see things through my camera that I may not notice otherwise.

Back to the present, I totally loved how these muffins tasted. They are lemon muffins with thier tops covered in dark chocolate ganache and ground pistachios.The citrus is not overpowering, neither is the chocolate. They are in complete harmony while the pistachios add life and texture to these muffins.To be honest, I wasn’t very happy with the muffin batter. While spooning them into the muffin cases I felt that they might turn out dry just as they did. If you have an alternate lemon muffin recipe..feel free to go with that. If you are using this recipe, take care not to over-bake. They taste amazing but are not as moist as some of the other muffins I have made before. I am a bit of a perfectionist so perhaps I could be a tad bit critical. My family loved them. The combination of lemon, chocolate and pistachio however, is sensational. Which is why I am sharing this recipe. I would probably add sour cream or yogurt next time instead of milk to test them out.

So, when life gives you lemons, make sure it doesn’t give you Chocolate!
If it does, well, you know now what to do:-)

Lemon, Chocolate And Pistachio Muffins (lemon muffin recipe adapted from here)
Makes 8 large muffins

2 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 tbsp lemon zest
1 1/4 cups milk
1 egg, lightly beaten
90 g butter, melted
chocolate ganache, to coat
ground pistachios, to coat

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C (160 degrees C for fan-forced). Lightly grease a 12-hole, 1/3-cup capacity non-stick muffin pan.

Sift flour into a large bowl. Add caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of lemon rind and stir to combine. Make a well in the centre. Combine milk, egg and butter in a jug. Pour milk mixture into the well. Using a large metal spoon, stir until just combined (don’t over-mix).

Spoon mixture into muffin holes until three-quarters full. Bake for 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Allow to cool in pan for 1 minute. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool. Once cooled dip the tops into chocolate ganache and then onto a plate of ground pistachios. Leave aside for 15 minutes to set.

Dark Chocolate Ganache

110 g dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup heavy cream

Heat the heavy cream in a small saucepan. Before it reaches boiling point, remove from heat, add the chocolate. Leave aside for 10 minutes. Mix till chocolate is well blended and smooth. Alternately, you could place the cream and chocolate together in a microwave safe bowl and microwave for a few seconds.

Dark Chocolate Cake with Milk Chocolate and Cherry Buttercream. And a Second Blog Birthday!

20|02|2015

Long long ago I wanted to become a pastry chef. Perhaps I didn’t know the term but I knew I wanted to make sweet things all day, running around the kitchen with flour on my clothes and smelling very much of vanilla and chocolate. I imagined what it would be like to live in Paris and work in a lush patisserie. I pictured myself rising before the sun and baking bread, making choux pastry, separating hundreds of eggs and making the glossiest of Italian meringue. Garnishes would get my special attention and I would make sure every dessert looked pretty. The plates would go out to my customers with a smear (you know, the classic smear) of berry coulis, quenelles of the most exotic mousse and fancy dots of citrus curd. Then on top would be my prettiest chocolate curls or sugar decorations resembling art work. They would obviously have fancy names. Like ‘beauty and the beast’ and an all green dessert plate called ‘spring’.
On the contrary, I joined a bank.

The job was great..it paid well and I had an amazing team to work with. Everything was perfect and I loved my job. I forgot all about my dreams. Once in a while when we went to a fancy restaurant and ordered dessert, I could feel something tug at my heart. But life was busy and I was having a ball of a time growing in my role and getting noticed for my work.
Then, many years later my husband walked in home one evening and exclaimed ‘This does not look like our house anymore. It looks like a pastry kitchen’ I was working on a recipe for the blog and there were bowls and whisks everywhere, I had piped designs on the table to practice, props were scattered on the floor. I looked up and suddenly the truth in those words hit me. My dream. My pastry kitchen. I did not even realise that this little blog of mine brought me so close to living the dream I once had. I am nowhere close to being a pastry chef but I am doing what I love to do the most every single day.

I love my precious corner of the Internet so much that if you ask me about the last two years I will be talking about recipes, photos, disasters, delayed meals, fresh produce, beautiful friendships, touching comments, features and all of that. As if my whole life revolves around this besides my family and nothing else. Thank you so very much my lovely friends and readers for making these two years such a happy time for me. Thank you for visiting my blog, give me your valuable time and keeping me on my toes. You make me live my dream, you give me a reason to smile everyday. You make me feel like an important person (a self-proclaimed pastry chef) who has to work on recipes all day, as if I am shouldering a huge responsibility. I know, I am. I hope I never let you down. I hope you find what you come looking for.

Between the last blog birthday to this one, Sugar et al. has seen many highs which I should probably share with you in a different post. I have been working very hard behind the scenes, focusing on my photography, another subject I am very passionate about.
Moving onto this cake, it is a dark chocolate cake with a cherry buttercream filling and frosted with a milk chocolate buttercream. The cake is dense and fudgy with a slight nuttiness from the hazelnut meal (ground hazelnuts). The cherry frosting is flavored with fresh cherries which goes well with the rich cake. Swiss Meringue Buttercream is my favourite frosting on cakes as it is easy to handle, light and fluffy and not too sweet to taste.

Here’s to another year of sweet sweet things!

Dark Chocolate Cake with Milk Chocolate And Cherry Buttercream
Serves 10-12

200 g unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup, firmly packed brown sugar
200 g dark chocolate, melted, cooled
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups self-raising flour
1/2 cup hazelnut meal (grounds hazelnuts) or any other nut meal
1/2 cup) buttermilk
1/4 cup) cocoa powder

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C (140 degrees C for fan forced) Grease two 18 cm round cake pans with melted butter. Line the base with baking paper.

Use electric beaters to beat the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy. Beat in the melted chocolate and eggs. Fold in the flour, hazelnut meal, buttermilk and cocoa until well combined. Divide equally between the prepared pans and smooth the surfaces. Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Set aside in the pan to cool slightly before transferring the cake to a wire rack to cool completely.

For the Milk Chocolate and Cherry Swiss Meringue Buttercream

4 egg whites
1 cup castor sugar
300 g unsalted butter, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla essence
120 g milk chocolate
8-10 fresh cherries, pitted and smashed with the back of a spoon

Place the egg whites and sugar in a large bowl that is placed over a saucepan of simmering water (over low heat), and whisk continuously, until the sugar has completely dissolved and the bottom of the bowl is warm to touch

Remove the bowl from the heat, add the vanilla essence and whip on high speed until meringue holds stiff peaks and looks glossy
Add the butter, a tablespoon at a time, until thick and fluffy. If it begins to look curdled, continue to whip until it comes back together, before adding in remaining butter.

Remove about 1/2 cup of the buttercream aside for the cherry buttercream. To this, add the smashed cherries with the juices and mix till blended.

To the rest of buttercream, add the melted milk chocolate and fold in till smooth.

To assemble: Place one layer of the cake on a cake stand or serving tray. Spoon the cherry buttercream on top and smooth out with a spatula. Sandwich with the other layer of cake. Frost the top and outside with the milk chocolate buttercream. Decorate with fresh flowers or chocolate curls.

Chocolate, Chai and Beetroot Cake

13|02|2015

It’s a beautifully romantic morning in Sydney today. The grass is wet from last night’s downpour, the sun apparently is a bit shy to show up and peeks through big fluffy clouds in a lavender hued sky. There are roses everywhere. In shops, in people’s hands, on pretty dresses, in songs, on doughnuts, on blogs and in every romantic’s heart. Love is powerful, isn’t it? Look what it makes you do. No matter which corner of the globe you are or who you are, it makes you do cute little things for the people who matter. I don’t really think that all those roses and chocolates should be reserved for just one day..love is not seasonal! But it sure makes sense to me that at least on this one day you feel slightly inspired to turn those emotions into meaningful gestures.

After dropping the boys at school, I bought two red heart-shaped balloons to surprise them tomorrow. I did feel a bit conscious, holding them and walking alongside a bunch of excited teenagers who had several of them in their hands. But thinking about the way my twosome would react made my smile. They love balloons. Normally, I would pick up different colors to avoid confusion that would generally lead to fights. I have decided to draw faces on the ones I bought today to avoid any of that. And I made this cake. Weekends are amazing when you have cake to snack on or douse with chocolate ganache to be eaten as dessert. Whichever way you like it, this tastes amazing.

I already have a chocolate beetroot cake with chocolate sour cream frosting in my archives. This one is slightly different. It is infused with Chai flavour and the texture is like a soft sponge. There is melted dark chocolate and Dutch processed cocoa in the batter for a very intense chocolate flavor. The beetroot is not what you taste but what adds a depth of flavor, nutrition and moisture to the cake. The spice adds in a touch of warmth. Many years ago, I had gotten into a funny little obsession of candying things. From herbs..to nuts and everything in between. Candied ingredients make for great garnishes while also adding texture and color to a dessert. The beetroot leaves are the only element that needs to be made one day ahead as they need time to dry up.
I used a bundt pan as you can see to make this, but I had a hard time taking it out of the pan. You could use a round cake pan or grease the bundt pan really really well if you are making this. The cake is moist and has a tendency to stick to the sides of the pan. If you do not have access to purple beet leaves, go ahead with green or even mint or basil leaves should work fine.

I hope you have a very very love-filled Valentine’s day. Even if you are single, I hope you get to eats lots and lots of cake. Cakes don’t need an occasion. Like love, they are not seasonal!

Chocolate, Chai and Beetroot Cake
Serves 6-8

120 g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
120 g unsalted butter, divided
1-1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar
3 eggs
2 cups raw beetroot, coarsely grated
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 tsp Chai spice powder
Chocolate Ganache, to serve (recipe below)
Candied Beet Leaves (recipe below)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C (160 degree C for fan-forced). Grease well a bundt cake pan or a 8 inch round cake pan.

In a double boiler or in the microwave, melt together chocolate and 20 g butter. Stir until well blended. Cool slightly.
Meanwhile, in a large bowl, whisk together the remaining (100 g) butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Combine flour, baking soda and chai spice together in a bowl. Combine the chocolate mixture, grated beetroot and vanilla in a separate bowl. Add the chocolate-beetroot mixture to the creamed mixture (mixture may appear separated). Gradually add in the flour-chai to the creamed mixture.

Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 45-55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Once cooled. pour over the chocolate ganache. Leave aside for 10 minutes to set. Decorate with candies beet leaves.

Chocolate Ganache

200 ml heavy or thickened cream
200 g good-quality dark chocolate, chopped

Place the cream in a small saucepan over medium heat and bring to just below boiling point. Place the chocolate in a bowl and pour over the hot cream. Stir together until melted and smooth. Allow to cool for 15 minutes before pouring over the cake.

Candied Beetroot Leaves

1 egg white
1/4 cup castor sugar
12-15 small beetroot leaves

Line a baking tray with baking paper. Place the egg white in a small bowl and the castor sugar onto a small plate. Make sure the leaves are dry before you start. If not pat dry with a kitchen towel. Working one at a time, dip each beetroot leaf into the egg white (scrape off excess against the bowl) and then dip into the plate of castor sugar, turning it to ensure an even coat on both sides. Lay the leaves in a single layer on the tray lined with baking paper to dry out. Leave aside for 24 hours, turning once in between.