Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake

Okay, so I should have posted this before Shavuos, but I just didn’t get to it. Bookmark this for next Shavuoth: super creamy cheesecake topped with soft caramel sauce and shards of milk chocolate. Kind of like a rolo crossed with cheesecake.

The basis for this was my Turtle Cheesecake, which is the same, but also has chopped pecans mixed into the caramel sauce and has a chocolate glaze instead of chopped chocolate. The chopped chocolate is easier to prepare than the chocolate glaze and is much, much easier to cut through when serving the cheesecake. I explain how to make home-made caramel sauce, but you could just buy caramel sauce or dulce de leche for the topping.

S’mores Chocolate Cake

Chocolate cake, glazed with chocolate, topped with a mixture of marshmallows, graham cracker bits, cake cubes and a drizzle of more chocolate glaze. Easy to make and keeps well.

Einat Admony’s Homemade Kit Kat Bars (and my dairy-free take on them)

The recipe that really jumped out at me from Einat Admony’s Balaboosta was her Kit-Kat Bars. It is kind of a variation on the classic peanut butter bars, which have a peanut butter and cornflake crumb base and a chocolate layer on top. This “Kit Kat” recipe swaps out peanut butter for Nutella in the base and puts a rich ganache on top.

Admony is the chef behind Taim falafel bar and Balaboosta restaurant in New York City (and she is opening another restaurant, too) . She says that the recipe for  this dessert came from Israeli restaurant Keren (Haim Cohen’s restaurant which was big in the 90’s), where she had her first professional job as a line cook.

I loved the idea of a crunchy Nutella bar, but I wanted to make these pareve. I tried two different approaches: (1) I swapped out the Nutella for chocolate peanut butter and (2) I combined regular peanut butter and hazelnut truffle chocolate. Both work. although the version with the hazelnut chocolate is a little truer to the original flavor combination.

Bonus: If you would like to see Einat Admony making these bars, take a look at this video at Daily Candy.

Another Bonus: Recent interview with Einat Admony where she talks about Sukkot and gives her mom’s recipe for chicken with pomegranate syrup and walnuts.

Yet Another Bonus: Chef Michel Richard included a recipe for Le Kit Cat in his book Happy in the Kitchen. The recipe is similar to Einat’s recipe, but calls for peanut butter and milk chocolate instead of Nutella in the base and the topping is chocolate mousse instead of ganache. If you want to see yet another variation on this, plus some attractive plating, take a look at this recipe from New Jersey chef Jonathan Adams.

Okay, one more: Chocolate Hazelnut Crunch Bars, using homemade pailleté feuilletine instead of cornflakes.

These Kit Kat bars look elegant and have a sophisticated taste–you would never guess that they are basically easy cereal bars.

Tarheel Pie

This is a super easy dessert: brownie batter baked in a pie shell. It sounds like not much, but people love it served warm with ice cream.  Maybe you have had brownie pies before, but do try this especially good version.

Easy Blender Chocolate Mousse (Vegan)

I had made chocolate mousse with tofu before. And it was very nice But when I saw a tofu based mousse recipe from Francois Payard, I had the feeling it would be a bit better than what I had tried before. It was excellent: although denser than some mousses, it was surprisingly light given that there was no whipped cream or egg whites folded into it.

I changed the recipe out of sheer laziness. The original recipe calls for heating soy milk in a pot, pouring it over chopped chocolate in a bowl, whisking to make a ganache and then folding in silken tofu that was pureed in a food processor. I found a way to make this a one appliance, one step recipe. I dump freshly brewed coffee, chocolate chunks and silken tofu in the blender and whirl away. The resulting mousse looks hopelessly liquid, but it sets up in the fridge. Somehow or other, the blender whips some bubbles into the mixture, giving it that fluffiness characteristic of mousses.

The original recipe calls for a pound of 61% chocolate, a pint of vanilla soy milk, 12.3 ounces of silken tofu and a fresh vanilla bean. There was no indication of serving yield.

I tried two different formulas:

(1) 6 ounces hot coffee, 6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, 2 ounces chocolate chips, 4 ounces silken tofu, 2 tsp. vanilla; and

(2) 5 ounces hot coffee, 1 ounces coconut oil, 6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, 1 Tbl. cocoa powder, 4 ounces silken tofu, a pinch of salt, and 2 tsp. vanilla.

Each version was good and yielded 4 servings (or 5 smallish servings).

Passover Dessert: Chocolate Mistakes

This cookies were an accident. I was making a cookie recipe which called for just cocoa, powdered sugar and egg whites, with some chopped nuts folded in. I must have gotten distracted when measuring out the powdered sugar because the batter was just too dry. So, I added in the yolks that I had separated out from the whites. Then the batter was too runny. So added in a packet of ground nuts.

I baked the cookies, but most of them ran into each other, so I had to cut them into squares. The whole thing looked a bit like a mess, but tasted almost just like boxed chometz brownies. They had that chewy texture, with the thin  crackly top. So, all in all, this is a mistake I would make again, but I would either bake them as bar cookies, or space the cookies further apart so they wouldn’t run into each other.

Blackout Cake

Blackout cake: layers of dark, moist chocolate cake,  chocolate pudding filling, bittersweet ganache frosting  and a final coating of chocolate cake crumbs. Chocolate layer cakes just don’t get more intensely, deeply chocolate than this.

Ebinger’s famous blackout cake is the stuff of legends (see here and here for nostalgic odes). No one knows the real recipe, but many have tried to replicate it. The original was chocolate cake, filled and frosted with chocolate pudding, but some recipes call for pudding filling and chocolate ganache frosting. A special feature of this cake is that the top and sides are encrusted with cake crumbs.

Super Fudgy Brownies (Gluten-Free and Kosher for Passover)

Yes, I know. Pesach is over. Back to chometz.

All the same, give these brownies a chance. A crackly thin crust, fudgy interior, intense chocolate flavor–these are stellar brownies that can hold their own against chometz brownies any day.

These are different from the Homemade Passover Brownie Mix brownies in that those brownies have a cocoa flavor (like a boxed mix brownie) with nutty overtones and a certain chewiness, while these have a deep, pure semisweet chocolate flavor and a soft, fudgy texture.

Pareve Chocolate Caramel Ice Cream

Long ago and far away, I tasted a delicious pareve chocolate ice cream. This “ice cream,” or “glace chocolat,” as it was called, was intensely chocolate like the best flourless chocolate cake or mousse. The recipe for the “glace”/”ice cream” base couldn’t have been simpler: eggs, sugar, oil, plus flavoring (chocolate, of course, for the glace chocolate). No pareve whip, no nut butter, no margarine. And the mixture was whipped light before being frozen, so there was no need for an ice cream maker, either. It was basically a dense frozen mousse, and it was delicious.

Unfortunately, my discovery of this recipe coincided exactly with the emerging realization in the US that raw eggs are unsafe to eat because of salmonella contamination.  So, for many years this recipe lay neglected and unused.

I recently was reading through Bon Appetit and was intrigued by a recipe for chocolate ice cream with caramel swirled in. The picture of the rich ice cream, the description of the texture, and the recipe reminded me of my Glace Chocolat. The Bon Appetit recipe (from Fergus Henderson’s restaurant St. Johns) is described as being “so rich, it doesn’t melt–it just gets truffley.”

So, I decided to dust off my Glace Chocolat and update it.

Parshat Masei, Pareve Condensed Milk and Dairy-Free Chocolate Revel Bars

Masei discusses the boundaries of Eretz Yisrael and recounts the journey and encampments of B’nei Yisrael as they traveled from Ramses to the Sinai desert to the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.

For my parsha cake, I made pareve chocolate revel bars, which have a bottom and top crust of oatmeal and a fudge filling. The top crust cracks a bit, looking very topographical. With better foresight, I would have shaped the top crust to look like the appropriate land masses and let the fudge filling be the bodies of water. I didn’t have such foresight, so I was compelled to roll out chocolate fondant to make the land. I used marshmallow bits to show the path of travel. If you want to see this kind of parsha cake in color, go here.

Here are the maps that the above parsha cake was based on: travels in the desert from Lookstein.org and boundaries of Eretz Yisrael from Tanach.org.