Chocolate!

I made granola this morning and added chocolate (awesome thread, btw) and it's delicious!

I posted the recipe at Hippie Sounds a few weeks ago and now I have neighbors breaking down my door for more.

I love those warm individual flour-less chocolate cakes. I call them hockey-pucks.
You cut into one and the molten chocolate oozes out of the wound. Yum.

Gee, I just love it when the bugs don't get into my cocoa powder and eat it. Which is why I've taken to freezing my cocoa. But decent chocolate? Here? *turns green with envy*

If you want an amazing flourless chocolate cake, try this recipe. It is wonderful - kind of like a cross between a brownie and fudge. I also liked it better the next day - it seemed denser from sitting in the fridge. I served it with a blob of whipped cream with strawberries on the side.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/FLOURLESS-CHOCOLATE-CAKE-14478

One thing that I often do with chocolate is to jazz up a plain chocolate cake mix cake with this simple whipped ganache filling/frosting.

Melt 8 oz of chopped up semi sweet chocolate blocks in one cup of almost boiling whipping cream just removed from the heat. Stir til smooth and add another cup of whipping cream and 1/2 tsp vanilla. Chill til very cold and whip til fluffy. This makes enough to fill and frost one cake mix cake (either 2 round or 1 9x13 cut in half and layered). Fantastic and so easy.

*laughs* Yeah, but who cares? The trick is to fit it into a small enough box that it doesn't pass through customs cuz if it goes through customs, there wouldn't be enough left for me to even have a whiff.

Seriously, though, we can get decent milk chocolate - like Cadbury's Fruit and Nut, Milk Chocolate, Mint, and other such flavours. We even have decent local milk chocolate in similar flavours. What we cannot get here is cocoa butter, semi-sweet chocolate, and dark chocolate. The cocoa butter means that, even with the decent enough cocoa, I can't mix up my own semi-sweet or dark chocolate, which, hey, I'd do, given the opportunity. But the cocoa is decent enough for my chocolate cakes and my very very very excellent brownies, courtesy of the Hershey's site, which I will link to tomorrow as it's now time for bed.

One of our favorites is this Fudge Pie. I serve it warmed with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Yum.

EDIT: AFTER BEING QUESTIONED ABOUT THE TUNNEL OF FUDGE BY CATSLAVE downstream from this post, I googled the following cake recipe. Although I did get this recipe from a friend, I was unaware this recipe won the Pillsbury Bake Off Competition. Credit should be given where credit is due. Ella Rita Helfrich created this recipe, which won the Pillsbury Bake Off Competition. Here is a link to the original recipe.

My two favorite make-at-home (and easy) chocolate snacks are these chocolate covered potato chips I posted in the “Chips Shrapnel” thread (post #10) and Rice Krispie Treats made with Koko Crispies. I use the store brand to make the latter.

This is a delicous cake that a friend of ours makes. She gave me the recipe just this past week. Guess what I'm making today?

TUNNEL OF FUDGE CAKE​

1 ¾ cups butter
1 ¾ cups sugar
6 eggs
2 cups powdered sugar
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

¾ cup cocoa
2 cups walnuts or pecans

Glaze
¾ cup powdered sugar
¼ cup cocoa
Approximately 4-6 tablespoons milk

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well to incorporate after each addition. Gradually add powdered sugar, mixing well.

By hand, stir in all remaining ingredients. Batter will be thick. Spoon into prepared pan, spreading evenly.

Bake 45-50 minutes or until top is set and edges are beginning to pull away from sides of pan. Cool upright in pan on wire rack 1 1/2 hours. Invert onto serving plate; cool at least 2 hours.

For glaze:

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and mix well. Spoon over cake allowing some of the glaze to run down sides of cake. Store tightly covered.

I tried an interesting twist from one of the food shows.
The Latina chef was making chocolate cupcakes and added chile powder and cinnamon to the frosting mix.
I added about a teaspoon or so each to my basic chocolate frosting and it added a definite chile kick to the background taste, but not too much.
I thought if a chile/chocolate/cinnamon combination works in a mole sauce, why not?

We have Max Brenner--the chocolate store 15 min away. They won't let me live there :{

brianm said:

TUNNEL OF FUDGE CAKE​

1 ¾ cups butter
1 ¾ cups sugar
6 eggs
2 cups powdered sugar
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

¾ cup cocoa
2 cups walnuts or pecans

Glaze
¾ cup powdered sugar
¼ cup cocoa
Approximately 2 tablespoons milk

Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well to incorporate after each addition. Gradually add powdered sugar, mixing well.

By hand or using an electric hand mixer set on low speed, stir in all remaining ingredients. Batter will be thick. Spoon into prepared pan, spreading evenly.

Bake 60-64 minutes. (A standard ‘doneness test’ cannot be used due to the cake’s tunnel of fudge.)

Cool upright in pan for one hour. Invert on plate and cool completely.

For glaze:

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and mix well. Spoon over cake allowing some of the glaze to run down sides of cake. Store tightly covered.

Click to expand...

So all the ingredients end up combined together in one bowl and form a tunnel of chocolate when baked?
No layering something in the middle of the cake before baking?
I'm trying to picture how the tunnel gets formed. *duh*

got this simple one from Stormie,
which is really good for cooking-challenged folk like me:

melt a chocolate bar,
mix it in warmed milk,
and voila: hot chocolate
(much tastier than the pre-packaged Swiss Miss stuff)

Favorite chocolate cookbook: Death by Chocolate by Marcel Desauniers. Some of the recipes are complicated and time-consuming, but are sooooooo good.

For eating, I love Vosges, especially the Red Fire bar (dark chocolate, chipotle chiles, and cinnamon). I still need to try their Bacon bar, though.

CatSlave said:

So all the ingredients end up combined together in one bowl and form a tunnel of chocolate when baked?
No layering something in the middle of the cake before baking?
I'm trying to picture how the tunnel gets formed. *duh*

Click to expand...

I copied her recipe exactly as she hand wrote it for me. Your question prompted me to google this cake and low and behold it is a Pillsbury winner.

Here's the link. I have edited my original post to credit the winner, the Pillsbury Bake Off Competition, and to clarify/match the original recipe.

No wonder I love this cake. It would have been nice if my friend had told me it was a competition winner and an original recipe, no?

Thank you.
So the "tunnel" mysteriously appears during the baking... okey dokey, then.
It will be fun to try this.