The White Ramekins

food & photography

Chocolate Crinkles

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There are days when you want to sit back and relax over a comfort food. Lately, I have been getting that sense of indulging into some sort of comfort food. And you can’t talk about comfort food without mention of chocolate. That silky smoothness of chocolate melting on your palate doesn’t require anything else to make you relieved of all your stress.

Comfort food has got it’s own memories for me from my childhood. Once in a while, my father would pamper me and my sister by taking us to a local confectionary store and would buy both of us a big slice of nutty ice cream cake {called Casatta } and a bottle of coke. I remember those were the days when coke used to come in glass bottles instead of more convenient pet bottles of today. One bite of cake and one sip of coke using pipe {hehe…it took us some time to learn the word straw} used to be the rhyme we would follow. And as opposed to Who will finish first, Who will finish last used to be our aim. So that one having the last bite last would get a chance to show off to the other. That might occur a bit purile to a now adult mind, but that’s how the childhood is.

I know, every one of us has got some nostalgia attached to one of our favorite comfort food whatsoever. As soon as we remember those moments, we tend to forget all our stress and tensions followed by a big round smile on our face.

This was the kind of smile I had when I first saw these beautiful eye soothing chocolate crinkle cookies sometime back. Their snow clad looks were so appeasing to the eyes and mind, that you almost feel like that you are sitting at the back of your couch, while you are enjoying your favorite comfort food.

Ingredients {Recipe adapted from JoyOfBaking, yields 3 dozen}

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
50 gm unsalted butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
230 gm bittersweet chocolate
2 large eggs
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Sifted confectioner sugar

Instructions

  1. Mix flour, salt and baking powder and keep aside.
  2. Melt chocolate with butter over a double boiler.
  3. Beat eggs with granulated sugar until pale and fluffy. It will form ribbon like consistency.
  4. Add chocolate mixture to egg mixture once cooled. Add in flour mixture and mix until incorporated.
  5. Cover the bowl with a cling wrap and refrigerate overnight until it is easy enough to make balls out of batter.
  6. Place the sifted confectioners sugar in a shallow bowl. First, form the chilled dough into 1 inch (2.5 cm) balls, and then roll each ball in the sugar. Make sure each ball is completely coated, with no chocolate showing through.
  7. Place the sugar-covered balls on the prepared baking sheet, spacing about 2 inches (5 cm) apart.
  8. Bake the cookies in a 160 degree Celsius preheated oven for about 10 minutes, taking care not to over bake the cookies.
  9. Let cool on a wire rack completely.

Vanilla Ice Cream Sandwiches

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When it comes to ice cream, of all the flavors, I like vanilla the most. Not even this flavor has got it’s own identity, but it is surely a great accompaniment of various kinds of tarts, brownies, bars or even a plain jane fruit salad. Such is the melding of two great flavors which you get in these snacky portable on-the-go vanilla ice cream sandwiches.

Vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two thin chocolate wafers. They are so convenient to eat that you don’t need any plate, fork or knife. Just take them out of freezer and enjoy them in nearly three bites.

To make my life simple, I decided to use store brought vanilla ice cream, rather than making it from scratch at home. But it wasn’t that simpler I had thought. Temperature here in north of India is touching 45 degree Celsius. And handling the ice cream in such an intense heat had really become a tough job for me.

I was literally dancing between the freezer and the platform, cutting a small block of ice cream, sandwiching between the wafers, wrapping them with a brown paper, tying them with a thread and swiftly popping them into the freezer, before the ice cream starts to melt. It was quicker than answering a rapid fire question round.

Recipe from Martha Stewart

Ingredients

1 2/3 cup plain flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
60 gm butter, softened
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tbsp milk
500 ml vanilla ice cream
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the wrappings (optional)

brown paper cut into 1 inch stripes
thread to tie
quick drying adhesive

Instructions

  1. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, cocoa powder in a bowl and keep aside.
  2. In a separate bowl, beat butter with sugar until pale in color.
  3. Beat in egg, vanilla extract and milk.
  4. Add flour to the mixture and mix to combine well.
  5. Divide the dough into two halves and make round discs, wrap in cling wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour at least.
  6. Roll dough to an 1/8 inch thickness and cut squares using pastry wheel cutter. Make holes using back of a toothpick and bake them for 8-10 minutes in a preheated oven at 180 degree Celsius.
  7. Let cool slightly on baking sheet and then completely on a wire rack.
  8. Using a sharp knife or same pastry cutter, cut vanilla ice cream of about 1/2 inch thickness and sandwich it with in two cookies.
  9. Transfer to refrigerator to harden for around 2 hours.
  10. Wrap the paper stripes around the sandwiches and tie them with a thread (optional).

Lamingtons…The Aussie Petits Fours

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Lamingtons, these Australian miniature cakes have me completely smitten this time. Small genoise cubes dipped in chocolate icing and covered with snow-appearing shredded coconut. These mini bites are quite adorable, so much so that I like to call them the petits fours.

Their small size makes them perfect for a tea time snack. Plus, you can enjoy their choco-latey flavor without worrying much about the calorie intake. And the nutty flavor of coconut wedded with bitterness of dark chocolate is totally divine. It reminds me of those small Bounty bars, having oodles of sweet syrupy moist coconut trapped inside a milk chocolate.

In order to mimic the same moist texture, I thought of using a recipe from The Cake Bible, which I recently bought. And fortunately, this one is the first recipe {of a genoise/biscuit}, from this book which I have tried. Rose Beranbaum’s small tips and tricks helped a lot in achieving that extra bit of moistness. And why shouldn’t it be, after all those wonderful and important tips are from the veteran herself.

I iced them with the chocolate icing made of bittersweet chocolate and the cocoa powder. Cocoa added to chocolate perked the flavor of icing. And for the coconut, I went an extra mile and do the job of peeling the hard coconut and shredding it’s tender white flesh {got my finger hurt while doing that}. But trust me, store brought desiccated coconut wouldn’t have done that job, which the fresh one did. And that effort paid off well.

Genoise/Sponge Cake:

6 large eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup (150 g) sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/3 cup (175 g) cake flour {i substituted this with 1 cup plain flour and 1/3 cup corn starch}
70 g melted clarified butter, at room temperature

Chocolate Icing:

170 g bittersweet chocolate, chopped
40 g unsalted butter
3/4 cup milk
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted
2 tbsp boiling water
200 g unsweetened shredded coconut

Instructions

  1. For the genoise, butter and line a 9 inch square pan with parchment paper and keep aside {i used two 9 x 3 inch loaf pans instead}.
  2. In a clean bowl, beat eggs with sugar at high speed for 10 minutes, till you get a ribbon like texture. {I did this by hand wire whisk}.
  3. Add vanilla and mix well.
  4. Using a fine mesh strainer, sieve the flour and corn starch over the egg mixture and mix well, without beating too much and taking care not to over mix. Otherwise all the air entrapped will be lost.
  5. Scrape the mix into the pan and bake in preheated oven at 180 degree Celsius for 30 minutes or until the sponge pulls away from the sides of the pan.
  6. Take the cake out of oven and after 10 minutes take that out of the pan and let cool completely on a wire rack.
  7. For the icing, mix the chocolate, milk and butter in a bowl and heat in microwave till the chocolate gets dissolved.
  8. Sift in the cocoa powder and icing sugar and mix well.
  9. Cut the sponge carefully into two halves horizontally.
  10. Apply the chocolate icing over one half and sandwich the other half and cut into 16 small cubes.
  11. Add the boiling water to the remaining icing and mix well.
  12. Carefully holding the cakes, dip them into the icing and then roll all the surfaces over shredded coconut, taking one at a time. Let them stand on a wire rack for some time till the icing firms up.