Love is in the Air

... or at least it's in my cookies.

Since today is officially the beginning of Valentine's Day Week (I just made that up, so don't try to verify it anywhere online), I thought I should start making themed cookies. Of course, chocolate had to be an ingredient (not only because of it's fabulous taste, but also because it's pretty much tied in to Valentine's Day -- at least as advertised by Hallmark). They weren't exceptionally hard to make,  but the decorating took a little longer than expected.

The actual cookies are coconut shortbread cookies, covered in chocolate ganache (which, due to my frequent use of it, I'll give y'all the recipe for it in a little bit), and decorated with pink chocolate. I've had two so far (because otherwise all my cookies wouldn't have fit nicely on the tray), and I thought they were delicious. We'll see the reviews the cookies get at school when I take them up there.

My advice for y'all: if you haven't baked before, or you're not overly confident in the kitchen but still want to start baking more, take baby steps. You could, for example, buy ready-made cookies and then cover them yourself in chocolate ganache. Or, so the final product isn't too sweet, you could just buy English tea biscuits and cover them in ganache and proceed. When I first started making cupcakes, I often just used cake mix and then, slowly, as I got more confident, I started actually making everything from scratch. Now, I've moved on to not even following recipes all the time, but making my own up. Remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

So here is the result of today's culinary adventure:

As you can see, I had a little bit of trouble with the decorating and not all my designs look perfect. But it's the imperfections that make these cookies so special. After all, Valentine's Day is based on being able to look past the imperfections, right?

Anyhow, here is the chocolate ganache recipe I promised:

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

3/4 cup milk chocolate chips

1/3 cup whipping cream

Heat up the whipping cream until it's boiling, then pour it on top of the chocolate chips. Stir. It will go from looking like poorly mixed chocolate milk to a nice creamy, chocolate-y goodness. Just keep stirring until it's homogeneous in texture. It is delicious. Also, try to use it as quickly as possible, so it doesn't harden in the bowl instead of on top of your cookies. You can store it in the fridge, too, if you have leftovers. 

Good luck in your baking adventures, everyone.

Next time... Fish Tacos!

Hey there, Puddin'

In keeping with my own advice from the last post, I went into my kitchen willing to try something I had never tasted before, something I had never heard of before, something I thought was a completely original dessert: blueberry mocha pudding.

Technically, berries taste good with chocolate. Chocolate tastes good with coffee. So, shouldn't berries taste good with chocolate and coffee? The suspense of that answer was motivation enough for me to venture to attempt the combination.

After doing a quick inventory of what I had in the kitchen, I chose blueberries (the only kind of berry we had, albeit frozen, not fresh). Luckily, we had cappuccino mix and my parents didn't finish their pot of coffee from the morning, making it an obvious invitation for me to use the leftover coffee.

Since I did not want to experiment with the texture of pudding, I thought it would be best to not put in whole blueberries. But since the berries were frozen, all I had to do to get a lot of their juices out was just thaw them. Of course, with my patience being unusually short when it comes to trying a new dessert, I put them directly in the microwave and it worked just the same. After squeezing and pressing all the juice out of them, I was ready.

I made regular vanilla pudding and regular chocolate pudding. Except the chocolate pudding wasn't completely "regular" per se. Instead of using just milk, as the recipe asked, I substituted some of the cappuccino and coffee to bring out the flavor. The result: mocha pudding! Upon initial tasting, the coffee taste was overpowering, but when mixed with the overly sweet vanilla pudding, they complemented each other perfectly!

After mixing the two puddings, my sister artistically poured the blueberry juice on top and voila: blueberry mocha puddin' for all! And it tasted fantastic, too. ;)

P.S. Stay tuned for more sweets soon, since the chemical engineering kids have requested some tasty treats from me this weekend!