11 Oct
Brownie Mosaic Cheesecake
Posted by Chelle as Brownies & Bars, Cheesecake, Chocolate | 30 Comments
Behold, a gorgeous four-part cheesecake in all of its glory:
Oreo crumb crust.
Creamy cheesecake.
Fudgy brownies.
Chocolate ganache glaze.
WOW. Now, many of you know I am a self-professed Queen of Cheesecake. No, I’m not tooting my own horn about how fabulous my own cheesecakes always turn out, but cheesecake is by far my very favorite dessert. I’ll eat it before anything else laid in front of me. And so when I saw this cheesecake featured on Smitten Kitchen, there was no turning back. I had to make it. Immediately. And with no good reason whatsoever other than I wanted it. No company, no dinner party, no celebration. Just because it looked THAT good.
15 Sep
Chocolate Biscotti
Posted by Chelle as Chocolate, Cookies, Italian | 16 Comments
I made these biscotti as part of the package I put together for Operation Baking GALS (sorry it’s taken me a while to get this post up!), which also included plain vanilla biscotti and chocolate chip biscotti. These biscotti come courtesy of Dorie Greenspan and were actually the second-ever Daring Baker challenge, back in December of 2006. Since I’ve been wanting to tackle all of the old DB challenges as part of My 100 list, and given that I had already decided to do a biscotti theme for my package, I thought throwing in these biscotti only made sense. I wouldn’t be a good baker if I didn’t taste test what I was shipping off (*wink*), so I made sure to give these a try. I thought they were absolutely fabulous and plan on adding them to my list of things that will go in my Christmas packages this year.
31 Aug
Daring Bakers do Chocolate Eclairs
Posted by Chelle as Chocolate, Custard Desserts, Daring Bakers, Pastries | 28 Comments
Chocolate Éclairs by Pierre Hermé.
Classic éclairs.
Chocolate pastry cream.
Chocolate glaze.
Hosted by Meeta of What’s for Lunch Honey? and Tony of Tony Tahhan, I was pretty excited when this month’s challenge was announced, as it wasn’t a layer cake and didn’t include a substantial amount of ground nuts. Score. I had made éclairs once previously and they were fabulous, so I was really looking forward to tackling these, especially since they included chocolate pastry cream instead of the traditional vanilla pastry cream that is usually found in the middle of éclairs. I bought a special piping tip to use to fill the middle of the eclairs (instead of slicing them open) and was ready to go.
Alas, don’t be fooled by the picture above; I would not consider this a successful challenge!
03 Jun
TWD: French Chocolate Brownies
Posted by Chelle as Brownies & Bars, Chocolate, Tuesdays with Dorie | 0 Comments
*Note to self: Let brownies cool before taking pictures, they would look less messy!
Wow. Just wow. With all due respect to Ina’s Outrageous Brownies, these French Chocolate Brownies have trumped and become my all-time favorite brownie recipe. Many thanks to Di of Di’s Kitchen Notebook for choosing this week’s recipe - what a fantastic job you did!!
These brownies were created in a pretty non-traditional way in terms of brownies. The eggs and sugar were whisked together in the stand mixture, and then the dry ingredients were added, followed by the melted chocolate/butter combination. In truth, Dorie states that when she created these she was aiming for a chocolate cake, not brownies. But wow, did she nail the brownies! These are dense, moist, insanely chocolatey, and just about everything you could want from a brownie. I couldn’t stop eating pieces off of them each time I walked into the kitchen!
This recipe says it yields 16 brownies, and after cutting these into 16 pieces I’m convinced that Laurie was right - these are French-size brownies, not America’s super-sized variety that we’re used to 
Oh, you will note there are raisins in the recipe, pretty a-typical for a brownie. I skipped these as I only had a handful of raisins left and wanted to hoard them for my oatmeal
Recipe and some process photos after the break…
01 May
Vanilla Cake + Chocolate Hazelnut Filling + Chocolate Frosting =
Posted by Chelle as Cakes, Chocolate | 0 Comments
Happy Birthday to my sister, Lauren!!
After I started taking my cake decorating classes, my sister asked if I would make (and decorate, of course) a cake for her birthday. Of course I said yes! Then she saw the drunk clown cake and demanded that a drunk clown grace the top of her cake. Haha, okay, of course that can be done! Err, so I thought. I was pretty pressed for time yesterday and I didn’t want to chance a clown catastrophe, so instead I gave her a cake of crooked writing and a martini glass. That’s drunk, right?
Oh, and I added polka dots to the sides:
When I asked what flavors she wanted she said a yellow cake, chocolate frosting, and some type of hazelnut-flavored filling. The cake is a classic yellow cake, made using the Fluffy Yellow Cake recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (recipes for the cake, filling, and frosting follow below). I decided to torte the layers for a more “sophisticated” cake, and between them is a very thin layer of chocolate frosting topped with a hazelnut ganache.
I was really happy with this cake except that I would have poured the ganache into the cake and let it set there instead of at room temperature, as it got a little too hard and was nearly impossible to work with between the cake layers. Everyone thought that the flavors of the cake were great, and said it was really rich, so if you want to make something a little less rich, I would suggest not torting the layers and instead going with a traditional 2-layer cake.
