Recipe please?
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I beg to differ, they look extremely enticing !!
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I know I have seen this recipe, based on the 16 oz and 1/4 cup amounts. I almost want to say it was on Epicurious, but I cannot check due to paywall.
Sure, here you go (I misquoted the 1/4 cup of flour - it’s actually a half cup!):
4 oz. unsweetened chocolate
12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips, divided
3 eggs
1/2 c. flour
1/3 c. butter
2 T. cocoa
1 c. sugar
1 1/2 t. vanilla
1/4 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
Melt unsweetened chocolate, butter and 1 c. of chocolate chips, cool for 10 minutes. Beat sugar and eggs; add vanilla and chocolate mixture. Add the dry ingredients, then stir in the remaining chocolate chips. Chill dough for at least 3 hours. Roll cold dough into 1 inch balls. Bake on ungreased baking sheet at 350 for 10-12 minutes or until puffed and lightly set. Allow to cool on pan 3-4 minutes before removing to a rack to cool completely.
ETA: The rolling step can get a little messy. I usually chill the dough for about an hour and then use a disher scoop to portion it out onto a parchment lined sheet, then chill those scoops fully before rolling. I dust my hands with a little cocoa to keep anything from sticking when rolling.
As for the source, @CaitlinM , I know my mother wouldn’t have gotten it from Epicurious, though it may have made its way there by now. She would most likely have clipped it from a newspaper or magazine sometime in the 1990s.
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Hi everyone!
We are hosting a cocktail party in two weeks, and I will have been traveling before then. Can you think of a super fun dessert that I could freeze? Thanks!
Any specs? Chocolate? Not chocolate?
For a cocktail party, bite-size brownies or bouchons (you can “fun” them up with additions) will freeze well. I’ve made my favorite Medrich brownie recipes in mini tins for a party, or there are the various bouchon recipes (Bouchon Bakery, Gateau, LPQ’s Belgian brownies, etc).
Cheesecake bars of some sort? Or also assembled in mini muffin tins / liners as bite-size.
What about an icebox cake? Or something like that also in bite size form. There’s a whole thread about them, and also this SE Ritz cracker pie recipe that would be easy to stack individually (and alter flavor profile on).
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!
Lemon buttermilk cake from Rustic Desserts. A fine textured crumb with a thin crust. The glaze is white chocolate with some freeze dried strawberries. There is a ribbon of freeze dried strawberries/sugar in the center of the cake, the sprinkles are berry flavored from De Ruijter and are very flavorsome. I imagine without the glaze and sprinkles this would freeze well.
@adawks
Add images here
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This is my favorite lemonade recipe (I know, not baking…)
It’s from Artichokes to Za’atar, by Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf, “Middle Eastern Lemonade.” No sugar syrup; well, you are making your own to start with just lemons and sugar. Use organic lemons because the peels are essential. It’s a process that includes an overnight, so prepare for that. I find this intensely lemony and not-so-sweet lemonade delicious. Easily diluted with more water if you prefer less tart.
The proportions in the recipe are 5 whole lemons (no weight given, and lemons do vary a lot by weight and size), 1 cup superfine sugar (I use regular granulated sugar), and 3.5 cups of water added later. Optional drops of orange blossom water. Can be scaled up or down.
The technique is to wash and dry the whole lemons, then cut them into 8 pieces each into a mixing bowl. I cut off the ends and cut them smaller since they are all peel. Then put in the sugar and massage very thoroughly, releasing the oil from the peels. While you are rubbing in the sugar, squeeze out as much juice as possible. Keep going for about 5 minutes or until the sugar turns into a thick syrup.
Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours (I’ve let it go overnight sometimes). Then add the water and refrigerate again, overnight.
To serve, strain and add orange blossom water, if desired, to taste (start slowly with very few drops). Add crushed ice and alcohol, or not!
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Sounds delicious, thank you! I wonder if you could put the mixture in a KA bowl with the paddle attachment and run on low?
Probably would work well. But our KA mixer, inherited from my husband’s mother, lives in the basement and it’s heavy for me to bring up. I could try the food processor, which lives in the kitchen. This recipe is something I make only occasionally and the pleasure of the lemon smell while I do it by hand, even with my arthritis, makes it worth it.
My all time favorite is limeade, and I hope to try this with limes soon, especially if I can find thin-skinned limes.
I think the food processor would overwork the ingredients, smash rather than mash! My KA is handy, just a thought for an easier mix!
ETA…Limes must be really delicious!
I’ve been wondering why limes so bad so much faster than lemons.
I like to squeeze lime on papayas.
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Our KA is one of the really old ones, much longer lasting, and very heavy. My arthritis makes it very difficult for me to move it even from a kitchen cabinet to a close by plug. I make this lemonade very infrequently, so when I do, it’s a good use of my limited joints to do it by hand.
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Testing for my English tea continues.
I remembered I owned a Nordic Ware pan that makes one-or-two bite tiny bundts, like petit-four sized. @Nannybakes pointed me to this recipe and a separate technique for making a decorative glaze that contains jam. This is attractive because I have shelves of homemade jam downstairs begging for a raison d’etre.
I made half a recipe of the cake and a third recipe for the glaze. The cake recipe is straightforward, except that you need to whip egg whites separately and fold in at the end. At scale, this would be tedious and create a lot of orphaned egg yolks. I could consider making lemon curd with them for the tea, though, so that’s an idea.
Anyway, the cake recipe is almond-flavored, but I swapped the almond extract for orange oil. I was a little worried about how defined the tiny bundts would be, because the nonstick spray often creates little bubbles or air pockets. I took the uncharacteristic step of brushing the (Pam with Flour) baking spray with a pastry brush in each well after spraying, in an attempt to make it more even. Ultimately it still created a mottled surface on the little cakes, which detracts from their visual appeal. I also overfilled the tiny wells, and several of the cakes had pronounced feet as a result.
By themselves, the cakes were quite good. I guessed at the orange oil amount, but it was nicely flavored without being overpowering.
I took a stab at the jam glaze, using homemade strawberry jam. I should’ve known not to include the vanilla in that recipe. For some unknown reason, I have an aversion to strawb+vanilla. I discovered this the first summer I learned to jam and can, when I made a batch of strawberry vanilla jam and disliked it so much I wanted to throw it into the sea.
Not surprisingly, the orange cake PLUS strawb jam PLUS vanilla was… a lot, even for a tiny bite of a cake.
We agreed the orange cakes were very nice on their own, without the glaze. I might try another half-batch with a chocolate glaze, but not dipped. Applied more sparsely. And no sprinkles.
Another challenge with these is that I can only make 12 at a time, so it would be… quite laborious to make 75+ of these suckers.
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Very purty looking but definitely too labor intensive for 75 pieces. I dm you regarding an alternative method that might be helpful.
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The past few months haven’t afforded me the opportunity to do as much baking as I would like. After traveling in Italy, and doing zero cooking, I came home and had to make it happen. I made two successful recipes from KAF, with minor tweaks.
Whole Grain Banana Bread - used all white whole wheat, sugar was 3/4 cup, and half olive oil and half yogurt. Stirred in mini chocolate chips (husband’s preference) and topped with pepitas. Will be my standby “healthy” banana bread.
Blueberry Breakfast Cake - I was looking for a something like the cheesecake that was served at our Italian agriturismo and this scratched the itch. (I will still be playing around with this idea, though!) This was not very sweet, and fruit forward which I love. I used quark and ricotta and left out the additional 2 tbs. of sugar.
Thanks to the kind folks who answered my query about bundt cakes! I will share my results here, as well.
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Perhaps squeeze and freeze?
Ginger Meringues
Another batch of meringues, these have freshly grated ginger in them and flaked almonds on the base. I used a #40 scoop for these. I routinely reduce the sugar in meringues with no ill affect.
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Day 2 taste test of the mini-bundts: predictably, I love them. The clashy flavors and, most importantly, the hideous vanilla-strawb taste are all mellowed.
The invites for the Tea event went out today, so fairly soon I’ll start having an idea of how many people are coming.
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Got the cutest thank you-love you-miss you text messages from my cousin’s kids for the cake, one with a pic of him eating it (the pre-teen), the other with more mushy sentiment his teen self would never speak out loud. Love 'em. Immediate and extended family and closest friends are all full of boys, and it is kind of adorable how they mush out with this doting aunt. 
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