Truffles for Your Valentine

It was approaching seven at night, and upon receiving a text from my friend about receiving a box of chocolates, I realized that it was Valentine's Day. And with Valentine's Day comes an excuse to eat chocolate whether you're single or otherwise preoccupied.

The dessert cases here at school had heart and red-themed treats within them, but if I was going to enjoy something chocolate or red, it was going to be on my own terms, and while celebrating the nice break from schoolwork. I was going to make truffles a week or so ago and bought the ingredients, and decided, what's a better thing to treat myself to on Valentine's Day?



I decided to add a festive twist, and with that, I cranked up the Taylor Swift, whipped out the cream cheese, chocolate, and raspberry preserves, and while covering the table and microwave in chocolate, made these yummy little morsels. I wiped the chocolate off my face, and then proceeded to wander around and share them with a grin upon my face.



Raspberry Chocolate Cream Cheese Truffles
makes about 36

1 8 oz. package cream cheese or neufchatel, softened
8 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted
1/3 cup raspberry preserves
10-12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (melted but later on)
decorations (i.e. sprinkles, chopped nuts, etc), optional

Beat the cream cheese until fluffy and beat in the chocolate and raspberry preserves. Chill until firm enough to handle and then scoop and shape teaspoonfulls into balls.

Chill for half an hour or so, and then dip into melted chocolate and place on a sheet of wax paper or silicone mat (and top with sprinkles or something if desired).

Refrigerate for a few hours until chocolate is set.

Enjoy!

Raspberries, Sorbet, and Fudge: A Temporary Goodbye

I've left home and at college now. It's a little weird. I don't start classes for over a week, my roommate isn't here yet, and the campus is fairly quiet. That, and I'm not at home where the kitchen is. This could take some getting used to.

Right before I left, I tried to take advantage of the kitchen I was neglecting, because I know that I'm going to miss it. I made zucchini bread, but not as much as I intended to, raspberry sorbet, and fudge. I was going to make tofu with bok choy for lunch one day, but I never got around to it with the leftover gormeh sabzi in the fridge. Hopefully someone in the house uses the tofu before it goes bad. But the best received thing I made was the dessert I made the night my aunt and Ed came over for dinner. I'd made the raspberry sorbet earlier in the day, and wanted something to go with it. Cookie cups would have taken a little too much time since I made it back to the house 5 minutes before my aunt showed up. Aunt B really likes chocolate, so I settled on fudge.

It was a tasty pairing. And super simple as well.


Almond Topped Fudge
1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
3 cups (18 ounces) chopped bittersweet chocolate or chocolate chips
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup slivered almonds

Line a baking sheet with or 9" square pan with parchment paper.

In a saucepan or in the microwave, melt the chocolate. Stir in the sweetened condensed milk and vanilla.

Spread the fudge into a 9" square. Top with almonds and press down lightly. Chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Cut into squares and serve!

Mice for Christmastime

My grandmother has been making mice for about a decade.
Yes, I said mice.
Like the one in the picture above. Except she didn't make it. Keri and I did. It was a team effort.


She taught me how to make them about six years ago, and the following year my friend Keri and I made them together. I'm not sure if we've made them since eighth grade (when I made a step-by-step tutorial, but this year we finally got around to making them again. And they're so adorable and fun to make!

Keri and I don't see all that much of each other. We see each other at lunch and in history, which is most all through high school, but it was fun to get together. And so the mice took four hours. But don't let that scare you. We easily could have been done in an hour, but we talked, ate lunch, and found fun ways to use the leftover chocolate- we crushed up candy canes to mix in and then poured the chocolate into molds.



Chocolate mice sort of instructions:
I have no clue about quantities, but we used 3 10-ounce jars of maraschino cherries, a 17.6 ounce bar of milk chocolate, part of a 12-ounce bag of slivered almonds (the smallest size should be fine, we needed 204 almond slivers that looked nice), 1 1/2 bags of Hershey kisses (the 11 ounce ones, or 102 hershey kisses), and part of a tube of red gel icing. The numbers were based on how many cherries with stems we ended up with, and that's what we ended up with.
Melt the chocolate, dip the cherries in, push the kiss on, stick in the almonds. Repeat. Place in fridge to harden up for a while, and then dot on eyes. For better instructions, see my how-to from eighth grade.


Last three pictures by Keri. She was having fun with the camera.

Will You Be My Valentine?

So Valentine's Day.

It's not exactly my idea of a great holiday. Except for the whole excuse to give people chocolatey treats and not look like the crazy person you are. (What? Is it not normal to give people oatmeal raisin cookies, pumpkin bites, or blondies just because you feel like it?)

So now the sob story. Actually, it's too embarassing and emotionally charged for me so I'll spare you. It boils down to I didn't make it to the store on Tuesday and was distressed. Wednesday was math team (I did pretty well, but got home too late to do anything), and slept in on Thursday. So I wore green and black and said Happy Valentine's Day only in response to the handful of people who said it to me first.

So after school Thursday, a few of my friends came over and while they were playing DDR (okay, just Kate at the time), I whipped up a batch of these heart shaped goodies. Or squares, if you feel like being boring. We (okay, Kate supervised after failing to assemble a parchment triangle, which I also can't figure out) decorated them with a white chocolate drizzle, which made them pretty and festive.


Chocolate & Peanut Butter Crispy Hearts
makes 16 square bars in a 9x9 pan

1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup chocolate chips
3 cups crispy rice cereal
white chocolate, melted to drizzle (optional)

In a saucepan stir peanut butter, honey, and chocolate chips together over medium heat until melted and well blended, about five minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in cereal.
Press into a greased 9x9 pan pan, or into a shape on a greased baking sheet if cutting into shapes with cookie cutters. Let cool 1 hour and then cut into desired shape and drizzle with white chocolate, if using.

Hairspray and Popcorn

As unappetizing as that may sound, my parents and I (well, okay, just me) watched Hairspray Saturday night. My friend lent me the movie, and I wasn't planning on watching it until after finals, but I figured Saturday night relaxing was just as good a way to spend it as any.

Of course, because this is my family, we started watching the movie at 8:30 and we usually are in bed before ten, so my parents both fell asleep before the movie was even halfway through. I, though, can't seem to fall asleep during movies unless I'm extremely exhausted or sick, so I saw it all.

But if I was only watching a movie (which I did end up liking), then why am I bothering to even write about it?

Oh yeah, because of what happened the few hours before the movie. And part of the reason why instead of watching it at seven like I had hoped for, we watched it later.

I decided I'd finally make Heidi's spiced caramel corn. The one that said "hey, try me!" when I was flipping through the pages of Super Natural Cooking, even though I've never been a big fan of caramel anything. Something strange has been happening. Of course, I'd returned the book to the library weeks ago (maybe months now) and didn't have the recipe. So the internet came to rescue. Or at least Amazon letting me peek inside the book so I could read the recipe, not that David Lebovitz didn't have a perfectly respectable copy of it. I just wanted to read the recipe next to the mouthwatering picture. Though had Amazon not let me peek in the book, I'm sure I would have followed his.

That was the easy part. Then came the popping the popcorn. This is not my first time popping popcorn, and it really isn't all that hard. I just somehow managed to burn the teaspoon of oil to the bottom of the pan because I couldn't remember if I'd used oil last time or not, and if I had, I know it hadn't been much. Dad said not to bother, but I didn't heed his warning. And at the same time I was burning the oil to the pan, I burnt the nuts I was toasting in the oven that Dad was preheating for his lamb chops. Oops.

At that point, with a burnt smell overtaking the kitchen and replacing what should have been pleasant smells emanating from Dad making dinner, I announced that we were not having popcorn with the movie.

Somehow, without being harsh, Dad managed to motivate me. He wasn't upset about the pot and was sure after a soak it would be fine, and told me, "At least you tried to make it. That's more than most people your age would do." I had to make it. I just had to. But without ruining anything else or burning down the house. I did still have enough nuts left, and I hadn't used up any of the popcorn yet.


So I tried again. Except the nuts went into their own oven, not the one that now contained the lamb, and at 350F so I could keep a closer watch on them. Or maybe it was 325. And I set the time for three minutes intervals until they were ready.

Then it was time for dinner. But after dinner I yanked Alton Brown's book off the bookshelf, flipped through it for the microwave popcorn instructions I knew it contained and rummaged through the kitchen for a paper lunch bag. Thank goodness for 12th birthday parties. I found the stapler, and a couple minutes later I had popped corn! No burnt stuff and very few unpopped kernels. It was like magic. Or you know, science.

So then the recipe went without a hitch. Though Mom and Dad keep asking me if there's ginger in it, and while it tasted like it, I swear there isn't.

Spiced Caramel Corn
from Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson

I didn't follow her instructions for popping popcorn because of the incident with the pan mentioned above. Somehow I've made popcorn on the stove before, and it was almost as simple as in the microwave. But this didn't require waiting to get the pot clean. To make popcorn in the microwave, take a clean standard-size brown paper lunch bag. Put about 1/4 to 1/3 cup of kernels inside the bag. Fold the top of the bag 1/2" over twice to close and place two staples about 3 inches apart on the folds. Place in the microwave (as long as it has a turntable) making sure the staples will not touch the walls. Press microwave button or microwave on high for 2 to 3 minutes or until there are five seconds between pops.

I chose not to put the recipe up because she never replied to my e-mail. or if she did it got lust in the glut of e-mails I've been receiving from colleges. But David Lebowitz has a copy of the recipe up, and there's a link above. I used a mix of pistachios, pecans, almonds, hazelnuts, and walnuts - I think that's the only difference.

Pralines from New Orleans

The first praline shop I went into was disappointing. I'd read about it in a guidebook and it sounded like the description of fudge shops I'd been to where you can see them making the candy. They had samples, and they were tasty, but everything was boxed up, and while I saw a window to a room, it didn't seem to be used. But it was 5:30 at night.
We walked another block, and I saw another candy store. It had all sorts of candies, including pralines. I bought a box of ten pralinettes there because they looked even better.

The following day, in between bouts of pouring rain, and sometimes even during, we darted between shops in the French Quarter I found the New Orleans School of Cooking which I'd read about because they do cooking demonstration/classes every day. It was almost noon though, and the classes were 10-12:30. One of the things they always make though is pralines. Mom bought a praline for us to split, and its ingredients were the friendliest out of all the pralines we'd had: sugar, pecans, brown sugar, vanilla, butter, milk

I'd found my praline. I also found the New Orleans School of Cooking Cookbook with easy recipes. I'm guessing the praline recipe they teach is the one they use.


New Orleans School of Cooking Pralines
adapted from New Orleans School of Cooking Cookbook

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
6 Tablespoons butter
1 1/2 cups pecans
1/2 cup milk
1 Tablespoon vanilla

Mix together all ingredients in a heavy saucepan. Cook over figure out heat, stirring to keep bottom from scorching, until it registers as softball on a candy thermometer (238-240). Remove from heat and continue stirring until thick and cloudy. Spoon onto a buttered piece of parchment paper and let cool.