attack of the orange and chocolate craving.

So i woke up saturday morning with a craving for some orange and chunks of chocolate concoctions, and after going through my food network magazine and wanting to make the orange and chocolate bread pudding... and consulting with mama callimanis- and her shooting down the idea (she's not the biggest fan of bread pudding- and i had to take her word for it since i have never had the stuff myself) i went on an googling extravaganza. I ended up with four tabs open on my browser when i declared times up for recipe searching (mainly because the office dvd i was watching had ended and i had to get up anyway to put on a new disk... but that's another post all together.) One was Ina Garten's mini orange and chocolate chunk cake- which satisfied my need for orange and chocolate chunks, but didn't include the nifty new (really old school) way of infusing orange into deserts when i came across a fellow bloggers orange and olive oil cake- which i would have loved to add chocolate into but the crumby texture that olive oil adds to cakes was not going to satisfy the craving. And a tasty kitchen recipe for double chocolate and orange cookies which would allow me to use my nifty new cookie dough scoop which i got for making truffles... but after some internal debate the mini orange and chocolate chunk cake won over... with a slight change to the original recipe- I used the old school way of boiling and orange for around an hour- then letting it cool in the water that it was cooked in and then pureeing it in the mini Cuisinart. The dough used about half the orange mixture, and tasted a little bitter, so i added a bit more sugar- Ina's original recipe called for a orange syrup to be poured over the cakes then a ganache. The cakes turned out delicious - slightly dense, but satisfied the orange and chocolate chunk craving wonderfully.
Now what to do with the left over pureed orange? After going through my yia-yia's joy of cooking book, it hit me- marmalade. its so surprisingly easy! soaking the pureed orange in the water it was cooked in for an hour, the boiling it for an hour. After the boiling the book recipe wanted around 4 cups of sugar- I cut it down to 3/4 of a cup to make it equal proportions of orange puree and water, it was a little runny when it was still hot, but thickened up quite nicely as it cooled. However when tasting it on toast this morning- a bit more sugar probably would have made it even better. But the good news in all of this- i've been bitten by the jam/jelly/marmalade bug! eek.

Truffles the good the bad and the ugly.

I just wrote a long long post about my adventures in making truffles, how I went to William Senoma got offended by the prices but then realized one day perhaps I'll be able to purchase nice things, then went to Crate and Barrel and fell in love with about 50 thousand kitchen gadgets, so on and so on, then it went on to describe the process, my current obsession with Good Eats, and some more things- but then it got deleted. It was very sad, so now all I'm going to write is that I made truffles they were delicious and surprisingly easy to make all thanks to alton brown.

The End.

adventures of truffles

I finally made truffles this afternoon. They was something that I had been wanting to make for a while after seeing an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats where he focused on anything and everything chocolate... it was 30 minutes of drooling. Anyway, he made them look so easy to make, and since recently I've been craving coconut and chocolate for months now (and mini mounds bars just aren't cutting it anymore) I decided to take the plunge into candy confection making.
First came the hunt for the proper tools, since a melon baller is the one thing mama callimanis doesn't have in her drawers filled with kitchen gadgets, the quest was on. Alton recommended using either a melon baller or one of the mini ice cream scoops with the swishing swingy thing to loosen up the deliciousness in the scoop also known as a cookie dough scooper, off we went on a adventure to William Senoma... and after lusting after all the gadgets, and recovering from the fainting attack that I felt coming on from the prices (30 some-odd dollars for a cookie dough scooper)... we decided to hit up Crate and Barrel where once again I lusted after kitchen gadget after kitchen gadget, with much more realistic prices (12ish dollars for a cookie dough scoop), my truffle making dreams were becoming more and more tangible.
Saturday was going to be the day... but the comforting familiar rain made it difficult to do anything other than playing around with the newly installed internet on my blackberry. Waking up this Sunday I was committed to the cause, I was going to make truffles. And so I did.

The first part put me at ease, melting chocolate adding heavy cream and brandy or in my case metaxa ( you know me always have to throw some greek into the mix), the closest thing to brandy that we had in the liquor cabinet, then put in the fridge for an hour... the next part was a little more labor intensive, having to use the new scooper and put them back into the fridge to get nice and hard. After a hotdog lunch break, back to truffle making I went. Alton's strict instructions not to let the coating chocolate to get above 94 degrees got me a little overwhelmed but then I was what eva alton its chocolate if it goes above 104 degrees its still going to be delicious and tasty! Then I got to coating, leaving the tray of uncoated truffles in the fridge so they stayed cold, and taking them out as needed, which meant that I had to wash my hands quite frequently because I gave up on his instructions of using a spoon to lightly coat the trufs and used my fingers instead, then rolled the coated truffs in the truffle toppings of toasted walnuts, coco powder and cinnamon, and toasted coconut. Rolling the truffles in the toppings proved to be the most difficult part since my hands were coated in chocolate then the toppings got stuck to my fingers which made it hard to open the fridge to get out the remaining truffles but was a tasty treat indeed!
Finally the coating process was finished and back into the fridge they went.
Then came the dishes, the worst part of the truffle making experience, and since I don't want to disturb you with the amount of dishes that are required to make and then are disturbingly dirty after you finish making them, I'll leave you with a picture of them all nice and clean and drying.

Lemon Bars

I've been craving these for just about a week and tomorrow I will make them... SO EXCITED!!
Crust
4 1/2 oz unsalted butter
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
confectioners sugar for dusting
lemon topping
4 eggs lightly beaten
1 cup sugar
1/4 lemon juice
1 tbs lemon zest
1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder

preheat oven to 350 lightly grease a shallow baking pan.
cream the butter and sugar with electric beaters until pale and fluffy.
fold in the flour with a metal spoon.
press into the tin and bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown and firm.
beat the eggs and sugar with an electric beaters for 2 minutes or until light and flurry.
stir in the lemon juice and lemon zest.
sift together the flour and baking powder and gradually whisk into the egg mixture.
pour onto the base.
bake for 25 minutes or until just firm.
cool in the pan and dust with confectioners sugar.