Saturday, November 19, 2005

All About Chocolates! (Chocolate Zucchini Cake & Double Choc Mint Cookies)

What a boring Saturday evening. It's raining cats & dogs outside. Seriously, what a heavy downpour. It's as if somebody is pouring buckets of water, one after another. *Sigh* Looks like I won't be able to go anywhere for a while. So what's the cure for a miserable Saturday evening? Chocolates, of course!

So I set about baking not one, but two chocolate treats, just in case I need a double-dose to douse my dampening moods. Here's what I picked:
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Chocolate & Zucchini Cake (courtesy of none other than Clotilde of "Chocolate of Zucchini")
Ah, what an ingenious combination. I love chocolates and zucchini is one of my favourite vege (seriously!). In addiditon to being "not really fattening", I changed the recipe to include some of my favouite ingredients such as demerara sugar, organic molasses sugar, Japanese cucumber (much more economical than zucchini at this point of time) and semi-sweet Belgian chocolate chunks.
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The end result? Maybe it's due to the changes that I made to the recipe but I would say that this is an "adult" cake. Being slightly bitter-sweet, my nephew took one bite of it and complained that it was too bitter. But I think I like it this way. And I think the cake is complex in a way. The taste takes a while to develope and it grows on you. I reckon that not everyone would agree to the taste of this cake; not me though.

Double Chocolate Chip Mint Cookies
I wanted to use my new EXOPAT baking mat and I also wanted to try this particular recipe for crunchy chocolate chip cookies. I thought since I was at it, why not make it a double chocolate chip & mint cookies, in honour of my new-found favourite chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, the thing that usually happens when I bake cookies happened again. The cookies browned too fast (either that or my oven temperature was way off) resulting in some burnt bits. One minute, the was a delicious aroma coming out from my kitchen and the next, whiffs of burnt food interlaced with the delicious aroma! Luckily, I managed to savage the cookies although it meant performing some "plastic surgery" (i.e., scrapping off the burnt bits at the bottom). And the cookies? They were dark, chocolatey, minty and crunchy. Nice but not quite close to my favourite though...
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Oh well, at least my Saturday evening is turning to be not quite as dreary as I feared it would be.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

viv, all I can say is : Try again. I did the same and only came out the ideal one for sale after a couple of trial n error. even when I could bake it right, I added one or 2 ingredients in to perfect the recipe. the most impt thing is to work on a basic chocolate chip cookie recipe. Once you get the oven temp/baking time right, then start to modify the ingredients. :)