Peanut Butter Cup Bars

A lot of people love chocolate and peanut butter, but my friend Emily really loves it. Like, "possibly bordering on an unhealthy addiction" kind of love. She actually refers to Reese's peanut butter cups as "crack," and goes out of her way to avoid the stuff because if there's any of it around the house, she'll keep eating and eating until she wants to puke.

OK, I know what you're thinking -- lots of people love chocolate, and pretty much everyone has at some point or another eaten so much candy that they want to die. Trust me when I say that this is different. I've seen this woman demolish a one pound, jumbo-sized Reese's peanut butter cup in 30 seconds and then reach for more. 

If peanut butter and chocolate = Emily's crack, I'm her dealer. The last time I had leftover peanut butter-chocolate cream cheese frosting, I gave her the carton and watched her eat it by the spoonful. Any time I see a new peanut butter/chocolate dessert online, I bookmark it to make for her later. And yes, I'm the one who bought her the aforementioned one pound, jumbo-sized peanut butter cups. You can call me a heartless enabler, or...you could say that I'm a super awesome person who likes to see her friend happy.

These peanut butter cup bars are my latest attempt to make Emily happy. I missed her birthday a few weeks ago, and I felt bad just giving her a Marimekko oven mitt. So, I whipped these babies up and gave them to her when she came over for dinner tonight. They were super easy to make, and they tasted exactly like store bought peanut butter cups. Delicious! I just hope she didn't eat all of them on the way home...

Recipe can be found here, courtesy of The Brown Eyed Baker blog.

Dulce de Leche

So, Dan and I just got back from a week in Costa Rica. We're a little more tan, a little more relaxed, and approximately $1200 poorer. No, that's not how much our trip cost...it's the combined value of all the stuff that got stolen from us on the beach at Playa Grande, Montezuma. Yeah. Don't you just love petty thievery?

Anyway.

Other than the bag-snatching incident, it was a good trip. The weather was beautiful, the food was delicious, and we even managed to squeeze in an exhilarating zip-lining tour through the canopy before racing home a few days early to take care of bank account stuff. Even so, I was more than a little bummed when we got home (I could still be on the beach, you know!). Instead of wallowing, though, I decided to make something for my blog. That's dedication, y'all.

So, why dulce de leche? Why not? Also, I had a bunch of condensed milk leftover from way back when, and it needed to be consumed one way or the other. Besides, dulce de leche is delicious, and the process of making it seemed pretty straightforward. Easy enough for a Friday night, anyway.

In the end, I was too much of a wussy to go the usual route and boil a can of condensed milk for 3 hours. I mean...I was not prepared to hover over a pot in the kitchen for multiple hours, and then what if the can exploded and my kitchen caught fire? I really couldn't handle a destroyed kitchen after getting robbed. Fortunately though, I was able to find a recipe online that didn't involve can-boiling -- just good ol' oven + condensed milk in a pan + water bath action.

Since I've never made dulce de leche any other way, I can't comment on any difference in texture or taste, but I can tell you that it's delicious. Thick and creamy, delightfully sticky, sweet, caramel-y goodness. Yum.

Dulce de Leche

Ingredients:
- 1 14 oz can of condensed milk

Steps:
(1) Preheat oven to 425.
(2) Pour condensed milk into a round baking dish. (I used a Pyrex pie dish)
(3) Cover tightly with aluminum foil.
(4) Place dish in a larger baking pan, and fill pan with water until 2/3 of the pie dish is submerged.
(5) Stick whole thing in the oven for 60-90 minutes, checking every 30 minutes to see if mixture is burning, or if water needs refilling.
(6) Pull dish out of the oven, uncover, and whisk mixture until smooth. Let cool, then store in airtight bottle or jar.
(7) Enjoy by the spoonful, smeared on top of stuff, or baked into desserts.

Turkish Delights

The first time I heard about Turkish Delights was probably fourth grade, when I was reading "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." The White Witch gives Edmund Pevensie some Magical Turkish Delights, and he gets so hooked on the stuff that he betrays his siblings  later in the story just to get another taste. I remember reading that and thinking the fourth grade equivalent of "that must be some good sh*t!" 

The book didn't really describe how Turkish Delights looked or tasted, but I just always assumed that they were chocolate. I mean, a magical candy good enough to cut through bonds of blood loyalty? Must be chocolate. Maybe with some caramel and mousse cream  and candied nuts. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered, years later, that Turkish Delights are not, in fact, chocolate candies, but actually lemon and rose-water flavored jelly confections made from sugar and starch. Sigh. Another dream dashed. I don't even like jelly candies! 

My dad, however, does like them. And, he's apparently a fiend for Turkish Delights. A family friend gave my parents a few boxes of the stuff when they were in Europe a while back, and he demolished the candy in record time. So, no brainer, I decided to make some homemade Turkish Delights for Father's Day. I didn't have lemon extract or rose-water (I don't even begin to know where to buy rose-water), so I opted for raspberry flavoring instead. Not super traditional, but whatever -- tasted fine to me. And more importantly, my dad liked them. A lot. He ate half a plate after lunch today and looked pretty happy with the extra tin of candies I gave him to take home. He even asked me to give the recipe to my mom so that she could make them for him regularly in the future. Awesome. 

Happy Father's Day, Dad! Love you :)

Recipe can be found here, courtesy of the Sprinkle Bakes blog.

Turtle Cheesecake Truffles

I meant to make these for Dan's mom on Mother's Day, since turtle chocolate is one of her favorite candy treats. But, things got busy and I didn't have time to whip up a batch of truffles before our trip to Boston last weekend. I ended up buying her some Godiva chocolates, but I really wish I could have given her some of these turtle truffles. Maybe next year.

Word on the street is that grocery stores actually sell bags of crushed graham crackers. I don't know which stores these are, but I've never seen one that sold graham cracker crumbs. Every time I make cheese cake I have to crush my own frickin' crackers. FYI, crushing crackers with the bottom of a glass is way more effective than using a food processor.

I had two containers of marscapone cheese left over from the last time I made tiramisu, so I decided to use that for my cheesecake base instead of the usual Philadelphia cream cheese. I originally thought that three months in the fridge would have ruined the marscapone, but it was totally fine. That makes me a little worried about the amount of preservatives in the stuff, but...I'm not going to think about that right now.

Remember how much trouble I had coating those chocolate chip cookie dough truffles? No problems this time! Jade over at the Steamy Kitchen blog had the perfect method for dipping truffles: (1) make sure the melted chocolate is nice and liquid-y, (2) drop the cheesecake ball into the mixture and make sure it's well  covered, then (3) lift it out with a fork and let the excess chocolate run out through the tines of the fork. Voila!

Oh man, these truffles are so good. They actually taste like cheesecake! Which is already good in and of itself, but when you cover it in chocolate, drizzle it with caramel, and top it with nuts...amazing!

Recipe can be found here, courtesy of the Steamy Kitchen Blog.

For other delicious chocolate recipes, click here.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles

So I'm going to a wine and cheese party tomorrow night, and I've been put in charge of making something chocolate-y to go with the dessert wines. Something chocolate-y? So many things come to mind, but I've been dying to make these chocolate chip cookie dough truffles since I saw them posted on my friend Lucy's blog last summer. 

No matter how you look at it, these truffles fit the dessert specifications of the wine and cheese party perfectly. They're chocolate-y on the inside and out, they're just the right size for individual consumption, and they're going to be delicious with port. Plus, they are egg-less, so they can be eaten freely without the usual fear of salmonella poisoning associated with raw cookie dough.

I wonder if a lack of skill in cake-frosting translates at all in the truffle-coating department? Because I definitely stink at both. I had an embarassingly hard time getting these suckers fully coated in chocolate. It was pretty much impossible to drop the balls of dough inside the bowl of melted chocolate and pull out a fully covered, un-smudged truffle. My fingers kept getting dirty, and anywhere they came into contact with a truffle, the chocolate would be completely smudged. I finally had to spear each dough ball with a skewer, dip it 90% of the way into the melted chocolate, swirl once, slide the whole thing off the stick, then smear another glob of chocolate onto the remaining 10% of the ball for full coverage. Phew. Pain in my ass, for sure.

But, I'm pretty sure all my blood/sweat/tears were worth it. The truffles turned out pretty great! Not very attractive, but definitely delicious. Sinfully delicious, even. Super rich and chocolate-y, but not so over-the-top-sweet that you can't eat more than a couple in one sitting. I think they're going to be a hit at the party.

For the recipe, check out Lucy's blog.

For other amazing dessert ideas, check out Sweets for Saturday.

Chocolate Fudge

I was in Boston the last two weeks, visiting Dan. Unfortunately, while I'm done with school already, he's still got weeks and weeks of classes and final labs left, and a thesis project to work on. Which meant, of course, that I was left to my own devises at home all day while he did complicated engineering stuff at school. I was bored. A lot. Like, really really bored. So I made fudge.

As it turns out, fudge is not exactly a complicated thing to make, but it's also not easy to make good fudge. The ingredients are simple, and the steps are straightforward, but a lot of monitoring and stirring and temperature-measuring are required. 

I don't have a candy thermometer. Dan definitely doesn't have a candy thermometer. But you need one to make fudge. I was supposed to let the chocolate boil to 234 degrees, and then let it cool down to 130 degrees before adding the last bit of butter. Obviously I had no way of measuring that so I just stuck my hand above the saucepan and said "Yup, that feels pretty hot," then turned the heat down for 10 minutes and called it day. Sometimes I think I should have called this blog "Just Winging It In the Kitchen."

The fudge turned out to be rich and intensely chocolate-y, but...grainy. That's the only way to describe it. It's like the sugar didn't quite dissolve, and you could still feel all the individual grains of that undissolved sugar. Not exactly unpleasant, but definitely not what you'd expect in fudge. After talking to Dan's mother (who is my baking idol), I've come to the conclusion that this graininess is probably the result of not having cooked the ingredients to the right temperature. Apparently my super scientific hand-over-pan method was inadequate. This can only mean one thing: time to buy a candy thermometer. 

Recipe can be found at the Food Network's website, courtesy of Alton Brown.