Chocolate walnut brownies recipe

For Sunday lunch my husband Andrei baked chocolate walnut brownies from a book Sweet Melissa by Melissa Murphy. We fell in love with Melissa's pastry at her cafe Sweet Melissa in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. The recipe is simple yet brownies turn out to be delicious.

To bake chocolate walnut brownies we will need:
2 sticks of unsalted butter
4 ounces of high quality Belgian unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups of sugar
1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract
1 cup of all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2/3 cup of walnuts, chopped



Melt the butter and chocolate. Remove from the heat and keep warm. In a separate bowl beat together eggs, sugar, and vanilla on medium speed for about 2 minutes. Add the melted chocolate and mix. In yet another bowl whisk together the flour and salt.



Add the flour mixture to the chocolate mixture in 3 batches, mixing on low speed until just combined. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the nuts by hand.



Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter and flour a square shape cake pan. Pour the mixture into the pan. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until the sides begin to pull away from the pan. Remove to cool. When cool cut into 12 brownies and serve.

The secret of the brownies is in the high quality chocolate. A great place to buy such chocolate is Trader Joe's stores where it's sold in big bars for a very reasonable price.

Happy Halloween findings on Etsy

I just created a Happy Halloween collection featuring bright orange Etsy findings. It's amazing how many wonderful pieces are created and sold on Etsy every day! It took me some time to locate these favorites as there are so many great items to choose from! My children love Halloween. I suspect they love it more than Christmas. Although I doubt if it's possible! Ok! They love Halloween at least as much as they love Christmas! So here is my tribute to Halloween!


I featured the following great Etsians in the Happy Halloween treasury:
MyWayToSay, FleetingStillness, graphicland, SilkMagic, bumblestore, Oksa, VitalTemptation, TomBjornDesigns, Beautyland, CuffeShop, FineEmbroidery, katrinshine, KarisaGraphic, cushyadornments, CityCrochet, herbolution

My second Etsy Front Page treasury Chocolates

I just found out that one of my recent Etsy east treasuries Chocolates was featured on Etsy's front page. It's quite flattering to get such a huge exposure and to be picked by Etsy admins out of hundreds of other beautiful and stunning treasuries!

Dark chocolate cocoa roll cookie recipe from Hungary

Dark chocolate cocoa rolls are my husband's favorite! Growing up in Hungary he used to eat them every morning hot, fresh and covered with white powdered sugar. In Hungary they are called "kakaos csiga" or a cocoa snail. Small bakeries all over Budapest bake these and lots of other wonderful pastries every morning spreading an amazingly sweet and yummy aromas all over the city.

We are now living in the US and just to remember flavors of the childhood we started baking these sweet and simple cocoa rolls.

You will need standard ingredients for the dough such as flour, butter, yeast, milk, egg yolks, sugar and salt. For the filling you will need butter, cocoa powder and sugar.
These cocoa rolls are made from sweet yeast dough. After the dough is mixed up roll it out so that it is thin. Spread a mixture of cocoa, butter and sugar all over the layer of dough and roll it like a piece of paper. Cut the roll into small pieces approximately 1 inch. thick. Bake them until they are done. After approx. 20 minutes of baking smear rolls with a mixture of butter and milk to make them look shiny and yummy.