Chocolate Tofu Cake. No Eggs. No Butter. Vegan Friendly.

“Secret Cake Club Perth is a group of bakers, food lovers, friends, strangers and general lovers of social gatherings, who come together once every 4-6 weeks to celebrate their love of baking. We set a theme, and up until the last moment, the location of the event is secret! We all show up to the secret location with our baked goods in hand, eat as much or as little cake as we feel like!”  (http://www.secretcakeclubperth.com/)

The last Secret Cake Club Perth for 2012 was held on Saturday 1 December and the theme was “Secret Ingredients” with a competition to see who could guess correctly the most secret ingredients. It was interesting to see what people came up with, there was so much creativity as well as trickery, as people tried their best to conceal what the secret ingredient in their cake was. So much so, that out of 13 cakes the highest score achieved for guessing the correct secret ingredient(s) in the cakes was 2 and Jacqui indicated that she had been very generous with her marking. I got a score of 1. 

It was quite hard trying to guess the secret ingredient(s) in the cakes. Often I could detect something but found it hard to articulate what the ingredient was, I couldn’t put a name to it. As the ingredients are mixed altogether into the cake batter, it’s easy to disguise the taste of something by combining it with a stronger flavour (eg: cocoa/chocolate). After a few cakes I was kind of drunk on sugar in that I could no longer concentrate properly or recognize flavours in the cakes. There are on average 12-15 cakes brought to each cake club event but I never eat every single cake, I generally taste a few and take a piece of the others home for later. One can only eat so much cake! But this time around, because it was a competition, I ate every (well almost) cake. 

 Cakes with number display - write down secret ingredient guess next to cake number.

My cake was No. 10

When I was trying to come up with a secret ingredient for my cake, a number of ideas ran through my head such as using different spices, adding alcohol or incorporating vegetables, but I felt that it would be to obvious. I wanted to use an ingredient that people wouldn’t normally think of adding to a cake.

In the end I settled on tofu as my secret ingredient. I had come across it being used in desserts before but I had never eaten tofu in a dessert or made a sweet dish with tofu before. I love eating tofu but it’s one of those ingredients that people either love or hate, with the haters perceiving it as bland and find the texture strange. I’ve grown up eating tofu in many savoury dishes – stir fried, deep fried, grilled and steamed, I’m all over it. Tofu is one of my favourite Asian ingredients. 

I googled for a tofu cake recipe and settled on a chocolate cake as I thought that the chocolate would be the best at masking the taste of tofu. What I also found out was that tofu can be used as a substitute for eggs in baking. I used an Eggless Chocolate Cake recipe from the Eggless Cooking blog. The mixture is enough to make a two layer cake but I ended up making a one layer cake and used the rest of the mixture to make muffins so that I could try some of the cake before cake club to make sure that it was ok. For the icing, I simply melted some chocolate and butter together, then dusted the top with a little cocoa powder.

The recipe for the cake contains a pretty standard list of chocolate cake ingredients - flour, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, sugar, vegetable oil, milk, coffee and vanilla extract, except that there are no eggs and butter with ½ a cup of pureed silken tofu added instead.

 

Puree tofu looks like yoghurt

When the cake finished baking I was surprised at how well it turned out. It rose nicely and the texture ticked all the boxes of what a cake should be - it had developed a nice crumb, it was moist and a bit dense which is what you want in a chocolate cake. It tasted fine and was very similar to other chocolate cakes I have eaten. But it’s quite strange to take an ingredient that you have grown up eating in certain ways and putting it in a different context. Knowing that it contained tofu and I was not making a stir fry with it, for some reason I couldn’t get it out of my head that there was something not quite right about the cake. My mind kept trying very hard to convince me that the cake kind of smelt weird, the texture was a bit off… having tofu in cake just feels kind of wrong…

 Chocolate Muffins

 Baked Chocolate Tofu Cake

Recipe - http://www.egglesscooking.com/2008/08/25/eggless-chocolate-cake/

Chocolate Tofu Cake

At Secret Cake Club Perth everyone commented on how good my chocolate cake tasted and no one detected what the secret ingredient was. Before revealing the secret ingredient, I asked everyone if there was anything that they felt was weird about the cake but everyone thought the cake was delicious, no one felt that there was anything odd about it. No one could tell that there was tofu in it. So I fooled everyone, including myself. A chocolate cake with tofu and no eggs or butter = a deliciously moist, rich tasting and dense chocolate cake. Another bonus is that it’s vegan friendly and would be quite healthy too.

The other cakes at Secret Cake Club had secret ingredients that I would never have thought of to include in a cake – cannellini beans, five spice powder, Corona (yes the beer), balsamic vinegar, chickpea in icing and special mention goes to this cupcake that contained 7 secret ingredients and multiple layers of flavours inside.

This cupcake was made by Dervla Delights – the cupcake batter contained matcha powder and Japanese mayonnaise which was dyed brown to fool us into thinking it was chocolate. There was jelly inside containing mango and lychee puree and a layer of caramel with coconut cream powder inside. An almond crumble was sprinkled over the top with nori and chilli powder. 

Although it is bursting with a parade of flavours and layers of textures, there was a unity in the cupcake which you don’t expect when you eat it all at once. This cupcake was on another level. 

Related Posts

• May Cake Club - Chocolate Bourbon Cake (Decadence)
• September Cake Club - Checkboard Cake (Retro Cake)

Chocolate Bourbon Cake with Cream Cheese Bourbon Vanilla Icing and Bourbon Cider Jelly

Me: I’m a food blogger.
Random Person: What’s the name of your blog?
Me: Food Endeavours of the Blue Apocalypse.
Random Person: That’s an interesting name.
Me: Do you know the metal band Tool?... My blog is named after a Tool song.
Random Person: You don’t look like someone that listens to metal.

This is a conversation that I often have with people.

“I don’t look like someone that listens to metal?!”

Well I used to have blue hair and wear black all the time, so I looked a bit like a Tool (sorry, pardon the pun) but I’ve grown out of it (I decided it was ok to wear colours and stop killing my hair) but my music tastes remain the same.

I have mixed feelings whenever this conversation occurs. On the one hand I think great, it’s kind of cool when you don’t conform to people’s expectations (ie: don’t judge a book by it’s cover). On the other hand I feel a little annoyed, it’s natural to form opinions on others based on how they look and I’m Asian. Being Asian comes with it a whole bunch of associations and stereotypes, which I am anything but….

See this sweet looking cake? It looks delicious, doesn't it? There is a lot of alcohol in it, namely bourbon.  It’s not such a sweet looking cake anymore is it?

How did bourbon get into the cake?

I was at Devilles Pad for a friend’s birthday, someone I had only known a few months. I offered to buy him a birthday drink and asked him want he wanted. He said surprise me.

At the bar I looked through the cocktail menu and the drink that stood out for me was Beasts of Bourbon. I thought that he looked like a bourbon drinker and I was right.  When I put the drink down in front of him, he instantly recognized it as Beasts of Bourbon and told me that he loved drinking bourbon. In fact, he had two duty free bottles of bourbon at home and he had been wondering what he should do with it all. We spent some time discussing what you could cook with bourbon, notably I told him about an amazing 6 hour bourbon beef short ribs that I had at The Classroom Bar which is something that I will attempt to make at some point. So I had bourbon on my mind that weekend as I was brainstorming a cake for the May Clandestine Cake Club in Perth with ‘decadence’ as the theme.

Alcohol is often used in cakes – rum, amaretto, brandy, Guinness…so why not bourbon. I like drinking bourbon. I suspect that I picked this up from going to many metal gigs and ordering what everyone else ordered “bourbon and coke” which appears to be the drink of choice and acquired a taste for it.

Someone commented on a photo of the cake that without the cream icing it would look like a cake version of bourbon and coke with the ice cubes on top. I’m sure that I could bake such a cake one day and incorporate some coca-cola into the cake batter. It would be a bogans delight. Bourbon and coke has always been known as the drink of bogans/metalheads and I have always wondered why. A search on google hasn’t yield anything but what I have found out about whiskey in general can be summed up as this - whiskey is a so-called man’s drink, it has a reputation as a hard liquor. It always has and still carries with it an association of manliness, it has a prominent place in situations of males drinking together and bonding. Scotch takes on an almost elite status in the eyes of many, representing a dignified drink, it’s almost like the colour of gold. It’s one to have on the rocks while having intelligent conversations about politics, economics and the like. Scotch is that drink that all your male friends mature into. Bourbon on the other hand, isn’t considered as classy. Bourbon is cheaper and its affordability and dark tone lends itself to a younger crowd, the working class and notorious associations with rock’n’roll. My friend Riche suggested that maybe it had something to do with where bourbon is produced, the majority is made in Kentucky which evokes images of rebellion, the wild west, being an outlier of society which is I guess how bogans/metalheads must feel sometimes.

So I couldn’t think of anything more decadent than making a cake with one of my favourite spirits, especially when it’s something that people would least expect. To be decadent is to be self-indulgent and I took it to the edge. My cake had a triple hit of bourbon in it. It was made up of a chocolate bourbon cake (1 cup bourbon), cream cheese bourbon vanilla icing (4 tablespoons of bourbon) and bourbon cider jelly (1 shot of bourbon and 500ml cider).

I wanted to add an element to the top of the cake so I decided to use apple as it’s a component of a Beasts of Bourbon cocktail. I settled on making jelly with bourbon and cider. I’m not sure if you are supposed to put jelly on a cake but I was experimenting, and I liked how the jelly wobbled on the cake every time I moved it. I also found out that as I drove over to cake club most of the jelly slide off the cake…opps. It’s like trying to drive with soapy hands, the jelly is quite slippery. If anyone has any ideas on how to make jelly stay on top of a cake, I would love to know. The apple cider jelly went really well with the chocolate bourbon cake. Everyone who tried the cake commented on how well the flavour combination of chocolate, apple and bourbon worked together.

 Cider Jelly

When I brought the cake to the Clandestine Cake Club and opened the lid of the container it had been stored in, the smell of the alcohol permeated through the air. I even got a bit drunk making it, it was all quality control of course as I tested the cake batter before it went in the oven, added in the bourbon bit by bit as I was mixing the icing until I got the desired taste and ate some (well maybe a lot of) jelly to make sure it had set properly. I was rushing around that Sunday afternoon trying to finish off the cake and when I stood up at one point I got a bit of a head rush. Consuming quite a bit alcohol and sugar on a Sunday afternoon probably isn’t a good thing. This cake should probably come with some sort of advisory warning, for example: Do not eat cake and then head bang to metal music, it may cause dizziness, feelings of nausea. 

Clandestine Cake Club Perth held on Sunday 20 May 2012 with 6 cakes on offer – caispiroska cake, 16 layer chocolate crepe cake, exploding chocolate gateau, flourless chocolate coffee cake with crumble on top, a white and dark chocolate patty cake, and my chocolate bourbon cake with apple cider jelly on top.

Chocolate Bourbon Cake with Cream Cheese Bourbon Vanilla Icing and Bourbon Cider Jelly

(Original idea by Blue Apocalypse adapting a cake from a Nigella recipe and using this recipe as a guide for making cider jelly)

FYI – I used Marker's Mark Bourbon.

Chocolate Bourbon Cake

Ingredients

•    250ml bourbon
•    250g butter, cut into 2-3cm cubes
•    75g cocoa powder
•    400g caster sugar
•    1 x 142ml pot sour cream
•    2 eggs
•    1 tablespoon vanilla extract
•    275g plain flour
•    2 ½ teaspoons baking soda
•    1 teaspoon salt

Chocolate Bourbon Cake batter

Method

Preheat oven to 180C and line a 20cm round baking tin with greaseproof paper.
Add the bourbon and butter into a small saucepan and heat until the butter has melted, then whisk in the cocoa powder until the mixture is smooth. Set aside for a few minutes to cool slightly.

Shift the flour, baking soda and salt together in a bowl.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together until just combined, then add in sour cream and vanilla and beat until well combined. Slowly pour the bourbon-chocolate mixture into the egg mixture and use a whisk to mix in and incorporate together. Add in the flour into the chocolate mixture and whisk to combine.

Blend the mixture well together with a whisk but don’t overbeat. You want the ingredients to be combined but you don’t want a light airy mass as the cake should have a dense texture.

Pour batter into cake tin and bake for 45 minutes at 180C and then turn the temperature down to 170C and bake for another 10 minutes.

Leave the cake to cool completely in the cake tin as it is quite a damp cake and will also sink a little in the middle.

Cream cheese bourbon icing

Ingredients

•    300g cream cheese (leave out to soften at room temperature)
•    150g icing sugar
•    125ml cream (whipping cream)
•    4 tablespoons bourbon
•    1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and then beat together.

Add the cream and beat until it has a spreadable consistency. 

 Icing Bourbon Cake

Bourbon and Cider Jelly

Ingredients

•    100g caster sugar
•    100ml water
•    6 sheets gelatin leaves
•    1 shot of bourbon
•    500ml cider (I used Custard Apple Cider)

Method

Put the sugar and water in a small saucepan and cook, stirring over a low heat until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat.

Put the gelatin leaves in a bowl and cover with cold water. Leave the gelatin to soften in the water for a few minutes. Drain and squeeze excess water from gelatine. Add the gelatin into the sugar mixture and stir to dissolve.

Pour the cider into the sugar-gelatine mixture with one hand and use a whisk to combine the mixture with the other hand. Add in a shot of bourbon and whisk to combine.
Pour the bourbon cider jelly mixture into a container (I lined a baking tin with foil). Refrigerate over night or at least 4-5 hours to set.

Put together the Bourbon Cake

Cut the top of the cake to make level. Ice the cake. Cut up the jelly into cubes and put over the top.

The Ultimate Cookie – Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookie with Dulce de Leche

I always find buying birthday presents hard, especially for friends who generally have everything they need and/or are renting/living in a small apartment so they are trying not to hoard too much stuff. So edible/drinkable presents are the way to go, they are even better if you make them yourself.

Growing up in a non-English speaking family, my first exposure to English was through watching TV, so I learnt to speak English from shows like Play School and Sesame Street. I have many memories of trying to imitate the Cookie Monster and shouting “Me want cookie!", "Me eat cookie!", and "Om nom nom nom" when I was young.

I think cookies make good gifts, everyone loves cookies right? I recently baked cookies as a birthday present for my friend Adam. To put things into perspective, last year it was Adam’s 30th and a group of us chipped in to buy him a Fender guitar. How do you top that? Thankfully, 31 is not one of those special birthdays, so there was no pressure surrounding present giving this time.

But being a food blogger, people expect more from you, so there is always a little bit of pressure to cook amazing things all the time. So I knew that if I was going to bake cookies for a birthday present, it wouldn't be an ordinary cookie, it would be an ultimate cookie. The cookie would contain the best things in life, so I settled on peanut butter and chocolate, it’s a winning combination. But that wasn’t enough, I had to up the ante, so I incorporated some caramel in the form of Dulce de Leche.

Peanut Butter + Dark Chocolate Chips + Dulce de Leche = Ultimate Cookie

I could not think of anything else to add to this cookie to make it better. This was it. This would be the ultimate cookie.

When I made the Dulce de Leche, I wasn’t sure how I was going to incorporate it into the cookie. There was a number of possibilities – using it as a spread to sandwich the cookies together, mix it into the cookie dough along with the peanut butter or drizzle some on top.

In the end I decided to stuff the cookie dough with Dulce de Leche. In my head, I had visions of biting into the cookie and the Dulce de Leche would ooze out. The baked cookie didn’t have the effect I was hoping for, instead the Dulce de Leche melts into the cookie so the middle isn't really gooey but is incredibly soft and moist. 

(you can see in this photo a bit of the melted Dulce de Leche in the middle of the cookie)

I like the composition of this cookie and how every bite gives you a different experience. First bite gives you a nice salty peanut buttery hit, the choc chips are scattered throughout so you score a choc chip with some bites but not all, midway through you get the combination of peanut butter and Dulche de Leche and if you are lucky, you may hit the trifecta of peanut butter, dark chocolate and caramel in one bite!

Dulce de Leche

A popular way of making Dulce de Leche is to put a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of boiling water and simmer for a few hours. This boiling a can method doesn’t sit well with me, surely something will go wrong like the can will explode or something?! But I came across a method for Dulce de Leche from David Lebovitz which takes less time and appears to be fail proof.

To make Dulce de Leche, preheat the oven to 220° C. Pour one can of sweetened condensed milk into a glass pie plate or shallow baking dish (I used my lunchbox sized glass Pyrex container). Stir in a few flecks of sea salt (I actually forgot to do this at the beginning so I stirred in some salt at the end instead). 

Set the container within a larger pan (I used an 8X8inch baking pan) and add hot water until it reaches halfway up the side of the pie plate.

Cover the pan snugly with aluminum foil and bake for 1 to 1¼ hours. (Check a few times during baking and add more water to the roasting pan as necessary, I checked it and added more water only once at the 45 minute mark).

Once the Dulce de Leche is nicely browned and caramelized, remove from the oven. Whisk (use a fork) until smooth and let cool. (When it comes out of the oven it will look like baked custard and be a bit lumpy when you whisk it, but keep whisking and it will have a smooth consistency.)

Store in the refrigerator until ready to serve. Warm gently in a warm water bath or microwave oven before using.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Ingredients

•    125g butter, room temperature/softened
•    120g light brown sugar
•    50g caster sugar
•    1 large egg, room temperature
•    1 teaspoon vanilla extract
•    200g salted peanut butter (I used Kraft smooth peanut butter)
•    1 ½ cups flour
•    1/2 teaspoon baking soda
•    1/4 teaspoon salt
•    ½ cup dark chocolate chips

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C and line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper.

Beat the butter, brown and caster sugar until smooth. Beat in the egg and vanilla until well blended (remember to scrape down the sides of the bowl while beating).

Then beat in the peanut butter.

In a separate bowl, whisk or sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the peanut butter mixture and stir with spatula until combined.

Then add in the chocolate chips and mix thoroughly into the dough.

To make the ultimate cookie.

Scoop up a heaped tablespoon of the dough into the palm of your hand and flatten a bit. Add a teaspoon of Dulce de Leche into the middle, fold the edges of the dough over to encase. Gently roll the dough between your hands to smooth and form a ball and then flatten. If the dough is too soft to form balls, can chill in the fridge for 30-60 minutes to firm up.

Place each cookie dough on the baking sheets about 2-3 cms apart.

Bake the cookies for about 15 minutes, rotating the baking sheets midway during cooking, until they are light-golden brown and the edges start to darken. Remove from oven and leave the cookies on the baking tray for 10 minutes before removing to cool completely. The cookies will appear quite soft when they come out of the oven but will continue to cook and harden with the residual heat from the baking trays.

Chocolate Éclair Cake – March Sweet Adventures Blog Hop: Layers

The Sweet Adventures Blog Hop this month is hosted by fellow Perth blogger The Capers of the Kitchen Crusader and the theme is layered desserts. 

My contribution is a chocolate éclair cake (its got 12 layers!)

I came across a recipe for chocolate eclair cake a while ago, it’s basically a type of ice box (aka refrigerator) cake made up of vanilla pudding which is lightened with whipped cream, layered between graham crackers and topped with a chocolate glaze. After refrigeration, this cake promises to taste just like a chocolate éclair as the graham crackers have absorbed moisture from the cream and softened, resembling the choux pastry found in an eclair. I love eating chocolate eclairs and the thought of a short cut way of making it where I wouldn’t have to mess around with choux pastry was an exciting prospect, but would it deliver what it promised? I wanted to find out.

Ice box cakes are an old school dessert that have been around since the 1930s, it was one of those back-of-the-box recipes by companies trying to promote their products to housewives by showing them how to make convenient party fare. The defining recipe comes from an American brand of cookie, Nabisco Chocolate Wafers which suggested stacking the wafers to form a log with whipped cream cementing them together and refrigerating overnight for a glorious looking chocolate cake that is deceptively simple to make. In Australia we have our own version made with Arnotts Chocolate Ripple biscuits.

The chocolate éclair cake is a bit of a spin-off containing graham crackers and a bunch of instant products - vanilla pudding, whipping cream and chocolate frosting. Graham crackers are an ingredient that I often come across in American dessert recipes where some sort of biscuit base is required. However, graham crackers are not readily available in Australia and I usually use digestive biscuits as a substitute but I don’t know if they would work the same way for this dessert. Luckily I came across some graham crackers at an Asian supermarket (Dragon Supermarket on William Street). You are also able to order graham crackers online at USA Foods. 

I’ve never used any box mix/instant product for baking before and I don’t intend to…ever. Even with box mixes, you are still required to add in other ingredients (some liquid, eggs), so I would rather make the whole thing from scratch so I know exactly what will be in it and I can use the best ingredients. For the chocolate éclair cake I made my own vanilla pudding, whipped my own cream and made a chocolate glaze.

(Supporting local and organic producers – using organic Margaret River milk 
and Bannister Downs cream)

I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical at first but was pleasantly surprised with the end result, it really did taste like a chocolate éclair. Although there is a difference in that you don’t get that crisp choux pastry encompassing the cream as the graham crackers have softened to a point that they literally melt in your mouth. But it’s delicious and that’s what counts. Picking apart the soft graham crackers, it has a flakey texture like choux pastry and provides a nice light layer in between the creamy vanilla pudding.

This chocolate eclair cake is really easy to put together if you follow the original recipe with all the instant products, but I made it a little harder by making the other components from scratch. I think it’s worth spending that extra time and effort as the result is superior.

Give this chocolate éclair ice box cake a go and put it into the category of cakes that you won’t be able to stop eating. It was my first go at an ice box cake and it definitely won’t be my last. Ice box cakes are a no bake dessert that can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be and the possibilities are endless – you could try using different types of biscuits, experiment with have different types of cream fillings and layer it with other things as well such as fruit or nuts. It can also be made and refrigerated up to 2 days in advance.

Chocolate Éclair Cake
(recipe adapted from allrecipes.com)

Ingredients
•    Graham crackers (the amount of crackers depends on how many layers you want, I used around ~400g)
•    Chocolate glaze (150g dark chocolate plus 2 tablespoons of butter)
•    600ml cream (for whipping)

Vanilla pudding (adapted from Joy of Baking)
•    3 1/2 cups full cream milk
•    1/3 cup plus 1/4 cup caster sugar
•    1/4 cup corn flour
•    1/8 teaspoon salt
•    2 large eggs
•    1 large egg yolk
•    2 teaspoons pure vanilla bean paste or pure vanilla extract
•    2 tablespoons unsalted butter

(Note: as a shortcut you can use instant vanilla pudding, can of whipped cream and premade chocolate frosting)

Method

To make vanilla pudding.

In a large heatproof bowl whisk together 1/3 cup sugar, cornflour, salt, eggs, and egg yolk. Whisk in 1/2 cup of the milk. Set aside. Rinse a medium-sized heavy saucepan with cold water and then shake out the excess water (this helps to prevents the milk from scorching). Add into the saucepan the remaining 3 cups of milk, along with the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar and bring just to a boil. Remove from heat and gradually pour the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly, until the mixture is smooth. Transfer the pudding mixture to a clean, large heavy bottomed saucepan and place over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens to the consistency of mayonnaise (about 3-5 minutes). Remove from heat and whisk in the butter and vanilla extract. If necessary, pour through the strainer to remove any lumps that may have formed during cooking. Transfer pudding to a large bowl and place a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate until completely chilled, about 2-3 hours.

(Vanilla Pudding)

Pour the cream into a large bowl and beat it until it forms whipped cream.

Using a spatula, gently fold in half of the whipped cream into the cooled pudding, then fold in the remaining whipped cream until combined.

Line a 8 inch x 8 inch baking pan with foil. Cover the bottom of the pan with enough graham crackers, breaking as needed to fit in the pan. Spread over the top of the crackers some of the pudding/cream mixture, smoothing the top with a spatula (the layers of cream can be as thin or thick as you want). Repeat with the remaining pudding/cream and crackers, the last layer should be crackers. Refrigerate until ready to glaze.

You can have as many layers of cream and crackers as you want – the recipe that I got this idea for chocolate éclair cake from had three layers of graham crackers and two thick layers of cream. I decided to do as many layers as I could – 6 layers of graham crackers and 5 layers of cream.

In a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, melt the chocolate and butter. Cool the chocolate until barely warm/room temperature but still liquid and then spread evenly over the top cracker layer. Refrigerate the cake for 6-24 hours.

Related post - My entry for January's Sweet Adventures Blog Hop: Death by Chocolate - Oreo Cookies

Oreo Cookies

The Sweet Adventures Blog Hop is the brainchild of Aussie bloggers Delicieux, The Hungry Australian, Dining With a Stud, The Capers of the Kitchen Crusader and 84th & 3rd. Every month there is a dessert theme for bloggers to participate in and this month is ‘Death by Chocolate’ hosted by The Hungry Australian.

To be honest, I generally bake relatively simple things. I think that one of the most satisfying things about baking is that you don’t have to outdo yourself to get a good outcome. A fancy chocolate dessert that has multiple layers and uses a number of different textures to construct it from a fine dining restaurant is always a real treat, but a good old fashioned brownie can also hit the spot. When chocolate came up as the Sweet Blog Hop Adventures theme for this month, the first couple of chocolate desserts that came across my mind and I’m sure crossed everyone’s mind were chocolate cake, cupcakes, brownies, mousse, pudding, slice... easy to make chocolate treats but deliciously satisfying, comforting foods.

Two weekends ago, The Kitchen Crusader and I made the trip down to Margaret River to visit our friend Nadia who works at Gabriel Chocolate. We stayed with Nadia and had access to her impressive selection of chocolate/dessert books. 

Flicking through her books to get some ideas, there were a lot of fancy things that I could have made but when I saw the recipe for Almost Oreos, I was sold. Oreos are a cookie that I love eating, I have never made them before and the recipe for it in Green & Black’s Organic Ultimate Chocolate Recipes: The New Collection looked really good and not too hard to bake so I wanted to try it. Oreos make a good after dinner treat and you can never seem to eat too many of them. So this is my blog post for the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop – "Death By Chocolate" this month.

Summer dessert – Vanilla ice cream with homemade Oreos crumbled over the top.

Homemade Oreos are great, everyone should try making them as it’s more chocolately and not as sweet, and instead of the sweet icing like cream filling, you get a lovely white ganache.

Oreos

(Recipe adapted from - Green & Black’s Organic Ultimate Chocolate Recipes: The New Collection)

Makes about 20

Ingredients

For the cookie dough

•    140g plain flour
•    ½ teaspoon salt
•    1 tablespoon cocoa powder
•    75g caster sugar
•    25g icing sugar
•    25g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
•    100g butter, softened/room temperature
•    1 large egg yolk
•    ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
•    Optional  - to give the Oreos an extra chocolate hit, I ground some cocoa nibs that I bought from Gabriel Chocolate with a mortar and pestle and added them into the mix.

 Ground Cocoa Nibs

For the ganache filling
•    125g white chocolate, broken into pieces
•    40ml crème fraiche

Method

Sift together the flour, salt and cocoa powder in a bowl (add in ground cocoa nibs if using). Melt the dark chocolate in a heatproof bowl of barely simmering water, making sure the bowl does not touch the water. Set aside to cool.

Using an electric beater, cream together the butter, caster sugar and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg yolk, vanilla extract and melted chocolate. Beat well to incorporate all the ingredients. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add in the dry ingredients and mix on a slow speed until a dough forms.

Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface and shape into a cylinder shape about 15cm long. Roll the cylinder on the work surface to even it out and then wrap it in cling film and refrigerate for at least 1.5 hours. 

Tips: To get an even cylinder shape for the cookie dough - make sure that you twist the cling film tightly and take it out of the fridge at regular intervals (every half hour or so) and roll it on a table so that it doesn’t take on a flatten side where it has been resting.
 

When the dough has rested sufficiently (it should be quite hard), preheat oven to 180C and line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper.

Remove the dough from the fridge, unwrap it and place it on a board. Using a sharp knife, slice the cylinder into thin rounds (2.5mm). Place the rounds on the baking sheet and bake for 11 minutes. Once cooked, leave to cool on the sheets. You should get around 40 rounds from the dough.

I have a small oven which can only fit one baking tray at a time, so I sliced enough rounds of the dough to fill one tray and refrigerated the dough while I baked that tray. Then I would take out the dough and slice enough to fill another tray and bake. I refrigerated the dough between baking the trays so that the dough keeps its shape (ps. Perth it's quite hot at the moment, we have a week coming up of 37-40 degrees so if your kitchen isn’t as warm as mine it would not be necessary to refrigerate the dough all the time).

While the cookies are cooling, make the ganache filling. Melt the white chocolate in a heatproof bowl of barely simmering water. Take the bowl off the heat and leave to slightly cool for 2-3 minutes, then stir in and incorporate the crème fraiche. Allow to cool for around 15 minutes at room temperature.

Melting the white chocolate

Stirring in the crème fraiche into the melted white chocolate

Turn half the cookies upside down and put a teaspoon of ganache in the center of each. Top with the remaining cookies and press gently together so that the ganache spreads until you can see it around the sides. Put the assembled cookies on a tray and refrigerate for around 30 minutes to allow the ganache to set. Then store the Oreos in the fridge in a sealed container.

Lessons learned: You shouldn’t put the cookies on top of each other to set as the weight of the ones on top squash the bottom ones which can result in the ganache spilling out over the sides. …opps…