But fear not!  I leave you with one last baking adventure.

I’ve always wanted to make a molten chocolate cake and over a recent long weekend, I decided to give it a shot.  But I didn’t know where to start.  I did know that I wanted deep dark chocolate flavor that knocked me off my feet.  I also wanted make a bunch ahead of time and stick them, unbaked, in my freezer for future snacking.  With some digging around in various cookbooks and food websites, I cobbled together a recipe that worked out beautifully.

One of the things I really like about this recipe is how easily you can change the flavoring.  For example, if you like chocolate and orange, replace the vanilla with a teaspoon of orange extract and one teaspoon of finely grated orange peel.  Peppermint or coconut?  Use a teaspoon of peppermint or coconut extract.

This particular one came out a bit runnier than I wanted which is why it looks a little unappetizing, but the ones I later baked turned out perfectly.  I wish I’d gotten a picture of those before I gobbled them up.

Molten Chocolate Cake

1 cup unsalted butter, plus more to butter the molds
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
4 eggs
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 TBS all-purpose flour
1 TBS cocoa powder, plus more for dusting

1. In the top of a double boiler set over simmering water, heat the butter and chocolate together until the chocolate is almost completely melted. In the meantime, beat together at high speed the eggs, yolks, sugar, salt and vanilla until tripled in volume and is light and thick.
2. Whisk together the melted chocolate and butter; it should be warm. Pour in the egg mixture, then quickly beat in the flour and cocoa powder, just until combined.
3. Generously butter and dust with cocoa powder eight 6-oz ramekins.  Tap out the excess cocoa.   Divide the batter among the ramekins.
4. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. This is where that oven thermometer I keep harping about comes in handy!  Bake the ramekins on a baking sheet for 8 to 10 minutes; the center will jiggle a bit when gently shaken, but the sides will be set.  If you have a convection oven, start checking on them at the 8 minute mark.
5. Invert each ramekin onto a plate and let sit for a minute. Unmold by lifting up one side of the ramekin; the cake will fall out onto the plate. Serve immediately.

If you want to freeze the cakes, wrap tightly, first in plastic, then foil after step three.  Freeze for up to a month.  There’s no need to let it thaw out before baking; just make sure your oven is fully heated before you continue with step 4 and bake for an additional 3-5 minutes.  If you have a convection oven, you’ll want to start checking the cakes at the 10 minute mark.

I’m going to miss sharing all my adventures (and failures) with you.  If not for this website, I might not have tried baking things like Gorilla Bread or Tres Leches Cupcakes or participated in my first holiday cookie swap.  I hope you’ve gotten as much pleasure from reading my posts as I have had in writing them.  Happy baking, y’all!

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The short answer: granulated sugar mixed with a small amount of molasses.  As they get blended together, the sugar becomes aerated and kind of fluffy. Unfortunately, this also means there’s not as much brown sugar in a measuring cup as you think; it needs to be packed tightly into the cup because you’re measuring by volume, not weight.   Unless the recipe you’re using calls for measuring out your ingredients by weight, which is actually much more accurate.  But that’s fodder for another time.

So here’s how to properly measure brown sugar:

See how it’s all mounded?  It looks like a ton of brown sugar, doesn’t it?

Here I’m measuring out one cup of dark brown sugar and using the ½ cup measure to smoosh it down.   If the packed sugar isn’t level with the top of the cup, add or subtract the appropriate amount to make it level.  Despite what looked like a massive amount of sugar I started with, I actually had to add more after I took the above picture.

Packed brown sugar

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In his freezer, I found some frozen blueberries and thought, “Hmm, BFF likes blueberries, and those are full of antioxidants and other healthy crap.  I think I’ll make blueberry turnovers!”

With BFF watching, I dumped half a bag of frozen blueberries in a saucepan with about 1/3 cup of sugar and brought both to a boil, then turned the heat down to let it simmer for roughly 10-15 minutes or until the berries have broken down a little before letting it cool completely.  In the meantime, I made BFF light his oven for me (because his is from the mid-late 1920s and I’m too scared about blowing up his apartment to do it myself) and preheated it to 350F.  I cut the well-chilled puff pastry into four pieces and spooned about ¼ cup of the blueberries onto each piece of pastry.  Then I brought one corner of the pastry to the opposite corner to form a triangle, brushed the edges with a bit of beaten egg, and pressed to seal all the edges.   Slid it on a parchment-lined baking sheet and baked for about 10-15 minutes or until the pastry puffed up and turned golden.

The BFF exhibited enough patience to wait a whole five minutes before taking a bite and proclaiming it delicious.  He was also amazed at how simple it was.  And if you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ll also know all about how Feisty Foodie herself uses prepared puff pastry to make all kinds of yummies without going through the laborious task of making homemade puff pastry.  Myself, I think it’s a miracle product!

The best part of making an easy blueberry turnover for my friend is not having to do the dishes afterward!

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After my week of gluttony, I moved on to Southern California.  To thank my best friend for letting me stay with him in his apartment, I cooked a few meals as well as a snack.

What kind of snack, you say?  Glad you asked!  I made him Easy Cheesy Cheese Sticks!

I wanted to keep this snack as simple as possible because BFF is a simple kind of guy with simple taste.   He doesn’t care about truffles or 40 year-old balsamic vinegar, though he wouldn’t say no to them either.  So the first thing I did was buy some puff pastry and shredded Parmigiano cheese.

I lined a baking sheet with parchment and laid out one sheet of the puff pastry on a cutting board. I cut the sheet into ½-inch strips. This is easy to do with a rotary cutter like the ones the local pizza joint uses. BFF doesn’t own one  so I used his sharpest paring knife instead. Don’t separate the strips just yet.

Brush with beaten egg, press on the shredded parm, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then gently pull the strips apart. Bring the ends of each strip together and twist the whole thing so that they’re half the original length. If you don’t want to do the twisty thing, leave them flat and cut the strips in half cross-wise.  Sprinkle with more cheese if you like.

Bake at 375F (you preheated the oven, right?) for about 15-20 minutes or until the sticks are golden brown and puffed.

The BFF pronounced these tasty, not too cheesy (though I’m not sure this is a good thing), light and flaky.  He might have gently pushed me out of the way for more too.

If you want to it to be a little more fancy, you can incorporate slivers of, say, salami or prosciutto into the twists, or use shredded Gruyere or cheddar or any other semi-hard to hard cheese that tickles your fancy.  I’ll even avoid judging you for using the grated cheese in the green can!

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I still had issues getting the tube to open in a timely manner–they really need to make those things easier for ding dongs like me–but at least I was prepared for the boom of the expanding canister.  I prepared it according to Pillsbury’s recipe, which is incredibly easy.

Cut each biscuit into quarters

Coat each quarter in cinnamon sugar.  One of the reviewers s on Pillsbury’s website mentioned that s/he dips each piece of dough in butter before coating with the sugar cinnamon.  Cinnamon + sugar x extra butter = happy Blind Baker.

Pour brown sugar and butter mixture over the whole thing.  Next time, I’ll increase the butter.  See math equation above.

Look how it turned out!  Beautiful, brown, and yummy!  Even so, I think there are a lot of improvements that can be made and I’m happy to make another batch of monkey bread to test out my ideas.  I’d like the next one to be a little more ooey-gooey and deeper in flavor.  For now, I’ll munch on the bread I’ve already made and be happy that it’s baked all the way through this time.

Pillsbury’s recipe for Monkey Bread can be found here

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