Turkish delight

 I have always said that if I had to choose one chocolate bar to live on for the rest of my life (do you torture yourself with these hypothetical food questions too?), I would pick Fry’s Turkish Delight. The reason would not be that, as the wrapper claims, it has “60% less fat*”,  but simply that it tastes fresh, isn’t too rich, and has a unique flavour. So this week I set about trying to recreate the taste at home.

While I really don’t think I managed to replicate the exact flavour and jelly-like consistency of a bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight, I have accomplished microwaveable Turkish delight (loosely based on a Super Food Ideas recipe) very similar to the boxed kind that you buy at the supermarket covered in icing sugar, and added some chocolate (a fetish I alluded to in my last post).

You might be interested to learn that the original name for Turkish delight is lokum. It was introduced to Britain after a British traveller tasted some in Istanbul – and was obviously as delighted by it (see what I did there?) as you will be if you try out my recipe.

Ingredients

750 ml hot tap-water

35 g powdered gelatine

500 g caster sugar

120 g cornflour

150 g soft icing sugar mixture

¼ tsp cream of tartar

2 tsp rosewater

4 drops red food colouring

200 g good quality chocolate, roughly chopped
Extra soft icing sugar mixture (if desired)

Method 

1. Grease and line a 27 x 18 cm slice pan and line bottom and sides with baking paper.
2. Pour the tap-water into a large, microwave-safe bowl (I used my big Pyrex bowl) and sprinkle half the gelatine quantity over the top, whisking in thoroughly with a fork. Repeat with the remaining half of the gelatine. The gelatine should break up and mostly dissolve. Stir in caster sugar.
3. Microwave for 5 minutes, stir with fork, then microwave again for 3 minutes.
4. Whisk in cornflour, icing sugar mixture and cream of tartar. Microwave for another 3 minutes.
5. Whisk in rosewater and red food colouring, allow mixture to cool for five minutes, then pour into prepared pan. Scrape any bubbles from the surface with a fork. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate overnight.
6. Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until melted and smooth. Spread chocolate over top of the Turkish delight with a spatula.
7. Refrigerate about 20 minutes before turning out of the pan onto a chopping board and cutting into squares (or funky shapes) with a big cook’s knife.
8. Straight before serving, roll squares in a small bowlful of icing sugar, if desired.

Tips

• Cooking times are based on my 1100 watt microwave.
• Leave plenty of baking paper overhanging to make it easy later to remove the Turkish delight from the pan and peel off the baking paper.
• From Step 5 onwards, I found it easier to use a proper whisk instead of the fork.
• At Step 5, it’s important to allow that 5 minutes of cooling time so that the baking paper doesn’t warp and buckle into the middle of your mixture. Try it and you’ll see what I mean!
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan – especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• Heating your knife will make it easier to cut the Turkish delight. Heat your knife by holding it under a (very) hot tap for a whole minute and drying it off quickly before cutting. If you have trouble with the chocolate shattering, try turning the Turkish delight upside-down to cut.

“*than the average of leading chocolate bars”

Reverse chocolate chip cookies

So I’ve just realised that I have a serious chocolate problem. One symptom: I believe I can “improve” every recipe by adding chocolate to it – well, every sweet recipe, anyway. And I’ve done it again!

These decadent little treats are a chocolate lover’s dream – a good dose of melted chocolate gleefully blended into a chewy cookie mixture, and plenty of white chocolate chips thrown in to give your teeth something exciting to hook into (and also provide a nicer visual than brown-on-brown).

My main piece of advice with chocolate chip cookies is to very carefully monitor the cooking time. Everyone’s oven works a little differently, so perhaps even do a few test runs of one or two cookies to find out what the ideal cooking time is in your oven. And it’s much better to take them out too early than leave them in too long. Who wants crunchy chocolate chips cookies? 

When you take them out of the oven, the cookies will be tall and puffy, and you might think they’re undercooked, but rest assured that they will collapse back into a normal cookie shape as they cool. Leave them to rest on the oven trays for a while, otherwise they will be far too floppy to transfer onto the wire racks.

Interesting fact: chocolate chip cookies were invented by a happy mistake! A cook named Ruth Wakefield was making cookies and, after running out of her usual ingredient (the exact ingredient varies depending on which version of this story you read), decided to use chopped up chocolate instead, thinking it would melt into the cookies as they cooked. Luckily, she was wrong, and so began the life of chocolate-chip cookies, which were initially named “toll house cookies” (after the name of Wakefield’s inn). It’s hard to believe this only happened about eighty years ago – can you imagine life without chocolate chip cookies?

Ingredients

120 g Nuttelex (see tips below for alternatives)

½ tsp vanilla extract

85 g brown sugar

85 g white sugar

½ large egg

190 g plain flour

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp cocoa powder

50 g dark chocolate Melts, roughly chopped

160 g white chocolate chips

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170°C and line baking trays with baking paper.
2. Melt the dark chocolate pieces in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring the bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until chocolate is melted and smooth.
3. Allow chocolate to cool while beating together Nuttelex, vanilla, sugars and egg with an electric mixer until light in colour and texture (see image below).
4. Scoop a cupful of the mixture into the melted dark chocolate and mix together with a spoon to bring down the temperature of the chocolate, before adding it to the rest of the mixture and mixing thoroughly until the colour is even.
5. Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder into a large bowl. Add half at a time to the mixture, mixing well after each.
6. Add white chocolate chips and mix lightly and briefly with the elective mixer or by hand.
7. Refrigerate 1 hour.
8. Roll mixture into 3 cm balls and place on the prepared baking trays approximately 3 cm apart from each other.
9. Bake cookies for 10 minutes. Cool on trays for about15 minutes or until cookies can be lifted across to wire racks without bending too much. Cool completely on wire racks.

Makes 25–30.

Step 3 – beat the mixture until it becomes light

Step 4 – add some of the mixture to the melted chocolate

Tips

• Nuttelex is a dairy-free table spread, which we used in my house while I was growing up. It’s an alternative to butter and margarine, and you can find it beside them in Australian supermarkets. I’ve also tried this recipe with unsalted butter and Meadow Lea (margarine), and they all work fine, but I love the Nuttelex ones best. Just use whatever you have in the fridge.
• If you don’t have white chocolate chips, it’s perfectly okay to simply chop up a white chocolate block, but make sure the pieces are the size of chocolate chips – because huge lumps of white chocolate don’t taste as nice in a cookie as huge chunks of real chocolate do.
• If you’re wondering why the ingredients list specifies half an egg, it’s because this recipe in its original form makes about 60 cookies from one egg. I crack one egg into a glass and whisk it well with a fork to combine the yolk and the white, then pour half of it into the mixture (very slowly and carefully or the entire egg will plop in all at once). I haven’t tried using an entire egg, but chances are it would work okay.
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• The mixture will be fine if left in the refrigerator for longer than an hour, but will become firmer the longer it’s in there.
• This recipe makes enough cookies to require three baking trays. Because I only have two, I put the cookie mixture back in the fridge while the first two trayfuls are cooking and cooling.

Chocolate brownies (cakey)

As many people like their brownies fudgy as those who prefer them cakey – when I put the question out to my Facebook friends, the responses were evenly split. A few weeks ago, I posted my recipe for lovely, dense and fudgy brownies. Since then, I’ve gone through kilograms of chocolate and butter, trying to perfect lighter, “cakier” brownies… and I’ve finally done it!

The secret seems to be cutting back drastically on the quantity of butter and sugar. I’ve added some sour cream because I saw it used in a brownie recipe in the Bourke Street Bakery cookbook and it seemed like a good idea.

I’ve also started using a metal tin when I make brownies (instead of my old ceramic slice pan) because I’ve read that it gives brownies a better “crumb”.

Of my two versions of brownies, this one has to be my personal favourite.

Ingredients

200 g dark chocolate (buttons, or roughly chopped)

50 g unsalted butter, chopped

2 eggs

200 g caster sugar

100 g plain flour

1½ tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

65 g sour cream

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C. Grease a 26 x 16 cm slice tin and line with baking paper.
2. Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring the bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until butter completely melted. Mixture will stiffen. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
3. Beat eggs and sugar together with an electric mixer until they are well combined and light in colour.
4. Add the cooled chocolate (it will have probably formed a ball) and mix well. Scrape bottom and sides of bowl with a spatula.
5. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt, then add to the chocolate mixture. Mix lightly until colour is even. Scrape bottom and sides of bowl again.
6. Add sour cream and mix until just combined.
7. Turn out into prepared tin and spread out evenly with a spatula or knife. Bake for 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
8. Cool completely in tin before turning out, removing the edges with a big, sharp cook’s knife and slicing into squares. Dust with icing sugar if desired.

Makes 10–12.

Tips

• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• The very top of the brownies will probably wrinkle or pucker during cooking because the brownies rise then deflate. If it worries you, leave the brownies upside down for a while before cutting them- it could “squash out” the wrinkles; honestly, I don’t bother.
• Ensure the brownies are completely cold before slicing, or they will end up with sloppy, rough-looking edges.
• I think these are best eaten within 24 hours of slicing.

Oreo truffles

If you think the taste of an Oreo can't be improved on, you're wrong. When mixed with cream cheese, shaped into balls and coated in chocolate, Oreos can become even more magical. Also referred to as Oreo balls, these delicious Oreo truffles are quite rich, with an intense flavour not unlike cookies'n'cream.
They are fantastic as snacks or bite-sized desserts, and the good news is that the recipe only requires a few ingredients, all of which you can store in your kitchen for months - so if you have the ingredients on standby, you'll be able to whip up a batch without making a special trip to the supermarket.

Ingredients
3 x 150 g packs of Oreo biscuits (or similar)
250 g cream cheese, softened
320 g milk chocolate melts
320 g dark chocolate melts

Method

1. Crush or chop Oreos into small pieces
2. Mix softened cream cheese on low–medium speed for about 30 seconds just to loosen the cream cheese a little. Add the crushed Oreos and mix on low speed until well combined. Refrigerate mixture for 1 hour.
3. Take 2 or 3 large dinner plates (note that they will need to fit in your freezer later). Shape tablespoonfuls of mixture into balls by rolling between your hands. Sit the rolled balls on the dinner plates. Freeze the plates and balls for at least 1 hour.
4. Melt the milk chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until chocolate is melted and smooth.
5. Remove half the quantity of Oreo balls from the freezer. Using two forks, dip each ball into the melted chocolate to coat completely, then carefully place back onto the cold dinner plate. Refrigerate.
6. Repeat Steps 4 and 5 with the dark chocolate and the remainder of the quantity of balls.
7. The coated truffles will not take long to set. Serve cold.

Makes approximately 40.

Tips

• The quickest way to break down the Oreos is to lay one packetful at a time on a chopping board, and chop into small pieces with a big butcher's knife
• You can experiment with different quantities in order to find you perfect ratio of cream cheese to Oreos.
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• To remove excess melted chocolate from the balls, scrape the underside of the fork with the other fork before placing the ball onto the plate.
• If you have time to decorate the Oreo truffles, you could sprinkle Oreo crumbs over them before the chocolate sets, or, after the chocolate has set, drizzle with melted white chocolate
• Why freeze the balls on dinner plates? Firstly, freezing the balls ensures that they won't become too mushy when dipped into the warm chocolate (which would leave you with very messy-looking truffles). Secondly, having the dinner plates extremely cold means that the melted chocolate won't spread too far before it sets. If you use room-temperature plates, the truffles will turn out with large "feet" and you could even end up with your truffles sitting in one big puddle of melted chocolate.
• Once the truffles are set, if you think their "feet" are too big, just sit them on a flat surface and carefully cut away the excess chocolate using a small, sharp knife.
• Oreo truffles are best served straight from the fridge (or at least below room temperature), otherwise the cream cheese flavour will be too intense.

Chocolate brownies (fudgy)

Is there anyone who doesn’t like brownies? Surely they must be as rare as those poor suckers who can’t stand chocolate. The brownie, which started life only a little over a century ago in America (okay, I’ve just lost everyone who thought I was talking about Enid Blyton’s mischievous hobgoblin creatures), is now pretty much universally adored.

I can remember the very first time I tasted a brownie. It was at a friend’s birthday party in early high school, we were playing pool in her den and listening to Coldplay’s “Yellow” (it was also the first time I’d heard Coldplay) and I picked up a strange, under-cooked-looking chocolate slice and took a tentative bite. There was no going back.

I understand that everyone has their own strong opinion of what makes the perfect brownie (fudgy or cakey, choc-chips or not, nuts or not, packet mix or homemade), so I’m not going to be stupid enough to promise that my recipe will rock your socks. But I can assure you that it’s rich, dense, fudgy, and I love it to bits – or, as Chris Martin sang, “you know I love you soo-ooo”.

Ingredients

250 g dark chocolate (buttons, or roughly chopped)

130 g unsalted butter, chopped

300 g caster sugar

100 g plain flour

50 g cocoa powder

3 eggs

Icing sugar, to decorate (optional)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C. Grease a 27 x 18 cm slice pan and line with baking paper.
2. Combine caster sugar, plain flour and cocoa powder in a large bowl.
3. Melt the dark chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until mixture is melted and smooth.
4. Add chocolate mixture to flour mixture and mix thoroughly. Add eggs and mix again.
5. Spread mixture into the prepared pan and even out the surface a little with a spatula or knife. Bake 30 minutes or until just firm. Be careful: over-cooking will make the edges too hard and crunchy.
6. Cool in pan, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. When cold, slice into squares with a sharp knife.
7. If desired, sprinkle with sifted icing sugar before serving.

Makes 12 squares.

 

Tips

• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• Including some white choc-chips after Step 4 will add some interest and texture to the brownies.
• I always remove the outer edge of the brownies to give each square a neat, symmetrical look. But that’s just me.

Chocolate-coated snakes

I hadn't even thought of this idea until I saw some chocolate-coated snakes for sale in the cafe at work. I quickly bought some (purely for educational purposes, of course) and decided to re-create them at home. I must say, my snakes taste better to me - probably because I used my favourite chocolate.
I thought I should share the "recipe" with you (if you can call it that) in the chocolatey spirit of Easter.

Ingredients
300 g of your favourite chocolate
350 g pack of snakes

Method 

1. Chop chocolate into small pieces and place in a heat-proof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Keep on medium heat until chocolate is melted, stir until smooth and remove from heat
2. Wait for chocolate to cool slightly (just a couple of minutes), then dip each snake in the chocolate
3. Place chocolate-coated snakes on a sheet of baking paper to set
4. Refrigerate once completely set.

the unsuspecting victims

preparing the torture chamber

Tips

•   When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• I found that waiting for the chocolate to cool slightly before dipping the snakes into it meant that everything was less messy, and the chocolate didn't spread out too much on the baking paper while the chocolate was still setting
• Don't like snakes? Chocolate-coat your favourite lolly instead. I would love to see some photos. Next I'm going to try chocolate-coating some of Darrel Lea's soft eating liquorice... Those will be some massive chocolate bullets! 

Choc-dipped Anzac biscuits

Mmmm… Easter is only a week away! And as you Australians would have noticed, this year’s Anzac Day falls on the same weekend – resulting in five days off work for most of us. I decided to celebrate the occasion with Anzac bikkies… dipped in chocolate.

Ingredients

75 g rolled oats

120 g self-raising flour

90 g caster sugar
90 g brown sugar

50 g shredded (or desiccated) coconut

100 g unsalted butter (chopped)

1½ Tbs golden syrup

1½ Tbs boiling water

1 tsp bi-carbonate of soda

250 g chocolate (chopped)

2½ tsp olive oil

Method

1.       Preheat oven to 150°C and line baking trays with baking paper

2.       Roughly combine oats, flour, sugars and coconut in a bowl

3.       Melt butter with the golden syrup and water in a saucepan over medium heat

4.       Remove from heat and whisk in the bi-carbonate of soda

5.       Pour the syrup mixture over the dry ingredients and mix together with a wooden spoon

6.       Form tablespoonsful of mixture into balls and place on the baking trays 4 cm apart

7.       Bake for 12 minutes, then cool on trays for approximately five minutes (to enable biscuits to harden) before transferring to racks to cool completely

8.       Place chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water until melted, then stir chocolate until smooth. Remove from heat and stir in oil.

9.       Dip each biscuit into the chocolate mixture, then leave to set on wire racks or cold plates covered with baking paper.

Makes 30

Tips

• Anzac biscuits spread much more than normal biscuits during cooking, so take care to use only a tablespoonful of mixture for each biscuit and place them the full 4 cm apart on the trays.