Baby Chocolate Oblivions

I had a rather productive day in the kitchen today, using 3 recipes from 2 different books by Rose Levy Beranbaum, plus one off her website. 🙂 I started out by putting together a batch of Rose’s favourite flaky & tender pie crust. I’d never made this before, since the Pie & Pastry Bible is the only one of Rose’s “heavenly” books that I don’t own, but I saw some mention of the recipe somewhere and decided to try it. I think it may have been in one of Rose’s youtube postings. Jay has chicken pot pie on the menu for later this week, so he needed me to put together the shells. I have to say, the method for bringing together the dough worked really well. Better (and with less liquid) than a lot of pastry recipes I’ve used in the past. The latex gloves are an inspired technique. Once that was resting in the fridge, I started a batch of pizza dough, from The Bread Bible. Left that to rest on the counter, while I put together the sponge & flour mixture for the Golden Semolina Torpedo. By now, the pastry dough had its requisite 45 minutes in the fridge to hydrate, so I pulled that out, rolled it out into the dishes for the pot pies, and stashed them in the freezer. Jay hates rolling out doughs, so that’s the least I can do to help with supper. He does the cooking, I do the baking, so something like a pot pie is a joint effort. 😉

At this point, Jay wanted the use of the kitchen for a bit (more about that later), so I used that time to put together my mise en place for the Baby Chocolate Oblivions, which are this week’s cake in the Heavenly Bakers group. I decided to go with the milk chocolate variation, partly because I happened to have a large amount of milk chocolate in the freezer, and I’m running low on dark.

By the time I’d weighed everything, Jay was finished with the oven, so I started melting my chocolate/butter/sugar mixture. Partway through that, he realized he hadn’t started the brine on the pork chops for supper, so asked me to do that, because he had squash, potato and flour all over his hands. So, I got to help with supper today!

The Chocolate Oblivion recipe isn’t very complicated. Basically, you melt the chocolate, butter, and sugar over simmering water, then set that aside. Then heat the eggs to “warm to the touch” over the same pot of simmering water, stirring constantly to avoid curdling. Beat the eggs for 5 minutes or so, or until they form soft peaks, then fold the eggs into the chocolate mixture. Spoon into silicone cupcake cups, put those in a hot water bath, and bake! I actually had some leftover batter, so I put it into the little square silicone pan I used for the brownie bars a few weeks ago. Didn’t have space in my oven for another water bath, so I just stuck it in on its own. The edges burnt a little, but after cutting those off, this made a great mini brownie-type thing. Jay ate the burned edges. 🙂 I put little squares of this extra “oblivion” into mini paper muffin cups, and I’ll probably frost them each with a little star of something peanut butter-based later this week. We’re having an open house housewarming party on Saturday afternoon, and I think these’ll make a good little treat, for those that don’t want a whole little cake all to themselves.

Here’s a picture of the finished Oblivions. I’ll probably forget to take a picture of one plated, so this is all you’ll get from me. 😉

Here’s what Jay was working on today:

These are Butternut Squash Dumplings, from Alton Brown’s Good Eats, episode “Squash Court”.

After all that was said and done, I put together the durum torpedo loaf, and unfortunately, I wasn’t all that pleased with it. I think I did the opposite of Marie, and didn’t let it rise quite long enough before I slashed and baked it. The flavour was really good and the crust was excellent, though. Guess I’ll have to try it again. I’m probably going to bake a few loaves of bread this week, for stuff to put out at the party Saturday. I was hoping this would be one of them, but we pretty much devoured it with supper tonight. Oops!