Chocolate Mousse

I've seen several chocolate mousse recipes before, some which utilize gelatin and other which simply fold in whipped cream. In fact, a mousse recipe by Nigella Lawson I used once even required marshmallows to be melted down. The chocolate mousse recipe that I tried last week was the best I have ever made and used a much more traditional method to gain a silky texture, beaten egg whites.

The first step of the recipe is simply to melt your chocolate down with some butter, adding egg yolks to it and setting it in the fridge. The next step is to whip your egg whites. Then you whip your whipping cream before folding both the cream and egg whites into the chocolate mixture. At the stage of melting the chocolate I added some strong coffee for extra flavour.

I chose to pipe the mousse into dessert bowls to give it a more elegant finish. Then I chilled it for several hours. The mousse was really silky and smooth, although I would use less coffee than I did because it overpowered the chocolate slightly.

Vanilla Cupcakes With Butter Frosting

I've definitely been on a cupcake kick over the last week or so making red velvet cupcakes a few days ago with friends, and shortly before that, baking some vanilla cupcakes with butter frosting. My sister and I used the recipe from the Joy of Baking website for these cakes, and while very sweet, I found myself enjoying them immensely.

I think that my sister's and my real motivation behind making these was to practice our piping technique, because thus far, we've simply been using a star tip to create a swirl topping for cupcakes. We thought we would try the star tip for other effects as well. The blue ones that we used the star tip on ended up reminding me of lilacs. Despite our piping technique not being expert yet, these cupcakes still ended up being very pretty.

Rosemary Foccacia Bread

The Italian Food Forever website is fast becoming one of my favourite spots for recipes on the internet. I've only made their pasta dough recipes thus far, but a few days ago, I attempted the Rosemary Foccacia recipe. My sister had made this recipe before (see Megan's Blog), but I didn't have a hand in it. I thought I would try it myself this time.


As far as bread dough goes, this was a quick one to come together. All the ingredients go in the bowl at once and then there is a period of kneading followed by letting the dough rest until doubled in size. Then, you shape your dough, set it on a pan and give it another period of rest. Afterwards, you dimple the dough all over so that you can fill the holes with olive oil, which makes this bread so moist. Part of what makes this bread so delicious, including addictive, is the sprinkling of freshly chopped rosemary and course salt over top. My family and friends couldn't get enough of it!

Homemade Fettuccine Alfredo

A few weeks ago, I purchased a Remy Olivier pasta machine for $30 which manually rolls out pasta dough and cuts it into fettuccine or spaghetti. This machine makes it so easy to make pasta at home, which I had never done before. My sister's and my first attempt of fresh pasta with this machine was butternut squash filled ravioli in a garlic cream sauce, which my sister blogged about at Megan's Blog. We purchased a circular ravioli stamp which both cuts and seals the edges of the ravioli. The effort to make these was long, but well worth it!



For our second attempt at making homemade pasta, we chose to invite a few friends over to make Fettuccine Alfredo. The recipe we used for the noodles was the same we had used for our ravioli, found at the Italian Food Forever website. For our Alfredo sauce, we simply poured whipping cream over the cooked pasta, and added grated fresh garlic, lots of parmesan, and butter to melt in, and let sit until thickened. This recipe was based on the garlic cream sauce we made for our ravioli, although I can't remember the website we got it from.


For us newbies, it took us approximately two and a half hours in total to make the pasta dough, cut it, and cook it, which isn't so bad when you have a weekend to do it on and friends to enjoy it with!

Leek and Potato Soup

Today I made leek and potato soup from Julia Child's cookbook which is extremely simple in both its ingredient list and cooking techniques. The soup consists only of leeks, potatoes, water, salt, and whipping cream, while the recipe only requires that you boil the vegetables until tender, puree them, check seasonings, and add cream just before serving. Despite the simplicity of this soup, it is a treat to eat with that onion and potato flavour, and richness of cream.


I served this soup for dinner with a delicious green salad tossed with cucumber, celery, blueberries, and strawberries, and some oatmeal molasses bread that I made the other day.Why not eat a simple dinner of soup, salad, and bread?

Homemade Sweet and Sour Meatballs

I know that sweet and sour meatballs don't typically get the stamp of being homemade, because usually a person purchases packaged meatballs, chili sauce, and grape jelly all from the grocery store, but  my recipe for sweet and sour meatballs is literally made from scratch. This is because, last year, my sister and mom did some canning and the expiry dates on those jars were coming up fast so they needed to be used. My sister made delicious currant jelly with currants from the currant bushes in our yard, while my mother made an exceptional chili sauce.

Now, you don't have to use a homemade jelly or chili sauce for these, but it is highly recommended because it gives these meatballs a whole other dimension of flavour than the store-bought products. Suffice it to say that the flavour is even more sweet and sour. I do, however, want to turn people on to making their own meatballs at home though, because they aren't really that time-consuming to make and the searing of them in a pan prior to hitting the oven adds some flavourful char on them that will not be achieved with the store-bought variety. Here is my recipe for sweet and sour meatballs:

For the meatballs

2 Ibs ground beef
1/4 cup milk
1 egg
3 tbsp ketchup
4 slices of bread, toasted and crumbled
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp ground black pepper
 2 tbsp vegetable oil

For the sauce

1 cup homemade chili sauce
1 cup homemade currant jelly

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. In a mixing bowl, add beef, milk, egg, ketchup, bread crumbs, salt and pepper, and mix until well combined.
3. To form meatballs, use a 1/4 cup to adequately measure the amount of meat you will use in one meatball. Then roll the meat into a ball with your hands. You should end up with twenty meatballs using this method.
4. Place a frying pan on the stove and heat the vegetable oil over medium heat until it is very hot.
5. In the frying pan, sear the meatballs in batches until they are brown and have a nice char on them.
6. Place meatballs in an oven dish.
7. In a separate bowl, combine the chili sauce and currant jelly.
8. Pour the sauce over top of the meatballs.
9. Place meatballs in the oven for approximately 1 hour until the meat is cooked and the sauce is thickened.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Whipped Cream Frosting

With the call of a snow storm here in southern Ontario the other day, I felt like having a treat. My initial attempt was to make a chocolate sponge cake roll with chocolate whipped cream, but after my sponge cake failed I was forced to try something different. The only problem was that I had already made my whipped cream. As such, I made chocolate cupcakes, because I figured the whipped cream would work well as an icing for them.

These cupcakes did not use the baking soda/vinegar trick that the red velvet one's did in a previous post, but somehow they were actually fluffier than the red velvet. I think this was due to the addition of one cup of boiling hot water to a 1/2 cup of cocoa powder that was added into the mixture at the end.

I decided that I like a whipped cream icing even better than a butter-based one or one with a lot of icing sugar, because it's not nearly as sweet and is easier to pipe.