Darkest dark chocolate cookies

I received these Scharffenberger 99% chocolate and cocoa nibs in the post a few days ago. I had been wanting to have unsweetened chocolate for baking for some time since its high cocoa content gives me more room in eliminating sugar in the recipe. If you haven't figured out by now, I like my chocolate desserts very dark and minimally sweetened, but sadly a lot of recipes that require a whole egg foam or a meringue need a good amount of sugar for the foam to be stable. If I used a 70% chocolate in such a recipe, the dessert would end up too sweet for my taste. Much better, then, to use less chocolate quantitatively, but up the cocoa content to 99 or 100% so that you have complete control of how much sweetness you add!

I scratched my head looking for a good recipe to use these fruity and pretty acidic Scharffenberger unsweetened chocolate. I dug in my word document of recipes and was reminded of these very dark and quintessentially American chocolate cookies. They're unusual because they rely on beating whole eggs until they reach a stable foam before folding in melted unsweetened chocolate. A minimal amount of flour is then blended in along with more unsweetened chocolate chips. I saw versions of this cookie by David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich as well as Essence of Chocolate (by Scharffenberger). My version is based on Alice Medrich's with some amendments:

1. I'm using baking soda rather than baking powder to neutralise some of the acidity of all the unsweetened chocolate.


2. Since I've kept the sugar amount very low, it's difficult to keep the centre of the cookies moist and gooey. I came to think of these cookies as miniature cakes, and I use Shirley Corriher's technique for adding a little cream to flourless chocolate cakes to keep them moist. I therefore replaced some of the butter with cream. Use only butter if that's what you have on hand.

3. I also added some SP cake emulsifier to fight with the deflation that inevitably comes with folding chocolate into a whole egg foam. Your cookies will have less volume if you don't add SP, but the recipe doesn't use SP to start with. Worry not!

Crème caramel - plain and caffeinated

There're certain dishes that I often associate with individual people around me. It's usually because of a person's love of a dish - or in some cases aversion to a dish - that gives me this association. I used to have a Taiwanese friend here in Cincinnati called Willy who absolutely loved all kinds of baked custards - custard tart, crème caramel, crème brûlée, etc. Initially, I was secretly shocked by how much he loved his custards especially since he didn't have a sweet tooth in general. He was also something of a purist in the sense that preferred pure eggy custards to flavoured ones. I really treasured Willy's friendship but he moved back to Taiwan a while ago. I continue to think of the time I spent with him and his friends in Cincinnati even though I cannot bake these custards again for him for some time.

Crème caramel is wonderfully simple to make but yields maximum deliciousness. You make a caramel, pour it onto individual ramekins, add custard on top and bake the ramekins in a water-bath in the oven. After a good chill in the fridge, you run a knife round the edges and invert the whole thing to serve so that the caramel (which by then has re-liquefied) runs seductively around the custard. It's amazing how a little caramel could elevate a simple baked custard to undreamt-of heights.

I'm offering two versions here: plain and coffee-flavoured. For the plain version, I use extra egg yolks to boost the custardy flavour; for the coffee version, I replace part of the milk with strong espresso and stick with whole eggs. It's really worth seeking the best eggs and milk you can find for the plain version. In either case, I've kept the sugar in the custard to a minimum since the caramel sweetens it plenty anyway.

Incidentally, it seems that people in the States don't really know these custards by their French name 'crème caramel'. I've always called them crème caramel and my friends always give me a bewildered look for that. Apparently 'flan' is how they're known here, like in Latin countries.

A few observations:

1. It's better to bake these custards in the lower third of the oven. In the past when I baked them in the centre of the oven, the top half of the custards was overbaked and wasn't as smooth as the part that was submerged in the water. You want heat to be away from the custards as much as you can.

2. You can steam these custards rather than bake them if you wish. If you decide to go down this route, make sure that you cover each ramekin with cling film / plastic wrap before steaming or the texture will be rough.

3. Gentle baking is the key to a smooth baked custard. After the initial 10 minutes at 180C/350F, I turn the heat down to 130C/250F which is a lower temperature than most recipes. This gentler temperature ensures that the custards emerge smooth and creamy.

4. The caramel will harden upon contact with the cold ramekins. If you're really picky about getting perfectly caramel-filled bottoms, you can preheat the ramekins (in the roasting tin) in the oven first so that they'll be warm when you pour the caramel on them. Even if your caramel doesn't cover the entire surface of the base, remember it will liquidy eventually to cover the entire base (or top) by the time you serve them.

5. I like to pour fridge-cold milk into the saucepan you made the caramel with to dissolve any stubborn bits of caramel that stayed on the pan. This isn't just frugality, but adds an extra something in the flavour of the custard itself. This also conveniently warms up the milk every so slightly to shorten the baking time.

Coffee chiffon cake

I've always found it bewildering that in America 'coffee cake' doesn't mean what it appears to mean. While chocolate cake means... chocolate cake, coffee cake has nothing to do with coffee flavour at all. It's simply a cake eaten with coffee - usually a large, flat cake, and often with loads of crumbs on top - think of New York-style coffee cake. I suppose this usage of the word isn't so outrageous when English teacakes aren't really tea-flavoured either!

I think I'm also justified in saying that coffee-flavoured desserts aren't so common in the West. While vanilla, chocolate, lemon, etc. are dominant flavours that you can find across the board, coffee-flavoured desserts are much rarer - maybe ice cream? When coffee is used in desserts it's mostly for enhancing the flavour of chocolate. Other than that I can't think of many desserts that are purely 'coffee'.

Not so in Asia! Coffee-flavoured desserts are among the most popular, ranging from coffee-flavoured Swiss rolls to coffee shortbread. I find this intriguing because Western people drink a lot more coffee than Asians, so you'd expect that coffee-flavoured desserts would be a staple in the West too (rather than in Asia which is by and large tea-oriented). Maybe they already drink enough coffee as a beverage to want it in anything else? :P

There's a marked differences in the kinds of cakes Asians and Westerners like, too. While butter cakes or pound cakes are the most common in the West, Asians like their cakes soft and light - i.e. sponge cakes. Westerns usually find this kind of cakes too dry and plain, and would slather them with syrups (an idea which might prove abhorrent to Asian cake-lovers...). In fact, most Asian cake recipes centre around génoise and chiffon cakes. While genoise cakes are often used as the base for layered cakes, chiffon cakes have an impressive range of flavours and are usually eaten on their own.

Matcha génoise