Category Archives: Chocolate

Chocolate chestnut brownies

Dan Lepard’s Chocolate Chestnut Brownies

I like the chocolate part very much, moussey and light in texture, just lovely in fact! However the freshly roasted chestnuts might have been the wrong thing to use, Dan Lepard specifies tinned ones in the recipe – I think I would leave them out altogether and just use the brownie part as a delectable chocolate dessert with lots of icecream. I think my taste buds don’t register chestnuts in desserts; they become strangely tasteless once they are combined with sugar. I am not too keen on them in bread either.

In my heart of hearts I really only like chestnuts straight from the shell, with some salt and black pepper and maybe a dab of butter. They’re good with sprouts and bacon at Christmas and I would like to try Azelia’s soup which has shitake mushrooms and lentils in it as well as chestnuts and sounds savoury and delicious.

Ottolenghi’s One-Pan Wonder and Suelle’s Chocolate Pear Pudding

ottolenghi in the Guardian Tidying up the living room today I found a carefully torn out page from the Guardian from July 24 2010. We loved the idea of dinner made with one pot, so Brian decided to make it.  We had lots of little tomatoes, potatoes, all the ingredients and we wanted a meat-less meal so The New Vegetarian scored again!

Brian says, you do need a second pot to roast the tomatoes, though I suppose at a pinch you could cook the tomatoes first and put them to one side and then carry on.  If I was camping this might be the sort of dish that I could just about put together outdoors. I’m not very good at camping though.

It’s a lovely supper dish and has those gorgeous Ottolenghi flavours, yoghurt, lemon, sumac, chili and tahini all cooked with a generous quantity of olive oil and I could eat it again really soon.

ottolenghi tomato tahini eggs potatoes

The method of cooking the eggs, on top of a base of pan cooked potatoes and onions reminds me a little of baked egg dishes, it worked pretty well and even though it stuck a little to the pan, there wasn’t any left over!

We followed it up by re-heating Suelle’s scrummy pear and chocolate pudding cake that I made on Tuesday and having it with yet more pears which I had poached in vanilla syrup, something I learnt from Azelia’s Kitchen which is in fact where I am popping back soon as she has a whole collection of fabulous dessert recipes for pears!

chocolate pear pudding mainly bakingWe like pudding in this house, but we don’t have it very often, so it was great to have this to re-heat. I think we put too much of the chocolate pieces in the middle of the cake, so it ran in a rather nice gooey fashion everywhere.

There are still lots of pears sitting neatly wrapped up in the garage.  I will have to speed up and make some more puddings with them!

Concorde pear

Hazelnut Amaretti with Chocolate Drizzles


So what did I do with all those left over egg whites from the Challah?

I made these soft amaretti of course.  Just getting in practice for Christmas I tell myself, plus I can offer them to Choclette for her cooking event, we should cocoa.

These are based on the ones that Celia at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial introduced me to last year and they are incredibly popular with everyone who the recipe has been shared with. Are they that easy to make?  Yes!  Patrick’s four-year old made them last weekend so what are you waiting for?

So I hope these are acceptable Choclette!  All I can say is that they are really expensive in the shops in their fancy tins and if you know someone who is a nut fan then this is a winner every time!

I used:

  • 250 grams ground almonds
  • 200 grams ground hazelnuts
  • 50 grams ground pistachio nuts
  • 4 egg whites
  • 400 grams sugar
  • 1/2 tsp of amaretto di saronno (optional but good)

Chocolate for dipping and drizzling

  • 100 grams of 85% dark chocolate (Fair Trade Co op)
  • 50 grams of milk choc chips (not sure where they came from)

To make:

  • Grind up any nuts that you might need for this.
  • Hazelnuts with their skins on are good. I used up the last of the ones I foraged a few weeks ago plus a few more that I bought and added some pistachio nuts and some ground almonds too.
  • Mix with the sugar and the egg whites till you have a nice sticky solid mass.
  • Put some baking parchment on baking trays.
  • Spoon out the mixture into blobs if you like blobs.
  • If you want high little macaroons then you need to wet your hands and roll the mixture into proper balls.  Today I went for mostly blobs and a couple of little ones.
  • Heat the oven to 160 C.  Put in oven and bake until the tops start to crack a little or until the edges of the blobs start to turn a little brown. Anywhere from 12 minutes to half an hour depending on how big you have made them.  They should be soft when you take them out.
  • Break up your chocolate into small pieces and put in a pyrex bowl. Keep back about 30 per cent of the chocolate in small pieces. Microwave on high in short 20 second bursts till it is melted. Stir in between each burst. Once it is melted, add the chocolate you kept back and allow to melt at room temperature. If it really won’t go then give it another 10 seconds in the microwave.

At this point your husband tells you  to drizzle the chocolate with a knife – as you don’t know what he is talking about, you ask him to do it. So he does. He also demonstrates how to half dip a biscuit.  As there was a tiny bit of chocolate left over we dug out a silicon chocolate mould and put some marshmallows in the holes and poured the last bit of chocolate over them and made chocolate buttons. No wasting chocolate in this house!