The Decadent Chocolate Dessert

[amphipodgirl]

I made this to serve at our seder and it turned out really well.  It's adapted from "The Very Easy Chocolate Dessert" in Mrs. Fields' I Love Chocolate cookbook, and adding some principles from Penny Eisenberg's Passover Desserts

Comments

[anonymous]

This looks great and I need to bring dessert tomorrow.

I could only find kosher for passover baking chocolate (unsweetened). Any guess on how much sugar I would add to this to combat unsweetened chocolate? Maybe 1 cup? 1.5 cups?

Karen

[amphipodgirl]

I googled a bit, and the Internet consensus is that 1 oz semisweet chcolcate can be mimicked by 1 ounce unsweetened plus one tablespoon of sugar. We used a healthfood, soy- and gluten-free brand, without a Passover hecksher, that Harold found at Andronico's. In past years, I've used Dagoba chcolate drops, also soy=free, and better chcoclate than Elite.

Let me know how it turns out!

[melimus]

Just a note on your baby tips. . .LOVE THEM!!! That's the type of info I really need, along with "only buy pants with snaps in the bottom". I am writting them down.

[amphipodgirl]

...until your child learns how to undo snaps. Than you have a different problem. 8^)

So is your cat out of the bag?

[melimus]

Yup. Tomcat as it turns out. 23 weeks and all is well.

About advice
I really am collecting "thing you know now that you wish you knew then". Please if you have any more please send them along. The mini steam cleaner is one of the few things that I might register for. Doing a used shower has provided me with many of the necessities (people are dropping stuff off already) so I'm asking for handmade stuff or gift cert to target for things that I figure oout I need or money for the education fund. The last 2 if someone really wants to gift. The preschool/first grade I want to send my kid to is $700 a month NOW.

About snaps
I was a total nudenic. Mom had to follow many a trail of clothes to the naked baby making a get away until she put me on a leash. I think the time I escaped at the mall was the last straw.

Actually I still am a nudenic but since I don't take my clothes off at the mall-or at least at the mall in front of my mother, all is good.

[amphipodgirl]

Yay! Now if I find any time to craft a baby gift, I can tell people who I'm crafting for. 8

[melimus]

So far I think the car seat is the only thing I am going to buy that I will need RIGHT NOW!!! You can't leave the birth center without one, or rather you can leave but they keep the baby :)

Tucson sun eats up plastic soooo fast plus they seem to get really grimy fast.

So far the Eddie Bower one looks good. Its under $200 and good to 80 lbs.

[amphipodgirl]

I know someone who knows someone who had trouble leaving the hospital without a car seat. They lived a block away, were planning to walk, and did not in fact own a car!

The seat you're talking about -- is it the kind that converts rear-facing to front-facing to booster? Can it be pulled out in one thing with the kid in it, like a "baby bucket" can? 'cause the bucket thing is so handy for sleeping babies... don't need to wake them up (or unbuckle) them to move them.

[anonymous]

So I made this dessert yesterday, and it weirdly seperated. It almost seems like it was a layer of butter or cocoa butter that came out (a yellow ring around the top that congealed). Not appetizing looking, but the end product tasted good. 1 cup sugar was probably a bit low == probably 1 1/4 would have been better.

[amphipodgirl]

I did get just a couple of whitish spots, possibly in places where the condensation from the plastic wrap dripped on the surface of the mixture as it cooled. What you saw may have been related.

Also, was your chocolate "real" chocolate? I've sometimes seen kosher l'Pesach stuff that had funny ingredients -- cocoa powder plus non-cocoa fats, for instance. Do you still have the package to check if it was anything funny there?

Alternatively, it may have been that you got bitten by your substitution -- that unsweetened chocolate melted with sugar is not the same as chocloate that has been industrially conched with sugar.

Those are my off-the-cuff guesses, having only made the recipe in this form twice myself (I did two batches rather than one huge double batch). I'm glad it at least tasted good!

[anonymous]

It was real chocolate, but you're right -- the sugar could surely have done it, or just how I cooled it. I actually used half and half, so I was thinking perhaps that did it? I don't know, but it is yummy and I would attempt it again. It was a hit at the party I took it to, so thanks for that.

[amphipodgirl]

Half and half has a different fat/protein/sugar balance than cream, so that could lead to separation. I'm glad it was a hit; maybe next time with more notice you can try it without substitutions and see if you get a tidier-looking result.

The nice thing about combining cream, eggs, and chocolate is that the output's likely to be popular, whatever mishaps are suffered, so long as you don't actually burn it or have stringy bits of egg white. Whether you get mousse, strata, or soup, it's still chocolate, right? 8^)

[anonymous]

So I made this dessert yesterday, and it weirdly seperated. It almost seems like it was a layer of butter or cocoa butter that came out (a yellow ring around the top that congealed). Not appetizing looking, but the end product tasted good. 1 cup sugar was probably a bit low == probably 1 1/4 would have been better. Any idea what I did wrong?