Saturday, February 13, 2010

Sweets!

Last night, J (at Secret Pie Shoppe) and I had a baking extravaganza.  After nearly 7 hours of working in the kitchen, we each walked away with homemade dark chocolate salted caramels, cake balls, and a new version of the brookie!

The first item we made were cake balls:

This recipe came from Bakerella , but since the grocery store we went to was all out of Red Velvet cake mix, we opted for Devil's food cake (but decided to still use cream cheese frosting to bind the balls together).  They were pretty messy to make, and we became frustrated when dipping them into the chocolates, but they taste pretty good!  We had a grand total of 82 cake balls made from one box of cake mix.





The second item on our list last night was originally a salted caramel recipe from Centsational Girl, but we wound up getting confused when looking at how she differed from the recipe she was going off of (found here at the Smitten Kitchen), so we decided to go with the original recipe that called for us to mix the chocolate into the caramels instead of dipping (next time, I think we'll make it without the chocolate...).  They came out tasting like Riesen candies.  Not bad, but it took a few bites to get used to the flavor.  Though it was our first time making caramels, we nailed the consistency, thanks to my nifty candy thermometer!


Our last treat for the night was a spin on the original brookies that I made last week.  Apparently the store we went to wasn't very well stocked in the baking aisle, so instead of getting a bag of regular chocolate chip cookie dough mix, we ended up getting OATMEAL chocolate chip cookie dough mix instead.  Also, we opted to forgo the chocolate ganache because by the time the brookies were done cooling, we were pretty over chocolate and decided that we didn't need more chocolate on top of the already chocolatey brookies.


After J went home (with 41 cake balls, a bread loaf pan's worth of caramels, and a half a pan of brookies), I started to crash from all of the sugar I had ingested by licking bowls and spoons, and went into a peaceful, chocolate-induced coma.

1 comment:

  1. I also went into a chocolate/sugar induced coma when I got home. For breakfast we enjoyed some brookies and caramels. Nathan's favourite thing is the caramels and they are definitely growing on me. I had fun baking with you - next time maybe we'll have to control ourselves and make fewer items...ja ja ;-)

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