C is for Cookie

I've been a fan of Pinterest since it first started. And I've spent an inordinate amount of time on the site as its infinite scroll served up inspiration for cupcakes and crafts. The height of my pinning was probably in 2015, when I had mono and spent three weeks alone in my apartment (which, in retrospect, was great training for the pandemic that followed five years later), but it's still my go-to for favourite recipes and new ideas. 

And so when I needed an idea for a friend's birthday treat this month, I turned to Pinterest again. I have a board titled "Baking and Dessert Inspiration," which seemed like a good place to start. As I scrolled, I was reminded of various treats I've made over the years -- a giant peanut butter cup, a Battenberg cake, a Robin Hood-inspired archery cake, a peanut butter layer cake, polar bear cookies... And I found a few ideas that I had forgotten. Like Cookie Monster Oreos.

Sandwich cookies dipped in colourful candy melts had a moment about six or seven years ago. Maybe a little longer. The designs were very creative. One of my favourites was the polar bear faces that used smarties for the ears and nose. I also thought the frogs, complete with sour candy tongue and pretzel legs, were adorable (and they were a hit with the recipient). Adding eyes and a mini chocolate chip cookie to make Cookie Monster? Brilliant.

Armed with Pinspiration, last Sunday I set off to buy a small package of Oreos at Dollarama, and then popped into Bulk Barn in search of blue candy melts. Unfortunately, there were none left, so I decided to colour white candy melts with some oil-based food colouring. I also picked up blue sanding sugar and a small bag of miniature chocolate chip cookies. 

A few days later, I pulled together my supplies and grabbed candy eyes from my stash. I cut the mini chocolate chip cookies in half, paired up eyes, opened the bag of sprinkles, and melted the candy coating. Then I added some (okay, a lot of) blue food colouring and a few drops of black. Stir, stir stir! Next I dipped an Oreo in the candy coating, pressed half a cookie into the mouth area, added the eyes, and sprinkled the blue sugar on top. 

I stood back to critique my work. Cute, but not quite right. The straight edge of the chocolate chip cookie didn't quite align with the curved side of the Oreo, and so it looked a bit off. 

I grabbed a paring knife and carefully shaved away some of the cookie, creating more of a crescent moon shape. And voila! 

Lather, rinse, repeat! Before I knew it, I had a set of Cookie Monster Oreos lined up like little soldiers, ready to go in the fridge for 10 minutes to set. 

Am I happy with the results? You betcha! They are cute and they taste great. Who wouldn't love a Cookie Monster Oreo? They're the perfect birthday surprise for a friend. 

And, upon reflection, dipped sandwich cookies need to make a comeback. 

Discounted Chocolate

How many of you wait until the day after Valentine's Day or Halloween (or any holiday for that matter) to buy discounted chocolate? Maybe you go for a box of Turtles, or a bag of Lindt truffles, or the can of Quality Street that you couldn't afford before Christmas. Almost always, it's industrial chocolate that you're buying. And to be clear, there's no judgement here. Industrial chocolate is delicious. (I'm looking at you, Reese peanut butter cups.) It's not normally ethically sourced, single origin chocolate made by a small business.

So you can imagine my surprise last weekend while strolling through the clearance section of Michaels (of all places!) when I saw a small box of chocolates that was now 70% off. I noticed that the label referred to "farm to bar chocolate" and thought it interesting. The brand, Truffle Pig, sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it. After confirming the price of a mere $2.10 at a self-serve scanner, I decided whatever they were, they were worth it. 

I have to admit, I was a little confused to have found this chocolate at Michaels. I spend a fair amount of time browsing there. I'm familiar with the horribly overpriced industrial chocolate and other snacks near the cash registers. Despite being at Michaels several times before Christmas, I don't recall having seen these anywhere in the store. Their sudden appearance after Christmas is a bit of a mystery to me. In any event...

Truffle Pig Chocolate is based in British Columbia. A woman-owned business, it is focussed on ethical chocolate that is sourced in fair and sustainable ways. A box of five truffles (aka piglets) can be purchased from their website for $6.00 and chocolate bars start at $3.75 each. These are already reasonable prices!

One of the things we liked about them immediately was that each truffle is individually wrapped. Now, admittedly, this does increase the amount of packaging (and is the type of wrapper that can't easily be recycled) and so is less sustainable from that perspective. But it does ensure the freshness of each piece when eaten over a longer period of time.

Ok, let's be honest, you can easily eat this box in one sitting, but as I write this I'm proud to report that four days later, there are two piglets left. (No promises on how much longer they will survive...)

The colourful packaging is appealing and clearly identifies the various flavours. And it features their very recognizable, happy pigs. (Why pigs, you ask? Because pigs are known to be truffle hunters -- the fungus variety, not the chocolate.)

Made with single origin chocolate from Nicaragua (you can meet the farmers here), these truffles are delicious. When I've tried other single-origin chocolate, I've often been surprised by the fruity or floral notes, but these, to me, had more of an earthy undertone. The chocolate is smooth and has just the right amount of sweetness. The peanut butter and hazelnut centres were beautifully balanced and the piglets were, quite frankly, cute.  

So, here's to discounted ethical chocolate and discovering it in unexpected places! And if you have the opportunity to purchase Truffle Pig Chocolate in the future, regardless of the price, it's entirely worth every penny. 

Repairing Ganache

Some of you may recall that last year I had a rather epic fail in my kitchen, when I made an orange white chocolate ganache to fill Easter eggs. I was baffled by it at the time and none of the salvage tips I could find online actually worked well enough for me to use it as planned. This week while continuing my chocolate reading, I found the explanation for what occurred and, more importantly, how to fix this issue in the future. 

According to Greweling, "A ganache that requires the addition of liquid to re-emulsify it is too high in fat. Its formula should therefore be adjusted for future batches" (Chocolates and Confections, p. 95). Now that I think about it, the white chocolate ganache I made, flavoured with orange oil and made with butter in addition to cream, definitely had a higher fat content than is the norm. Adding more cream and more melted white chocolate did nothing to fix the issue because those additions didn't improve the ratio of fat to water. Had I added milk or even water, I might have had a different result and more success in repairing the broken ganache. And when I remade the ganache the following day, I essentially did reformulate the recipe, because I used less butter and more cream, which in turn altered the ratio of fat to water. Heavy cream has a fat content of about 35%, while butter has a fat content of about 80%.  

The idea that a ganache could have too much fat has never been on my radar. Too much water, sure -- that would shorten the shelf-life. But too much fat? 

Usually when we talk about ganache, we talk about ratios of chocolate to cream (or whatever else is being used to soften the chocolate). Milk chocolate requires half as much cream as dark chocolate to achieve the desired effect and white chocolate requires half as much cream as milk chocolate. So the ratios we were taught really weren't expressed in terms of fat content, but in terms of the type of chocolate. When making ganache, it's not uncommon to substitute alcohol, butter, or even water for some or all of the cream, complicating things further. And while I've noticed that alcohol in a ganache causes it to behave differently, I simply attributed it to some characteristic of the alcohol and not specifically a change in the fat to water ratio. 

Once you deviate from a traditional ganache recipe, it seems, you have to pay attention to the fat to water ratio. Lesson learned. 

I also learned another interesting tidbit during this week's reading. Not enough to warrant a blog post, but fascinating nevertheless. I already knew that starch molding is a common method of making fondant, jelly, and cordial centres that are later enrobed in chocolate. I was first introduced to this confectionary technique while watching the YouTube videos of Hercules Candy. You press shapes into cornstarch (or another starch mixture), deposit liquid centres into the wells, leave them to crystallize, and then remove them from the starch mold to be covered in chocolate. But did you know that starch is flammable‽ (Yes, I just used an interrobang. It seems appropriate in this context.) Greweling cautions, "Should a large quantity of [starch] become airborne and be exposed to an open flame, the result could be a flash fire or explosion" (p. 90). 

While I'm all for experiential learning, I'm happy to acquire this knowledge by reading instead!

Soup January

A few years ago, with an intention of eating more vegetables (because let's be honest, we could all stand to eat more vegetables), I implemented "Soup January" -- a month to eat cozy, heart-warming soup packed full of veggies. I'm sure that at the time I thought I made it up. I'm also (now) certain that it existed as a thing before I started doing it. Today, if you go on social media like X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), you'll can search the hashtag and find posts from far and wide. I like to think that great minds think alike.

I'm not sure how other people roll with their version of Soup January, but in my version the goal is to make a pot of "soup" once a week throughout the month of January. I use scare quotes because I'm pretty generous in my definition -- soup, stew, stoup, chili, and curry are all fair game. Sometimes I make old favourites and sometimes I try something new. More recently, it's become somewhat of a competition, with the soups ranked at the end of the month. 

Over the years, there have been some real winners -- Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon, Newfoundland wedding soup (as printed in Downhome magazine), creamy tortellini soup, and Julia Child's French onion soup stand out in my memory. But in all honesty, I can't recall a soup that wasn't good. 

Actually, that's not true. I did have one kale soup that was a disaster from start to finish. Until this very moment I had erased it from my memory. I think the lesson here is that you can take the intention of eating more veggies too far. But I digress...

This year, after eating leftover crockpot pork chili from my freezer for a few days, we kicked off Soup January with a pot of chili lime ginger turkey soup. The broth was very flavourful and I was pleasantly surprised when the soup wasn't too hot/spicy for my liking. We decided the recipe does need a few tweaks in the future (seasoning the turkey before cooking it, adding more edamame, cutting the bok choy into smaller pieces, etc), but we're definitely going to make it again. 

A fun new addition to this year's instalment are the two sets of silicone freezing trays that I received as Christmas presents. The brand name version is called Souper Cubes, but there are dupes available online. These sturdy reinforced trays have tight fitting lids and are designed for freezing individual portions of soup (or any other liquid you might like). They come in a variety of sizes and feature fill lines so that you can portion appropriately. You can store the soup in the trays or, once it's frozen, you can pop out the portions and put them in a freezer bag. I'm thrilled to have them because I very often freeze leftovers and the round Ziploc containers I have seem to waste a great deal of space in my freezer. I'm hopeful that these portions will stack and store in a more orderly fashion and take up less space! 

Now, I hadn't anticipated having so much of this soup left based on the ingredients and what I thought was the serving size. And since I already have a plan to make mulligatawny soup for suppers this week, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to test my present. As for whether this soup will freeze well, it remains to be seen, but there aren't any ingredients that were immediate cause for concern. And, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained! I'm looking forward to enjoying it again as lunch or supper throughout the week and month. 

Next weekend, Lidia Bastianich's minestrone con pesto soup is on the docket. Since it makes 3 quarts of soup (!), I'll probably have to cut the recipe (or fill a few more Souper Cube trays!), but I'm looking forward to it. 

Until then, I'll be busy putting away Christmas and finding space in my cupboards for my Souper Cube trays.