Posts Tagged With: chocolate chips

Mason Jar Chocolate Ice Cream

American Dessert

MASON JAR CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM

INGREDIENTS

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 cups heavy whipping cream
5 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
⅛ teaspoon salt

SPECIAL UTENSILS

food processor or blender
3 cup Mason jar

Makes 2½ cups. Takes 20 minutes to make and 4 hours to firm in freezer.

PREPARATION

Add chocolate chips to pan. Melt using low-medium heat. Stir constantly. Add melted chocolate chips and all other ingredients to 3 cup Mason jar. Make sure that the lid to Mason jar is screwed on tightly. Shake jar vigorously for 5 minutes or until mixture thickens to the consistency of batter. Put jar in freezer. Let sit for 4 hours or until firm.

TIDBITS

1) Family dinners can often be quite contentious.

2) Why?

3) There’s always someone who doesn’t like some dish that you made for the gathering on the clan.

4) And you spent up to two days making your feast.

5) And someone always brings up politics, which always gets people riled.

6) But this argument gets forgotten when someone offers to help and puts your grandmother’s cast-iron skillet in the washer. 30 minutes your angel of a daughter, Sally, looks up at you with soulful eyes. Tears drip down as she quavers, “Mommy, you were going to give that skillet one day.” Her distress punches you in the feels as you review the ingratitude and argument of the dining room. You wish, you really wish that just once serenity could prevail while eating with those oafs.

7) With this recipe your wish is granted. Everybody, absolutely everyone loves chocolate ice cream. Eating this dessert makes everyone so happy that they become strangely pleasant. Furthermore, this dish takes almost no effort to make and is so easy to clean. What more could you want?

 

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook,  Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on  amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, observations | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Cool Mocha Coffee

American Appetizer

COOL MOCHA COFFEE

INGREDIENTSCoolMocha-

3 cups hot, brewed coffee
⅔ cup sugar
¾ cup semisweet chocolate chips, milk chocolate if you prefer it sweeter
3½ cups milk

SPECIAL UTENSILS

glass jars with lids if you wish to save the coffee. This coffee will keep about as long as milk does.

Makes 7 cups. Takes 10 minutes.

PREPARATION

Add coffee and sugar to large mixing bowl. Stir with fork until sugar dissolves. Add chocolate chips. Stir with whisk until chocolate melts completely and blends completely with coffee. Add milk. Stir with whisk until blended. The mocha is ready to drink. Keep remaining mocha is sealed glass jars in refrigerator.

TIDBITS

1) I would have written the tidbits for this recipe earlier but for my worries about plate tectonics.

2) I mean what if the Earth’s plates shifted to such an extent that my computer ended up fifty miles from my bed. That would be quite a walk in my pajamas to finish a recipe.

3) And what if the resultant earthquake from some monumental shift of the Earth’s surface created a deep crevice between me and my computer? What if there were pumas in the crevice?

4) But with any luck the earthquake that created the puma-filled crevice in my office would destroy the pumas with debris from the ceiling.

5) Of course, this is not an entirely realistic fear. My fair town of Poway is in the middle of a giant surface plate. My bedroom, my office, and indeed the rest of the house would shift the same amount and in the same direction as the rest of the region. It would indeed be like catching a wave and sitting on top of the world, except that the speed of plate surfing is maybe an inch a year. Geo tubular, man.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, humor | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chocolate Fondue

Swiss Dessert

CHOCOLATE FONDUE

INGREDIENTSChocolateFondue-

3.5 ounces TobleroneTM Swiss milk chocolate
6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 ounces pound cake (See above recipe.)
6 ounces strawberries
4 ounces marshmallows

SPECIAL UTENSIL

fondue pot
fondue forks

PREPARATION

Cut pound cake into 1″ cubes. Add Toblerone chocolate, semisweet chocolate chips, sugar, butter, and vanilla extract to large pan. Warm mixture using low-medium heat for 5 minutes or chocolate melts and everything blends together. Stir constantly.

Transfer melted chocolate in pan to fondue pot. Adjust flame under fondue pot so that the chocolate stays smooth, but barely bubbles. Use fondue forks to dip cake cubes, strawberries, and marshmallows in chocolate sauce.

TIDBITS

1) Chocolate fondue was invented on April 1, 1798, by the great Swiss ballet dancer and explorer, Fon d’Ue. Monsieur d’Ue and all his fellow ballet dancers were at that time in the 89th infantry.

2) One day, d’Ue held up a handful of brown musket balls. “Bah, we never kill any French with these things.” He flung the balls away. The musket balls bounced off the marbled statue of the beautiful ballerina, Madame Swiz Staek that lurked in the town square.

5) The musket balls landed in the regiment’s soup pot. “Want not, waste not,” was the philosophy of the regiment’s Calvinist cook, Claude Monet. Monet dipped his supply of pound-cake cubes, strawberries, and marshmallows into the soup pot. He fished out a coated marshmallow with a long thin fork. It tasted great! The regiment’s and indeed the whole army’s bullets were being made from discarded chocolate remnants from the frugal nation’s chocolate factories.

7) And so Switzerland had lost every battle. The French annexed the whole chocolate-eating country for nearly sixteen years. Bad for Switzerland, sure, but great for the culinary world. Yum.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chocolate and Vanilla Sundae

American Dessert

CHOCOLATE AND VANILLA SUNDAE

INGREDIENTSSundae-

3/4 cup whipping cream
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/3 cup unsalted peanuts (or already ground)
2 pints chocolate ice cream
2 pints vanilla ice cream
nonpareils (optional)

SPECIAL UTENSIL

spice grinder or other grinder or quick hands with a knife

PREPARATION

Make chocolate sauce by adding whipping cream, chocolate chips, and vanilla extract to pot. Cook on low heat for about 5 minutes or until chocolate is completely melted or liquid becomes uniformly dark. Stir constantly.

Grind peanuts. Add large scoop (is there any other kind?) of chocolate ice cream and a large scoop of vanilla ice cream for each bowl you make. Drizzle chocolate sauce over each bowl, top with ground peanuts and nonpareils, if desired.

TIDBITS

1) Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) enjoyed snow flavored with nectar and honey. He was just a few steps away from inventing ice cream. But no, Alexander invaded the Persian Empire instead. His armies conquered land after land. However, these conquests never brought him the satisfaction that only a scope of ice cream could have given. Alexander came to realize how he had wasted his life by not coming up with ice cream and he drank himself to death.

2) The Roman Emperor Nero (54-68 A.D.) enjoyed ice and snow topped with fruit. He committed suicide rather than share this dessert with a jealous Roman mob

3) Marco Polo (1254-1324) is most famous for bringing the idea of ice cream from China to Italy. The Renaissance followed shortly.

4) Ice cream became readily available in seventeenth-century France. French literature flourished.

5) Ice cream came to America in the 1700s. and caused the birth of the American Republic in 1776.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chocolate Cupcakes With Cream-Cheese Frosting & Sad Sack Comic

American Dessert

CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES WITH CREAM-CHEESE FROSTING

INGREDIENTSChocCup-

CUPCAKE

6 tablespoons butter
6 tablespoons confectionary sugar
3 tablespoons granular sugar
2 eggs
3 tablespoons milk
1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa

FROSTING

1/2 cup white chocolate chips
6 ounces cream cheese

UTENSIL

cupcake pan
12 paper cups
electric beater or mixer

PREPARATION

Take butter out and let it soften. Beat eggs lightly. (They rarely ever beat you. They don’t even seem to try.) Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Put softened butter, eggs, confectionary sugar, and granular sugar in mixing bowl. Use beater set on mix until butter and sugars have blended. Add milk, chocolate chips, flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa. Use same setting on beater to blend all the ingredients.

Spoon an equal amount of the batter into each paper cup. Put the cups onto the cupcake pan. Put cupcake pan on center rack and bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes or until toothpick stuck into cupcake comes out cleanly. Remove pan from oven and let cool for 15 minutes on wire rack.

Make frosting while cupcakes are cooling. Put white chocolate chips in small pot. Cook on low heat and stir constantly until all chips have melted. Remove from heat. Put cream cheese in mixing bowl. Add melted white chocolate chips. Blend with electric beater set to cream. (Some electric beaters have a “burst of power” button. It’s cool, like accelerating a FerrariTM. Well, maybe not. But a cool electric beater costs tens of thousands of dollars less.)

Spread an equal amount of the white frosting on top of cupcakes. Serve to joyous, clamoring guests.

TIDBITS

1) Chocolate comes from the Aztec word “xocolatl” meaning bitter water.

2) My spell checker does not recognize “xocolatl.” Perhaps this is fair as the Aztecs didn’t recognize what sugar could do for cocoa.

3) But the 15th century Spaniards did. So, the Spanish royalty sent conquistadors and chefs to the new land.

4) After a generation of bloody conquest of Mexico, the sugar isles of the Caribbean were safe for hot chocolate.

5) Lacking minimal amounts of No DozTM or even Red BullTM energy drinks, Napoleon carried chocolate with him on all his military campaigns.

6) Napoleon’s energized armies racked up victory after victory until his enemies starting carrying chocolate as well. Defeat for the French became certain when chocolate rich Switzerland defected from the Gallic side.

7) The world today remains in a state of precarious peace, based on equal access to chocolate for all nations.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

comic

 

 

 

 

Categories: cuisine, humor | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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