Chocolate Chip Pancakes!

It's actually the 19th but I shall post this as the 18th.

For dinner I went out to eat pancakes with BV. We went to the Ritz Diner... because where else do you find chocolate chip pancakes at 8pm? Yes, PM, not AM. An amazing but sugar-crashing-filled meal. Seriously, by the time I was halfway through the pancakes, I had a huge sugar rush and I felt all hyper and sleepy at the same time. Which is how I felt on the night of graduation. Anyway.

When the waitress asked us what we wanted and we both said pancakes [I got two pancakes, he got three. I know that three is a LOT of pancakes, since last time, I got three blueberry pancakes and even though my brother ate some of it, we still didn't finish it...so that's my experience with food from the Ritz. It's a rule. You can't finish a plate of it in one sitting. This was proven true again since BV didn't finish his pancakes, and nor did I. Again.]

The chocolate chip pancakes are fabled to be amazing. That's what I had learned from people but not from experience two years ago from after Counties in Spring Track. I personally think that they are deliciously fluffy pancakes [not boiling-water-spattering like the blueberry ones] and not too sweet, which meant that the syrup filled all the spongy cavities in the dough. They were also neither extremely eggy nor gluteny, which I like. I noticed that the chocolate chips only appeared on the underside of each pancake, though, which I suppose helps the chocolate chips not stick to the griddle.

The people at the Ritz are nice.

Amazing day.

Random Blahs.

I'm actually going to go out to dinner later, but I'm not going to be back in time to update... so tomorrow I shall update about that. Instead, I'm just going to post a few random pictures.

Whole wheat spaghetti soup with onions and garlic and green peppers. And tomato, of course. And clumps of Boca burger. I have officially finished cooking Boca burgers and I will never consume another Boca burger in my life. I am completely sick of them. I like plain tofu better. Or even plain chickpeas.

:)

I found some Airheads candy in the food drawer. From 2007. Or maybe it was 2006. I don't really know. So I unwrapped them all, rolled them into a tyre shape [hey, it fits the theme of Cars] and threw it into the garden. Now I have a nice piece of space in the drawer for other food!

Yup - the sesame chocolate cookies I made a few days ago... This time I microwaved them for 40 seconds, flipped each over, and microwaved them for another 17 seconds. My sister actually liked them! She said that they looked and sort of tasted like fudge. Which is great, since fudge is very much appreciated in the world. Which is why everyone says, "Oh. Fudge!" when something goes wrong, because, by calling fudge into the world, all problems shall disappear.

Chocolate Shell Ice Cream

I think that this was the first time in my life in which I tried a hard shell coating ice cream. Once, when I used to go to Mc.D, I ordered a sundae, and the guy gave me one of these instead... and I told him, no, I wanted a chocolate sundae. So he promptly dumped the ice cream into the bin and made a sundae for me.

I wish he had just given me the chocolate coated ice cream... that would've been cool...

Anyway, in March, I tried the chocolate-shell ice cream for the first time in my life... and as you can see above, one end of it was smooshed, due to the fact that it arrived in a box from Carvel [my sister's friend's parents own a Carvel]. I saw the mum today at the library, actually, which is why I thought about blogging about this [I've not only lacked the chance to blog about this, but also haven't eaten anything of note today to blog about, so this is a suitable time to talk about this ice cream].

I imagined that the chocolate coating would taste waxy or oily, due to my belief that there are tons of random emulsifiers and additives in order to make the chocolate have a low melting point, but also a low freezing point. Actually, while I was at Carvel, I made a bunch of these... you basically make a vanilla soft serve, dunk it in the melted chocolate [or cherry] sauce AT AN ANGLE for 3 seconds, and gently pull it out and let it stand there for a while. The shell forms FAST. I unfortunately lost an ice cream through this procedure, but I think I made.... around 10 of them? I never cared to try one, though.

So, taste-wise... the chocolate actually tasted sweet, like chocolate. It wasn't waxy. It wasn't bland. It wasn't very chocolatey, either, but actually sort of tasted like a less creamy version of fudge. Maybe chocolate plastic would be a good description of it.

The vanilla ice cream... is just vanilla ice cream. Eh. And, the cone was just a sugar cone with PHO but oh well.

Nut Crunch

My mum bought this thing from Costco that is basically cashews, pumpkin seeds and almonds, smothered in hard sugar coating. It's a "cashew nut crunch" thing... and I tried to emulate it.

I think I dumped in some baking soda into the corn syrup way too early... it was when the syrup was at the soft ball stage, rather than the hard crack stage. I poured it over the fruit and pine nut and almond and peanut and soy nut mix at this point, and, a few hours later, the whole mixture was still gooey. In other words, it was more "chewy" bar than "crunchy" bar, if I were to liken it to granola bars. So, I started microwaving chunks of it, 20 to 30 seconds per batch. In my first timid batch, the fruit completely burned out from the inside... but the nuts were really crunchy and flavourful. The remaining batches were zapped to a crunchy consistency, but they're still rather soggy, due to the fruit. The sugary stuff has solidified, though, but still isn't crunchy. I need to learn how to make candy. In the past, when I made caramel, taffy, and fudge, I never went past the soft ball stage. I don't think I dare myself to. Next time... however...

I wonder what chocolate gummies taste like. I have some leftover corn syrup and a lot of cocoa powder... this is gonna be interesting, when I try it out.

Sesame Chocolate Cookies!

In the book Chocolate by Nick Malgieri, I found a recipe for almond chocolate cookies on page 179. Actually, they're called "Sicilian Easter Hearts", although after my tweaking, they are official not such an object. I also didn't bake the cookies. I just microwaved them.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups of flour and cocoa powder. Use whatever ratio you want.

1 cup of ground sesame - We happen to have ground sesame [a.k.a. sesame flour?] at home. You may have ground almonds.

Ginger powder

0.5 cups of honey

0.5 tbsp baking soda

Some sugar and/or instant coffee powder. Just 'cuz.

Water

So, you just mix everything except the water. Then, add water at about a tablespoon at a time until you get something that resembles dough. This dough must be really dry, but it also has to be malleable. In other words, you can roll balls of it in your hands without it crumbling. If it gets too sticky, too bad, you're out of luck :P.

I stuck mine in the fridge for easy slicing. Then, I sliced three of them [small pieces] and microwaved it for 30 seconds. Seeing that it was still a tad gooey, I microwaved it again for 20 seconds. This time, two of the cookies turned out fantastic, but the third one was a bit too hard in the middle. Either way, this is way more efficient than actually baking the cookies. I'm not sure how many these yield, since I have the rest of the log in the fridge, but the book says that it "makes about 15 large cookies".

Although eating this raw had the same texture as... say, almond paste, I think I prefer it cooked. I prefer it cookied. Haha. It's a bit too dry. So, after microwaving, I prodded them, and they were really poofy and looked like mini pastries, even though they were technically "low fat" [technically, there is a ton of fat in sesame and cocoa powder. However, the fat in those substances pales in comparison to the % of fat in oil or butter or cream cheese, which is basically 100%]. They even tasted like some sorta cakey-cookie thing! The cookie above was really moist in the middle, as you can see. I couldn't really taste much cocoa powder, due to the fact that there was three times as much ground sesame as there was cocoa powder... so I think this leans towards the more "exotic" and "non-traditional" flavourings of cookies, which is cool. I couldn't taste much ginger spice though :(, which is a bit of a letdown. Guess I'll add more next time. I think I'm going to experiment with the microwave a lot more now... since I have proven that it does NOT produce inferior cookies. I mean, the past few years, the microwave has yielded disasters concerning cookies... but this was a nice change.