Hot Chocolate

Being increasingly upset with the concept of "instant hot chocolate", I showed my brother and sister that it is perfectly simple to make hot chocolate from unsweetened cocoa powder and sugar (and vanilla, cinnamon sugar, nutmeg, and whatever else). We rarely buy single-serving packaged hot chocolate, but I feel unhappy knowing that THAT STUFF GETS SOLD, and people LOVE IT! It's not my business to poke my spoon into other people's mugs, but I don't understand why one'd shell out more money than necessary for mugs of mediocre -- six packets (packaged in a neat box, which may or may not be wrapped in plastic) of mostly sugar, a tiny scoop of cocoa powder, some sort of creamer, partially hydrogenated oil, flavouring, FD&C Yellow #5, and caramel flavouring. 

Convenience? 

"But, but, but, my method is convenient too!", I whine, with pearly tears gushing down my face. "And my hot chocolate's packaging is recyclable, unlike the foil-and-paper-blend wrapper that most companies use!"

So, here's something that's intensely bitter-chocolatey (whoo!) or super sweet (if you're my sister), depending on your preferences, gives you 8 g of protein, and doesn't take much time at all! No stoves! If an 8 year-old enfant gâté [read: spoiled brat] can do it, so can you (yes, even the time-deprived and sleep-deprived college students)!

Ingredients -- for a mugful

1. UNSWEETENED cocoa powder

2. Sugar (or honey/molasses/aspartame/candy)

3. Water (preferably at room temperature)
4. Fat-free milk! (preferably at room temperature)
5. Flavourings/garnishes -- vanilla, cinnamon sugar, coffee powder, nutmeg, chilies, marshmallows, pudding...

Method
1. Add 1-3 tsp cocoa powder and 1-3 tsp sugar. Add flavourings. I would prefer 2-3 tsp cocoa powder and 1 tsp sugar... but my sister would honestly just want a pinch of cocoa powder and some 50 g of sugar.
2. Add enough room temperature water to submerge the solids, microwave for 30 s, and stir.
3. Add room temperature milk until your mug is 6/7 full. I don't want to add more because I'm scared that things will explode in my microwave.
4. Microwave for 50 s. Stir. Repeat until your hot chocolate is hot!
5. Add garnishes. We added ice cream and coloured marshmallows.

Actually, if you really wanted to, you could eat half a canister of unsweetened cocoa powder (bake with it, make pancakes with it, mix it with peanut butter etc.) and then pour sugar into the canister's remaining space. Now, you have enough hot chocolate mix to last a winter. Or just the finals season.

While my brother and I were enjoying our cocoa-studded hot chocolates, my sister was complaining that we don't have whipped cream in the house, and that the hot chocolate at the Diner is so much better. She was on the verge of shooting out those irksome tears. I sometimes wish that she understood that when my brother and I were her age, we didn't have hot chocolate in the house. We didn't have an oven or a microwave! I didn't even know what cinnamon was!

"Two-Ingredient" Brownie

Yay for college kids with "no food" and a microwave!!

This brownie recipe requires you to purchase two ingredients.

1. Chocolate. I used baking chocolate, which is bitter (no sugar), though you could just use a candy bar. It was about $0.125.

2. Flour/bran/potato flakes/crushed cereal/whatever.

Actually, let's say your co-worker gives you a candy bar. A Twix bar, for instance. In that case, you only need to purchase one ingredient, the flour/bran/whatever.

You probably have the other ingredients in your house, or you can probably pick them up at Wawa or at some restaurant.

1. One packet of mayonnaise.

2. A few packets of sugar. I used four, but I think I could've done well with three. Some people may want to put in 14. If you use a Twix bar, you could put in less sugar, of course.

Method

1. Melt chocolate in microwave in a ceramic bowl.

2. Add mayonnaise, sugar, and a few tablespoons of water.

3. Add in flour/bran/crushed cereal/etc. until you have something that looks like cake batter. If you want something super gooey (like the chocolate brownie in the picture above), make it the consistency of pancake batter.

4. Microwave for a minute. Add a few more seconds if you want.

5. The brownie firms up a little when it cools.

6. DELICIOUSLY GOOEY AND MOIST AND HOT AND CHOCOLATEY!!!

...so next time you have all those random mayonnaise/sugar/artificial sweetener packets, you know what to do!

The price of chocolate is now the price of that flavour of cake! Whoo!

Mayonnaise is basically eggs and oil, which give the cake the fatty taste and the rise (eggs). No baking soda/powder needed!

As a side note, I found a super-widely-followed-blog (that I won't name, because I'm not impressed by it anymore) that gave out recipes listing the exact cost of the ingredients and the price per small serving. Everyone, including me initially, is so damn intrigued by it because it shows that a serving of pound cake is some 0.46 cents, or whatever, and that a batch of cookies is $5.21 or whatever. Right, if I follow the recipes on this blog, I'll make delicious cheap food.

What I realised after reading some of the recipes, though, is that the recipes are normal. They're the kind you can find ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET. ANY blog could stick out its ingredients with the prices. ANY person can buy and make food using cheap ingredients from Walmart. My mum does. She just doesn't blog about it. I don't get why this particular blog gets so much fanfare; if I make a batch of cookies using someone else's recipe, it's probably going to cost around $5.00 as well. Only, the blog won't tell me it's $5.00 (my grocery receipt will, though). I mean, this blog says, oh, make cookies using flour ($x), eggs ($x), sugar ($x), butter ($x), chocolate ($x). $x per serving.

My blog says, oh, make cookies using flour, eggs, sugar, butter, chocolate. Eat them.

So, after I thought of this, I realised that that blog wasn't a big deal after all. And I also got turned off with the shopping at Walmart part. Meh. Haters gonna hate. I'm gonna hate, haha.

Why Follow?

Why follow the instructions on the package?

Do you ever follow the recipe on the can of sweetened condensed milk? No! The one on the plastic wrapper that envelopes chocolate chips? No! The one on the back of cake mix?

W-WAIT! Of course you follow the one on the back of cake mix, or cookie mix, or pudding mix... there just is NO other way to use up that powdery stuff! You MUST add three medium sized [yes, medium] eggs, one stick of butter, and half a cup of water. Otherwise, the cake will cease to ever exist! It will blow up the oven, or stick to the spoon, or end human intelligence [not that THAT would be a huge deal, since it happens if you DO follow the recipe down to the millimole]!

However, since this household lacks butter, I decided to make this gluten-free cake mix that my mum bought [I don't know why, since she knows that I rarely use mix, let alone gluten-free cake mix] using my brainpower.

Also, I didn't want to use the oven because it would waste a lot of energy.

All I did was add two eggs and some water. In other words, this cake is pretty much "fat-free". Then I microwaved a bowl of it, for about 148 seconds.

And... it tasted like plain store-bought-cake-mix chocolate sponge cake. Without the burnt parts, and the wasted oven heat.

Easy.

You don't see cakes in bowls much.

This is technically the 27th, but I microwaved my first cake on the 26th.

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.

100 Gingerbread Crumbs!

For the 100th post, I decided to add some spice to the items that I usually blog about. :) [haha...] By spice, I mean gingerbread. Not "real" gingerbread, though. It's microwaved gingerbread.

"Microwaved? Inconceivable!", you say. I'll let you mull over that while I talk about the tomato couscous soup I made again today! This time I added soft tofu, which added this amazing soft nuttiness to it, which contrasted with the grainy texture of the couscous.

Anyway, back to gingerbread. Or, gingerbread mix. This is actually a gingerbread cake mix from Target [Archer Farms?] that I was too lazy to follow directions and add the butter and stick it in the oven. Instead, I just added an egg, water, and a bit of oil [Not sure how much, though]. Then, I mixed it until it looked like cookie dough rather than egg batter, and stuck it in the fridge.

About two tablespoons of this dough, covered with a spoon of cold milk, then microwaved for 60 seconds, yields the image above. GOOEY AWESOMENESS! Well, awesomeness for those who like cakes that are of a brownie consistency. I stirred up the bottom which was still liquidy and microwaved the whole thing for another 20 or so seconds. If you want a more "cakey" [read: dry] cake, stick it in the microwave for another 30 seconds, and then another 10. Just because. Last time, I microwaved one spoonful for about 90 seconds, which yielded a really CRUNCHY COOKIE rather than cake.

In other words, this stuff is really versatile. For those of us who aren't afraid of salmonella [I'm not afraid!], it tastes great "raw", too. It's gingery, but much sweeter so that the ginger taste isn't prevalent. I guess if you want an authentic nutmeggy gingery taste, this isn't for you, but since I honestly dislike the taste of ginger, or ginger candy, or ginger tea, this "ginger"bread works just fine with me. Oh, and if any of you end up walking around 59th ish near that park at NYC near the Lincoln Centre, BUY THE GINGERSNAPS. THEY. ARE. AMAZING.