Better living through chocolate

It's been AGES since I put a food post up so, in an attempt to assuage the prevailing mood with chocolate, here's a new brownie recipe.  Mr. Mouse and I are attempting to eat a plant-based diet these days which, to us, means not only no animal products but also no oils.  A lot of vegan recipes add fats via oils so I have adapted a "Chewy Vegan Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipe from www.food.com as follows:

CHEWY VEGAN CHOCOLATE CHIP BROWNIES

¾ cup unsweetened applesauce*

2 cups sugar

2 tsp vanilla

1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp ground flax seed**

½ cup almond milk (or soymilk)

2 cups flour

¾ cup cocoa powder

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 ½ cups semisweet vegan chocolate chips***

Preheat oven to 350◦F.  Add ground flax seeds to almond milk and stir for about 30 seconds, set aside.  In a large bowl, sift together cocoa, flour, baking soda and salt.  Cream sugar and applesauce in another large bowl.  Add the flax seed/almond milk mixture and mix well.  Stir in vanilla.  Slowly mix in dry ingredients.  Mix in chocolate chips. Pour brownie mixture into lightly greased**** 9x13 baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes or until knife inserted comes out clean.

Note:  the original recipe was for cookies but I found the dough too wet to roll into balls and went the brownie route instead.  They came out very moist and fudgy.

* This is a substitution for ¾ cup canola oil.  The applesauce worked GREAT.

**  I found pre-ground flax seed in the health food section of my regular grocery store; you can also find whole flax seeds and grind them yourself.  Flax seed is somehow an egg substitution in vegan baking.

*** I found non-dairy/non-gluten dark chocolate chips in the health food section and just used a whole bag.  They were actually tasty on their own – not like yucky carob.

**** I used just a tiny bit of coconut oil

This is quite possibly the best thing ever. Ever.

We pause in our interminable Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles coverage to spread the word about this delectable-ness:

BACON S'MORES

I just read about this, which falls squarely in the "why the hell didn't I think of this years ago?" category, on NPR this morning.  It is just one more example of how bacon makes everything better: you take your regular ol' s'mores* - toasted marshmallow on slab of chocolate on graham crackers - and add some crispy bacon in there, probably between the marshmallow and the chocolate.  That is completely brilliant and I am totally doing this on our next camping trip.

*  NPR linked to this site here, which got all fancy-pants with homemade pig-shaped graham crackers.  That might be a little too Martha Stewart for yours truly but the little pig-shaped s'mores are about the cutest things you've ever seen.

Photo credit: NPR.  Oh gawd those look fabulous, even for indoor s'mores.

Deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon on a stick: FAIL

Mr. Mouse and I went to the Utah State Fair recently, and while I'm not going to repeat the blog post about the fair that I did over there at my other blog, I will say that I was SORELY DISAPPOINTED with the deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon on a stick.  Which, as you all well know, is in theory the Friend Mouse Holy Grail of bacon-centric foods. 

Imagine, if you will, as I did: crisp bacon, dunked in chocolate, battered and deep-fried to golden goodness.  Or even crisp bacon, battered and deep-fried to golden goodness and then drizzled in chocolate.  It could have been SO fabulous, glistening alongside the deep-fried Twinkies, deep-fried Snickers bars, deep-fried Oreos and deep-fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

 But no.  Sadly, this is what I got for my $4.50:  a strip of bacon, threaded onto a wooden skewer and deep-fried, then plopped in a cardboard basket and spritzed with thin chocolate sauce.  That was it.  Fer chrissakes, I could do that myself at home.  Should have gone with the deep-fried Snickers - and next time I will.

Don't believe the hype

All of my favorite things

My dear friend Blonde Ambition knows me too well.  She sent me a Christmas present (even tho' she shouldn't have because we were cutting back and not sending Christmas presents this year) that combined all of my favorite things:  chocolate, beer and bacon.  Let me repeat that for you: chocolate and beer and bacon, all together.

From the charming chocolatier, Socola Chocolates (just look at their website without drooling, I dare you), came a gorgeous box of twelve truffles entitled the Beer and Bacon collection: six Guinness-infused dark chocolate tidbits, and six "Notorious H.O.G." nibbles.  The bacon truffles were also dark chocolate, embedded with bits of applewood-smoked bacon and garnished with black Hawaiian sea salt.  The Guinness truffles were just ravishing, smooth and creamy with just a bit of bitterness from the beer.  The bacon truffles had the best mouth-feel when allowed to melt whole in your mouth - as opposed to taking a bite out of the candy - as that way the little bacon bits didn't get lost.  The Hawaiian sea salt is a miraculous addition - an excellent counterpoint to the richness of the chocolate.

I opened the box a couple of days before Christmas and finished the last truffle last night, taking my time to savor each individual morsel.  These are really good chocolates.  And Socola (which uses the most adorable mascot: Harriet the flying alpaca!) has a whole bunch of other truffle varieties that sound just as amazing: Calmyrna fig, Earl Grey tea, burnt caramel, guava, Vietnamese espresso, jasmine tea, green tea, dark chocolate champagne ... now I'm drooling!

The company is run by two sisters, Wendy and Susan Lieu, and can be bought in person in several locations in San Francisco/Oakland.  Or order some online - I promise you won't regret it.