Monthly Archives: February 2011

Pôts de Crème

This easy and elegant dessert is my go-to when we have people over for dinner. In fact, chances are if you’ve been over to our house for dinner, this is what I served you.

If I didn’t, please notify me immediately so that I can rectify the situation with an emergency dinner party.

I’ve never met a dessert before that was so delicious and so easy. Really, really easy. I know, everyone and their mother promotes recipes by saying ‘it’s really easy, guys!’ but this one–this one. This one is the real deal. You blend a couple things, and then chill the mixture. And that’s it. It’s one of the Pioneer Woman’s more brilliant recipes, and I bring it to you in step-by-step form today.

Ingredients

(Serves 6)

12 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips

4 eggs, room temperature

2 tsp vanilla extract (or Kahlua, Baileys, Amarula, cognac, etc.)

1 pinch of salt

8 oz strong, hot coffee

First, my friends, let your eggs get to room temperature on the counter. If you forget to take them out ahead of time, run them under some tepid/warm water for a few minutes and they’ll warm right up.

Now grab your trusty blender and put in the chocolate chips and the eggs.

I chose to use a gross dirty old blender from Big Jake’s basement.

I should clarify for my hygiene-conscious friends: the glass receptacle is spanking clean. The gross and dirty part is the base, and that’s only because I don’t want to get close enough to clean it. But it chuggalugs along, and that’s all that I ask of it for now–we’ll talk about blender beauty pageants in future years.

Looks delish, eh?

Add the salt (a “healthy pinch”) . . .

And the flavoring. You can use vanilla extract, but you can also amp it up with a fun liqueur. Kahlua or Baileys are obvious choices.

I chose to use a bottle of Amarula from Aunt Laura. It was out of this world.

And there it all is! One big happy dessert-to-be.

Blend!

After things seem pretty homogeneous, and while it’s blending, pour the coffee into the blender in a slow, steady stream. I reiterate that it must be very, very hot. In fact, bring the coffee to a boil in your microwave just before adding it in–this has great bearing on the final texture of the dessert.

You can prepare a gourmet pot of espresso expressly for this purpose . . . or you can use instant coffee. I used a packet of Starbucks via mixed with some off-brand instant coffee to add strength.

Now say ‘espresso expressly’ ten times fast. If you can do it perfectly, you will receive a cool little prize from me.

The ‘cool little prize’ is my eternal admiration of your agile tongue. And aren’t the intangible prizes the most valuable ones? I mean, ultimately? Doesn’t the promise of my approval make you want to try your best?

What? You could care less about my approval? But I’m an older sister! Everyone must work to please me!

Wow, that tangent is headed for some kind of frenzied crisis, so let’s return to the chocolate that brought us here today. After about a minute of blending, you will have a creamy, chocolaty mess. Blend for an extra minute just to make sure everything has gotten married and become One Flesh. We don’t want granules of chocolate chips floating around trying to be independent.

Pour the mix into serving glasses.

Just leave plenty of room for the whipped cream that you’ll be heaping on them before serving.

It can be fun to use glasses of assorted shapes.

It adds a little whimsy to the whole sordid affair.

Now chill them in the fridge for 3-4 hours.

Right before serving, whip some heavy cream and pile it on. I whipped a little more Amarula into my cream the last time I made these, and it was fantastic.

You can fold in pieces of fruit, and top it off with chocolate shavings or little curls of orange peel if you’re feeling fancy.

I’m feeling fancy. Let’s pile on the chopped up chocolate!

Beautiful, eh?

Let’s take a bite.

So rich . . . so decadent . . . like silk on the tongue.

And just for fun, let’s add some chopped up canned mandarin oranges.

Don’t even get me started on the idea of adding heaps of fresh berries when the summer returns. *swooning* Fruit and chocolate were meant to be together.

I can’t seem to stop photographing these little beauties. And envisioning variations–such as stirring minced cranberries into the chocolate before chilling, to add a note of tartness. Or sprinkling some peanuts and macadamias on top right before serving–along the whipped cream. The whipped cream is one thing I’m not compromising on; it adds a necessary balance to the richness of the chocolate.

Make this dessert for your next dinner party! You can throw it together the night before, and it’s guaranteed to please everyone. Or you can always just make it for yourself. One batch should provide one fortunate individual with a dessert for every single night of the week. Now that’s an idea . . .

Click here for printer-friendly version: Pôts de Crème

Snow Day in Chicago

Yesterday was a snow day.

Based on the blizzard that was on the docket for Chicago, my ever-so-kind boss told us to simply not to come in. So when I left work Tuesday evening, I forwarded the office phones to my handy ole Blackberry, and I prepared my soul for a delicious day full of blankets, sweatpants, and fuzzy socks.

That night, the wind blew fiercely, the snow came down, and we cuddled in our bed to the tune of some rumblingly loud thunder. We woke up to shuddering winds, a cold apartment, and this view from our paper-thin windows:

Our windows have such thin glass and rattle so loudly in the wind that we have stuffed wads of paper between the glass and frame to reduce the noise.

All I had to do Wednesday for my job was answer the phone and keep an eye on my email.

These two mild activities were perfectly compatible with other endeavors.

Endeavors such as this cup of coffee, laced with my old friend Mr. Bailey.

Endeavors such as reading a cozy murder mystery on the couch. Please don’t hold me in contempt if I tell you that it’s called “Blueberry Muffin Murder.” It was the right thing to read curled up under an afghan with a cup of Hot Honey ‘n’ Lemon.

My husband responsibly did his school work in our second bedroom/office, and we both watched the storm progress.

I coined a new nickname for my husband–‘sweetie-bar-pie.’

Driven to the kitchen by sheer coldness, I made a hot pot of soup with some leftover turkey and generous amounts of wine and cream and Parmesan, based on the mushroom soup recipe I’ll be sharing with all y’all shortly.

It did not disappoint. I ate the soup while I talked to my Mom and caught up on her life and doings.

I love catching up with my Mom.

Then I read some of Yancey’s “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” and meditated . . . with another cup of coffee in hand, of course.

I finished off the fantastic biography ‘The Last American Man’ (review coming soon!).

To preemptively avoid house-craziness, I did a little yoga/Pilates session on the rug, while watching The Biggest Loser. You can see my tried-and-true method on the computer screen: a minimized window playing my exercise DVD (with the sound muted) next to a show that I could hardly watch from a seat on the couch–it would just feel wrong.

They do crunches, I do crunches, and I can pretend that the trainers are yelling “one more time!” at me instead of the contestants. It’s quite motivational.

The snow stopped around noon, and over the next few hours the wind went from a howling force bent on destruction to a mild breeze.

So around 4pm, we donned hats and coats and boots and met our friends Julie and Zane at a nearby coffee shop, Zanzibar. I posed on a drift of snow in our apartment courtyard.

The piles of snow on the street made it an adventursome walk. Here’s my sweetie-bar-pie climbing over a mountain:

You can see a car in the bottom right of that first picture–it was simply abandoned in the middle of the street due to the impassable amounts of white stuff.

Julie and Zane had been out hiking around for 4 hours already. These people are hard core adventurers. In fact, Julie knows how to dehydrate food and thus fed the two of them for a week during an epic hike in the wilderness. I love having cool friends. Their coolness is bound to rub off on me, somehow, some time.

Zane is a photographer and has a scary face mask.

But on the way back home, when my entire nasal structure was starting to congeal and my earlobes were in a fiery agony, I started to deeply desire a scary face mask for myself. So what if I frightened small children? When you’re cold, nothing else seems to matter except getting warm again.

We walked down Lake Shore Drive, which was empty of traffic and instead peppered with people taking a walk, or skiing. There was a cute family who was progressing in snow shoes, all in a row, along the snow-covered beach. Zane and I snapped away at the eery landscape in front of us. I have so many pictures to share with you guys–but I’ve also had my fill of Photoshop for today. So maybe next week I’ll bring them out. The patterns of ice and snow were simply beautiful, the carefully placed strokes of an ingenuous Creator.

At home again, it was time for a dinner of hot, buttery noodles with a sprinkle of Pecorino Romano (a la Cacio e Pepe).

Later on in the evening the sweetie-bar-pie and I snuggled down on the couch and fired up our Netflix Instant Play. A bowl brimming with popcorn, freshly stove-popped and salted, also played a significant role.

All I can say is, when can I have another snow day? I’m all for it.