(Vegetarian) Chocolate Pudding...Project Ramekin.

I love chocolate. I could do anything for chocolate. Almost. Just not kill the baker. I was on a no-carb, no-sugar diet all of last week. It was a great detox for me and my totally addicted to baked goods body. But then, A being the cruel husband that he is, continued to experiment. Every single night of the week, he baked something. Cheesecake, coffee cake, chocolate something-else and mango pudding, mango loaf... one of the things he baked was this chocolate pudding. And the most torturous thing was that I had to take all the pictures! I've decided that if I lose weight, I shall be given a bravery award!

He used a tart pan instead of a ramekin and tried agar-agar instead of gelatin. Being vegetarians and careful ones at that, we are very reluctant or rather will never use gelatin. You can imagine my agony every time I see a panna cotta or any other dish with ingredient. So, being very sweet, A decided to use Agar-Agar during the week I was on the diet. So sweet no? I'm so lucky no? Say it, say it. Come on! Uff!

Here is the recipe for all you bored folks waiting for me to finish my rant. I do not know how it tasted and I'm quite proud to say that. A loved it and ate the whole thing and baked this again the other night!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup semi sweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup milk
1/8 cup sugar
2 tsp strong freshly brewed coffee, room temperature
1 /2 tbsp agar agar powder

1. Pour the milk into a saucepan and bring it a medium heat.

2. Add the agar agar powder and stir well. Add the chocolate chips and sugar and heat until the chocolate chips have melted. Add the coffee. Make sure that the liquid is free of lumps so keep stirring every now and then.

3. Continue heating till you barely observe bubbling. Turn the stove off and pour this hot liquid into a greased tart pan/ramekin. It should fill it up.

4. Bring it to room temperature. This should set the pudding mostly. Place it in the refrigerator for a couple of hours to set it fully.

Dig in! Trust me, you won't be able to tell the difference between and the store brought Jello...it was THAT good :) Silky smooth texture, melt in the mouth chocolatey goodness...'nuff said!

We are sending this to Poornima's event, ' For the Love of Chocolate.' We love it as much as you do! :)

Project Ramekin - Lemon Cheesecake.

Like before, this is yet another experiment. We wanted to try a cheesecake in a regular baking dish, a ramekin, a cake pan etc. Our springform pan leaks and is flawed. So, A, one night, in one of his usual baking endeavors decided to bake a lemon cheesecake. The next night, I broke my diet regimen of 2 weeks and ate the cheesecake. It was THAT good. I'm not going to talk much now, but will just let the man give you the recipe!

Ingredients:

4 ounces of Neufachtel cheese, at room temperature
4 ounces of Mascarpone cheese, at room temperature
1.5 tbsp butter (room temperature)
1/3 cup sugar cookies, broken into small pieces
1 tsp cocoa powder
1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon zest
1 tsp lemon juice




1. Preheat oven to 375 F.

2. In a food processor, pulse the cookies, cocoa powder and butter to form a coarse powder (like grated Parmesan Cheese).

3. In a 4"X1 2/3 " deep circular ramekin, apply cooking spray generously. Don't worry, none of this will go inside you ;) This is to line the ramekin with a piece of parchment paper, cut just enough to cover the bottom and rise a little above all around to form a little 'cup'.

4. Press the coarse powder to cover the parchment paper. Pack thoroughly to form a nice, thick crust.

5. Bake for 12-15 mins. until nice and brown. Remove and let the crust cool to room temperature.

6. Reduce the oven temperature to 350F. Get an oven safe saucepan slightly larger than the ramekin and fill it 1/2 way with water. Place it in the oven 5 mins prior to placing the batter filled ramekin.

7. In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese, lemon juice, lemon zest and the sugar at medium speed, for about 2 minutes.

8. Add the egg and beat at high speed for a minute.

9. Pour this on top of the cooled crust.

10. Place the ramekin inside the saucepan in the oven. The water should rise to cover about 1/3-1/2 the level of the ramekin. If not, adjust the amount of water accordingly.

11. Bake until the center is slightly jiggly, about 1 hour. Make sure that the top doesnt have cracks. If so, that means the cheesecake has overcooked. Use a thin knife and run around the edges, taking care not to break the cheesecake.

12. Take it out of the oven and let it cool down to room temperature, about 1 hour. Then refrigerate it overnight or 4-5 hours. Use the same knife to pry the cheesecake apart at several places. Then gently invert it on a plate and invert again to get the sunny side up :)



Trust me, its worth the wait and the effort :) The lemony flavor went very well with the chocolatey crust. The consistency was perfect and as usual, it was gobbled up in no time ;) As evident from the pics, we had ours with some blackberry Coulis(a fancy word for blackberry preserve thinned out with water and warmed a little bit ;) ).

Project Ramekin.

This is an idea we came up with recently. And no it doesn't need any participation from anyone. We happen to be the only participants in this project ;) We're just two people and we are suckers for desserts. When we come across recipes on various sources, they invariably ask for cups of flour, lot of eggs, cream, sugar, so on and so forth. Initially, in order to learn baking and to feel more confident about ourselves, we followed the recipes to the T. Sometimes we ended up with some great stuff, but in huge amounts for just two people! And I personally think that desserts are at their best when consumed fresh. The longer they stay in the refrigerator, the less delectable they become. For instance, the hazelnut flour cake we tried came out great, but it was a LOT for just the two of us. And we're not Ina Garten to host parties almost every single day ;) So we end up consuming most, if not all of the goodies! So we decided to start scaling down recipes. This serves several purposes.

1) Less stuff to eat (or discard, if it doesn't succeed ;))
2) Is it really possible to scale down certain recipes? (Consider meringues and so on)
3) While scaling down, can we add or subtract some of the 'rich' ingredients and still retain the flavor of the dish? If the answer is yes, then it rocks! If not, then we're eating less of it anyway. So its a win-win situation ;)
3) Portion control. This is a key if you're on a diet and still want to indulge in small amounts. Also, sometimes its really cool to serve individualized desserts when you're hosting a few people.

With this in mind, the geek in me came up with Project Ramekin. That is to scale down and experiment with all the good desserts until I can get them into a ramekin...or 2 at the most ;)

The first successful recipe that we're posting is that of a chocolate hazelnut torte. Its different from a muffin as it doesn't necessarily require flour so you get a nice, dense chocolate flavor. Or as I like to say: "more bang for your buck' ;)

Here's the original recipe I followed. As you can see, it needs a ton of stuff. 1 cup (equals 2 sticks!) of butter, so on and so forth. Lot of fats, to be honest ;) And note that it prepares four servings according to them.

I scaled down the recipe to use just one egg. So here's mine:

1 large egg
2tbsp butter
1/8 cup semi sweet chocolate chips
1/5 cup toasted, de-skinned hazelnuts (I used about 6 individual nuts)
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed (this is less than their prescribed amount)
1/2 tsp cocoa powder
1/2 tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour

When you're baking at 10 PM in the night, you really don't have patience to take out that hand beater and use it and clean it. So, in a small blender (called mixi in India :D), pulse the butter and sugar. Scrape the sides and add the nuts. Pulse a few times. Add the chocolate chips and pulse a few more times. Finally, add the egg, cocoa powder and the flour and pulse it a couple of times. The idea is not to overbeat the eggs.

Pour it in the ramekin and bake it at 350 F until a skewer comes clean, about 23 mins. in my case.

The amount of batter was actually less than 1 ramekin but I didn't fill up to the brim, the whole ramekin because I feared that the rising will cause things to overflow. So I filled about 2/3rd of the ramekin and was left with a tbsp or two of batter which I ended up discarding. So their 4 servings would actually amount to five of our servings...something that worked to our advantage ;)

I've never baked a torte before so I chose to add a little bit of flour to be on the safer side. I guess I might try to make a flourless one in future :) But this came out really well! At first, it looked a touch crusty on the outside. But when we dug into it, we could clearly see (and taste) the dense, rich chocolatey goodness inside :D We devoured this in a couple of minutes :)

What do you think of this project? We plan to post frequently on experiments in our kitchen. These are not dishes no one's tried before, or very unique or tough dishes. They are 'our' experiments in 'our' kitchen. So, it could be a success or like a lot of times, failure! Let us know!