mix, mix…stir, stir

Personal sized desserts always look like they were more work to make, but really there is no difference and they are a lot easier to serve. This week for Tuesdays with Dorie it was Milk Chocolate Mini Bundt Cakes, and the recipe really got me thinking about ingredient substitutions.

Most notably I didn’t use milk chocolate. I much prefer dark, really dark, chocolate so I rarely have milk chocolate on hand and just did a straight substitution of dark for milk. The flavor was great. I often bend a recipe to suit my taste, or to work with ingredients I have on hand. If you don’t care for an ingredient in a recipe don’t be afraid to find an equivalent to substitute. The trick is to understanding the role of the objectionable ingredient so you substitute an alternate that serves the same purpose. David likes to mock me, “well I didn’t have any ground beef so I substituted peanut butter” or some other outlandish swap, but I rarely have a substitution related disaster. Notice I didn’t use the word “never”, hence the mocking.

This recipe gave an alternative that I wouldn’t have thought of off the top of my head, but will remember for future applications. The cake called for ½ cup whole milk and in the sidebar notes Dorie mentioned buttermilk can be substituted with the addition of 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda to the dry ingredients (the baking soda is important to neutralize the acidity of the buttermilk). I was happy for the option because I had buttermilk, but no whole milk, thus no special trip to the store needed!

These little cakes hold a surprise swirl of crunchy treats. Had I followed the recipe, it would be walnuts with cocoa powder and sugar, but I thought walnuts and cocoa nibs would be more interesting. The cocoa nibs were fantastic. They were actually the hit of the cake requiring vigilant attention to ward off intruding forks attempting to sneak over and steal them off of one another’s plates. There was an increased risk of nib pilfering because I over baked the cakes which made them crumbly and if a crumb contained a cocoa nib, be on guard it might get snitched. I think it’s because I baked them on the convection setting, but forgot to decrease the baking time. I’ll be interested to visit other Tuesday with Dorie baker’s posts to see if anyone else had dry cakes.

If you haven’t used cocoa nibs, I hope you will pick some up and give them a try. They make a great addition to most baked goods. They add texture that is crunchy but not gritty. Nibs crunch and then sort of  melt when chewed. They also lend a deep chocolate flavor the way unsweetened chocolate or cocoa powder would. Cocoa nibs are created very early in the chocolate making process. Once cocoa beans are roasted they are run through a machine called a winnoer to remove the outer husk. The pieces of bean that are kept for chocolate are cocoa nibs. The nibs are then ground and conched, which is essentially a grinding process to create a beautiful smooth texture before the chocolate is molded into bars or candies. My favorite cocoa nibs come from Theo Chocolate. They are a local Seattle company that is one of very few manufacturers in the US making chocolate from raw beans to finished bars. One of the reasons they have such a nice product is they process in very small batches so the quality of the roast on the nibs is carefully monitored.

Kristin of I’m Right About Everything picked the recipe for this week and will have it posted on her blog if you’d like to give it a try.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 111 recipes completed 110 to go! Look we are over the hump!

All photos by David Peterman unless otherwise noted

Tags: Cocoa nibs

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Chocolate, Tuesdays with Dorie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.