Chocolate Muffins (makes 12)

September 3, 2017August 4, 20181 Comment

Chocolate Muffins by The Fat Foodie

Sometimes I make things that aren’t originally intended for my website, but when I taste the finished result I kick myself for not paying more attention and noting the ingredients down because it’s turned out to be a really tasty recipe. These chocolate muffins were one of those recipes. I’d had a number of sweet potatoes in the fridge that needed to be used up so I thought it’d be nice to make a batch of chocolate muffins to take into work the next day. Of course, it was only after I’d taken them into work and tasted them that I realised how lovely they were, leaving me to resolve that I’d make another batch very soon.

Although these chocolate muffins have sweet potato in them you can’t tell at all. The sweet potato simply bulks out the muffin mixture while adding moisture, body and sweetness to the sponge. The beauty of using the sweet potatoes in the chocolate muffins is that you can use less flour in the mix and it also adds a number of vitamins and minerals into the muffins that you wouldn’t ordinarily get from only using gluten-free flour.

I genuinely think that this is my go-to chocolate muffin recipe from now on because they are soft, light, moist and incredibly fudgy and you certainly can’t tell that they’re gluten-free. They’re everything you could possibly want in a chocolate muffin really.

Ingredients:

420g peeled raw sweet potatoes (cut into small chunks)

200g brown sugar

100g gluten-free flour (I use Dove’s Farm G/F flour because it’s made with low FODMAP ingredients whereas many other gluten-free flours are made with high FODMAP options.)

50g cocoa

100g chopped walnuts (optional)

2 large eggs

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp xanthan gum

140ml vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

140ml rice milk

1/2 tsp salt

For the chocolate muffin icing:

200g icing sugar

25g cocoa

Around 1 tbsp of water (but depends on how thick you want the icing to be)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 190C/170C Fan/375F/Gas mark 5.

Lay out 12 muffin cases in a muffin tray.

Prepare the sweet potatoes and cook them on a plate in the microwave until they are soft. Put the cooked sweet potato in a large mixing bowl, mash well and leave to cool.

Once the sweet potato is fairly cool, add all of your wet ingredients and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients and mix well.

Divide the mixture between the 12 muffin cases and bake in the oven for 30-35 mins or until a skewer pushed into the middle of one comes out clean. Leave to cool.

To make the icing, slowly stir the water into the icing sugar and cocoa to blend the icing together (you can make it as thick or thin as you like) and once you’re happy with the consistency pour it over the chocolate muffins.

Munch!

Chocolate Muffins by The Fat Foodie

Chocolate Torte (serves 6-8)

August 6, 2017August 4, 2018Leave a comment

Chocolate Torte by The Fat Foodie

The other day I was walking home from work when my Dad stopped his car to say that he’d got me a clutch of fresh duck eggs from one of his colleagues. Never one to turn my nose up at free ingredients, particularly ones as generous as eight massive, freshly-lain duck eggs, I dutifully followed him home to collect them. Once I’d given them a wash (chickens aren’t that fussed about keeping their productions clean) I was rewarded with the sight of a bowlful of creamy, pink and blue, large eggs with striations that made them look like they’d been sculpted from marble. They were truly a thing of natural beauty.

Freshly Lain Duck Eggs

Now I’d been wracking my brain trying to come up with a recipe that would do them justice. Duck eggs are very rich, infusing a delicate and delicious intensity into cakes and biscuits with very little effort, so I knew that I didn’t want to waste them on a bake that would fail to let them shine. After some consideration I knew that a chocolate torte would be the perfect vehicle for their use because the richness of the torte would only be enhanced by the duck eggs.

A chocolate torte is a very rich, buttery and intensely chocolatey cake. It’s not made with a flour sponge like most cakes are and instead depends on the lightness of whisked eggs (and in this case a small amount of ground almonds) to provide the structure of the cake. Accordingly, the result is a slightly dense, but infinitely moreish, chocolate torte that requires only a small serving to satisfy one’s sweet tooth.

Much like pavlovas and profiteroles, this bake looks complicated and its reputation only bolsters this misconception, but trust me, this chocolate torte is really easy to make. It literally only requires you to melt your butter and dark chocolate in one jug, whisk all of your other ingredients together in another jug and then pour one into the other before whisking again and baking. You can’t really get any easier than that, can you?

This chocolate torte is a dream to both make and eat, particularly when served with a dollop of whipped cream or a scoop of good quality ice-cream. It’s a torte that is decadent and luxurious, with a rich, fudgy, but light cake base that delivers the perfect chocolate hit to the taste buds. Try making this one soon, guys, you won’t regret it.

Chocolate Torte by The Fat Foodie

Ingredients:

85g salted butter (at room temperature)

170g dark chocolate (broken into small pieces)

4 large hen’s eggs (or 3 duck eggs, if using)

50g sugar

2 tsps of instant coffee granules

1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon

50g ground almonds

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Cocoa powder (for dusting the top)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180C/160C Fan/350F/Gas mark 4.

Line a 9 inch cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Place your butter and dark chocolate in a microwavable jug and slowly melt in the microwave, stirring frequently so the chocolate doesn’t burn. If you don’t have a microwave then melt it slowly by placing the jug in a pot that’s been filled with boiling water (but is not on the heat) and allowing it to melt down. (Don’t have the pot over heat though or you might melt your jug!)

Leave the melted chocolate mixture to cool slightly.

Measure all of your other ingredients into a separate jug and whisk well until thoroughly combined and airy.

Slowly pour the chocolate mixture into the other jug, whisking all the while. Mix it all together and then pour into your cake tin and bake for 40-45 mins.

Check the cake is cooked by poking a skewer into the middle. It should be cooked when only a few crumbs are on the skewer when removed from the cake, but remember that it is supposed to be moist and fudgy in the middle so don’t panic too much if it’s a bit wetter than a normal cake.

Leave to cool and then dust with cocoa powder and serve with whipped cream or ice-cream (or a non-dairy alternative).

Chocolate Torte by The Fat Foodie

Chocolate Torte by The Fat Foodie

Chocolate Profiteroles (makes 14)

July 16, 2017August 4, 2018Leave a comment

Chocolate Profiteroles by The Fat Foodie

I’ve always been under the strong impression that chocolate profiteroles and the choux pastry they are built from were really difficult to make, requiring a lot of ingredients and skill to produce them. After all, whenever they’re featured on The Great British Bake Off they make such a song and dance about the difficulty of the task ahead of them that they must be hard to make, right? No, wrong actually! I can now confirm that this is not the case, they are made from very few ingredients and they are actually incredibly easy to bake!

I was really surprised at how little work was involved in making the chocolate profiteroles. Now, I did use my food processor to mix the dough together, which most definitely lessened the strenuousness of the task, but I suspect that most people nowadays have at least an electric whisk in their kitchen cupboards that would do the same job. I think that if you try to make choux pastry by hand you’ll be stirring until the cows come home and you might fail to get the same smooth, glossy finish that’s required from the pastry dough.

Chocolate profiteroles always seem like such an indulgent and decadent dessert due to their whipped cream filling and slathering of chocolate that coats them, but they’re actually really cheap to make. In fact, I’d estimate that the entire batch I made, which produced 14 profiteroles, cost around £1.40 to make. That’s not bad for a dessert that’s renowned for being really expensive.

It was surprisingly easy to make these profiteroles free-from. I did wonder how they would turn out if I made them with gluten-free flour, but I can happily confirm that they taste just the same as the normal version! Everyone who ate them said that they would never have known that they were gluten-free if I hadn’t told them. I filled my profiteroles with lactose-free double cream, but you could easily fill them with a non-dairy alternative, such as a whipped blend of coconut cream mixed with icing sugar or even cold Bird’s vanilla custard made with rice milk. (I actually think that if I were to make them for people who are dairy intolerant I wouldn’t try to fill them at all and would simply serve them in bowls drizzled with chocolate sauce and a non-dairy cream.)

As I’ve said, the batch I made produced 14 profiteroles, but with hindsight I’d have made them much smaller. Choux pastry is a strange dough that seems very loose and almost liquid when you pipe it onto the baking tray. Therefore, when I was piping it onto my greaseproofed baking trays I was reluctant to make the mounds too small in case they didn’t puff up enough. I should have trusted myself though because they puff up considerably in the oven, so smaller profiteroles would have been fine. As a result, my profiteroles were oddly shaped and too large, but next time I’ll trust the dough to do its thing.

Also, when it came to making my chocolate topping my melted chocolate began to seize (I suspect a dash of water had accidentally got introduced into the mix) so I had to quickly shape it into chocolate discs to sit on top of the profiteroles, but when I make them again I’ll just drizzle them with a simple chocolate sauce made from melted chocolate mixed with a bit of sugar and cream.

If you decide to make these chocolate profiteroles I would wholeheartedly recommend using disposable piping bags because they make life so much easier. You’re able to fill a piping bag with the choux pastry without having to worry about having to thoroughly wash it out before you fill it with whipped cream and then go through the same palaver when you need the piping bag for the chocolate sauce. I buy my disposable piping bags from Poundland and they do the job perfectly, but you can also buy them from Amazon.

If you follow this recipe you’ll be rewarded with a light all-butter choux pastry dome that encases a thick, sweetened whipped cream centre and is topped with a generous layer of dark chocolate sauce. They’re the perfect dessert to make if you want to impress your friends and family.

Chocolate Profiteroles by The Fat Foodie

Ingredients to make the choux pastry profiteroles:

75g gluten-free flour (I use Dove’s Farm G/F flour because it’s made with low FODMAP ingredients whereas many other gluten-free flours are made with high FODMAP options.)

1 tsp sugar

50g butter (or dairy-free version)

150ml boiling water

2 eggs

Ingredients for the cream filling:

284ml carton of lactose-free double cream (or non-dairy alternative)

2 tbsps icing sugar

To make the chocolate sauce:

100g dark chocolate

150ml lactose-free double cream (or non-dairy alternative)

1 tbsp caster sugar

Method:

Preheat your oven to 200C/180C Fan/400F/Gas mark 6.

Lay greaseproof paper out onto two large baking tray and have a disposable piping bag at hand.

Put the flour and sugar into the food processor.

Crack your eggs into a separate bowl, beat them and then leave to one side.

Put the butter and boiling water into a microwavable jug and heat it in the microwave until it is boiling. (You can use a saucepan over a medium heat if you’d prefer.)

Pour the hot water and butter into the food processor and blend the mixture for 1 minute.

Leave it to cool for a few minutes and then add the eggs and blend the mixture again until the dough looks smooth and glossy.

Transfer the dough into a piping bag and pipe small mounds (approximately 1 teaspoon’s worth) onto the greaseproofed baking trays, leaving a gap of a couple of centimetres between each mound of dough.

Bake in the oven for 20 to 25 mins or until the choux pastry profiteroles are golden brown.

Remove from the oven, place on a cooling rack and spear the side of each of them with a small sharp knife before leaving to cool.

Freshly Baked Profiteroles by The Fat Foodie

Once the profiteroles are cold, whisk the cream with the icing sugar until thick, transfer into a piping bag and pipe the whipped cream into each profiterole until it is full.

To make the chocolate sauce put the cream and sugar in a saucepan and stirring all the while, heat until the sugar has dissolved. Add the chunks of dark chocolate and stir until the chocolate had melted and become one with the cream.

Serve the cream-filled profiteroles in dessert bowls with a generous topping of chocolate sauce.

Chocolate Profiteroles by The Fat Foodie

Save

Save

Chocolate Bundt Cakes (makes 12)

May 17, 2017December 1, 2017Leave a comment

Chocolate Bundt Cakes by The Fat Foodie

The 13th of May was the 1 year anniversary of my blog and today is my 100th blog post, so I thought I’d follow in the footsteps of The Great British Bake Off and bake a ‘Showstopper’ to mark the occasion. I originally started my blog (which turned into The Fat Foodie website) as a way to showcase my writing skills in order to try to get a particular job that I really wanted at the time. Sadly, I wasn’t successful in getting the job and although as a result, I did think about calling it a day with the blog (I think at that point there was only a couple of months worth of blog posts on it), I’m really pleased I didn’t.

My website has become an extremely enjoyable activity for me. This might sound odd, but prior to starting the blog I never thought in a million years that I would have my own website. I wasn’t (and still am not) a ‘computery’ ‘techie’ type of person, so to find myself regularly contributing to the internet still thrills me every Sunday and Wednesday morning when I boost my blog posts through my social media channels.

I guess the experience of starting and maintaining my own website has taught me that we shouldn’t hold on to a rigid view of our own sense of who we think are because we can change over time to become something other than what we believe to be true. We can adapt and develop skills that we never knew existed within us and this can help us to contribute to the world in ways that we never considered possible before. That’s what my website has done for me.

So all I’ve got left to say is thanks very much for visiting my website and reading my posts. I hope to continue for a good while yet! Now on to the showstopper!

The other day I was in Lidl and a box of six silicone bundt cases caught my eye, particularly because they were only £1.99. Silicone baking cases are renowned for being pricey so I didn’t hesitate to pick up two boxes. I’ve been mulling over what I was going to bake in them for a while now, but I eventually decided to go with chocolate bundt cakes because I don’t think you can beat a decent chocolate cake in terms of both visual impact and taste.

These chocolate bundt cakes have a hefty whack of good quality dark chocolate in them due to the inclusion of cocoa powder and the dark chocolate drizzled over them. These two forms of pure dark chocolate are further enhanced by the dark brown sugar, which creates a deep, fudgy flavour. In terms of difficulty, these chocolate bundt cakes are really simple to make, involving nothing more taxing than measuring out your wet and dry ingredients into separate bowls and then just blending them together to create your cake mix.

Other than the beautiful taste of the chocolate sponge, I think the real impact of these cakes comes from whatever you decide to bake them in, such as the silicone bundt cases, but you could just as easily use plain old cupcake cases. You certainly don’t need to dust them with edible gold glitter either. It’s just I’ve got the stunning visual impact of my website to take into consideration, you know? 😉

Ingredients:

220g dark brown sugar

120g fine polenta (aka cornmeal)

50g gluten-free flour (I use Dove’s Farm G/F flour because it’s made with low FODMAP ingredients whereas many other gluten-free flours are made with high FODMAP options.)

90g ground almonds

80g cocoa powder

A pinch of salt

2 tsps baking powder

1/2 tsp of bicarbonate of soda

120g butter (or a dairy-free version)

100g coconut oil (melted)

4 eggs

60ml rice milk

100g dark chocolate (for decoration)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180C/160C Fan/350F/Gas mark 4.

Lay out your silicone bundt cases or cupcake cases onto a flat baking tray.

Measure all of the wet ingredients into a mixing bowl.

Measure all of the dry ingredients into another bowl.

Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix well.

Pour equal amounts of the cake mix into the silicone bundt cases and lay them on the baking tray.

Tap them firmly on a work surface a few times (to help prevent bubbles in the base of the bundts) and bake in the oven for around 25 mins. (They’re cooked if a skewer pushed into the middle of a couple of the cakes comes out entirely clean.)

Leave to cool on a cooling rack before taking the bundts out of their cases.

Once cool, melt the dark chocolate in the microwave and drizzle it over the chocolate bundt cakes.

Feel free to dust the bundts with completely unnecessary edible gold glitter if you like.

Chocolate Bundt Cakes by The Fat Foodie

The Fat Foodie

Making Low FODMAP Food Good!

Tag: #chocolate

Chocolate Muffins (makes 12)

Chocolate Torte (serves 6-8)

Chocolate Profiteroles (makes 14)

Chocolate Bundt Cakes (makes 12)