Bossche Bollen

Bossche Bollen. How to explain them. Basically they are ginormous profiteroles, filled with cream and covered in chocolate. Their origin lies in 's-Herogenbosch, and they are balls so.. Bossche Bollen.

The best Bossche Bollen come from bakery Jan de Groot in 's-Hertogenbosch (or Den Bosch). Take the train, walk out of the train station (main entrance), keep walking and after some 150 meters on your right hand is the bakery. These bollen are legendary, they bake gazillions every day. But since I'm hardly in Den Bosch these days (and no one bothers bringing me one..), I decided tobake my own.

The dough is not that hard, it is fairly similar to profiteroles.

Ingredients (makes 3 bollen):

Water: 125 ml

Butter: 45 grams

Flower: 64 grams

Egg: 1egg and 1 egg beaten.

Cube the butter and place it in a small sauce pan together with the water. Over medium heat, melt the butter and bring to a boil. Keep stirring the whole time, use a wooden spoon. Once it boils, take the pan off the heat. Add the flower and keep stirring until you get one dough ball. Add in 1 egg and whisk until incorporated, then keep on adding egg and incorporating it, u til the dough comes off your whisk in long strands (about half the egg).

Heap three balls of dough onto a baking tray covered with baking paper. Put in apre-heated oven (200C) and bake for 25-30 minutes (until they feel light when you pick themup and are nice golden brown). Remove from the oven, gently prick a hole in the bottom using a piping tip and return to the baking tray, bottom side up and return to the oven (make sure the temperature is turned off). Leave the bollen to dry for about 20 minutes. Then remove them from the oven and leave them to cool on a rack. 

In the meanwhile, you can make the filling. I don't like just using whipped cream (and bakery de Groot uses something else as well, not sure what though). So, I made white chocolate mousse. Yes, you read that right.

Ingredients (more than enough for 4 bollen):

White chocolate: 150 grams 

Cream: 250ml

Egg white: 125 ml

Sugar: 75 grams

Melt the white chocolate (au bain marie, in the microwave, whichever you prefer). Leave to cool slightly. Whip the egg whites with the sugar until stiff. Whip the crem until stiff. Fold in the chocolate. Gently fold the egg whites into the cream-chocolate mixture. Don't add all the egg white at once but about four portions. When done, place in a piping bag with a regular tip. Place in the refridgerator for about half an hour.

When the bollen are dry and cool, take the piping bag out of the fridge and fill your bollen, use the hole you made earlier. Just keep filling until the filling comes out. Place them upside down (hole up) on a plate and put them in the fridge for 15-20 minutes.

You can now make your glaze

Ingredients (enough for 3):

Cream: 50 ml

Dark chocolate: 100 grams

Break the chocolate into pieces and place in a sauce pan together with the cream, on gentle heat melt the chocolate. Be careful to not let the cream boil. Let cool slightly (about 5-10 minutes).

Take your bollen out of the fridge and gently pour the glaze over them. A good cover is required.

Place the bollen back into the fridge to let the glaze set.

ENJOY! (Fair warning, eating Bossche Bollen leads to a mess. The good things in life are always a bit messy, right.. ;-))

Happy Easter

Easter stands for chocolate. Chocolate Easter bunnies, Easter eggs and so on. I love watching 'Chocolat'. Since I have been making bonbons myself, I wanted to make my own Easter eggs as well. And last year I finally found the mold I wanted, and thankfully Santa brought it for me at Christmas.

So I went nuts. I made six flavours. Cinnamon, amarula, caramel, dulce de leche cream, coconut and just white chocolate.

It's a process. A messy process. And now I am just glad there are no food related holidays for a while! (mostly because I really don't want to clean my kitchen 6000x per week anymore)

Enjoy a little photo spread of the chocolate love. Happy Easter!

Chocolates. A mess but a great gift

This year for Christmas, I decided to not only give regular gifts. I decided to make my parents and brother boxes of chocolates. Because who doesn't need extra time in the kitchen?

I had to work a ton in the week before Christmas so it turned into 6 o'clock wake ups to crank out chocolates before work, which aided in the making of a GINORMOUS mess

(Art really.)

I made 6 varieties of chocolates and I got more excited about every variation as I tasted them. (I can't possibly give away chocolates without trying them! And eating the 'damaged' ones. Obviously)

The six varieties were:

Hazelnut praline.

Amarula.

Malibu and coconut.

Mango and red pepper.

Dulche de Leche.

Popping candy.

The popping candy chocolates were an absolute nightmare to make. But oh my goodness WHAT fun! I felt very cheffy! (my brother was disappointed I didn't make the popping candy myself, but then again he didn't have to deal with my moods after four 6 o'clock mornings. (and yes, it led to me having a nervous breakdown over damage to the gingerbread windmill I transported over 200km to my parents. Distraught doesn't begin to describe how my poor, sleepdeprived self felt.)

I must say, I am happy how the chocolates turned out. And I am a little bit in love with seahorse shape! 

Angry Profiteroles; A Little Piece of Heaven

Yesterday I was baking one of my favourite pound cakes and for some reason it exploded all over my oven and worse still, it tasted horribly. So after ranting about how upset I was about wasting all the ingredients and having to clean my oven, again, I decided to put my anger (crankiness) into something productive and make profiteroles.

I had never made them before in my life and my mother has always assured me, making them is a nightmare. But.. It was oddly easy. I used the recipe from Kookook, a Dutch cookbook with basis recipes and preparation techniques. I think everyone should have a cookbook which covers all the basics. And going back to them, sometimes, is the smartest thing.

(of course, as always, I forgot to take pictures during, so you'll have to make do with the finished result)

Pecan pralinés - A Photo Essay

Really in no mood to type out the recipe tonight, but it will follow later (read: eventually). For now, here aresome photos of my first trip into being a chocolatier!

Pecan praline

Ground pecan praline

Pecan praline ganache - filling

Tempering chocolate (that didn't work, better luck next time)

Chocolate molds

Homemade pecan pralinés

Never buying seabanquet chocolates again

Leftovers or.. Treasure troves?

I've been trying to conserve food in the best possible way as to not waste anything, so my fridge has turned into a ziplock haven. But some things don't ziplock too well. Like soy cream and condensed milk. So I decided to look in my cupboard and see what else I had left I could use with cream and milk. I found half a bar of chocolate and dried coconut. And thus my stracciatella coconut ice cream was born, in short: bounty dark chocolate ice cream: HEAVEN. 

The result was this, and it makes me SO happy! I adjusted the recipe to a perfect mix (to me)

200ml soy cream light

Vanilla bean

150 ml condensed milk

25grams dark chocolate

20 grams coconut

Heat the cream with the vanilla pod, bring to the boil and let simmer for five minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for an hour. Remove vanilla bean and scrape seeds and put them into the cream. Turn heat back on, add condensed milk, don't boil. Turn off heat. Let cool and transfer to a freezer proof container.

Place in freezer, let cool for 30 minutes then stir, place back in freezer for another 30 minutes, meanwhile melt chocolate and let cool till it's still liquid but not warm. Remove cream from freezer and while stirring drip in chocolate. Place container back in freezer for another 30 minutes. Remove from freezer and add coconut while stirring. Place back in freezer and remove+stir at four 15 minute intervals, after that leave to freeze. The result is truly divine!