Ich will keine Schokolade

There are essential choices to be made in life.
Cats or dogs.
Pants or skirts.
Blond, brunette, red or black (or any other colour, really).
Vanilla or chocolate.

Today, we chose chocolate, all the way.

The day started out with a marvelous sunset above the city roofs before heading into the Musée d'Orsay an hour before opening to see the Misère et Splendeurs exhibition again, this time without the masses and the space to notice the details or contemplate with the other interns the practicality and positioning of a special intercourse chair made for a corpulent king whose name I can't recall but who was a frequent visitor to the higher-end Parisian brothels before being crowned. In glass counters we discovered century-old condoms, business cards for the ladies of the night touting Swedish massages and multilingual abilities as well as small pamphlets for brothels that look identical to the ones handed out now also in the North of the city for marabouts that can cure any ailment.

A rare sight: the Musée d'Orsay, empty. 

Manet's Olympia, where no photograph could do its beauty justice.  

From the exhibition we headed across the Seine to Angelina, an eatery famed for its hot chocolate and Mont Blanc patisserie. By coincidence (or rather Instagram scrolling) I had found @desserted_in_paris, a pâtissier who posts daily photographs of beautiful sweet indulgences. I started making a list of places to stuff my face at and Angelina happened to be one of them. The four of us ordered the hot chocolate and two pastries to share. Postcolonialist me shuddered at the calling a hot chocolate "L'Africain" or the one pastry a "Negresco", but this did not distract from pure chocolate overkill. The hot chocolate is basically melted dark chocolate in what I suspect to be half-and-half, with the Mont Blanc consisting of a mound of chestnut vermicelli resting on a meringue and cream base. The Negresco is the perfect combination of meringue, light dark chocolate mousse, dark chocolate icing and dark chocolate shavings to round it off. Had we not shared them I think I would have gone into a blissful but necessary chocolatey coma.

Sweetness!

Hot chocolate and Negresco. 

Their signature patisserie, the Mont Blanc. 

Right next door to Angelina is the Galignani bookstore, which focuses on art and fashion books and has an admirable English book selection at the back with two comfortable leather reading chairs. They have a copy of Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler which I am waiting to buy at the end of my stay here, kind of as a reminder of this city and a reward for finishing the thesis (one can hope and pray and actually sit on one's behind to make this happen).

From there we trotted back reluctantly to sit at our computers and do menial work of unimportance.
What a day.

Options

In the mornings my sister will only eat half a banana whilst reusing her mug from yesterday as a bowl for Bran Flakes or Special K with low fat milk. In between spoonfuls of cereal she takes bites of the banana. What I would probably see as a bit of a disgusting habit in people who I am not related to with her it is just normal. Maybe I am like Pavlov's dogs, conditioned into accepting the remaining half of the banana when I hear my sister leave her mug next to the sink.

I have never had the same affinity for bananas. Much rather give me a mango, or figs or berries. However, it is only the beginning of berry season here and let's just say it is never mango season in Germany. So my weekly grocery shopping often includes bananas (also because I am poor and they are cheapest).

Today one of the bananas was extremely blackened and instead of making a bread out of it I searched for a cookie recipe. I found these Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies over at the Cooking Channel and decided on them because they included oats (yay illusions of healthy cookies). They are easy to make, taste great and offer a good alternative to banana bread :)

Banana choc chip cookies and a view that I can't get enough of. 

Cough Cough

Is there ever a reason not to bake cookies? With foodgawker and millions of food blogs available I relish in trying a different recipe every time, even though sometimes they are not as great as the photos make them look. For my language group I baked Mini Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies  because I thought they looked quite cute and seemed fairly easy to make. And I had nothing else to do. So there's that.

Basically you mix the dough, roll little balls and with your finger make a little hole in the middle which you can later fill with something. The recipe uses a cocoa-icing sugar mix, I melted chocolate instead. But when my lovingly rolled cookies came out of the oven, they had spread and there was no sign of an indentation to fill up with the chocolate. I am not sure if this is our oven or the recipe, but needless to say this was a bit of a fail. They are also not that great tasting. So onwards goes the quest for the perfect cookie.

Hello ingredients.

Everything still running smoothly in the cookie assembly line. 

Then this happened, and I had to press little holes into the cookies with a spoon. Joy.

Still pretty though. 

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Black Gold

There is a patisserie called MyDarlings on the corner of Lynnwood and Brooklyn street. I had never noticed its blue-and-black striped exterior even though I had driven past it hundreds of times. And then, on a revolutionary day, my mother and I had wanted to go to Aroma coffee but it was full so we discovered MyDarlings, which is right next door to the coffee shop.

On that day we shared one of their mud cakes, and if ever I would be served the death penalty it would be on my last-meal list. Outside it looks like an ordinary chocolate muffin, but when you take a bite it is gloriously pudding-like inside and very decadent. And somehow the outside-cakey-consistency works fantastically with the chocolate-mousse interior.

Since then I have been trying to recreate the mud pie, but have never really succeeded. There is one recipe though that comes quite close, namely this one for Miniature Chocolate Mud Pies. I have baked it once in SA and now tried it again as a Christmas dessert.

Here is the original recipe with my adaptations in brackets:


1 cup chocolate wafer crumbs (I used choc butter cookies)
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 tbsp water
2 tbsp all purpose flour
2 tsp vegetable oil
2 1/2 oz light cream cheese
2 tbsp chocolate chips (normal 70% chocolate, chopped)
2 large eggs
2 tbsp hot water
1/4 cup low fat sour cream
1 tsp instant coffee
3 tbsp corn syrup (or golden syrup)
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla


1. Preheat oven to 350 F (180°C). Spray a 12 cup muffin tin with vegetable oil.

On the left: molten chocolate and coffee mix. On the right: crushed chocolate cookies. 

2. In small bowl combine chocolate chips, water and coffee.  Microwave for 40 seconds or just until chocolate begins to melt.  Stir until smooth. (Instead of microwaving everything I simply let the mixture stand for a few minutes and the heat from the water automatically melts the chocolate)

3. In small bowl combine wafer crumbs, water and oil until mixed.  Divide and pat into bottom of muffin tins. (I added some of the chopped chocolate pieces)

4. In bowl or food processor add sugar, cocoa, flour, cream cheese, eggs, sour cream, corn syrup and vanilla.  Puree until smooth.  Add chocolate mixture and puree until smooth. 

5. Divide among muffin cups and bake for 12 minutes or just until centre is still slightly loose.  Cool and chill before serving.  Remove from tin with a knife. 

Hmmm delicious :)





Per serving:
• Calories 220 • Protein 3.6 g • Carbohydrates 30 g • Fiber 1.5 g • Total fat 5.8 g • Saturated fat 2.1g • Cholesterol 23 mg • Sodium 62 mg
• prep time 15 minutes
• bake time 12 minutes
• make ahead Can be baked 2 days in advance and refrigerated.

Where Are You Now

In limbo. That's where I am. That's where I have been for all 269 days of this year. And it feels like that is where I'll remain until I move into my own place, the university starts and my life heads somewhere again.

In the meantime I am sorting through old postcards and photographs. A pipe burst in the basement where everyone in the building stores their stuff. Nothing is inundated, the water just slowly drip-drip-dripped out onto the boxes containing old books and photo albums.

Now it is my task to sort through my great-grandmother's obsessive collection and see what can be thrown away and what should be kept. Fun fun fun.

As a distraction from sitting and sifting though damp papers I baked cookies. They should've been salted caramel Nutella stuffed double chocolate chip cookies, but I didn't have all the ingredients. It is strange how you know your own kitchen (or rather, my mother's kitchen) and by comparison cooking somewhere else does not cut it, entirely. Our kitchen at home is spacious and well-equipped. Here it is more cramped and only the most basic of utensils are available. Anything for cookies though.

Adapted from Top With Cinnamon, here is the recipe:

1/2 cup (110g) butter

1 1/2 cups (350g) light brown sugar

1/2 cup (55g) cocoa powder

2 eggs

1/4 tsp salt

3/4 tsp baking powder

2 cups (260g) all-purpose flour

1 slab of the cheapest milk chocolate, chopped into pieces

1 handful of hazelnuts, also chopped

flaky salt/ fleur de sel/ maldon salt, for sprinkling

approx. 1/2 cup (8 tbsp) nutella

Line a baking tray with parchment paper. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C)

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter. Take off the heat and stir in the brown sugar and eggs. Then add the cocoa, salt and baking powder and stir until well combined. Add the flour and stir until no floury patches are left. Lastly stir in the chopped chocolate and hazelnuts.

Take 1 heaped tbsp of dough, use your finger make a large indentation the centre of the dough and fill the indentation with a small blob of Nutella (like 1/2 tsp ish). Top with a flattened tablespoon of dough, and seal the edges.

Sprinkle with fleur de sel and bake for 8-10 minutes.

And then you get this: 

Top with Cinnamon adds salted caramel or a piece of chocolate containing caramel and omits the hazelnuts in the original recipe. I couldn't find chocolate with caramel in, so that is why I replaced them with hazelnuts. It worked out quite tastily, like a harder brownie with a Nutella centre. Om nom  nom. 

Sweet Disposition

I don't know what happened, but I felt like abusing the kitchen today.

First up, The Best Chocolate Ice Cream You'll Ever Have, and, ja, that stuff is so good that I just want to tap myself a bathtub full of it and live in chocolate heaven for-----ever.

Image via A Cup of Jo

Below is what mine looked like before freezing. Joh joh joh. It is rather rich, but worth making. And you don't need an ice-cream maker.

After that came beskuit, which is Afrikaans for rusks, the dough looks a bit dodge. I sort of combined whatever I felt like putting in them, so they contain All Bran flakes, coconut, sunflower seeds, oats and packets with the words 'wheat' on them. Normally my mom or sister bake the beskuit, or my grandmother brings us some, but for a first try they turned out well. I don't have a recipe, but this one looks pretty similar.

Then there was a special at the grocery store, R 20 for three packs of asparagus, so I made leek, asparagus and bacon quiche. I think after the road trip and eating only burgers + chips, today was the day I needed to eat food that didn't taste like it could be a year old. Again, no recipe, I pre-browned the leeks and bacon, used some instant shortcrust pastry, put the raw asparagus on top, then poured over a mix of 1/2 cup cream + 3/4 cup milk+ 4 eggs, and then grated some pecorino over it. Nom nom nom. 

And in between I baked these World Peace Cookies, because yesterday we went to this baking store and I got three different kinds of choc chips (white normal caramel) and instead of baking choc chip cookies, these had to be tried out. They are ok, but I don't think they are as fantastic as smittenkitchen writes they are. They're tasty, but not revolutionarily so. 

Pre-baked, the dinkbeest version

Baked, the smittenkitchen version

Also between it all, I made more cordial because we don't eat the oranges from the tree in the garden and I didn't want to waste them. Booooom! Being a housewife is exhausting.