Honey Chocolate Pudding Cake: Perfected

As you may recall, a while back I posted a recipe for chocolate pudding cake as an example of how to convert a recipe to honey. Since then, I have tested the recipe, and found that a little tweaking made it much better.The original didn't have enough pudding, and the cake did not rise through the syrup as it was supposed to. Both problems have been solved.
So here it is, a delicious, puddingy, chocolatey, cakey dessert.

Flip upside down to serve

Honey Chocolate Pudding Cake

-pudding
1/2 cup honey
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups milk
1/8 tsp cinnamon

-cake
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup milk
2 Tbsp melted butter
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350*. Have an 8x8 pyrex cake pan ready. 
In a small saucepan, mix the pudding ingredients together over low heat, and heat, stirring occasionally, until it comes to a boil, but do not let boil over. (it will try to if you let it)
While the pudding ingredients are heating, mix the cake batter. Blend the dry ingredients together in a small bowl, make a well in the middle, and add the wet ingredients. Do not mix into a batter until the pudding mixture comes to a boil.
When the pudding mixture comes to a boil, pour it into the 8x8 cake pan. Quickly blend the cake ingredients together to make a batter, and drop by scant teaspoonfulls evenly across the top of the pudding mixture.
Bake at 350* for about 25 minutes, until the pudding on the bottom seems to be boiling well, and the top of the cake seems cooked and dry. Some of the pudding may boil through onto the top, this is fine.
Remove the cake from the oven and let cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. The cooling time is very important to allow the pudding to thicken, otherwise the bottom will be more milky instead of puddingy.
With a large spoon, scoop cake and pudding out onto small plates. This cake is great by itself, but even better with whipped cream or ice cream.
This cake is very rich, so a little goes a long way. If you have leftovers, the cake is also good cold and stores well in the fridge... until someone with a spoon comes along and devours it, that is.

Some of the Cake has been devoured

Batter and Pudding ready to go

-A note on cocoa powder. The first three times I made this recipe, I used Ghirardelli cocoa powder. It was delicious. This last time, (the only time I remembered to take pictures), I used Hershey's "special dark" cocoa powder. The result was... less than stellar. I purchased the hersheys only because the store was out of Ghirardelli cocoa powder. It is much darker than regular cocoa powder, and smells as though they achieved this by burning some (if not all) of the cocoa beans to charcoal. It is unpleasant, bitter, dark, and does not taste like chocolate (but then again, when has hersheys ever tasted like chocolate?).

In conclusion, you can use a little less than a cup of high quality cocoa powder and make a dessert that is worthy of the gods, or you can use the same amount of cheap cocoa powder and have a dessert that is merely 'meh'.
It is your choice.Choose wisely.
-Zay

How to Convert a Recipe to Chocolate: Chocolate Banana Bread

It happens to all of us. You're puttering around in the kitchen, cooking something, when it strikes you.
This recipe would be better if it was chocolate!
But how do you do it? How do you take your humble recipe and convert it to chocolaty heaven?

Fear not, I am here to help.

There are two ways to make your recipe chocolate, one using unsweetened baker's chocolate, the other using cocoa powder. Both can be demonstrated using my basic Banana Bread recipe.



Recipe #1

Recipe #2



Here's the original.

Banana Bread

3 to 4 ripe bananas, mashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1/3 cup honey
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

Preheat the oven. 350* for a loaf, 450* for muffins. Lightly grease your loaf pan or 12 cup muffin tin.
In a large bowl, smash the bananas with a potato masher until fairly smooth. Add the honey, melted butter, egg, and vanilla.
Pour the flour in a heap in the middle, measure the baking powder and salt out on top, and mix it in with your fingertips. Mix the wet and dry ingredients together until all the flour is incorporated, but do not overmix.
-For loaf: Scoop the batter out into the greased loaf pan, smooth it slightly, and bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes to an hour, until the center is raised and cracked and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
-For muffins: Scoop the batter into the muffin tin, using about 1/4 cup per muffin, trying to divide the batter evenly between the cups. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the muffins are lightly browned and spring back when poked.


The first method to turn this recipe Chocolate replaces a little of the butter with an ounce of baker's chocolate, the two are melted together over extremely low heat, and added to the recipe the same way you would add the butter in the original.

Mmm, chocolaty butter

 The recipe then becomes:

Chocolate Banana Bread (#1)

1/4 cup butter and
    1 oz unsweetened baker's chocolate, melted together
3 to 4 ripe bananas, mashed
1/3 cup honey
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
Melt the butter and chocolate together in a small pot, then proceed with the recipe.

The second method replaces a little bit of the flour with cocoa powder, and is the easier of the two methods. You can use this method with any recipe that calls for flour. I have used it successfully with cookies, cakes, breads, and of course, banana bread.

Chocolate Banana Bread (#2)

3 to 4 ripe bananas, mashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1/3 cup honey
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

Make the recipe exactly as you would the plain banana bread, just adding the cocoa powder along with the other dry ingredients.

Mmm, chocolaty flour

My Banana Bread recipe is a very forgiving one, and particularly delicious. It never fails to turn out moist, tender, flavorful, and very good warm with lots of butter. It's a recipe I would recommend for beginners because if you get the quantities a little wrong, it still turns out fine. You can tweak this recipe any way you like. I always make it with Whole Wheat flour. If you like nuts in your banana bread, I wouldn't add more than 3/4 cup, at least the first time, until you know how much more (or less) nutty you like your bread. You could add chocolate chips, or whatever it was that made special the very best banana bread you ever ate. I promise it'll turn out good.
-Zay

How to Convert a Recipe to Honey: Honey Chocolate Pudding Cake

Recently I went to over to my Aunt Mary's for dinner. Knowing Tyler and I don't eat refined sugar, she had made a special 'sugar free' chocolate pudding cake for us. Unfortunately, she used fake chemical sweeteners in it, which destroyed the good flavor of the chocolate as well as making me feel a bit queasy about eating it.  With this in mind, I thought I would try to write an easy guide to converting a recipe to honey, which is good for you and usually tastes as good or better than sugar.
Converting a recipe to a honey version is usually quite easy, as long as the recipe already calls for a liquid. I will begin with a basic chocolate pudding cake recipe link. I chose this one because it has a lot of good reviews. Look at the original ingredients list. 

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup white sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups hot water

The original instructions tell you to first make a cake batter out of some of the ingredients, sprinkle others on top, and pour hot water over all before baking. In theory, the water dissolves the ingredients sprinkled on top, the cake batter rises through this syrup, and a pudding layer forms on the bottom. I can work with this.  
The original recipe cake batter ingredients are:
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
3 Tbsp oil
This calls for both sugar and a liquid. Since honey is about twice as sweet as sugar, you want to use half as much honey as it calls for sugar, and reduce the liquid by that amount. I will also replace the oil with butter because it makes everything delicious. This changes the recipe to:
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup honey
scant 1/4 cup milk
3 Tbsp melted butter
Obviously, there is no way to tell if these proportions are right without testing the recipe, but they should be close enough to make a good product.

In the original recipe, the next step was to sprinkle cocoa and sugar on top of the cake batter, and pour hot water on top. Here is where the recipe will diverge from the original. The original sprinkling ingredients were:
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup mini chocolate chips
and the hot water to pour on top was:
1 1/4 cups hot water mixed with
1 tsp vanilla.
In my version it will all be mixed together into a syrup which will be poured on top of the cake batter. I will reduce the water by the amount of honey I replace the brown sugar with, and replace the chocolate chips with a little extra cocoa powder. I will also add a dash of cinnamon to cut the honey flavor without being detectable itself. Leaving us with:
1/2 cup honey
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup hot water
1 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp cinnamon
and that's it for the most part. All that's left is testing and fine tuning the recipe. The final version is:

Honey Chocolate Pudding Cake
Cake
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup honey
scant 1/4 cup milk
3 Tbsp melted butter
Syrup
1/2 cup honey
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup hot water
1 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp cinnamon

Mix together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the honey, milk, and butter. Spread into an 8x8 cake pan.
In a small pot, mix together the honey, cocoa, hot water, and cinnamon. Heat to near boiling. remove from heat, add vanilla, and pour over the cake.
Bake in a 350* oven for 30 to 35 minutes until the top looks dry. Let sit for at least 10 minutes before serving.

** disclaimer**
This is an untested recipe, put here to demonstrate the ease of converting a recipe to honey. I will test it as soon as I can, because I love chocolate, but I don't have any cocoa powder right now. It might be that the proportions are off. The cake might not rise up through the syrup, it might not be sweet enough, or too sweet, or not rich enough, or too rich. I don't know. The water in the syrup might need to be replaced with milk, or some other flavor extract might need to be added (rum and maple come to mind). The syrup might need to be added to the pan first, the cake batter spooned on top. Only testing will tell, but this recipe should be reasonably close to good.
</perfectionist>

Dark Chocolate Mousse

not bear poop

No longer will this chocolate addict be denied Chocolate Mousse with Raspberry sauce, for I have created one with no refined sugar!

Muahahahaha! The world will now be mine!

Dark Chocolate Mousse

-mousse
1 medium egg yolk
1 T butter
2 medium egg whites
1-3 T real maple syrup or honey
1/2 cup heavy cream
6 oz Dark, Semisweet, or Unsweetened Baker's chocolate.

-sauce
1/4 cup real maple syrup
2/3 cup fresh or frozen raspberries
lemon juice
extra raspberries to garnish (optional)

Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler. beat in the egg yolk and 3 T of the cream.
In a large bowl, beat the remainder of the cream until it holds it's own shape. Fold carefully into the chocolate.

In a separate very clean bowl with a very clean whisk, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Gradually whisk in 1 T of the maple and continue whisking until stiff but not dry. Gently fork the egg whites a little at a time into the chocolate until well combined. Taste the mousse, depending on the darkness of the chocolate used, add 1-2 more T of maple, folding in gently, if needed. Cover and refrigerate.

-sauce
Combine maple and raspberries in a small pot. heat until almost boiling and simmer stirring occasionally for 3 minutes. Puree in a blender then rub through a sieve to remove most of the seeds. Add lemon to taste. To serve, spoon a small amount of mousse into a small serving bowl. pour a little raspberry sauce over top. garnish with a few fresh raspberries and eat with a spoon.