Peanuts and chocolate are a gorgeous pair.  They play well with each other.  they are comforting. They hang out well together.  to top all of these compatibility perfections, they are simple to combine.

Both are wonderful on their own.  Aside from those with allergies to nuts, most people enjoy these lovely legumes.  Most people also enjoy chocolate.  Bringing the two together is a match made in culinary and confectionary heaven.  It’s also mind numbingly simple to pull off, which is a plus for someone like me who enjoys instant gratification where food is concerned.

I’m not sure if this is so much a recipe as it is a method, but for the sake of semantics, we’ll say that it’s something worth learning, especially if you would like to get in to playing with chocolate.  I’m sure there are better methods and more advanced recipes for this, and if David Lebovitz can tell me how to keep 60% cacau chocolate from melting the second I touch it, I would be very greatful, as these candies are messy, but so very worth it!

Read more…

Popularity: 3% [?]

Ingredients:

• 2 cup Sugar
• 1 1/2 cups Butter or margarine
• 2 tbsp Water
• 1/2 cups Slivered almonds
• 1 lg Milk chocolate bar broken into small pieces

Method:

Combine sugar, butter and water in a heavy saucepan, cook, stirring constantly to the soft-crack stage. Add the almonds, cook, stirring to hard-crack stage. Pour immediately on unbuttered cookies sheet, spreading as thin as possible. Place chocolate on hot toffee, spread melting chocolate to cover the toffee.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Holiday dessert season has begun.  It’s a fact of life.  You’ve just got to have sweets around for the Holidays, even if for the rest of the year you generally don’t bother with them.  We’re no exception here and we’re kicking off the sweetest season of the year with something that’s not only sinfully delicious, but amazingly simple to make. One of my wife’s personal favorites, Peppermint Bark, but with a little twist.

Peppermint bark is usually made in bars, or simply shattered off of a large sheet like a brittle.  This version is a bit more… Structured.  The bark is poured between a pair of tiny candy canes shaped into a heart.  Cute, yes?  We thought so too.  Unfortunately I can’t claim the idea as my own, we saw it in the Pillsbury circular.  It just looked like a really fun thing to do.

These take nearly no time to put together, but they definitely don’t suffer in appeal.  The kids can help put them together, though I’d leave the chocolate depositing to either an older child or an adult, but as far as decorating goes, let the little ones at it.  They’ll have a blast, and you get help with the candy making.

Read more…

Popularity: 4% [?]

The goal: A supremely simple yet still sweet and unexpected Valentine’s gift for my wife.

The result: Chocolate Peanut Perfection, with a kick from Cajun spices.

I don’t usually “do” Valentine’s Day, at least not in the sense of buying flowers or going out to the best place in town for dinner. (Which would have required reservations made before Thanksgiving.)  I prefer to use my own grubby little mitts to create something that’s mildly surprising and special.  I enjoy it more and so does my wife.

This year I decided early on that I was going to do some happy heart-shaped stuff and since my wife has been doing an amazing job of abstaining from it (fitness testing coming up.) I figured some sort of a sophisticated chocolate treat was in order.

While these little gems are no more than fancy peanut clusters, the flavor is probably not what you would expect at first glance.  The addition of Cajun Seasoning to both the nuts and to the chocolate itself does a wonderful job of adding several different subtle undertones to the chocolate, all of which serve to make it taste even more like chocolate, if that’s possible.

These aren’t perfect, but then I’m lacking in a few of the tools I would like to have when molding chocolate.  They are also quite obviously hand made, and were done so in secret, which is not an easy task when your wife is only out of the house for 4 hours at a stretch. (Melt, mold, fridge, cleanup in less than 2 hours, then cook something that covers the smell of the chocolate…  You try it!)

In the end it all worked.  My wife was presented with a few of these last night.  She was thrilled, which makes me extremely happy.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

Read more…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Peanuts are a part of daily life, at least around this house.  They’re consumed as butter, as a recipe addition, as a snack, and pretty much any other way I can come up with to use them.  I started working up a recipe for Valentine’s day a little earlier in the week and I knew from minute one that I wanted it to include peanuts, but not just any peanuts, these needed to have a kick.

I remembered a recipe from David Lebovitz for Salt-Roasted Peanuts (see below), and that seemed a good start.  On closer examination, it was the perfect beginning, since chocolate was to be involved in the next stage, and his recipe was quickly and easily adapted to what I had on hand, as well as what I had in mind.

Originally I was just going to post the recipe for this preparation with the finished treats but in the end, these nuts are so intensely good that I decided that they need their own moment in the spotlight.  They are salty, sweet and ultimately spicy (The more you eat, the hotter they get, I love that!) but the flavors fit so well together that you may find you can’t stop at just a few.  I know I’ve had a hard time not just eating all of them instead of using them for their intended purpose.

Thankfully I’ll only need about half of the nuts I made, the other half are up for grabs!

Read more…

Popularity: 7% [?]