A tribute to Chocolate and Peanut butter

So just to provide some foreclosure: most, not everything on my blog will be healthy, nor middle eastern. After all, I love food, be it raw, cooked, natural, processed, eastern, western, healthful, or sinful. I love food so much that I had to become a dietitian and fitness enthusiast to keep myself in check. :-D

My brother's favorite candies growing up have always been Reese's peanut butter cups. So to give him the caloric indulgence he so deserves, I decided to make him a giant one!

Bwaahahaha... No. Bigger! Much bigger!

So with all my concentration, I set out to defy my principles of health and fitness for the most luxuriously fattening creation that my kitchen and my conscience could muster...

Taking notes from many different websites, I created 2 layers of chocolate cake, making the cake less fluffy and more like fudge, and adding a layer of peanut butter fudge in between. Later covering the cake in a shell of chocolate I made especially to be soft-solid at room temperature, and covering the cake in crumbled Reese's peanut butter cups. The neighbor's little girls came over just as I was decorating and insisted to wash their hands, get aprons and help. Those are 8-year-old hands, decorating and stealing extra bites of candy every time my back was turned.

 For the chocolate fudge cake, I adapted a recipe from a recipe on the Whole Foods website for Chocolate Mint Fudge Cake (the recipe is here). I modified it by using 1.5 cups of whole wheat flour instead of 2.25 cups of white flour, double the amount of chocolate and butter, using bittersweet chocolate instead of the unsweetened, and adding less sugar, and of course no mint, to create a more rich fudge-like consistency (plus adding antioxidants and fiber, if you really stretch your mind) for fudgey centers of the cakes, I decided to use metal pans only for baking. This helped the surfaces of the cake to cook a bit better than previous attempts using glass. A nonstick pie plate may also work just as well.

For the Peanut butter fudge, I adapted this recipe to be more fudge-like also, adding double the amount of peanut butter and a little less of the sugars. The original recipe tastes actually way too sugary to tolerate eating with such a rich and dense chocolate cake. I also used a natural peanut butter from whole foods containing only peanuts and flaxseed. Hooray for omega-3 fatty acids! Overall, being less sugary, and more healthy fat content than the original recipe.

The funniest thing happened. I miscalculated the amount of fudge I would need and made a half-batch extra. So I just added more peanut butter and more butter, chilled the remaining mixture until it was thick, then rolled them into 1/2-teaspoonful balls and froze them as little peanut-butter candies.  The result of my leftover meanderings was also a huge hit!

For the chocolatey fudge I melted semi-sweet chocolate chips with a little added coconut oil (solid at room temp, but never as solid as butter it seems) to my melting chocolate. It makes the chocolate shell of the cake softer so its easier to cut after being in the fridge, and won't chip off in huge chunks. Plus, it adds a slightly different aroma and mouth-feel to the chocolate, assisting its transformation into a more Reese's-like chocolate coating.

So for the sake of keeping this post short, the recipe is attached HERE...

Meanwhile, Happy 35th bday, Blub! Please enjoy, and not all at once! (The poor guy has a dietitian as a sister, but also another Dietitian in his life as an even more influential girlfriend. Sorry buddy, but you'll be stuck eating healthfully for a very long time!)

PS. If you think I'd be so self-loathing to count the calories in this, you'd be insane. I'll just eat it little by little while it taunts me in the refrigerator... A piece a day, every day, until it magically disappears.

Perhaps if I eat it while hanging upside down it counts as negative calories? lol.

Enjoy! :-)