Brazilians have lots of little sweets - cocada, brigadeiro, beijinhos de coco, doce de leite, and so many more. Many of them (or, at least, the ones my Brazilian boyfriend has introduced me to) involve sweetened condensed milk and take about ten to fifteen minutes to make.

Brigaderio's no exception. Sweet little balls of slighty caramel, chocolatey goodness, typically rolled in balls, and rolled in sprinkles. It's not unlike a slacker fudgey truffle, with only three (or four) ingredients: a 14oz can of sweetened condensed milk, 3 Tbs of cocoa powder, 1-2 Tbs of butter, and (optionally) up to 1 tsp of vanilla, which are cooked over medium heat until it all comes together and gets thick, about 10 minutes (constantly stirring).

Normally, at that point, you pour it into a bowl, let it cool 30-60 minutes, and butter your hands to make it into balls, and roll the balls into chocolate sprinkles. I made this batch at 3 am, while finishing up laundry, so I didn't hang out long enough to roll it and just spread it out like I would fudge and shook sprinkles onto half of it. (Totally not traditional, but what can I say? It was 3 am, and I was tired!)

Incidentally, beijinhos de coco is essentially the same thing, but instead of 3 Tbs of cocoa powder, you use 4 Tbs of sweetened dried coconut that you add after 15-20 minutes (instead of immediately), and instead of rolling it in chocolate sprinkles, you roll it in more sweetened dried coconut. Traditionally, you also press a whole clove into the top of a beijinho de coco (but it's entirely for decoration so you don't haaaaaaaaaave to).

One of my favorite desserts in the summer is lemon cream pie. It's bright and cheery, and nothing goes better with the plethora of fresh berries than the tangy flavor of lemon. Sometimes, I like to mix things up and rather than serve berries on the side, smear some berry puree on the bottom of the pie crust, before pouring in the filling.

My stomach is growling just thinking about it!

A side note: this isn't a last-minute kind of pie. With all the resting and setting time, there's about 9 hours of resting time, and probably an hour or so of baking time (though you could bake the pie shell while working on the lemon curd).

This year, for Thanksgiving, my only responsibility was the desserts. (My mom roasted the turkey, and my siblings took care of the sides.)

Rather than have the same-ol', same-ol', I decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of a bland pumpkin pie that nobody really likes to eat (we end up throwing it away after a few days with only one or two slices eaten), I opted for the pumpkin cheesecake in the December 07 issue of Cuisine at Home ("Pumpkin cheesecake with gingersnap-pecan crust and maple-sour cream topping"). Instead of regular pecan pie, I opted for a Food 911 classic -- Bourbon and Chocolate Pecan Pie.

The cheesecake was the real star. Don't get me wrong, Ty, you're one of my kitchen BFFs, and your recipes rarely fail and have excellent results, but ... man ... there's something about this little gem.

The name by itself suggests that this will be decadent. Triple chocolate (unsweetened, semi-sweet two ways, and white). Irish cream. Mmm. And if that didn't suggest a rich experience: it's very nearly sugarless, and has a wee bit of coffee liqueur to enrich the chocolate flavor.

It's enough that a tiny slice is almost too much.

To back this up a bit... this all started because my mom was having her 29th birthday for the 29th time (give or take a few years). With all the fruit cakes, fruit breads, fruit crisps/crumbles, and spice/nut cakes I've been baking this fall, she's been clamoring for something rich, decadent, and chocolate. And, well, it was her birthday, and who am I to deny her the one thing she's been wanting to eat?

So, I whipped out my cookbooks. I scoured through the recipes, looking for something that would give me a dense, intense chocolate cake, when finally I stumbled upon the Double Down Chocolate Cakes in my chocolate cookbook (Marcel Desaulniers' Celebrate with Chocolate).

The recipe was nearly perfect - very little flour (making it dense), very chocolatey, the sweet addition of Irish cream (one of my mom's favorite liqueurs). But, of course, there was a catch: the book calls for 16 mini pans, which beyond the fact that I don't have any mini-pans (let alone 16 of them), how unfun is it to have a birthday cake that's in 16 pieces? Almost defeats having a homemade birthday cake, if you want it pre-sliced, you may as well go out. So, I used a standard cake pan. Normally, that'd be an 8" round, but I couldn't find mine, so I used the 9" springform round. Needless to say, I have no clue how long it should be baked like this, but mine was in the oven about a half hour.


Anyway, come the birthday dinner, we had already partaken in a bottle of excellent Pinot Noir, some smoked rib roast, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, and green beans. These short bits of chocolate were enough to send us all into chocolate heaven.

Incidentally, the cake was significantly better the second day, so if you're planning on making this for a special event, I recommend baking it the night before and letting it hang out in the fridge - you can do the decorating that day, if you want.

Yesterday, I made a beautiful pumpkin pound cake. Light, fluffy, pumpkiny, spicy.. it was great. There were a few things I'd change (the pumpkin was really light, and so I'd use the entire ~14oz can of pumpkin instead of just a cup, and I'd probably go back to using cake flour for a more delicate crumb, and think hard about chopping the nuts and tossing them in the cake because I really hate nuts on a bundt cake as they always fall down).

There's no photo because the glaze turned out a bit odd because I got distracted and let the butter separate, and then grabbed half-and-half instead of cream, and found out too late that I didn't quite have a full cup of brown sugar lightly packed (let alone firmly packed), so instead of being a beautiful caramel sauce, it was weird. It was still delicious, though. Maybe next time - it was a hit, glaze aside. I'm thinking that the next time I make this, I might try a coconut-less half-and-half version of the icing from the spice cake (it's looser than the heavy cream, which is awesome if you go and poke holes in the cake, so the glaze gets inside).

This is what we in my family like to call "improvisional using up of produce" We bought 2lbs of pears to stuff a pork roast, and ended up deciding against the pears when it came to cook time. But, those pears had to be used, eh? And dessert's such a wonderful way to use it up. And what goes better with pears than cherries? Mmmmm.

Thursday night was my turn to cook again. Fortunately, this week I thought ahead and coordinated my two meals: Tuesday night, I had made some smoked chicken and corn on the cob, and had the foresight to make some of the extras for the chicken tortilla soup (so all I had to do for the main meal was chop up everything and toss it in a pot - the meat was leftover smoked chicken and the corn on the cob was already grilled; I didn't need to do anything for the peppers, as I happened to have some roasted peppers on-hand in the pantry).

I had planned to make some southwest eggrolls (basically, mini-burritos stuffed with a mix of chicken, black beans, spinach, and cheese that are served with an avocado sour cream), but I didn't want to run to the store for the beans (or spinach, though I suppose I could have used kale instead).

Anyway, the lack of prep work meant I had time on my hands, and this gave me time to consider the dessert options.

In our newspaper, we occasionally get this random free magazine called Relish. I've got this bad habit of reading random inserts, because there's occasionally some culinary gold in there. That was definitely the case with this one. Gooey, fruity, and very fall-y, this cake is definitely going to see some repeat business around here. In fact: I heard a rumor it may make it on the Thanksgiving table this year, kicking out one of the pies.

So my recent issue of Cuisine at Home (Oct 2007) came today. If I haven't mentioned them before, they're my absolute favorite cooking magazine. As much as I like reading Bon Appetit and the like, most of the time, there are are weird ingredients or a strange technique or equipment that I don't have. But Cuisine at Home involves ingredients & equipment I usually have, and while there may be a few new techniques, they're nothing crazy.

ANYWAY, inside, there were all sorts of delicious recipes, as normal. There were two I simply HAD to make. HAD to. So I did. The other one will be tomorrow's entry, though.

This is lightly spiced, and with the cake flour, it's got a delicate crumb. Not too dry, not too moist. I do think the icing is a bit much for the delicateness of hte cake - I think a light sweetened whipped cream with a bit of caramel on it would suit this better.

(I do plan to update to add a photo tomorrow, when the camera comes back.)