Cartoonist wants bacon and chocolate

I swear all i wanted was a bacon dripping with some ohhy goey chocolate! like the sample at the ice cream shop (which made me gag by the way). But beside the point i was so pissed off when i tasted that crap!! it had little bacon tastes in it but nothing more!! it was as if the makers said bacon was after thought but lets put it on the cover and call it “mo’s BACON bar”

BAAACCCOONNN!!! there’s supposed to be more bacon instead of chocolate!! Oh course while all of this is going mi madre is saying this bar is completely against what we’ve been doing for the past few months.

Breaking up the coacoa bar

My friends and I had a gathering a few days ago, and one of the foods that was brought was Reese peanut butter cups. As my friends were enjoying munching on them, and saying they were like chocolate from heaven. I decided that I should make a healthy version of them. I’m not a big fan of them, but whenever there is chocolate and peanut butter, if fills my happy meter to maximum.

Spooning in the chocolate

However, trying to start from scratch with raw chocolate, means that its difficult to make it somewhat sweet. Adding raw sugar didn’t even bloody dissolve even when i put it into  the microwave it still came out as a lumpy very bitter (like a unripe banana) chocolate mix. I decided on adding honey but even after adding 3 tablespoon  of the stuff it didn’t do a bloody thing to the friken chocolate! I guess i gave up then and just put them in the fridge for an hour to cool.

The next stage went rather smoothly (haha get it? since chocolate is smooth when oh never mind!) i just scooped almond butter into the cups and melted the rest of the chocolate. added honey this time which didn’t seem to do jack since it was still friken bitter!! But it took to bitterness of the unripe banana away and made it a lemon. Let it cool for ANOTHER hour.

Tasting the finished product

Finally after a long bitter 2 hours (haha get it bitter! as in chocolate! sorry i’ll stop) it was finally ready and after a few happy bites i believe my happy meter was filled. Despite the bitterness still being there like an old smell it was counter attacked by the almond butter. Next time though use more honey.

In the early evening after i had oddly enough finished my homework i was looking for a recipe. i stumbled across my moms book Raw power or something like that and found one on a banana and honey bar. it was just what i wanted and it was the only other bar recipe that didn’t call for a dehydrator. Course i didn’t see the “must keep stored for 24 hours for flavors to meld and blend.”

There was no friken melding or blending it just stayed there in the same mixture, NOT BLENDING!  So i followed the recipe and yelled to my mom at certain points and I’ll point it out here and now. 1) i could not see the granola 2)it looked like uncooked brownie mix. Now maybe some of these things should’ve been sure waring signs saying “oh god LEAVE US” or “THIS IS THE END!” But my mom i both agreed that it will look better after 24 hours in the freezer.

WRONG!!! It still freaken looked like uncooked brownie mix and it tasted not at all like it. The next task said we had to keep it in the freezer so i did that. Unfortunately every time i wanted a piece of a “granola bar” i would follow these basic instructions. Step 1 get tin out of freezer. Step 2 hack at the part you want to eat. Step 3 if that doesn’t work pry at the cut pieces with fingers until they are to numb. Step 4 repeat steps 2 and 3. when you finally have your granola thing the least you could do to make it less painful would to imagine your eating frozen brownie mix.

As one can see this granola bar thing ( which by the way i saw no granola) was horrible and at a certain point i gave up and just left it there freezing until my mom threw it out recently. my lesson? don’t make bars without a dehydrator, which we got..now

What happened with the frozen energy bars

Admin amendment: They were truly horrible. And we hoped, that once we got a dehydrator, things would go better.

The lumpy batter

I mean really what the Frick!!? We were actually going to try to make a recipe without changing anything!! you heard me!! NOTHING!! zero, zip, nada, nothing! No ingredient was changed!!…well maybe there was a little swichero on the flour but that doesn’t count OK!

Anyway my mom and i both thought that it would be fun to make something without changing anything for once.  We thought “Oh what could possibly go wrong?? We’re following the god damn recipe! The recipe will guide us”… Did the cooking gods agree with our small change? NO! NONONO they did not! they thought “Ohh they’re trying to make something from the book! lets make their batter look like bread dough!”

That’s exactly what they bloody did! While i was mixing the batter thinking of that this might make a good breakfast tomorrow, i noticed the batter wasn’t really batter anymore. Pointing this out to my mom she was concerned, but we both decided what the hell and into the muffin tin the “batter” goes.

The glazed muffins

Despite their appearance they were actually very good with the glaze on top which goes to show kids…NEVER FOLLOW A RECIPE, CHANGE IT!! At least they were not as bad as those bloody macaroons (by the way if i sound way to British and sweary today blame Dr Who and Zero Punctuation)

Amendment by Admin: The recipe was from page 97 of the Broccoli Forest cookbook. We changed from white flour to white rice flour. I did add a dash of xianth gum, but looking back, I think I should have used a few more eggs.

In the morning, since we didn’t put the muffins away the night before, the glaze had hardened, and the muffins weren’t bad. The lemon was very lemony, which I liked. Still, more like a biscuit than a muffin though.

Somehow she came up with bananas+ coconut= awesome. Cause it filled both our happy meters, i like bananas and she coconut ( mostly cooking with it though) We did more improvising when we got home though, i suggested the coco nibs but since there was a small amount left i just tossed it all in. Anyway I’m too lazy  so my mom will finish this entry more quickly then I.

bananas in the blender

OK, I, admin, have take over the rest of this.

OK, so of course the first thing one must do is purré the bananas. We decided that all liquid would go into the blender, and all the dry stuff would just be mixed in a bowel.

Cartoonist took over the liquid bits and I took over the dry bits. I think it was that there were bananas.

Dry mix

As mentioned above, I thought it would be fun to cook the cake with coconut flour.  I needed a base recipe, and although I love the Broccoli Forest, it is not gluten free cooking. I thought ti might be easier to use one of my gluten free books, but Baby Cakes didn’t have anything I wanted to start with. No base recipes.  So I went to my other gluten free book called, strangely enough “Gluten-Free Baking”. I haven’t liked anything from it yet, but what the heck, I was just looking for a base.

Did I following the recipe, even a little, well sort of. Here is what we did to it. For liquid we put in 6 bananas, 1/2 cup of coco nibs, capful of vanilla and capful of almound, one stick of melted button, 3 eggs, and one cup of soy milk.

The mix waiting to be bakes

For dry part I put in 2 and a half cups of coconut flour, 1 cup of raw sugar, 1/2 cup of almond meal, 1/1/2 table spoons of baking powder, 3/4 teaspoon of Xanthan gum, and a dash of salt. I mixed in my corner, and cartoonist ran the blender loud and long in her corner, and then we looked for a bowl to mix it all together. Everything was in the dishwasher, as we have been cooking every day this week. I had to dash into the running dishwasher to find a bowl for the dry stuff, but we had to wash out a bowl for the two to be combined.

Finished cake

We mixed it all up and poured it into the cake pans, and popped both into the oven. I had no idea what to expect.

What I should have done was a) grease the pans more and b) smooth out the cake more, but that can be done if we decide to make this one again. It was hard to get out of the pan when it was all said and done, but it did taste good. Just not show quality.

On the other hand, I have had things come out easily from the pans, and that had nothing to do with their quality. The lump that was the bread came out very well. It was a brick, but it came out when it was done.

Good enough to eat

And so, we come to the end of another failed, or not so failed attempt.

The beginnings of the ingredients

Nahhh, i’m a teenager it didn’t occur to me, besides i had already thought of a backup plan. My fist idea was strawberries which were..meh. The next day i decided to make it again but this time i used unsweeted chocolate nibs.They are very very bitter, just by themselves but my thought was they would taste better when cooked. Of course i was faced with another delema which was i didn’t have lemons. So i used (drumroll please) ORANGES!!

Whats the worst that could happen?? I only switched out the flour with white rice flour, blueberries with chocolate nibs,lemon to orange,and milk to soy milk (Silk). Oddly enough they turned out pretty well. Besides being overly crumbly, I’d say for people to give it a go.

Want to know who the hell i am?? go to the cartoonist page!

And now, I, admin, am going to talk about how we made these, with pictures yet.

Chocolate nibs and raw sugar

The main thing was we wanted to cook something with chocolate in as raw a form as we could. We didn’t want any added stuff, so I was quite happy when I discovered cocoa nibs. They were just bitter cocoa bean bits. They were perfect for what we wanted to do. We would add our own raw sugar, so control the sweetness.

I have found that if you read ingredient list, you would be surprised how much added crap there. Since I started making granola, I have checked out what store bought ones have it them, just in case there is something I want to add. What I notice is that they put a lot more sugar into everything.

how small the nibs were

We both weren’t sure how the nibs would work, not having used them before, but that is what cooking by experiment is all about.  My neighbor, when I told her about this, said she usually only changed one or two things in a recipe, so when it did or didn’t work out, she would know what had caused it.

Yeah, well, we didn’t do that. Oh well.

The finished muffins

Oh, but we were quite happy with how things turned out. A little flat, as often happens with gluten free, but still quite tasty.

And, cartoonist actually wrote down how she changed the recipe, in the book. (see below). So, if we want to try this one again, and perhaps add more baking power, or something, we can do that.

The alterned recipe