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Gingerbread Men

Grandma’s Chocolate Gingerbread Men

3½ cups all-purpose flour, divided
¾ cup cocoa powder, sifted
1½ tablespoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2/3 cup vegetable shortening
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup molasses
1/8 cup raisins, for garnish (optional)
1/8 cup red-hot candies, for garnish (optional)
1 cup vanilla icing
Position racks in the top & bottom thirds of the oven, then preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease several large baking sheets and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, baking pow- der & cloves until spices & coca are evenly distributed, then set aside.
In a 2nd large bowl, cream shortening & brown sugar until fluffy, about 1 minute. Beat in egg & then the molas- ses. Turn off mixer & add flour mixture, then slowly combine, just until crumbly bits of dough form, but not until the mass begins to cohere into a ball.
Lightly flour a clean, dry work surface as well as your hands. Turn dough out & knead just until it forms a smooth mass, about 30 seconds. Divide into thirds & cover them with a clean kitchen towel.
Lightly dust the work surface again & roll one of the thirds to a rectangle about 1/4 inch thick. Flour the dough & a rolling pin only as necessary. Use a gingerbread-man cookie cutter to cut the dough into the desired shapes, then carefully transfer to the prepared baking sheet(s).
Gather any scraps, lightly dust again with flour & roll out a 2nd time, creating additional gingerbread men. Decorate the cookies with the raisins & red hots, if desired, or decorate with the icing after they cool.
Bake for 4 minutes, then rotate sheets top to bottom & front to back. Bake another 4 minutes, or until cookies feel dry but still are a little soft. Remove from oven & cool on the baking sheets for 2 minutes before transferring the cookies to wire racks to cool completely.

Zingerman's Chocolate 2: Dark Chocolate Gelato at Zingerman's Creamery

It's a cold and rainy fall weekend in Pittsburgh, but some friends of mine countered the impending gloom last night by cranking up the ice cream maker and inviting people over. The folks at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, do exactly the same thing every day.

In the second of several installments from the Midwestern foodie giant, Zingerman's Chocolate Lady Duff returns to recommend "in addition great fresh cream cheese and goat cheese, Zingerman’s Creamery's (est. 2001) unbelievable Sicilian-style gelato":

My favorite is the Dark Chocolate. It is super dense and not too sweet, like perfectly chilled chocolate mousse.

Gelato is ice cream’s distant Italian cousin - variations in the ingredients, process and serving style of gelato give it a unique texture and flavor. At Zingerman’s Creamery, we use milk from a local dairy – Calder Dairy – to make each batch of gelato. With great milk as the first ingredient in the Dark Chocolate Gelato, we’re already off to a good start! Then we add a hefty dose of natural, unsweetened cocoa powder from Scharffen Berger, a little sugar, give it a spin in our single-batch gelato machine and voila! The best chocolate gelato this side of The Pond.

Zingerman’s Creamery and Zingerman’s Deli stock the Dark Chocolate Gelato year-round, so you can stop by and try a spoonful anytime. But here is the real news. During the month of February – and February only - the Creamery makes a bunch of extra special chocolate gelati. Chocolate Balsamic Strawberry, Turtle, Rocky Ride, Chocolate Heat... I look forward to February all year just for the arrival of these flavors. And for me to say that I look forward to the fourth of six long months of winter in Michigan should give you an indication of how great these chocolate gelati really are! Maybe you want to strategically plan a mid-winter visit to Ann Arbor?

Chocolate & Beer Oktoberfest

Pictures are in from our dinner this past week, and WOW it was a good one. Obviously its my job to describe the eats at our dinners with such scintillating detail that you all can't wait to make a reservation for the next one... but I am making no over-exaggeration when I write that this was the tastiest menu yet. And at 17 dinners and counting... well that's saying a lot. If you missed it, you're outta luck; we don't repeat menus. But if you're brave enough to trust me on the next one, call us ASAP (619.578.2984) to reserve your space for October! This past dinner sold out a week before the event so don't wait.

What's for dinner? Check it:

Join us Saturday, Oktober 24th, at 4.5, 6.5 or 8.5 for three courses of savory chocolate deliciousness. And yes, I said Oktober! This time the theme is Chocolate & Beer Oktoberfest! For just $25, guests can enjoy:

Beer-Cheese Soup with Soft Pretzel & White Chocolate-Mustard Sauce

Gouda-Stuffed Bratwurst or Sweet Onion & Cheese Spatzel

both served with Baked Gouda, Cocoa Nib-Infused Sauerkraut, & Crusty Bread

Black Forrest-Dark Chocolate & Cherry Torte

Also enjoy our appetizer:

German Meatballs with Creamy Dill Sauce ($12)

and a first for us:

Three Course Beer Pairing (one beer with each course for an additional $15)

If all of this is too hard to comprehend, just take a look at the pics from our last dinner. Commence mouth-watering now:



Appetizer: Goat Cheese-Stuffed Figs Wrapped with Proscuitto

First Course: Ribollita Soup with White Chocolate Olive Oil Crostini

Entree: Rosemary-Crusted Roasted Lamb Chop or Gorganzola Aranici with Stuffed Tomato and Cocoa-Balsamic Sauce.

Dessert: Tiramisu with Burnt Caramel Espresso Sauce and Milk Chocolate Coffee Toffee

Zingerman's Chocolate: El Rustico Askinosie Bar at Zingerman's Deli

This has been a long day. In fact, it's already 12:30am. That's frightening, since what still feels like tomorrow promises to be an even longer day. So I think I'll turn things over post haste to Duff Anderson from the foodie haven Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her official title is "Chocolate Lady."

This is the first of several installments reporting on the state of chocolate at the various Zingerman's location around Ann Arbor (including the famous Deli, the Bakehouse, and the Creamery). I'd like to especially thank Duff for sending her report from the front during a hectic Jewish Holiday sandwich-making extravaganza (while, she tells me, she was also working on Zingerman's annual Paella Party).

I give you, Duff:

Last February, Zingerman’s Deli and Askinosie Chocolate launched El Rustico Chocolate Bar, inspired by the traditional foodways of the vanilla-growing regions of Mexico. We named it El Rustico – the rustic one – a Mexican style chocolate bar with delicate bits of whole vanilla bean.

There isn’t anything else like this bar out there in the chocolate universe right now. I proclaim this with a little bit of a proud-mommy complex (I helped develop it) but mostly as a completely objective observer!

We did no conching and very little refining on this chocolate, which gives it a really nice, crystalline texture. We are using Askinosie’s bean-to-bar Soconusco Mexican cacao to make El Rustico, partly because there is much great choco-history in that region (the Aztec’s sourced their cacao there) but mostly because we love its flavor!

But we didn’t stop there. We decided to sprinkle the bar with tiny morsels of super supple, hand-chopped (by yours truly and a very patient chef at the Deli) whole vanilla bean. Now, using whole bean vanilla (including the pod) in a chocolate bar – to amp up both flavor and texture – is crazy and delicious. So crazy and delicious, in fact, that no one else is doing it.

Askinosie Chocolate and Zingerman’s Deli are about to begin production on the next batch of El Rustico (the first batch sold out!), so you should see it back on the Deli shelves sometime in October. The bar will also be available online at www.askinosie.com.

Virginian Chocolate

In July, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists engaged in an ongoing debate on the Association for the Study of Food and Society listserv about the definitions of and differences between the words criolla and criollo. One respondent argued that both are (differently gendered) versions of the same adjective derived from the Portuguese Brazilian crioulo, and someone else surmised that "criollo in general refers to someone born in the Western Hemisphere to parents who came from Spain" while "criolla refers to grapes (aka 'mission grapes') brought to California (and other places in the Western Hemisphere) by the Spanish in the 16th century and planted there for the purpose of wine-making." My own contribution to the conversation was that

As high-end chocolate becomes more mainstream, marketers like to draw attention to criollo cacao beans (as opposed to forastero and trinitario beans, though, as several people have already mentioned, cacao plants are naturally genetically intermixed) as the "purest" and "finest" cacao--that is certainly an oversimplification. A couple of facts that challenge/complicate that characterization: 1. Juan C. Motamayor has actually proposed that there are ten rather than three "genetic clusters" of cacao, in his paper "Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree (Theobroma cacao L)" (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003311), and 2. My own experience in rural Guatemala was that people used the term to refer to cacao that came from trees that were wild and that they believed to be of inferior quality (whether that cacao would turn out to be genetically "criollo" is not clear to me), as opposed to "hibridos," known hybrids (often introduced in the 1940s or 50s, I believe, by the United Fruit Company) that they understood to be superior.

Implicit in my argument is is the assumption that the word the chocolate industry is concerned with is criollo, not criolla.

Brothers Tim and Matt Gearhart either disagree or are misinformed. Quite possibly, they simply don't care about semantics. The signature bon bon at their Gearhart's chocolate shop in Charlottesville, VA, is the "Criolla": a ganache of El Rey couverture and Shenandoah cream, combined with cacao nibs. The Gearharts treat chocolate the way that winemakers in the Jeffersonian stomping ground of the "Monticello Region" that surrounds Charlottesville treat grapes--they turn out a good product without self-consciousness or pretension.

In addition to the Criolla, former Marine cook Tim Gearhart makes fifteen other confections (Matt handles the business end), including maple pecan candies, an earl grey bon bon I'd like to make another trip for, and an orange-, cinnamon-, and ancho chile-infused ganache that borrows a lot of its flavor from the Green & Black's Maya Gold bar. The second Gearhart's location is scheduled to open in Richmond later this month.

Rustic Tuscan Dinner

Listen up, cocoababies! Our next Three Course Prix Fixe Dinner is only three weeks away! Silly old me decided to take a few days off for my bday and I forgot to post the announcement before I left. Those of you who are in the cafe often have already reserved space from seeing flyers around... but the rest of you might be a little behind. Allow me to catch you up.

Exclusively Saturday, September 19th, with seatings at 4.5, 6.5, & 8.5pm we will be hosting three enticing courses from the Italian North! Our Rustic Tuscan Dinner is as follows:

Goat Cheese-Stuffed Roasted Figs Wrapped in Prosciutto (optional starter)

Ribollita Soup with White Chocolate Olive Oil Crostini

Roasted Baby Lamb Chop or Fried Gorganzola Risotto Cake

both served with Cocoa Balsamic Sauce and Parmesan-Stuffed Tomato

Espresso Bean Tiramisu with Milk Chocolate-Toffee Crunch

Seatings are $25 per guest (plus gratiuty and tax, of course) and we plan on selling out. As always, we are holding RSVPs with a valid credit card and have a 48hr cancelation policy. Don't wait to call us or you might lose out! 619.578.2984

Until then, here's the yum-yums from last dinner:

Starter: Spinach-Articoke Dip with Cocoa-Glazed Bacon and Garlic Flatbread

First: Caprese Brulee Salad with Cheroke Heirloom Tomatos and White Chocolate Balsamic Glaze

Entree: Ricotta-Mascarpon Ravioli with Chile-Burnt Caramel Hazelnut, Sage Brown Butter Sauce, and Lemon-Vanilla Bean Fennel Salad

Dessert: White Chocolate Summer Berry Bread Pudding with Cocoa-Nib Creme Anglaise