Chocolate Bouchons

This dessert wasn't supposed to be next in line. In fact, I have two other recipes to write about that were made before this. All that changed when I was walking through Williams-Sonoma the other day and saw this. Apparently Mr. Keller owns Williams-Sonoma now, because you'll see his name there more often than the stores name. After picking up these molds I was given a free little book of waffle recipes, designed by Keller himself. Seriously.

Bouchon is a French word that translates to cork in English, so it's not hard to guess why these desserts are named how they are. It's a little bit of a longer jump to connect the name of the restaurant to these desserts, but the connection is there, I promise. According to Keller:

"...the first proprietors put a pine branch or bouquet--called a bousche--above their doors, a reference to Bacchus that announced that they served wine"

So wine is the connection between the restaurant name and this seemingly unrelated chocolate dessert. Anyway, I made these for dessert after Christmas dinner. And then again for New Year's Eve. That probably gives away the ending a little early.

The ingredients here are pretty simple. You probably have all of it already, with the possible exception of 6 oz of semisweet chocolate. And all of the butter you need. The rest of the stuff is vanilla, cocoa powder, salt, sugar, flour, and eggs.




That's not a joke. That's 3 sticks of butter. That's a step in the right direction, right? The first thing I did was chop the chocolate into tiny chips. I used a 61% chocolate I found at Whole Foods (the recipe calls for 55%), and to me it was an improvement. But I'm a dark chocolate fan, so do what you like....


I put the 3 eggs and most of the sugar in the mixer and beat it on medium speed for about three minutes, until it looked roughly like this:


I added the vanilla and mixed it until just combined. To this mixture I added the dry ingredients, which had been sifted:


and 24 tablespoons of butter, alternating 1/3 of each mixture at a time. The last step was to throw in the chocolate pieces and stir it until they were evenly incorporated. Batter complete. And tasty.

A couple of hours after Christmas dinner we decided it was time for dessert. I took the batter out of the fridge and did...nothing. The batter had hardened to the point that I wasn't about to do anything with it for the next 30 minutes or so.

After it softened some, I poured the batter into a ziploc bag I had cut one corner off of and piped it into the mold I bought:

Here's another shot so you can revel in how perfectly consistent I was filling each mold:


I figured they'd melt and settle some (they did), and things would be ok. They mold, placed on a baking sheet, went into a 350 degree oven for about 22 minutes. The tops, which are really the bottoms, looked kind of like a brownie when they were finished.

I took the mold out and moved it to a cooling rack. After letting it cool for just a couple of minutes, I flipped the mold over and let the cakes finish cooling upside down (or right-side up I guess). Since this was a fancy silicone mold, they cakes popped right out, and they were ready for serving.



I dusted them with confectioners' sugar and served them with some homemade vanilla ice cream. They were fantastic. Very chocolatey, moist, and rich. For a total time investment of maybe 45 minutes, it's a dessert you probably can't beat. It's probably at the top of the list of Bouchon desserts, at least for now.

As usual, I don't post recipes here, but this one is readily available other places on the net. Check out this for more info. There are some discrepancies on the yield depending on what size molds you use, but it'll all taste the same...

Chocolate Ice Cream

Editorial Note: Ice cream is probably the most valuable food a home cook can make. In this case, valuable means that's it's absurdly easy, incredibly cheap, and many many times better than store-bought ice cream. Seriously, go buy an ice cream maker and use it. It'll pay for itself in, oh, about 10 gallons. Also buy a treadmill while you're out; you'll need this later.

The chocolate ice cream recipe probably has the fewest ingredients in the entire book, save Vanilla ice cream. What we've got here is some 61% chocolate, some milk, some heavy cream, a bunch of sugar, and a measuring cup full of yellow-orange blobs of fat.


Essentially, all you do is make some ganache and freeze it. Good write up, eh?

All right, here's some more details. I spent a little longer than I should have trying to chop up the chocolate that I bought. I made the mistake of buying about 1000 little pieces instead of a larger block, so that was lesson number one. Anyway, the chopped up chocolate goes into a bowl and waits patiently.

Meanwhile, combine the cream, milk, and sugar and bring it to a simmer. While that's happening, mix together a little more sugar and the egg yolks until it looks a little like partially thawed orange juice concentrate. Add a bit of the cream mixture to temper the eggs and then combine everything back into the pot and simmer for five to ten more minutes. Eventually the custard will thicken up a little. I believe the word, and thickness were looking for here is nape.

Divide the custard, adding about a 1/3 of it to the chocolate and the rest into a separate bowl. After a few minutes, the chocolate will be very soft and can be combined with the cream. Whisk it until it's smooth, and then combine with the other bowl. I'm not totally sure why you can't do it all at once, but if there's one thing I've learned about Sir Keller so far it's this: Seemingly unnecessary steps tend to be the difference between ordinary and extraordinary. So I followed his instructions.

I cooled the custard in an ice bath, put it into a bowl, and refrigerated it over night. This seems to be standard procedure for every ice cream I've ever made. Think of it as marinading your meat, only for dessert. The final step is to make the ice cream in your ice cream maker. It will finish with a consistency of soft serve ice cream, but a couple of hours in the freezer will take care of that.

Now that I've already declared that homemade ice cream is the best thing since homemade sliced bread, I guess I should tell you how it turned out. I made this to go with vanilla macaroons, but you can read about that disaster as soon as I write it up. Until then, let's just say there were no macaroons. The ice cream, on the other hand, was pretty fantastic. It was creamy, chocolatey, and frozen. There are probably only two improvements I would make. These are personal preferences only, and reflect nothing on the delicious recipe. First, I would use slightly darker chocolate, or maybe mix the 61% with some 72% or something along those lines. Second, and I would probably cut back on the fat for health reasons. Next time I'll use light cream instead of heavy cream just to try it out. It certainly doesn't lack creaminess with heavy cream, so I'd tone it down a bit just to see if it makes a noticeable (and unacceptable) difference.