We Should Cocoa: Halloween Chocolate Krispie Monsters

First I must confess this is not an original idea; I saw a picture of these somewhere on pinterest and rather liked the idea of very chocolate rich rice crispie cakes turned into monsters for halloween. Some of the eyes have not worked so well but I think you get the idea.

These are a little fiddly to make as the rice crispie cake blobs are allowed to set and are then dipped in tempered chocolate before quickly adding the smartie eyes and then at the end piping some chocolate pupils to the eyes.

I was planning on making a lot more but quickly tired of carefully spooning out the rice crispie mix into mounds. It was fiddly to get the mound into a nice even shape without dropping bits or getting too straggly edges that might drop off when dipping.

If you already have a favourite chocolate crispie recipe do use that but you will need a mix that is not too dry. Whenever I make things like this I use a mix of milk and dark chocolate to reduce the sweetness and up the cocoa flavour, but all milk would be more traditional.

Second confession is that I have no idea how much chocolate you will need for the dipping. I do a lot of home chocolate making so have large bags of couverture chips in store and to make dipping easier I always work with about 750g or more. What is left over is then used for the next chocolate bake or confection. If you do not feel like dipping your monsters you could get away with just sticking the smartie eyes on the bare mounds but the faces will be so cute or, more importantly, so chocolaty. You could use a chocolate flavoured candy covering/melt for easy dipping but then the scary element would be the taste and texture rather than the look.

Recipe
150g milk chocolate (or milk/dark mix) broken into pieces
50g butter
60ml golden syrup
100g rice crispies

Extra chocolate for dipping, preferably tempered to get the best finish.
Smarties for eyes
2 baking trays lined with baking parchment

• If your rice crispie packet has been open a while and you live in a damp climate like I do then you might want to dry the crispies out in a low oven (80C) for 20 minutes or so first.
• Put the chocolate, butter and golden syrup into a large bowl and gently microwave (or place over a pan of warm water) to melt.
• Add the crispies into the chocolate, butter, syrup mix and stir gently but thoroughly to make sure all the crispies are well coated with chocolate.
• Using dessertspoons carefully place mounds of the mix onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
• Push any straggly edges back into the mound. Try to leave a slightly flattened top to the mound to make it easier to fix the smarties eyes on later.
• Allow to set in a cool place and if leaving overnight make sure they are in an airtight container.
• Melt/ temper the chocolate for dipping and then one at a time using a chocolate fork or large tined dinner fork dip each crispie mound into the pool and gently tap off excess chocolate.
• Carefully transfer the dipped mound onto a second parchment lined baking tray.
• Place the smartie eyes onto each monster as you go. If the outer coat has set before you get the eyes on, put a drop of melted chocolate onto one side of the smarties and then pop it chocolate side down onto the mound.
• Once all the mounds are dipped and eyes are on, put some of the remaining melted chocolate into a piping bag and pipe chocolate pupils onto each one in as spooky a manner as you see fit.

I am submitting my chocolate monsters to this month's We Should Cocoa challenge. The October 2014 challenge is being guest hosted by Hannah of  Honey & Dough.

Happy Monster Munching!

Animal Biscuits for Easter

I am trying to catch up with my Easter Baking write-ups before Easter is all too soon, over so here is another quick review, this time of my Easter biscuit experiments. The money shot is of course the ones that found themselves dipped into chocolate so I will start with these:

The base biscuit is a plain sugar cookie (recipe link later). Once baked and cooled each cookie is then topped with a thin layer of marzipan (all the better if a high almond content marzipan can be used) which has been decorated by pressing a texture sheet or rolling pin over the surface first. The marzipan layer is cut out using the same cutters as the biscuits and then stuck to the biscuit by a thin layer of jam. I used a sieved cherry jam but apricot would be another good flavour. The biscuits are then 'carefully' dipped into a pool of tempered chocolate so that the chocolate coats just up to the edge of the marzipan layer. Eyes are added at the end. If you are making these for marzipan haters then decorate them with rolled fondant icing instead. The icing can be coloured which adds a lot more interest to the presentation.

Well, this chocolate dipping was fun but a rather messy business as plunging whole biscuits into a pool of chocolate whilst keeping them on the fork is a bit of an art that I have not yet mastered. They are very keen to hop off the dipping fork when they shouldn't and my clumsy dipping fork action also meant I was dribbling chocolate around rather too liberally and 'streaking' across the top of what started as perfectly dipped biscuits. So having managed about a dozen 'good' ones I gave up and decided plain biscuits were actually very good too!

The sugar cookie dough recipe comes from an American baking blogger Wanna Come With and I have used it twice now with great success. Please click over to the website for details as there are some super decorating tips there too and detailed instructions there.

The recipe makes a huge number of cookies but the baked cookies keep incredibly well. I have recently used a volume-to-weight-calculator-for-the-kitchen/ downloaded from Blog site Khymos to enable me to convert the recipe from american cups/spoons to grams. This also makes scaling the recipe very easy too, if you do not want a full batch. If you are often put off American baking recipes by the need to measure out your butter in tablespoons do give this download a go.

The cookie dough is quite versatile and I made a batch of it into chocolate chip cookies by simply kneading in a good handful of chocolate chips to the raw dough and then resting it for 30 minutes before rolling and baking. It is not so easy to get clean/sharp edges to the cookies once you have added 'chunks' but these are very tasty variations.

Currants would work just as well and make a more traditional Easter biscuit.

The texturing can be added directly to the cookie dough before baking as so long as the impression is reasonably deep. I had better results with my texture sheet than the rolling pin but I am sure that was just because the particular pin I used made quite a shallow indentation to the dough.

To use the texture sheet I placed it on top of the rolled out dough and gently rolled back over with a plain rolling pin to push the mat into the dough. Lift the sheet off carefully and cut out as normal.

I have a large rabbit cutter that looks quite cute with a halved marshmallow pressed on to the baked biscuit to give a bunny tail. Much easier than trying to pipe a bunny face!

If you are a cookie cutter addict you could create quite an Easter menagerie.

I am putting this post forward for the April 2014  We Should Cocoa Challenge managed by Choclette over at Chocolate Log Blog. This month's challenge is being guest hosted by blogger Rachel Cotterill who has chosen Easter as the theme. You will find a round up of all the entries on her site and Choclette's at the end of the month.

It also seems very appropriate for the April Biscuit Barrel Challenge as this month they are focusing on FUN. More information for biscuit lovers can be found on Laura's blog I'd Much Rather Bake Than

Happy munching!