Dessert By Candy

Trick Or Treat Giveaway!

It’s giveaway time! Are you ready for Halloween tomorrow? I don’t plan to dress up this year but I’ve been building a coffer of homemade candies. Surely you don’t think I spoil my appetite with just any store bought chocolate treats? Don’t feel left out because trick or treat isn’t limited to those who knock on the door of my house. Let’s have a virtual trick or treat right here at Dessert By Candy!

If you’re from Canada or the USA, you have three options to enter the contest (you're welcome to pick and choose!):

1. Leave a comment on this post and tell me the candy you most like to try from Candy By Candy. Don’t forget a valid email address!
2. Retweet this post.
3. Like my Facebook Page so you will not miss out on all my sweet or savoury adventure.

Winner will receive a prize pack of Candy By Candy assortment including Mocha Mallomars Surprise , Trillian Bar, Curry Coconut Brittle, and other sweet goodies. One winner will be selected on November 1, 2014 6pm EST. I will contact you by email, or twitter DM, or Facebook message, depending on how you enter the contest.

Trick or treat? I think you know the answer.

Mocha Mallomars Surprise

I grew up snacking on Whippets, the Canadian counterpart of American Mallomars. If you’re familiar with the Danish treat flødeboller, you can see similarities too. The combination of soft cookie and marshmallow cream coated in chocolate captures the best part of s’mores without the hassle of setting up campfire. What’s not to love? I could happily wolf down a whole box without a second thought.

The “happy” part came to an end last week when I realized my own homemade concoction tastes far superior to any store-bought version. Instead of satisfying my occasional craving with a short trip to the grocery store, I now need to spend hours making Mallomars from scratch. There’s no looking back, unfortunately. I cobbled together a few of my favourite things to create these Mocha Mallomars Surprise: soft crumbly espresso shortbread biscuit from a family favourite recipe, fluffy delicate coffee marshmallow, a surprise crunchy centre of malted milk ball, all surrounded with a smooth dark chocolate. Is your mouth watering yet?

Sticky Business

Tempering chocolate used to make me quake in my shoes from intimidation. Not anymore. Like most skills, with enough practice, I finally master it well enough to do so reliably. At the beginning of the year, I set out to learn new techniques and tackle unfamiliar recipes. The parade of successes and failures came out of kitchen non-stop: baba au rhum, steamed barbecue pork buns, popovers, marshmallows, countless candies, many kinako treats, Swedish baked goods, kouign amann, croissant, French crullers, beef jerky, butter tarts, Princess cake, slab pies, baked Alaska, and of course, croquembouche. The biggest gain is my love affair with confectionary. Playing with sugar and chocolate become a large part of my repertoire. I marvel at the variations a few simple basic ingredients can turn out depending on how I manipulate them. It is as close to alchemy as it gets.

It took me a long time to gather up courage to make nougat. It is one of my favourite treats so you would think I want to make it at home as often as I can. With an addictively soft and sticky texture, it is a joy to eat but a pain to handle. I feared facing a slab of stubborn sticky sugary mess on my chopping board. But my confectionary education would not be complete without nougat. So I made it anyway last weekend.

Wafu (Japanese Style) Sandwich Cookies

Baking inspirations come in waves and recently I have more ideas than I can keep up. An interesting opportunity has come up recently and baking may take on a much bigger role in my life. It’s both scary and exciting at the same time. The scary part I need to face with unbiased analysis and determination. The exciting part is the reason behind this latest of burst of inspiration.

I keep a notebook of ideas. Most of the time it is simply a bunch of words I jot down with little meaning without explanation. More mature ideas I like to include sketches to flesh out how I envision the dessert. Yesterday I went for a run around my neighbourhood and an idea came to me without warning. Obviously I did not have my notebook with me. As soon as I got home, I decided to keep the notebook and jumped directly in the kitchen. Experimenting can be such fun.

My favourite chocolate chip cookie is Heidi Swanson’s Mesquite Chocolate Chip cookies. Over the years, it evolved in my kitchen and eventually became Kinako Chocolate Chips Cookies (recipe). Yesterday I transformed it some more and got rid of chocolate chips entirely and added a buttercream sandwich filling. The kinako (toasted soybean flour) inspired an even stronger Japanese taste profile with addition of sesame seeds, toasted nori seaweed, and miso.

Baked Alaska My Way

Last Sunday my cooking friends and I had another one of our famous themed gathering with ice cream being the feature star. With over 15 of us and many  brought in more than one flavour of homemade ice cream, the selection was dazzling. Our host foodpr0n roughly divided the event into three segments. First, vanilla ice cream taste off. A bunch of us made our favourite vanilla ice cream recipe and we had a side by side taste test to determine the crowd favourite. The tasty contenders included recipes from Jeni’s, America’s Test Kitchen, Melissa Clark, David Lebovitz, Thomas Keller, Alton Brown, and Martha Stewart. After multiple rounds of tasting, our decision was deliciously split between David Lebovitz’s and Melissa Clark’s recipe. All seriousness aside, we then proceeded to make our most outrageous vanilla sundae creations with homemade sauces like bourbon caramel, chocolate magic shell, feuilletine, pie crust pieces, cookie crumble, and almond brittle.

Coconut Cake For Dad

I baked many birthday cakes for family and friends. Some were greatly appreciated. Some we ate with indifference. Some instigated arguments that made irreparable damages to relationships. I never know what kind of reaction my homemade birthday cake would bring yet I never give up on this small gesture. I like to think that cake brings people together in delicious way.

Last week I made a fancy four layer coconut cake for Dad’s birthday. The Cook’s Country recipe would yield a large 9-inch cake fit for a big party. I made a 6-inch and a 5-inch cake instead so it was not so daunting. The recipe was uncomplicated except for the use of cream of coconut (think Coco Lopez and pina colada). It took me a while to source this cocktail ingredient but it was effort well spent. It gave a huge boost of coconut taste in both the cake and the frosting.