Tuesdays With Dorie: Boca Negra

For our second Tuesdays With Dorie recipe for February, we made Boca Negra, a basically boozy, almost flourless chocolate cake. The cake assembles pretty easily, except for one small problem incorporating softened butter into a melted chocolate-whiskey sugar syrup. Apparently, there is supposed to be enough residual heat to melt the butter enough for it to blend into the chocolate-syrup mixture. I ended up having to do that over a double boiler.

Other than that, everything about this cake was smooth. I opted out of the boozy white chocolate cream recommended as an accompaniment for the cake, thinking that it might be too much for the 17-year-old. Instead, I served it with lightly sweetened mashed raspberries and whipped cream. Definitely a hit.

For another story about Boca Negra and the recipe, visit this week's host at A Frederick Food Garden.

Tuesdays With Dorie: Focaccia

Due to both the cold weather and the recent U.S. figure-skating championships, I was pretty much indoors a couple of weekends ago. Since I was inside anyway and had the computer in the kitchen anyway (for streaming video of all the skating stuff that wasn't being shown on TV), I decided to tackle the two February Tuesdays With Dorie projects in one day.

My plan was to make focaccia dough, then bake the bread and serve it with pasta for Sunday dinner. Unfortunately, I merely scanned the recipe and didn't read it thoroughly, which meant that I was out of luck as I started the focaccia on Sunday at noontime. I missed that whole thing about letting the dough rise in the refrigerator for 24 to 36 hours.

Nonetheless, I had the dough under way and decided I'd just finish it off a day later, which freed us to have dinner at Panera. Ha.

I wasn't sure we'd be up for eating three focaccias, so after I separated the dough into three portions, I froze two of them and baked off one. Although the process was a bit time-consuming, I think everyone in the house was thrilled with how the focaccia turned out. I made the focaccia with olive oil, kosher salt, and chopped rosemary.

For this week's recipe, visit Sharmini at Wandering Through ...