Comunidad Health Foods

I used to hate chocolate. I mean, sure, I loved my candy bars and can't remember ever turning down a brownie as a kid, but I was a vanilla ice cream, vanilla cake, white chocolate kind of girl. I even preferred these off-brand, potentially expensive (since we only got them once in a blue moon) white chocolate peanut butter cups over the Real Deal - you see, I was always a strange one when it came to food, I guess. Then, something happened. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I'm almost positive it started with the first bite of The Most Amazing Chocolate Cake in the Universe. It was sold by a local deli-type restaurant, and oh. my. god. Seven layers of dense, fudgy, rich chocolate topped and stacked with chocolate frosting with, of course, chocolate chips pressed into the sides. It was heaven on earth. I think it converted me to chocolate because now, chocolate is my achilles heel. That cake opened up the pandora's box of my taste buds, and there's no going back.

Unfortunately, with the whole no-trans-fat thing I've got going on, I have since banned that cake from my life (and basically anything else from a bakery), and need to find my chocolate fix in other ways. Although I will eventually need to try my hand at a comparable chocolate cake, I haven't yet, and settle instead with smaller ventures. This chocolate-rum pudding is one of those, and it really happened by chance. You see, I had made a batch of vanilla ice cream (which I will post about, but it's, well, winter time, and my apartment is freezing, and laboriously describing ice cream does not sound very enjoyable or productive at zee moment), and this ice cream left me with extra heavy cream and half and half. I don't drink coffee, so I figured I'd turn it into a dessert somehow. Pudding seemed like the perfect option.

The actual recipe calls for milk and I'm sure that you can use low fat - trust me, I will be trying this recipe out with healthier ingredients someday - but it certainly didn't taste bad with the extra fat in it, let me tell you! It's also just a recipe for chocolate pudding, but I had a little rum extract lying around so I just decided to add it in. Either this addition gave the pudding a nice, nutty flavor, or my taste buds lack adequate flavor discrimination and I've been fooled. Regardless, it tasted tres delicieux. Eat it warm and it's like you're eating brownie batter - and without the eggs, so you don't hear your mother's voice yelling, "don't eat that, you'll get sick!" Eating it cool like a normal pudding is also sufficient, but if I were you, I wouldn't waste my time with such novice approaches. I also added some frozen fruit to it - bananas, strawberries, pineapple - anything that's good covered in chocolate would be good in this dessert. I'd imagine you could also use legit rum instead of the extract, but I don't presume to know the proper ratio, nor do I keep hard liqueur handy, so I just stuck with my cooking products.

Tonight, I actually finished my to-do list before midnight, and so I'm finally back to talk to you about some of the cool things I've been cooking up lately. With all of the holiday parties coming up, I figured it would be a good time to share with you a "recipe" for candy bark - which is really just code for assorted candies pressed into freshly melted chocolate and allowed to reharden. I brought it to an induction ceremony this past week, and it got rave reviews. Unfortunately, I can't actually eat the bark (though I did try it) because of the lovely hydrogenated oils in some of the ingredients (more on that in a bit). The beauty of this is that it's kind of the edible trash can of the recipe world - any desserty/snacky ingredient you have on hand works. Pretzels? M&Ms? Candy Canes? Anything! So this really isn't so much a recipe as it is a suggestion for letting your creative juices flow. The original poster used Christmas candy corn and things like that to make a fully Christmas themed bark, while I made 2 batches - 1 with mints pressed in for a mint-chocolate variety, and 1 with butterscotch chips and caramel-filled hershey kisses - so it can be as plain or themed/festive as you want.

Candy Bark, courtesy of Gingerbread Bagels
Yield: Maybe 15-20 pieces? I doubled it to do the 2 different versions, and I had a whole lot.
The Ingredients
8-12 ounces semi sweet chocolate chips
4-8 ounces milk chocolate, butterscotch, or peanut butter chips (this + the semi sweet should equal 16oz.)
10oz. of candy melts (both Gingerbread Bagels and I used green and red for Christmas)

The following are just suggestions - feel free to add in whatever you have handy/want:
1/2C oreos (optional - Christmas oreos, but I used plain), quartered
1/4C m&ms (any version you want)
1/4C candy corn or those cadbury Christmas chocolate balls
1/4C hershey kisses (candy cane, caramel filled, whatever!) or crushed mints

The Method
1. Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave, being careful not to burn them. You could also do this in a double-boiler.
2. Spread the chocolate onto a piece of wax or parchment paper in the rough shape of a rectangle. It should be maybe 1/4" thick, but I really just went with whatever looked right.
3. Melt the candy melts (in separate bowls for each color) and drop spoonfuls sporadically on top of the chocolate rectangle.
4. Use a knife to swirl the candy melts into the chocolate.
5. Press the candy into the chocolate (really do this well - I just kind pressed it a little and a lot of the candy fell off when I broke the bark into pieces) and set aside for at least 3 hours to harden.
6. Break up the bark and enjoy!

I'd say something about how good this is, but first of all - how can it not be good? It's your choice of candy pressed into your choice of chocolate/misc. baking chips. Second of all, though, I didn't really eat much of it, especially once I found out the ingredients of some of my choices. I should have known better - of course candy melts and butterscotch chips have hydrogenated oils in them. How else would manufacturers get them to take that shape? I should have known, but for some reason I didn't think to read the ingredient lists until I stuck the butterscotch chips into the microwave along with the chocolate and, lo and behold, they didn't melt. I found that odd, and then I thought about it, and had an aha! moment. Yes, one of the first ingredients is "partially hydrogenated oil."

For those of you who don't know my bizarre eating quirks, I avoid any trans fats that I can - shortening, hydrogenated oils, etc. It isn't just because of the implications they have on heart health, though that is a huge deciding factor. It's also this very fact that the butterscotch chips don't melt (okay, as an example). There's just something so unnatural about items with hydrogenated oils and shortening. I mean, take crisco itself - that stuff can sit at room temperature for a century and not go bad. McDonald's has been known to sit at room temperature for a year and not grow mold. Things like this just aren't natural, and yet we consume these chemicals and additives all the time. I'm not trying to convert anyone, honestly. It's just something that I feel very passionately about. I eat a lot of butter and I eat a lot of dessert - I'm no junk food phobe. But I care a lot about the ingredients that go into those desserts and foods, because I firmly believe that we need to be eating food and not edible non-food items (or so Michael Pollan says in his book that I just started reading - how convenient - In Defense of Food). Eating healthily is about limiting fat and refined sugars and eating a plethora of fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean proteins, you've heard that spiel. Yes. I'm not railing against my own future profession. But it's also about knowing your food - where it comes from, how it's made...heck, how to pronounce all of the ingredients. You can make great strides in maintaining a healthy diet if you just rule out the foods with stuff in it you can't pronounce. But that's just my opinion.

That's it, that's my soapbox for the day. Again, if you go and make this candy bark and share it with people and you enjoy it immensely - even if you make it and eat the whole batch by yourself - I won't think you're a sinner or you don't know how to eat well. My idiosyncratic eating habits are just that - little quirks that I've picked up. We all have them. But this right here, it's just a little food for thought. I will definitely make this bark again, but likely without the candy melts (maybe some dyed white chocolate instead?) and butterscotch chips. When you get right down to it, this recipe is a crowd pleaser - trans fats or not - and it's one of the easiest and most versatile desserts out there. And isn't that what really counts?

P.S. I apologize for not having a picture - I forgot to take one and am a little too comfy in my chair (it's been a long week) to get up and take one. I'll try to remember to take one tomorrow to post on here. But for now, you can head on over to Gingerbread Bagels to see the absolutely magnificent pictures she took. If those don't make you run into your kitchen and whip up a batch right this second...but I digress.

Now, as delicious as those Margarita Cupcakes were, you didn't really think that I would stop at one birthday dessert, did you? After all, only a fully sane person would stop at one - if any - self-made dishes on their Special Day. You see, I was all set to have a smorgasbord of alcoholic cupcakes for dessert: I'm talking margarita, Strawberry Daquiri, and - one that I was particularly intrigued by - Irish Car Bomb.

The first fly in the ointment was the price of alcohol. A huge reason why I bake for my own birthday (though not the main one) is that cakes are borderline astronomical these days, and just not worth it...in my humble opinion. So, had I loaded up on three separate types of alcohol and used just a tablespoon or so of each per recipe, my birthday dessert would've gone from frugal to bank-breaking in a matter of seconds. The second fly in the ointment was the amount of time I had to create all of these desserts. The weekend before my birthday coincided wonderfully with the end of a beach vacation, meaning I would get home Saturday afternoon and have less than 24 hours, including sleep time, to make this all work. And the third and final fly was the fact that apparently, I am not the only one in this Whole Wide World or even my entire family who shies away from alcohol, and some people just might not appreciate having to choose between negligible amounts of intoxication in their desserts, or no dessert at all (totally unacceptable, I know).

Basically, I needed another option, and thought that a nice cookie would do the trick. In keeping with the citrus/summer theme and my love of all things Smitten Kitchen, I turned to one of SK's recipes: slice and bake cookies with a thousand-and-one mix-in options, including lemon poppyseed. This recipe not only gave me a simple, well-reviewed cookie (complete with enticing pictures), but it is also a dough that can be frozen. So, a week and a half before the Big Day, I was able to crunch these cookies out, roll them into logs, stick them in the freezer and be on my merry way. My mom was loving enough to slice and bake them for me while I was off getting a shorts tan on the beach, so I have to give credit to her, as well.

Lemon Poppyseed Slice & Bake Cookies, courtesy of Smitten Kitchen
Yield: Roughly 50 cookies, says Deb...I 100% forgot to count. I'd say, if anything, a little less.
The Ingredients
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature (or, salted butter and omit the salt later on)
2/3 C powdered sugar, sifted
2 large egg yolks, room temperature
*pinch of salt
1tsp. vanilla or almond extract (I used vanilla, but more on that later)
2 C all-purpose flour
Mix-Ins: the zest of 2 lemons, 1/4C poppy seeds to coat or mix* (I also added 1/2tsp. lemon extract)


The Method
Cream the butter on medium speed until smooth. Add the powdered sugar and continue beating until the mixture reaches a smooth and silky consistency again. Beat in the egg yolks, salt (if using), lemon zest, and poppy seeds (unless coating). Reduce the speed on the mixer to low and add the flour, mixing until it just disappears. If in doubt, it's better to under beat here, incorporating the remaining specks of flour with a spatula. Turn the dough onto a counter and form it into a ball. Divide the dough in half, wrapping each separately in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Once the dough has chilled, remove it from the refrigerator and form each ball into a log measuring about 1 to 1 1/4in. thick. Now, I found this to be much more troubling than it probably should have been, but maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Yes, I did pull out a ruler and measure, and yes, I did adjust the logs when I got a measurement of 1 1/3 or 1 1/2. I cannot tell you how necessary this is, though I get the impression that aside from altering the number of cookies you will wind up with and maybe the cooking time, it really doesn't matter. Anyway, once you have gotten your well-measured (or not) logs in order, wrap them in plastic and chill for two hours. At this point, you may freeze them for up to 1 month or refrigerate for up to 3 days, just make sure they go in an airtight container. I used plastic wrapped followed by a freezer bag, which was ultimately a poor decision because the logs were too long, and so I wound up with crooked logs (because you know I sat there until they "fit," anyway).

When you are ready to bake them (remember to thaw the dough a little if you opt for freezing first!), divide your oven into thirds using the oven racks and preheat it to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets (or as many as you need) with parchment paper.

Meanwhile, roll the cookies into the poppy seeds if you're coating them with it, and use a sharp and slender knife to portion them into roughly 1/3in. slices. If you make them any thicker, just be aware that the baking time will likely need to be increased. Place the cookies on the baking sheets with around 1/2in. space between each one.

Bake the cookies for 12-14 minutes, watching for them to set but not brown. Transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to cool to room temperature.


*Note: My first intention was to mix the poppy seeds in, but seeing that I only had a meager tablespoon or two of poppy seeds left in the container, I changed plans. I mixed in what I had, and decided I would add them to the shopping list and coat the logs with the remaining amount, so that there was a little of both. Plans changed again when the poppy seeds were accidentally left stranded in the grocery store, and so I just used the small amount that had been originally mixed in. I thought they came out fine, both aesthetically and in terms of taste, and probably would not mix the whole 1/4C in next time, even if I have it on hand.


These lemon poppy seed cookies were big hits in my family. I think L would have gladly eaten the entire batch himself, as would several other people. They're light and crumbly (in the good kind of way, not in the I-just-bit-into-this-cookie-and-now-more-than-half-of-it-is-in-my-lap kind of way) and the citrus flavor is strong but not overpowering. They're buttery and full of flavor, as they should be with two sticks of butter thrown into the mix. Also, they keep well. They didn't last more than a couple of days in my house so I can't give you any conclusive evidence, but I didn't notice a change in quality at all in that time frame. They were apparently easy to bake, and definitely easy to make, and more than that, this is a great base recipe to have in your pocket. You should go to Smitten Kitchen and look at all of the other options she has listed, and then sit down and think of some of your own. I plan to make these again, both in lemon poppy seed form and in countless other forms, too. Plus, who doesn't love having a frozen log of cookie dough on hand to pick at without cooking every time you open the freezer be able to whip up at a moment's notice?

And that brings an end to the birthday desserts, but have no fear, because L's birthday is in just a few days and I have all sorts of plans for that. Ushering in people's 21st birthdays with "alcoholic" food might just be my new specialty...