Rich and decadent, the recipe for these luxurious cookies was the result of a visit to Café Ilio, an artisan chocolatier in northern Tehran, run by husband and wife team Sahar Hossein-Najari and Mehrdad Aghameeri. The pair spent six years travelling around Belgium, France and Italy, honing their craft, before introducing Iranians to the wonders of fine chocolate, incorporating traditional ingredients – like saffron, pistachio and cardamom – into a whole new world of truffles, macaroons, jams and cakes. Thanks to their winning combination of dark chocolate and sour cherries, these cookies are loved by adults and children alike.
I started thinking about about the waste from coffee because in a restaurant people drink a lot of coffee; you can end up throwing away a lot of coffee grounds. We decided to start cooking with used coffee grounds, and the dishes we came up with tasted just as good - with a rich dark coffee - as they would have using fresh coffee grounds. Just store the ground in the refrigerator in a sealed plastic container with enough space for air circulation.
American's Test Kitchen shared this recipe with us as part of their recent muffin tins equipment review.
Very popular in South China to serve to the guests as a snack during the Chinese New Year. It is so named because the round dough balls, when deep fried, will crack open like someone laughing. It carries a meaning of being able to laugh throughout the year.
So that people who avoid alcohol could still enjoy the extraordinarily moist yet soft texture of my Grand Marnier cake, I've adapted the recipe using ground almonds and lemon.
What This Recipe Shows: By rolling the dough balls in plain sugar first, the confectioners sugar does not soak in so much and stays on the surface better.
Get the leavening right and you'll have lighter, finer textured cakes.
Wedges of these spicy kulchas are great as an appetizer with any legume curry. Of course they are best when they are hot off the grill, but you can make a batch ahead of time; wrap them in foil and rewarm them in a preheated 300ºF oven for about 10 minutes. Like many of the Indian flatbreads, this freezes very well for up to 2 months.
Use this Orange Flower Cake as a blueprint for other citrus cakes. Serve it plain, with a dusting if confectioners sugar, or poke the top with holes and saturate it with a tart glaze as follows.
This is very rich and sweet, almost more of a pudding than a cake. It first appeared in the Fifties, but was still popular a decade later. My husband, who is not usually a dessert eater, said that it is "extremely good!".