MAKES 1 1/2 CUPS

Whisk the sauce gently so as not to create tiny air bubbles that can mar its appearance.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
For the best bittersweet chocolate sauce recipe—flavorful and rich with just the right consistency—we added corn syrup to a mixture of cream and butter, giving our smooth sauce a shiny finish. In our chocolate sauce recipe, we used bittersweet chocolate rather than cocoa or semisweet chocolate for a complex sauce that fell off the spoon in deep chocolate ribbons.

SERVES 6

For profiteroles, the smooth, dense texture and rich flavor of a high-quality custard-style ice cream is preferable to the light, fluffy texture and milky flavor of Philadelphia-style ice cream, which is made without eggs. In our September/ October 2001 vanilla ice cream tasting, Edy’s Dreamery came out on top. If you’re serving several guests, prescooping the ice cream makes serving quick and neat, but if you’re assembling only a couple servings or your freezer lacks space, you can skip the prescooping step. Refer to illustrations below when assembling profiteroles.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
To develop a perfect profiteroles recipe—for a crisp, tender, and airy pastry encasing cold, creamy ice cream and napped by dark, luxurious chocolate sauce—we began with the pastry, using both milk and water for puffs that were crisp and browned nicely. We used the powerful food processor to incorporate whole eggs into the choux paste and baked the puffs on an uncrowded baking sheet to keep them from collapsing. We slit the baked puffs to release steam and then returned them to the oven for 45 minutes to ensure crispness.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/bake-it-better/2013/01/secrets-to-profiteroles/

Serves 10 to 12

Be sure to give the pudding and the cake enough time to cool or you’ll end up with runny pudding and gummy cake.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Chocolate Blackout Cake was first made by a bakery in Brooklyn 35 years ago. We wanted to create a version that could be prepared long after the shop had shut its doors. To achieve this, we used Dutch-processed cocoa for big chocolate flavor, and added cocoa powder to the butter we were already melting for the cake. This method—toasting the cocoa in the butter—produced a cake that was dark and rich. And to complement the distinctive chocolate flavor of the Chocolate Blackout Cake, we wanted the pudding component of our recipe to taste sweet and dairy-rich. We achieved this by using a combination of milk and half-and-half, which gave the pudding a velvety quality.

note: recipies includes ingredients for both cookies and frosting

two sections under ingredients: cakes and filling