Nakos - Small-Batch Baking for Chocolate Lovers

Everything Is Better with Chocolate

Nearly every morning, my husband, Lindsay, breaks off a tiny square of an 84-percent cacao chocolate bar and slides it into my mouth before I am fully awake. The deep chocolate flavor melting and lingering on a virgin tongue first thing in the morning is indeed a sweet sensation.

After my husband listened to an NPR radio show about chocolate tasting, with a mention of chocolatier Steve DeVries in particular, Lindsay did some investigating and learned about DeVriess travels around the world to find the perfect cacao beans for making chocolate. He ordered a sampling of DeVries chocolate bars to surprise me and, since that first luscious morning experience with chocolate, we have rarely spent a night without a bar by our bedside.

You may have deduced that I am a chocoholic. If the cake, muffin, cookie, tart, or souffl is not chocolate, I can usually pass it up. I love looking over a restaurant menu at the crme brles and tortes and tarts and cakes; but if it has no chocolate in it, I am going to skip it. If I am at a bakery, the inclusion of chocolate helps me narrow down the seemingly impossible decision of which treat to buy. I cannot imagine why anyone should ever want a birthday cake that was not, at least partially, chocolate.

Basically, if it contains sugar, it has to be chocolate.

I am fortunate my passion for chocolate has appeared during my development of small-batch recipe creations. Today, there are countless, tiny 2- to 4-ounce bars of artisan chocolates available. The premium quality of chocolate can mean the difference between a good chocolate souffl and a heavenly one. Because the recipe yields just 2 servings, all you need is a single chocolate bar to complete the recipeso its possible to splurge on a unique flavor palate.

For this book, I developed small batches of my favorite chocolate treats, and I have updated some previous recipes to include chocolateeven when chocolate is not native to the recipe. Take baklava, for example; I put chocolate in the nut filling, and the results were amazing. It has the same texture and honeyed syrup, but with chocolate-covered nut layers between the crisp pastry. Likewise, cinnamon rolls are more tempting when they have chocolate rolled up with the nuts and cinnamon sugar. Pumpkin pie is really something to be thankful for, too, when you add melted chocolate to the filling. And shortbread, sugar cookies, and many more are just betterwith chocolate.

My twenty-three-year-old daughter survived her high school years largely because I made pans of small-batch brownies for her at the very first sign of teenage-girl angst. Now, armed with baking skills for tools to reduce her stress, she makes a mini loaf pan of them for herself, in her own apartment, completely assuaging whatever ails her at the time.

My eight-year-old daughter and I bake small batches of often, sometimes every other day, because we can eat them in under 30 minutes (start to finish), warm from the oven. We love this small-batch process; no more waiting on baking sheets to cool so you can put the next batch in the oven. (With her youthful attention span, she was always done with baking them after the first sheet of cookies went into the oven, anyway.)

The recipes in this book are perfect for mothers and grandmothers to bake with children. Its easy to make measuring ingredients into a terrific math lesson in fractions, weights, and measures. Baking in small batches is instant gratification; you will be eating what you bake in less time than it would take to go to the store and buy a bag of cookiesanyone whos spent time with kids knows about their restricted attention span! Perhaps most satisfying is that the process is much less messy than if you were baking a large batch. I know from experience: when a child simply has to measure cup flour, there is less to clean up.

Small-batch recipes can be a great entree for aspiring cooks who want to learn to bake. My older daughters college friends loved Small-Batch Baking ; they learned serious baking techniques and were able to practice often. It is the perfect cookbook for someone in their first apartment; the recipes can even be baked in a good toaster oven. (My younger daughter and I once baked cookies in her Easy-Bake Oven!)

For empty nesters and people living the single, high life, this is a must-have cookbook. It will put baking back into your lives, because the recipes are scaled back to manageable proportions. There will be no leftovers to lure you into overindulging, but you may be tempted to bake a different chocolate treat every day.

What You Need to Get StartedEquipment, Ingredients and Measuring Techniques, and Storing Ingredients

Many people have remarked to me, since the first Small-Batch Baking book, that baking is a scientific process. Well, in fact, it is but it need not be dauntingly so. True, I did graduate from Virginia Tech with a BS in home economics and had to take several chemistry courses along with the food-related; some of that knowledge from long ago nagged at me while I worked with these recipes. But what has turned me into a baker is the experimenting I have done over the yearsthe successes and the failures have added to that basic knowledge and have given me a feel for baking. Believe me, my grandmother did not take as many science courses as I did, and she was one fabulous baker. All you need to learn is a willingness to practice.

This book can give you a lot of practice, because you can bake almost every day and still not overindulge. You can hone your baking skills and not eat too much of a good thing. Following the guidelines of moderation and portion control as you treat yourself is the ultimate having your cake and eating it all, too.

Most methods I describe in Small-Batch Baking for Chocolate Lovers are the same as one would use for baking large batches, i.e., you mix cookie dough the same way except in a smaller bowl with less ingredients. But it is not always possible to divide a standard recipe by halves, thirds, or quarters and arrive at the same flavor and texture. So the recipe ingredients are specifically tailored to baking small batches, and they will result in the quality of baked goods you expect from its traditional counterpart. The formulas I have worked out and the clear instructions on manipulating them will give you success and confidence in your baking skills.

Equipment

Since the original Small-Batch Baking was published in 2005, many manufacturers have come out with smaller pans tailored to baking in miniature. And while those can be fun and efficient, honestly, you can most likely use what is already in your kitchen. I love to recycle 8-ounce and 14- to 15-ounce cans from standard pantry itemslike water chestnuts and tomatoesfor baking; they are perfectly safe to use in the oven.

For muffins and small cakes, 6-cup muffin pans with standard- and jumbo-size cups are easily found in supermarkets, kitchen shops, home goods stores, and online. Petite loaf pans, with a 2-cup capacity, are the perfect size for baking loaf breads and cakes. For tarts, I like to use 4-inch-diameter tart pans with removable bottoms; the 4-inch-diameter tart pans are also good for baking individual pies. Both sizes have removable bottoms for easier serving. And, actually, you can make pies in jumbo muffin cups; look through the section on muffin pans to see how to do it.