Did you know it's organic?

Not to repeat the title, but did you know that it's organic? The zucchini, that is.  Grown from my garden this past summer.  I had so much of it that I had to freeze it. So zucchini, as organic as it is; it doesn't really connect to Parisian baking, so we'll put our Parisian theme on the back burner (get it, a cooking pun!).

So zucchini... what do you do with zucchini? Well, it grills up really well, it's a great substitute for certain pastas, and you can sneak it into chocolate cake! Yes, you read that right, chocolate cake. Since we're adding zucchini to the cake, we thought that we should try to make a healthier version of it, but with all the flavour of regular chocolate cake. Also, my husband has been complaining about all the zucchini in my freezer for the past 6 months.  Therefore for the sake of my marriage, we decided we better bake with the zucchini tonight.

Paul and I looked through a couple of cook books and weren't really happy with what we found. I decided that we were seasoned enough to make our own recipe up and pulled out my copy of Secrets of Fat-Free Baking and started looking at what we could improvise. But before we get to the good stuff, I want to share with you my apple sauce recipe that we used as a substitute for the fat (butter or oil).

Apple Sauce

5 Apples (McIntosh were what I had on hand)
1/2 tsp Cinnamon

Peel, core, and slice the apples and place in a saucepan. Add the cinnamon and cook at medium-high heat until the apples turn into mush (technical terms). Ta-Da!! Applesauce!

This is our Healthier (as healthy as chocolate cake can get) Chocolate Cake

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

For the cake:
1/4 cup of apple sauce
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp coffee granules
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 cups zucchini
3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chopped

1.  Preheat your oven to 325F.  Grease a 9" x 13" pan.
2.  In mixing bowl, cream together the apple sauce, vegetable oil and the sugars. Beat until well incorporated.
3.  Add the vanilla and eggs and continue beating until well mixed.
4.  In another bowl, combine the baking soda, salt, baking powder, flour and cocoa powder.  Give it a good stir.
5.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet in 3 additions alternating with the buttermilk.
6.  Stir in the coffee, zucchini and chocolate.
7.  Bake for 30-35 mins or until a skewer comes out clean

Cool the cake and start the frosting. This is where the health-kick kind of starts to fade...

Chocolate Frosting

6oz of Semi-Sweet Chocolate
1/2 cup Coconut Milk
1/2 cup Icing Sugar

Set a double boiler on medium heat and melt the chocolate. Add in the coconut milk and icing sugar and take off heat while mixing. Voila, frosting!

Paul was skeptical, as usual; but I pushed on and am pretty happy with how this turned out! Not bad for our first attempt at creating a recipe. The consensus on this recipe is that we'd make it again but next time call it a brownie, since it reminded us more so of that than a cake.

We even tried to fancy up the presentation. What's fancier than maraschino cherries? Nothing! 

On se prepare pour Paris

"Hey, what do you want to bake this week?"
"How about something French-inspired"
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to Paris!"
"What?! You lucky bastard!"

So to celebrate Paul getting ready for a short séjour to Paris, we decided to make choux à la crème (cream puffs). Light, fluffy, heavenly cream filled puffs of deliciousness.  Paul thought this would be so difficult... but I convinced him that it was easier than he thought; and of course I was right.

To make the mood even more French, Paul turned on his BRAND NEW record player and we listened to Edith Piaf and ate chocolate (can I tell you the Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy is all kinds of awesome/the worst idea for diets ever).

The cream puffs are surprisingly easy to make with few ingredients.  First you need to start with the choux paste:

Choux Paste

250 ml of water
1/2 cup of butter
5 g of salt
185 g of all purpose flour (or bread flour)
6 eggs

1.  Preheat your oven to 400F
2.  In a saucepan place the water, butter and salt and bring to a boil. Don't put a lid on the pot when bringing to a rolling boil; the butter will turn frothy.
3.  Add the flour and stir until the paste is formed and it pulls away from the sides of the pot. Take the saucepan off the heat.
4.  Place the dough in a mixing bowl and mix to cool.  When no more steams comes out of the choux paste, you can move to step 5.
5.  Add eggs one by one until fully incorporated. 
6.  Pipe using star shape and bake for about 30 minutes until golden.

Yes, 30 minutes seem like a really long time but if you pull them out sooner, the puffs will have an eggy-taste and no one wants that!

Once all your Choux Paste have been baked, it's time to start the filling. We decided to stick with the classic and made a whip cream filling.

Whip Cream

500 ml of  cream
40g of icing sugar
a splash of vanilla extract

Mix all the ingredients together with a whisk until stiff peaks form. 

Cut the puff pastries in half using a seraded knife and fill with the whip cream filling (we used a star shape pipping tip again).

Once finished, you can dust icing sugar like we did or make a chocolate ganache (we wanted to make the ganache but it was 9:00 pm and we both have to work tomorrow). These will probably not make it to work tomorrow!