Author Archives: Jessica Petersen

Seattle Chocolate Salon 2009

 
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Reviews of chocolates and other products presented at the 2009 Seattle Chocolate Salon by Oh! Chocolate, Theo Chocolates, Forte Chocolates, L’Estasi Dolce, Choffy, Eat Chocolates, Carter’s Chocolates, La Châtelaine Chocolat, Chocolopolis, Divine Chocolate, I Love Chocolate Jewelry, Posh Chocolat, Crave Chocolate, Amano Chocolate, Intrigue Chocolates, Suess Chocolates and William Dean Chocolates.

Eat Chocolate at the 2009 Seattle Chocolate Salon
 

I had the really good fortune to check my email shortly after a message showed up from Foodbuzz offering the first two Featured Publishers to respond a ticket to attend the Seattle Chocolate Salon on their behalf. (This was back in mid-July–did I really start writing this post a over a month ago? Fortunately, chocolate never goes out of style, but I still want to give FoodBuzz a big thank you for being kind and patient with an exhausted and preoccupied pregnant foodie!)

My fortune wasn’t favorable just because I got a free ticket; Chris attended as my trusty photographer and we both felt that the experience was well worth the $20 he spent to get in. No, I also count myself lucky because if it hadn’t been for that email, I never would have known about the event at all. I don’t know if I live under a rock or what, but the only other place I’ve seen a mention of the event was in another food blog after I already had scored myself a ticket. To make matters worse, in the days leading up to the Salon, I felt a bit confused by the layout and wording of the site, and was unsure exactly what kind and quality of event I was going to be attending. So even if I had found out about it another way, if I hadn’t had that ticket already, I’m not sure the website would have convinced me to go.

Which would have been a huge shame, because the event itself was all kinds of awesome. Several different varieties of awesome, in fact, that far exceeded both of our expectations. Continue reading →

Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes with Three Types of Ganache

 
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Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes with Three Ganaches

Tres leches, move over. There’s a new cake in town with three iterations of the same component: tres (or maybe it should be trois?) ganaches chocolate raspberry cupcakes. Sounds decadent, right? Well, they were. Decadent, extravagant, and definitely delicious…if possibly slightly unnecessarily complicated.

Not only that, but I used expensive eating chocolate for all of them. Bars and bars of the $3-$5 for two frickin’ ounces kind of eating chocolate. Valrhona raspberry ganache fills both the raspberry inside the cupcake and the one on top. Around the interior raspberry is a Scharffen Berger ganache. Finally, Michel Cluizel ganache frosting swirled on top crowns it all. The only reason I said that it was possibly unnecessary was that while eating the cupcake it wasn’t necessarily apparent that there were three different chocolates in play. But you definitely could tell that the chocolate involved was really, really good chocolate. Continue reading →

Falafel-Stuffed Roasted Tomatoes

 
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Pregnancy continues to interfere with my food blogging.

But now it’s meddling in a new and more creative way than morning sickness that’s not bad enough to complain about but was annoying enough to keep me from cooking anything interesting enough to write about. No, now it’s gotten sneakier.

Falafel-Stuffed Roasted Tomatoes

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to have dinner waiting for Chris when he got home, in an attempt to make up for all the times he made dinner this spring when I wasn’t feeling up to it. I had a cucumber and several tomatoes–beautiful tomatoes, small Camparis as red as fire engines and hovering just at the apex of perfect, sweet ripeness–so something vaguely Greek/Mediterranean seemed the way to go. I turned to a box of falafel mix in the cupboard, but suddenly plain falafel fried up from a mix seemed too boring for those tomatoes.

So I got creative. After getting a batch of potatoes bathed in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and Greek spices in to the oven to roast, I halved the tomatoes and scooped out the watery seeds, just leaving the juicy yet still firm flesh behind. Kosher salt served both to season the insides of the tomatoes and encourage them to let down some of that juice once I turned them upside down on top of some folded paper towels. I oiled the pan and the tomatoes with more olive oil and spaced the red beauties out, cut sides up, and stuck them in with the potatoes to roast for, oh, about 15 or 20 minutes at 375-400 degrees (you see, I’ve already forgotten), until they had softened and sizzled and the kitchen was perfumed with their scent. Continue reading →