Chocolate Drives Me Batty

Yes, Gentle Reader, it's that time of year again. The latest Taste of Home Halloween Food & Fun has hit the magazine rack.

Just like last year, the boy spied the issue at Wally World. Since last year's edition yielded the glory of Canadian Curry and Yummy Mummies and a barrel of laughs, how could we pass up this year's edition, even with its $4.99 cover price? (Yes, Gentle Reader, money's gotten so tight here at Chez Boeckman-Walker that $4.99 for a lousy magazine is a true splurge.)

This year's issue did not disappoint. We have a fun mix of fun Halloween-themed sweets and treats alongside a scary (and not because they have anything to do with ghouls and goblins) collection of stereotypical "hearty" Midwestern cookery--many of which are designed to be made in a slow cooker! Because nothing says Halloween and autumn like a hunk of red meat slow cooked for eight to ten hours....

I gave the issue to the boys and told them to pick something we could make this weekend. Although the husband, like me, was eyeballing the maple-ginger fudge, the pair decided on a recipe that they themselves could probably make and not royally screw up.

Batty Bark8 1-oz. milk chocolate squares
4 1-oz. semisweet chocolate squares
1 C crisp rice cereal
1/4 C unsalted sunflower kernels
1/4 C dried cherries, chopped

1. Line a baking sheet at least 9" x 12" in size with wax paper.
   
2. In a microwave, melt the chocolate together, stirring until smooth.
   
3. Stir in the cereal, sunflower kernels and cherries.
   
4. Spread the chocolate mixture onto the baking sheet so it measures 9" by 12", then refrigerate until firm.
   
5. Remove the chocolate from the refrigerator and let stand 10 min. at room temperature.
   
6. Cut the chocolate using a 3 1/2" bat-shaped cookie cutter.
   
7. Remelt scraps and cut more bats, if desired.

Yield: 18 bats

Nutritional Info
It's got chocolate in it. Twelve ounces of chocolate. Use your imagination, Gentle Reader.

The Faudie's Futzings
Because we were aiming for a recipe for which we already had most of the ingredients, I used dried cranberries instead of dried cherries. That was my only intentional futzing.

My choice of chocolate might be considered a futzing. I didn't use squares. No, I used regular 'ol chips and morsels. It's all chocolate, right?

I thought I had some Nestle milk chocolate morsels in the deep freezer, but instead I had an 11-ounce bag of milk chocolate chips combined with peanut butter chips, so I wound up having to buy a new bag of just milk chocolate chips. Comparing prices and ingredients while at HEB, I opted for a bag of Guittard real milk chocolate chips. Even though this brand is a little on the chichi side, it was cheaper than the Nestle and Hershey products, which I was leery of buying because.... Well, Gentle Reader, have you eaten a Hershey bar lately? It's chocolate-flavored wax. Badly flavored wax. Guittard's chips offered the most basic ingredients: milk chocolate (sugar, milk, cocoa butter, chocolate liquor), soya lecithin and real vanilla.

(To make up for my purchase of the chichi chips, I used Nestle mini morsels I had on hand for the semisweet chocolate required. Therefore you cannot, Gentle Reader, accuse me of becoming a foodie with my purchase of the chichi chips.)

In case you're wondering, Gentle Reader, how those chichi milk chocolate chips taste, they are delicious. If you've ever had Cadbury milk chocolate--not the stuff that enrobes the goo of a cream egg, but a straight-up milk chocolate bar--then you've tasted something very, very similar to the Guittard milk chocolate chips. It's a very different taste from the milk chocolate most of us know here in the States, where many chocolate makers have been quietly upping the amount of non-cocoa butter fats used, which helps yield that waxy flavor. Remember when Palmer was the brand for cheap-ass chocolate that was like eating candle wax? Well, now a lot of big chocolate manufacturers are churning out much the same stuff. Blorf!

Now as to why chocolate drives me batty....

I don't know how in the name of the FSM you're supposed to get a 9" by 12" rectangle out of this recipe. Here's what I got:

Yeah, that's nowhere near 9" by 12" in size.

I was perturbed that the recipe didn't say how thick the rectangle should be. Not that I might have achieved that thickness or thinness because this stuff was hard as hell to spread. Maybe I should have sprayed my silicon spatula with cooking spray to ease things along. I dunno. I just...I got the stuff out of the bowl, leaving behind a fair amount of chocolate for the husband to lick off, and in the process of trying to schmear the goo into a 9" by 12" rectangle without any holes or bald spots, I lost a fair amount of chocolate on the spatula. All that chocolate gone to waste....

Okay, it didn't go to waste entirely. The husband and I licked up as much as we could, but.... But that meant I didn't have more chocolate from which to cut bats. Disappointing.

I let the pan chill in the 'fridge for 90 minutes or so while I prepared supper and we all ate and then cleaned up. Before scrubbing up some supper dishes, I set the chocolate out to soften, as the recipe indicates, for cutting. Given that our thermostat was still set to 83 degrees, I figured I wouldn't have to wait the indicated 10 minutes for it to soften, so I started to press in the plastic Wilton bat cookie cutter, which I'd found to be problematic last year for making cookies, after the chocolate had set out about 4 or 5 minutes. Initially, I encountered some resistance pressing the cutter into the chocolate, so I waited another 7 minutes.

By that time, the chocolate had softened enough that it yielded a little more easily. However, the moment I started to pull the cutter out, the bat shape began to crumble. So I tried with the cat cookie cutter. It went in fairly easily, but it crumbled even worse when I took it out. Grrr...

The 5 or so minutes more I worked to get at least one good bat, the chocolate started to melt--and fast. Frustrated by the heat and the crappy cookie cutters, I gave up after my fourth bat attempt broke in half because the bottom of it had melted and stuck to the wax paper. Fuckaroo!

I wound up with two cutouts that could be recognized as bats:

And I wound up with a box full of chocolate chunks and pieces:

While the finessing of the recipe with the cookie cutters was a total pain in the ass, the finished food product is damn tasty. Think Nestle Crunch but with small bits of dried cranberry. It took a helluva lotta will power not to eat all the broken bits and chunks out of frustration because it was so delicious.

As I shared my woes with the husband, he offered two observations. First, he suggested the recipe might work better with metal cookie cutters. That's probably true because they'd probably have sharper, cleaner edges. Second, he hypothesized that this recipe might work best in a Midwestern kitchen, where it probably wouldn't be 80+ degrees, especially close to Halloween. Y'know, kitchens in homes in parts of the U.S. that actually experience autumn--and that sure as hell isn't Central Texas.