Hearts Full of Joy

The Worlds Best Chocolate Cake and Other Yummies

:The Worlds Best Chocolate Cake (really!):

Note: Usually I am all for making my recipes healthier. This recipe is my one big splurge, where I make an exception to that rule.

This recipe was originally "Hershey's Perfectly Perfect Chocolate Cake". It was modified by my friend Donna, whose mother was a prize winning cake baker. She says you should always add an extra egg, and use cream in place of milk. So we do. We made further modifications, making it dark chocolate and gluten free (but I include the regular recipe too).

Perfectly Perfect (Dark) Chocolate Cake

2 C sugar
1 3/4 C flour (we use gluten free flour, plus 3/4 tsp xanthan gum)
3/4 C cocoa (we use dark - it makes it so much yuumier!)
1 1/2 tsp baking poweder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 eggs (Donna says 3, so we use 3)
1 cup milk (Donna says cream, so we use cream)
1/2 C oil
2 tsp vanilla
1 C boiling water

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two round cake pans.
Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil, & vanilla. Beat for 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water. Pour into pans.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until middles spring back when touched. Cool for 10 minutes, then remove from pans to finish cooling.

Frosting

1/2 C butter
2/3 C cocoa (we use dark)
3 C powdered sugar
1/3 C milk (we use cream)
1 tsp vanilla

Melt butter. Stir in cocoa. Add milk. Then add sugar and beat until spreading consistency. Then add vanilla.

We couldn't find powdered sugar in Korea, so I tried making my own in the blender. It worked fairly well. Here's a recipe. The key is to do small batches of no more than 1 cup at a time.

 

And to make up for that less than healthy indulgence, here is a scrupmtious muffin recipe that is flourless, has no refined sugars other than in the chocolate chips (if you use a natural peanut butter), no dairy, no trans fat (if you use a natural peanut butter), and and batter tastes like a little bit of heaven. I just made them for the first time today, to share with our sister missionaries, and it was all I could to keep from eating the batter by the spoonful.

Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Mini Blender Muffins

I also tried making them in regular muffin cups, baked them for 15 minutes, and they also turned out great. I even reduced the honey by 1/3, and I thought they were plenty sweet. But after 12 years in Japan, I don't like my food super sweet.

 

And another fun recipe I tried this week, since we can't buy cottage cheese in Korea.

How to Make Cottage Cheese

It was surprisingly easy, and turned out nice and dry like it is in Japan. I love it that way! I found that I like it better with a little salt added to it.

 

And since I had fresh cottage cheese, and left over Easter eggs, I also tried this recipe:

Estonian Egg Salad (with butter and cottage cheese)

This was really yummy too. We ate it on baked potatoes, since we are gluten free, and the family loved it. It is really heavy on butter, which I didn't realize just from reading the recipe, because I'm not used to measuring in grams. So I cut the butter in half, and it was still delicious.

 

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Healthy & Delicious Hot Fuge

a quince-ident

2 Ingredient All Natural Pancakes!

I finally tried these pancakes, and they were a success! The family loved them.

All you need is one banana and two eggs per serving. Really.

You can add cinnamon and vanilla if you'd like. I did. But it's not necessary.

They are gluten free, dairy free, sugar free, high protein, low carb, low calorie and really yummy.

And so simple!

The recipe is here.

I mixed mine up in the blender, to smooth out all the banana lumps. I'm not sure if that was a good idea or not. It made the batter really smooth, but it also made it really airy and runny. They still tasted great, but it took me a while to figure out how to not pour too much batter into the pan, and when was just the right time to turn it so that the pancakes stayed in one piece when they were turned. Next time I may try it without the blender to compare.

Healthy & Delicious Hot Fuge

I am always searching for yummy healthy recipes. But I happened across this one because I was looking for a hot fudge sauce with ingredients we have on hand, or could easily get here in Korea. It was a long search on Pinterest, but I came up with this recipe. Our Bishop and his wife were coming to visit our home and I had planned to serve them hot fudge sundaes/banana splits, but then realized that I didn't have and couldn't get the ingredients for my favorite go-to hot fudge sauce, and I was out of time.

I was a little nervous about this recipe - melting the chocolate chips into water? Would that really work? It didn't seem like it would. But it did, and it was so yummy! It only requires four ingredients - chocolate chips, water, coconut oil (only 1/2 tsp) and milk (only 1 Tbs). I used sour cream in place of the milk. It is only a Tablespoon, and I thought a little creaminess sounded good. It was VERY good. And much richer and prettier looking than this photo from the blog I found it on.

Here is the recipe.

Every other recipe I looked at called for one or more of the following ingerdients  in large amounts - corn syrup (no please!), heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, powdered sugar, evaporated milk.