chocolate

Review: ChocoVine

Sips

ChocoVine

ChocoVine

On a recent wander through World Market I was headed for a freshly-opened check out line when I did a honest-to-Bacchus double take. Near the registers was a display of something that looked like chocolate milk in a wine bottle, selling for $11.99.

The cashier informed me that it was actually pretty good and I wavered. I figured, for twelve bucks I could give in to my curiosity.

From the label:

ChocoVine

The taste of dutch chocolate and find red wine

Product of Holland * 14% Alcohol/Volume

Imported by Clever Imports LLC
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312

Consume within six months of opening.
Shake well, store in a cool dark place.
Do not mix with acidic drinks!

It was a couple of days before we had a chance to open it’s screw-top lid. Poured into glasses it still looked like chocolate milk and, when swirled, resembled oily chocolate milk. I know that doesn’t sound very appetizing and, yet…

The taste is distinctive–rich, definitely chocolate, with a hint of something stronger underneath. Todd suggested Kahlua and I had to agree that it was reminiscent of a Mudslide but further sipping made me think of a melted Wendy’s Frosty. Only spiked.

We’ve sipped it on two occasions and still have a third of a bottle left–it’s pretty potent stuff. Unlike a bottle of red wine which you could sip on over the course of an evening, CocoVine is a dessert in and of itself and best in small doses.

Shortcake… or is it?

Nibbles

It was Mom’s birthday this weekend and she put in a double request for dessert: something with strawberry and chocolate and a chocolate pecan pie. So I suggested a chocolate angel food cake layered with cream and strawberries.

Like a shortcake, right?

Not really. This has been bugging me for a few weeks, now, after having seen an “expert” reply to this:

Q. Are strawberry shortcake and angel food cake the same

A. The cake is the same but the way you eat them are completely different.

Shortcakes versus Foam Cakes

Classic Strawberry Shortcake

Classic Strawberry Shortcake

A short cake is actually more like a biscuit or scone and takes it’s name from the “shortening” of the gluten from the solid fat (butter or vegetable shortening–no that name is not a coincidence) being cut in to the dry ingredients. Short cakes also use baking soda or powder for leavening.

Angle food cakes, on the other hand, are foam cakes, use absolutely no fat whatsoever and very little flour, for that matter. What gives them their lift and structure is the protein from the beaten egg whites that make up the majority of their volume.

Those little golden twinkie-textured things near the fruit in the produce section? Those are usually sponge cakes. Unlike foam cakes they often use outside leavening agents while still depending on the air beaten into the eggs (whether whole or separately and then combined).

So what is that shortcake-like dessert made with a split angel food cake, berries and cream?

A really yummy dessert. You could, I suppose, call it a torte after the process of splitting and filling the layers (commonly known as torting) though a traditional (German) torte is dense from the use of ground nuts instead of flour (though there are exceptions to every rule). But calling it a cake (even a strawberry cake) is really the safest bet out there.

Chocolate Angel Food Cake with Strawberries

Back to Mom’s birthday cake.

When in need of a fool-proof cake recipe, there’s one place I can turn: Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible. Of course she has a chocolate angel food cake recipe and, of course, the instructions are incredibly detailed. It’s really tough to mess up one of her recipes unless you take a short cut somewhere.

Incredible Egg Whites

Incredible Expanding Egg Whites

The one thing I didn’t have was cream of tartar but I opted to just go without–it adds stability and helps you to form stiff peaks of the egg white but with my stand mixer I wasn’t too worried about that. The 2 cups of egg whites (from 16 large eggs) quickly grew to fill the 4.5 quart bowl. It’s a good thing to have a separate, larger bowl to do the folding of the scant dry ingredients in with the very stiff egg whites.

We also ran into a slight problem with the cooling step–it seems my angel food pan was made differently than most and the opening of the center tube was not large enough to fit over the neck of the wine bottle, as suggested, or anything else that we could find. Until, that is, Todd spied the lighthouse decoration in our bathroom–between the dowel-rod point on top and the upper cabinets to keep it from wobbling we managed to keep the finished cake from deflating too very much while it cooled the required 1 1/2 hours. Pans with the little arms on top can also serve this same purpose, sans lighthouse.

I had planned to use whipped cream in the layers, along with macerated (sliced and sugared) strawberries and fudge sauce but the 16 egg yolks were just screaming to be made into a batch of Deluxe Pastry Cream (all yolks instead of half yolks, half whole eggs). Granted, it yielded over 2 quarts of pastry cream and it took a little more time than the whipped cream would have, but the finished dessert was that much creamier for the extra effort.

Speaking of which….

The Interior Layers

The Interior Layers

I split the angel food cake into three layers and topped the bottom and middle layers with pastry cream, strawberries and drizzles of chocolate. The top layer, once in place, got pastry cream and chocolate drizzle and the 6 whole strawberries I’d saved out of the quart before slicing the rest. The finished cake tipped a little in towards the center but benefited from a 2 hour rest during which the pastry cream seeped into the cake and turned the airy layers into creamy ones.

And Mom loved it, which would have made it right even if it’d been technically wrong.

Chocolate Angel Food with Strawberries

the Finished Chocolate Angel Food Cake with Strawberries

50 Shots of America–Ohio

Sips

Ohio is the 17th state admitted to the Union but it wasn’t quite so simple as it sounds. It wasn’t until 1953 that they were official declared the 17th state retroactively.

As part of the Northwest Territory, an area became eligible for statehood once it reached a population of 60,000. In 1953 the realized there had been no formal Congressional resolution to admit the state into the Union even though President Jefferson signed the act that set Ohio’s borders in February of 1803. 153 years later it would be Eisenhower who declared the date of statehood as March 1, 1803.

That’s some serious bureaucratic back-log!

Despite having a state beverage of tomato juice (at least it’s not milk!) I couldn’t ignore the more obvious theme for this state. Ohioans are considered Buckeyes and most of us have encountered–on holiday cookie swap or another–the confection of the same name. Little balls of sweetened peanut butter dipped in chocolate but leaving a bit of the filling exposed to mimic the seeds they get their name from.

Now, to my knowledge there’s not a peanut liqueur (not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily) but we do have some other nut liqueurs to work with. And since there are two drinks already with the name Buckeye (one a gin-dry vermouth martini, the other a variation on the Irish Car Bomb) I’ve decided to call this week’s drink

the Buck-Shot

3/4 oz hazelnut liqueur
3/4 oz chocolate liqueur
1/2 oz vanilla vodka
1/4 oz butterscotch schnapps

Combine over ice in a petite shaker and shake it colder than lake-effect snow. Strain into a chilled cordial glass.

While I dearly love amaretto, it tends to overpower even in small amounts in these small drinks. Frangelico turned out to be perfect for the taste and, with the addition of the Butterschnapps you can almost fool yourself that it’s a peanut butter ball and not something more akin to Nutella.

50 Shots of America–Louisiana

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Yes, I know, I’m skipping over 4 states in the whole date-of-statehood-order but I have a really good reason:

First, today is my birthday and if you can’t bend (your own) rules on your birthday, what’s the point?

Second, it’s also Louisiana‘s anniversary of statehood. So happy birthday to both of us!

And, in case you missed the memo, I spent the first 6 years of my life in and around Ponchatoula, LA, before I was rudely dragged to Florida to live out what seems to be the rest of my days. Seriously, all I remember about that trip was laying down in the back seat, as furious as a 6-year-old can be, absolutely insulted that we were moving so far away from all of our family.

Louisiana and me? We go way back. So that’s why I’m bending the rules. I promise I will go back and give the 4 states we just leap-frogged their Friday in the sun and delicious cocktails.

My grandfather on my father’s side was an honest-to-goodness hobo during the war. Long after that he built my grandmother her dream home and it’s the home I remember most from my childhood since we lived there, too, for a while. I’m still a little irked that my uncle sold it out of the family more than a decade ago. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a farmer and grew prize-winning strawberries and assorted veggies. It’s his strawberries I remember best, which he made into strawberry freezer jam and made his own strawberry wine, and the annual Strawberry Festival held every April (and still going strong) in our little town.

And, oh, the daiquiris! Obviously I do not remember these so much from my childhood, at least not directly! Not the classic lime daiquiris,but thick, frosty frozen daiquiris absolutely chock-a-block with strawberries. Oh, so good.

Chocolate Covered Daiquiri

1 medium strawberry, hulled and quartered
1 tsp superfine sugar
3/4 oz light rum
1/2 oz strawberry schnapps
1/2 oz chocolate liqueur

Muddle the strawberry, sugar and rum in a sturdy mixing glass until the berries are thoroughly mashed. Add the schnapps and liqueur and top with plenty of ice. Shake it like a last booze run before the storm comes in and strain it into a chilled cordial glass.

This is not too sweet, not too chocolatey, it’s just enough. And if you have trouble tracking down superfine sugar just buzz some regular granulated sugar in a food processor or spice grinder for a bit.

50 Shots of America–Pennsylvania

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You’d think (or at least I would) that Pennsylvania would have been the first to ratify the Constitution, seeing as how much time our forefathers spent doing big things in Philadelphia and all during those early colony days. Instead, they signed on a full 5 days after Delaware, on December 12, 1787,* becoming the second official state of the Union.

The site of the first commercially drilled oil well in 1859, oil is not what most think of as being the prime business in the woods (Pennsylvania means Penn’s Wood after the founder, William Penn, and the Latin silva for forest). Some consider Pennsylvania to be the “snack food capital of the world” and with good reason. Not only are the Hershey chocolate factories located in the heart of the state, so are Mars, Wilbur Chocolate Company, Wise Snack Foods and Just Born (the company behind, among other things, Peeps!).

Even though I’ve actually been to Pennsylvania (well, Philadelphia, and only for one partial day–I did some comics about it) and, therefore, actually _can_ find it on the map, I did not get a chance while there to visit that mecca of many: Hershey, PA. No, no pictures with a kiss-shaped street light for me. Not yet at least. I’ve got two sets of people I can stay with should I get a chance to head that far north again and it WILL be on the agenda when that day comes. I did recently read an excellent history of Mr Hershey and his town, though, which makes getting to concoct this next drink extra fun!

(Interesting side note: did you know Hershey found early success not with chocolate but with caramels? It was the success of his caramel business, the recipe for which he learned in Denver, that gave him the opportunity and backing to experiment with making eating chocolate like they did in Europe. I was also fascinated to learn that Hershey’s distinct flavor can be attributed to the slight souring of the milk as it’s processed–apparently the European chocolatiers used milk powder instead of liquid milk in their recipes. But I digress…)

The Sweet Tooth

1/2 oz Vanilla Vodka
1/2 oz Godiva** liqueur, divided
1/4 oz Amaretto liqueur
1/4 oz White Chocolate Irish Cream
1/4 oz Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup

Combine all ingredients except 1/4 oz Godiva in a cocktail shaker over ice and shake it like you’re making a milkshake. Strain into a shot glass and float the remaining Godiva over the top by pouring over the back of a bar spoon.

Now, I’ve read that all-alcohol bevvies aren’t supposed to be shaken. Whatever. If you keep all of your alcohol chilled (I know I don’t have the fridge-space for that!), I suppose you could skip the shaking and just stir it up in a small bar glass before transferring to a shot but I wanted it really cold and, with this many ingredients (probably another no-no for a shot), well mixed so my petite shaker it is!

Incidentally, the state beverage of Pennsylvania is Milk, so if you wanted to mix up a double batch of the Sweet Tooth and stir it into a nice cold glass of milk, I think that’d be just fine, too.

*You know, if the blog-stars align to where I’m writing about a state on the day it became a state, I might just have to play the lottery or something!

**Don’t worry, Godiva’s totally valid here--the North American debut of Godiva chocolates was at Wannamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia in 1966!

PS–The state tree is Hemlock. Insert classics geek joke here. (Q.What were Socrates’ last words? A. I drank what?)

PPS–From Todd at dinner: “Life is like a shot of chocolate.” To which I, being of a philosophical bent today, added: “Exactly, if you make it yourself you know exactly what you’re gonna get!”