Profiteroles (choux à la crème)

Light-as-air choux pastry filled crème patisserie with hints of vanilla dipped in melted dark chocolate... What can I say? Absolutely drool-worthy.

Okay, so the first and second attempts I made at choux pastry puffs were rather... dismal. The first time... it deflated slightly and wasn't very airy and the second time? Well, it deflated completely and stuck to the baking paper underneath and was as flat as...an ironing board. Oh, and it was quite soggy too. So, this time what did I do differently? My wise words of the day, "Forget any recipe on the internet and let's WING it" And it went PERFECTLY.

Double Chocolate Raspberry Muffins

This is not one of those muffins which are super light and airy. PLEASE DO NOT BE MISTAKEN. These muffins are more like brownie-muffins... In fact, these are almost based on my brownie recipe. But with cocoa powder instead of chocolate because there was no chocolate on hand. There is also quite a bit of butter... Not to mention, it's a one bowl recipe!

If you have a look at the ingredients, you'll see that there is a generous amount of sugar. It's not actually that much, because you need to keep in mind that we're using cocoa powder. Another thing to note, is that I'm using regular cocoa (since I can't seem to find any Dutch-processed cocoa around here...NOOOO!) and this will affect the rising of the muffin. You would need to add baking soda. How much? Unfortunately, I don't know since I've never worked with Dutch-processed. In fact, the final result actually (sort of) looks like it uses dutch-process.