If you love baked goods, I’m sure you’ve already been introduced to the blanket of velvety goodness that is chocolate ganache. Ganache has been used to cover nearly every sort of baked creation you can think of, because it has a luxurious sensuality that leaves people a little out of breath. It’s bedecked the crowns of cupcakes, eclairs, and even taken the lowly donut to new heights.

Ganache doesn’t harden like traditional frostings. It stay soft and supple, even after a stint in the fridge (which will indeed cause it to firm up, but not become brittle). When warm it pours easily, also unlike frosting, and can be used to create an organic-looking flow of icing that you can’t accomplish with anything else.

The thing that most baking civilians don’t realize is that – shhhhhhh! – ganache is probably one of the easiest frostings you can make, nearly as simple as the whipped cream recipe I posted a few days ago. I’ve screwed up my fair share of cooked icings, and let me tell you – even I can’t mess up ganache.

I’m posting this now because I’m going to talk about a cake next week that calls for ganache, and I want to dedicate a whole post to perfecting this lovely little recipe. It’s painfully simple to make, but as with anything else, there are a few caveats when it comes to actually using it.

For now, here’s the basic recipe. Scroll down for details on how to use the stuff.

Super Easy Chocolate Ganache Recipe

Makes about 2 cups of ganache.

• 12 ounces semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, chopped finely (or use chips)
• 1/2 pint of heavy whipping cream
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 tablespoon of flavoring, such as espresso or bourbon (optional)

1. Pour chopped chocolate (or chocolate chips) into a metal mixing bowl.
2. Stirring constantly, heat whipping cream, butter and vanilla in a small saucepan to just about boiling, but don’t let it actually come to a boil. You should see bubbles forming around the edges of the pot. If you’re using a thermometer, heat it to about 180 degrees.
3. Immediately pour hot cream mixture over chocolate and use a small whisk to mix until completely smooth.
4. Add flavorings, if you’re using them.

That’s it! I told you it was easy, didn’t I? You don’t even have to directly heat the chocolate, so there’s no chance of scorching or seizing it. In fact, if you’re ever made truffles, you’ve made ganache. And if you’ve never made truffles, see how easy it is?

To create a crumb coat, which will prevent random crumbs from ruining the smooth coating on your cake:

1. Place cake on a wire rack, which is placed over a piece of parchment to catch any falling ganache.
2. Brush away any loose crumbs.
3. With a cake spatula, spread a few tablespoons of ganache over the top and sides of cake, then refrigerate for a few minutes to set the coating.

To finish frosting your cake, pour the rest of the ganache in the center of your cake and quickly spread with a spatula. Use sweeping strokes to push the ganache over the sides and create an even layer over the whole thing. Cover any bare spots with extra ganache.

Refrigerate any leftover ganache for future use, but use it quickly as it will capture bizarre flavors in your refrigerator!

Here are a few tips (as well as a tutorial and interesting history) by Joy of Baking:

• To make a glaze or coating: use one part cream to three parts chocolate.
• To make a truffle filling: use one part cream to two parts chocolate.
• To make a light filling: use one part cream to one part chocolate.
• Refrigerated ganache can be whipped for fillings and frostings or formed into truffles.
• When warm, ganache can be poured over whatever you like to make a smooth, shiny glaze.
• When chilled it can be spread like regular frosting.
• If covering a cake with ganache that is to be refrigerated, make sure the cake is cold before frosting. This will ensure that the ganache does not dull when stored in the refrigerator.

Today’s post is compliments of Paula Jones, a food writer who blogs at bell’alimento. I love her site for many reasons – she’s fun, lively, and the food is amazing! Plus her photography is gorgeous and she’s constantly making me hungry.

I’ve asked her to write a guest post here at Wasabimon because I know you’ll love her as much as I do. So without further ado…

Hi! My name is Paula and I am the recipe developer & food writer for bell’alimento. Bell’alimento (Italian for “beautiful food”) is a fresh food blog specializing in Italian cuisine (but we do on occasion, venture outside of our box every now and then). Our philosophy is that beautiful food doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple can be good, even extraordinary!

When Stephanie asked me if I would like to do a guest post on Wasabimon I was honored. I love the snappiness of her site & her recipes and stories always keep me coming back for more. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to write about, and settled on espresso! I’ve been quite a night owl lately and have been relying more and more on my morning espresso to get me going. I thought I’d share how you can enjoy the perfect cup of espresso each morning in your own kitchen. Yes, gasp! It’s truly possible to have an amazing cup of espresso without going to Starbucks or the like.

So you might ask, is this going to cost me an arm and a leg to purchase a fancy schmanchy high tech machine that I’ll have to hire a barista to use? Well you CAN purchase one of those machines, but the good news is you don’t have to. All you’ll need is a Moka Pot (here’s a link), some water and coffee (preferably Italian, well what did you expect me to say? LOL).

Above is my Moka Pot that I brought back from when I lived in Italy many many many years ago. She’s not as shiny as she used to be, but she still works like a champ!

To give you a little history: The Moka Pot was created in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti. His stove top espresso maker revolutionized the preparation of espresso coffee, and is still the most popular way of making espresso at home. Especially in Europe. For those interested in the technical part: the coffee is prepared by creating steam pressure in the bottom chamber that forces hot water up through ground coffee and into the serving chamber. The steam pressure produces a smooth and creamy coffee with a distinctive frothy cap. Me, I just like to know that it makes an ah-mazing cup of coffee that even a novice can prepare!

Okay, if you’ve never used a Moka pot I’m sure you’re thinking, this can’t be as easy as that? Well it is and I’ll show you:

How to Make Espresso in a Moka Pot

Step 1: Unscrew the bottom chamber from your pot and remove the filter. Fill bottom chamber with cold water (to just below the steam release valve). Okay, so far not too complicated, right?

Step 2: Replace filter back into bottom chamber and fill it with espresso GROUND coffee. Level it off (no need to pack it in) and screw the top chamber onto the bottom chamber.

Step 3: Place the pot on the stovetop with low to medium heat. When the pot makes a sweet gurgling sound (this could take 10-15 minutes – but hey, give it a chance, it’s so worth it) the brewing is complete.

Okay, I really don’t recommend that you lift the top while it’s working it’s magic, but I wanted to show you. Ah, look at that espresso. I want you to know that I risked life, limb and lens for this photo. Okay, maybe not life LOL.

Now for the hard part. Okay not really, but do carefully remove the pot from the stove. It will be HOT so have a kitchen towel or oven mitt handy. Pour into your cute little espresso cups and serve! Espresso is usually served in 1-1/2 – 2 oz servings.

I hope you’ll agree that this is one ah-mazing cup of espresso! Here’s a cup for you until you can run out and pick up a Moka Pot of your own!

Thanks again to Stephanie for letting me stop by! It was such a pleasure!

I love saffron, and this saffron rice recipe almost brings me to tears every time I make it. Something about the sweet coconut milk paired with saffron’s bitter earthiness just makes me tingle. It’s waaaay better than that yellow packet we used to get at the grocery store, that’s for sure.

Since saffron is expensive, many folks don’t bother to cook with it. But in small amounts, it’s actually pretty affordable and a little goes a very long way. Amazon has a decent deal on saffron, and they’ll ship it right do you door for free. How can you beat that?

This saffron rice recipe cooks up pretty quickly, making it a great dish if you’re in a hurry – as long as you keep a few cans of coconut milk in the pantry for just such an occasion (and you do, too, right? Don’t we all?). I’ve been known to eat an entire pot of this stuff to my head, foregoing all of the other goodness on my plate. Plus it’s one of those rare dishes that gluten free AND vegan by default, so almost anyone can eat it.

Check out these posts from other food bloggers:

• Sweet Saffron Rice from eCurry
• Jaden’s Saffron Rice
• Kirsten’s Lamb Kabobs with Saffron Rice

I love whipped cream. I could (and often do) eat it by the spoonful, though these days I’m trying to find new and exciting ways to use it. You’d be surprised what you can do with a bowl of homemade whipped cream – and I’m sure you’ll see several recipes over the next few weeks that involve this sweet, dreamy fluff.

For now, I’ve just going to give you the recipe I’ve been using lately. After months of noodling, I’ve found – once again – that less is more. Why add a ton of crap to something that’s beauty rests solely in its simplicity? Does that sentence make any sense?

I put this stuff in everything these days. Napoleons, parfaits, hot chocolate, crepes – you name it. The agave has a nice, clean sweetness about it while the vanilla rounds out the flavor with a little musk. You can get agave nectar for super cheap on Amazon, where it works out to something like $2.75 a bottle – much cheaper than the $5 Whole Paycheck charges. (This deal is even better, but they sell out quickly)

This particular whipped cream recipe is good for creating your own fun, quick and easy summer dessert ideas, since it’s light and won’t bog you down with a ton of sticky sweetness.

Dammit, I’m making myself hungry… did I mention I’m trying to avoid sugar?

My birthday was last week, and as a gift my husband helped me to redesign Wasabimon. There are still a few more minor changes coming down the pike, but for the most part the big stuff is done.

I have a favor to ask you, dear Internet. Would you mind acting as my de facto QA folk? Please click around the site and let me know if you see anything missing or out of place. If there’s anything you find annoying or weird, please comment here. Also, leave a comment and tell me your thoughts on the design overall!

I really appreciate your help, and I promise to reward you for your awesomeness with some great giveaways in the very near future.

The other day I mentioned making vanilla sugar, and the person I was talking to looked at me like I’d grown a third head.

“Really?” They asked. “Isn’t that difficult to do?”

I laughed, and then realized they were, in fact, serious. New flash, folks: flavored sugars are probably the easiest thing in the world to make. The process involves putting something dry in your sugar container, and leaving it there for a while. That’s it. No, really.

Flavored sugars are all around fun things: add them to a cake for a hint of something special, or stir a spoonful into your coffee. They can be sprinkled on or into anything, and make great gifts when presented in decorative jars.

A few tips: you want to keep your sugar in a sealed container in a cool, dark place, lest your aromatics do funny things like grow green fuzz. That’s definitely not good eats, so let’s avoid growing a science experiment, ok?

Also, the longer you leave aromatic ingredients in your sugar, the stronger the taste will become. It’s kind of a no brainer, but it never hurts to mention it.

Enjoy!

A few posts from other blogs you might be interested in:

• Baking Bites: How about some lemon sugar?
• Delish Food: Another post on vanilla sugar
• The Knead for Bread: Vanilla sugar sweet buns. Um, YUM.

I have a lot of cookbooks – and I mean a lot of cookbooks – but only occasionally do I come across one that truly wins my heart. That’s an especially difficult thing to accomplish lately, as I’ve been bogged down with day-to-day stuff and terribly uninspired in the kitchen. What can I say? It happens.

Then, Monica Bhide released her newest cookbook, Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen. I have a thing for Indian cooking, so perhaps this book was meant to fall into my hands. Between the comforting recipes and Monica’s gentle, flowing prose, Modern Spice is helping to lift the fog that’s settled over my kitchen. The severity of my little gastro-depression has begun to evaporate. I’m cooking again! And enjoying it!

Recently Monica asked a handful of people to make a recipe from her book and blog about it. I selected her rice pudding recipe, a dish that was not only fun to make, but resulted in such a beautiful dessert that part of me didn’t want to eat it (ok, a very small part!). I recommend serving it in wine glasses, layered with mango and homemade whipped cream. Your guests will be impressed with your culinary prowess and have no idea that it’s actually a breeze to prepare.

I have to preface this recipe by saying that I adore cardamom. I have a love affair with spices in general, but cardamom gets me every time. It’s such a lovely, warm spice… even a whisper of the scent makes me curl my toes.

Today’s my birthday! I’m not saying how old I am, but I did want to say that over the past few weeks I’ve been slowly collecting birthday gifts that will up the ante of my food photography on Wasabimon. I’ve actually got years of photo training (in the traditional film world, that is), but you would never know it due to the fact that I’ve been using a crappy point-and-shoot digi. Ew!

So, over the next few weeks I’ll be experimenting with photo techniques, and I’d love your feedback. If you see a photo you like, please comment and say what you like about it! Same goes for images that don’t quite work – I’m working the bugs out of this newfangled digital thing, and would definitely appreciate your feedback.

ETA: And I’d like to wish a very happy birthday to fellow gemini food blogger Karina Allrich, with whom I share this great summer birthday.

I’ve been trying to avoid sugar lately (trying being the operative word here), which means I haven’t been baking very much. Let me tell you what a bitter irony it is to discover that your most beloved hobby is hazardous to your health. While I’ve been mostly good about gorging myself on the white stuff – and if you think about it, sugar really is similar to any other white powder out there – I occasionally just need to BAKE SOMETHING.

I mean, come on – you know what I mean, right? Don’t you ever have the undying urge to just bake? To watch the satisfying flow of batter into a pan? To cover something with velvety layers of brightly colored icing? To see the look of gratitude and ecstasy on your loved ones’ faces? These, my friends, are all reasons why I love baking. That and I have this friggin $400 KitchenAid mixer that I bought literally a week before I discovered I couldn’t have gluten. >_<

But, I digress. I recently had the urge to create something beautiful, and while I can fix a steak that will make you cry, I wanted curved and colors that only baking could provide. As luck would have it, I had also just interviewed Chef Richard Coppedge of the CIA, who wrote the most amazing gluten free baking book I’ve ever read. Seriously folks, if you’re sans-gluten and have a hankering for gorgeous pastries, you must have this book. It inspired me out of my rut, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Below you’ll find Chef Coppedge’s recipes for gluten free vanilla sponge cake, which converts easily into a cupcake batter. Now, keep in mind that Chef Coppedge is a classically trained pastry chef, and his recipe isn’t just mix and go. Listen to the man, follow his directions and your cakes will turn out lovely. When he says sift, sift. When he says stream while folding, for the love of god, do it. Don’t just throw a bunch of junk in a bowl and call it done. It’s not hard to get good results with gluten free baking, but you do have to read the directions.

Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who entered the Shun Kitchen Knives are Bad Ass Contest! The lucky winner of the Shun Ken Onion 8″ Chef’s Knife (compliments of Sur la Table) is a lucky person named Doryan.

Wasabimon will be hosting a few more free drawings this summer, including some GREAT books and other fun things. Stay tuned, and congratulations Doryan!