Sep
2013
Dairy Free Chocolate Chip Cookie and Fudge Petit Fours
A petit four (plural: petits fours) is a small confectionery or savoury appetizer. The name is French, petit four (French pronunciation: ​[pÉ™.ti.fur]), meaning “small oven”.
A week ago on Friday I met the lovely Jenny Paulin from Mummymishaps at Yeo Valley, and whilst we were eating their delicious home made cakes *mouth waters at the memory* we quickly got chatting about The Great British Bake Off…a programme a lot of us religiously watch every week, hoping that we may ourselves be able to recreate some of the amazing things they bake. Now, I’ve not been able to do any baking recently after my oven trouble but when Jenny told me about her linky #thegreatbloggersbakeoff I was desperate to join in and try something new. So try something new I have…and I could either be embarrassing myself totally by revealing my lack of cooking ability in this post….or you could discover a new recipe you’d like to try yourself! (Fingers crossed!)
So, with no oven (new one hopefully being bought this morning!) I plumped for making petit fours this week! Making petit fours that did not require any cooking. I thought about cheesecakes, but didn’t know how I’d make them so small as none of my kitchen utensils matched the ideas I had. Then, whilst I was brainstorming in the kitchen my middle son walked in asking for some chocolate (a regular occurrence) and I had a light bulb moment! Recently my son has been advised to avoid all dairy due to a nasty phlegm producing cough that just won’t go away. (sorry to mention the word phlegm in a cooking post, it won’t happen again!) Luckily in the supermarkets these days there are so many dairy free options that he still can have chocolate and baked treats, but I hadn’t yet done any real dairy free baking for him. As a child I loved chocolate refrigerator cake (who doesn’t?!) and so my offering for today’s Great Bloggers Bake Off is just that…
Dairy-Free Chocolate Chip Cookie and Fudge Refrigerator Petit Fours.
125g dairy free chocolate chip cookies (I got mine from Sainsbury’s)
150g plain dairy free chocolate
50g Pure dairy free spread
75g golden syrup
100g dairy free chocolate chips (Silver Spoon)
75g raisins
50g dairy free fudge, chopped into small pieces (from Asda)
Hundreds and Thousands (yes old school I know, but I had nothing else to decorate with!)
Method
Put the chocolate chip cookies into a bag (top tip: use a strong bag to do this and not one that will burst like I did!) and hit them with a rolling pin until they are in lovely little chunks. Quite therapeutic I found! Then place the Pure spread, golden syrup and chocolate into a heatproof glass bowl and melt slowly over a saucepan of simmering water. Try and avoid having a taste at this point if you can, otherwise there may be none of this mixture left for the cakes!
Remove from the heat and add the fudge, biscuits, raisins and chocolate chips and mix them all together thoroughly. Now, don’t be too concerned at this point if the contents of your bowl represent something you’d find in your child’s nappy. It really does taste better than it looks I can assure you!
Next, grease your container (I used an old silicone one I had for weaning) with the Pure spread and fill with the chocolate mixture, pressing it down into the container firmly. (again, if it still looks unsavoury don’t worry, this is where the hundreds and thousands come in!)
Lastly sprinkle with hundreds and thousands, or glitter sugar, or dairy free buttons, or spray with gold food spray…be creative, I would’ve been I just didn’t have any of those things in the house! Then place in the fridge for one and a half to two hours and sit down and have a cuppa. When they are set remove them from the fridge and press out onto a chopping board.
Cut into petit fours size bites. (if I was actually on the programme I’d have measured each one to make sure they were of equal size obviously, however this time I went for the rustic look!) Then I chose to put mine in cases, but how you display them is up to you.
I did put a couple of sticks on two to make lollipops for the children which went down very well!
And then finally….eat them! They seemed to have gone down very well here and the boy loves his dairy free bite sized treats! Next time I may experiment with orange and chocolate flavoured bites as you can get dairy free orange flavoured chocolate; or add some dried apricots and cranberries. The possibilities are endless!
Right, I’m now off to do some oven shopping…for if I am to join in with pies next week I am going to need one!
Thank you, as always for reading and if you’d like to join in the link then make sure you visit Jenny Paulin at Mummymishaps! 😉