Laylah (laylah) wrote in and_cupcakes, @ 2008-05-24 10:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | character: tifa, course: desserts, fandom: final fantasy vii |
Tifa's homemade chocolate cures for what ails you
It's amazing, the number of things you can get processed and ready-made and instant in Midgar. How much fancy stuff you can make just by adding (filtered, or better yet bottled) water to something out of a box.
Tifa's never liked any of it. Sure, you might be able to make caramel-swirled glazed brownies and frothy pudding with flavor names that are hard to pronounce just like that, but it feels...cheap, somehow. Her versions, the recipes she brought with her from Nibelheim, are plainer and less fancy, and they do take more work, but she swears up and down they taste better, too.
cake brownies
3/4 cup butter
1-1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1-1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup milk
a cup or so of chopped nuts
Grease and flour a big flat baking pan -- 15"x10" or so is best, but you can make it with something as small as 9"x12" if that's all you've got. Pre-heat your oven to 350.
Melt the butter (you can do that on the stove or in the microwave, whatever you like) and stir in the sugar and the cocoa powder. Next add the eggs and the vanilla.
Measure out the flour and baking powder into one measuring cup, and the milk into the other. Take turns adding those, a little bit at a time, to the bowl with the chocolate. Once it's all nicely combined, stir in the nuts.
Pour the batter into your pan, and slide it into the oven. Bake until a toothpick will come out clean from the middle -- that can take as little as 15 or 16 minutes if you have a really big pan, so the batter's spread out flat, or as long as half an hour or so if your pan's smaller. Keep an eye on it, and start checking when the top looks done.
Set them aside on a rack to cool as long as you can stand it -- you're supposed to wait two hours, but sometimes the temptation to try one sooner than that is a little much. When they're cool enough, cut them into squares and serve with milk.
chocolate pudding
Put a medium sauce pan on the stove. Fill it with 6 tablespoons of sugar, 3 tablespoons of cornstarch, 4-5 tablespoons of cocoa powder, and three cups of milk. Turn the heat on to medium and stir that together with a wooden spoon -- you'll want to keep stirring, slowly but constantly, the whole time it cooks. (Sometimes Marlene helps with this part.) In ten minutes or so, the mixture should be thickening. Let it cook until it boils, so there are bubbles breaking on the surface, and the mixture doesn't close instantly behind your spoon anymore.
Take the pot off the heat and stir in a teaspoon of vanilla extract before you pour the mixture into bowls. You can probably use as few as two or as many as five bowls, depending on how big you want the servings to be. Shallow bowls work better than deep ones, in any case, because the next thing you do is put them someplace cold to chill until they solidify, and they'll chill faster if the bowls are shallow.
If you can get fresh fruit -- always a gamble, in Midgar -- then some berries would go nicely with it, but it'll also do just fine on its own.