Nutella-filled chocolate cake with melted marshmallow frosting

Hello guys!


How was your Mother's day? I was never the affectionate daughter (or person for that matter). But last Sunday was supposed to be a "special day". Soooo, my sister and I ended up doing our own chocolate cake for our Mom! ;)

Ina Garten's chocolate cake is now definitely my go-to recipe when baking a chocolate cake! My sister was not ssatisfied with the sweetness level though of my first cake, so we added more cocoa powder into the batter. The recipe calls for only 3/4 cocoa powder, we ended up putting 1 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. TRUE ENOUGH, the fudge was deliciously chocolate-y!!!

We did the double layer this time, and while debating what to put inside as the filling, we ended up deciding on a melted marshmallow frosting  on top and sides.

After several browsing through the net, I decided on this recipe -- it's simple and very much easy to understand. The only problem we encountered was when to know and decide that the egg whites have been beated until "thick".

Also, note to self: this frosting is VERY hard to accomplish without a hand nor a stand mixer. As I previously mentioned in my other posts, I have yet to own a mixer, THIS MARSHMALLOW RECIPE banged my head to the door and urged me to buy one asap! Egg beating is hard, I must say.

Our frosting was a mess.

Our frosting did not turn out quite as expected. :( Somebody help me!

I believe we were not able to "mix until thick" the egg whites before adding the syrup and everything else, but our arms could just do so much. Still yummy though! Oh, and we used brown sugar instead of the white sugar (due to health reasons of our parents), but I am not quite sure if this change merited a change also in the composition.


We topped it with chocolate chip cookies....

And voila! A Nutella-filled chocolate cake with melted marshmallow frosting! :)

 Well, again.... EVERYTHING is BETTER with NUTELLA.

Til next time!

N

The Nutella milkshake experiment

Happy Easter everyone!

My newly trimmed three-year-old Shih tzu (who is always mistaken for a 4 month old puppy) says Hi!!! His name is Little one (obviously because of his size), and to whom I'll dedicate a whole blog post soon.

The dog I perpetually bully because of his forever-sticking-out-tongue

I'm guessing that everyone else is busy enjoying their last few minutes strolling in the beach before school/work starts again. All the while, I'm stuck at home lounging around, catching up with some TV series, feeling the scorching summer heat of the sun.

After hearing mass and idly observing how the little kids endure the heat to find those Easter eggs around the event's place, I toggled along with my mom to the grocery store to stock up ingredients for more baking adventures. I bought sugars, flour, cocoa powder, and more chocolates (especially the Easy Melt Chocolate buttons, because my sister ate them all up). We also ended up buying a gallon of ice cream just because it is too hot. Trust me, the weather here is no good at all. The temperature was close to 40 degrees Celsius! Well, it may be appreciated by those tired of the cold, winter days. But me, personally, this heat is just too much. Snow come here!!!

Anyway, when I got home, I ate some Vanilla ice cream and topped it with Hershey's syrup. Yum.
But I want more. I saw this Nutella jars at home (we really do have a lot, actually) and acted on making up my own milkshake - a Nutella milkshake.

What is a milkshake? How does it differ from a smoothie?
 According to the Free Dictionary online:

milkshake (mĭlk´ shāk`)

n.

1.

A frothy drink of milk and flavoring and sometimes fruit or ice cream, shaken together or blended in a blender.

 A smoothie, on the other hand, is a blended, icy drink. It does not require any ice cream! :)

My own version of a Nutella milkshake

 Here's basically what I did to achieve this Nutella milkshake. I just really tossed everything I wanted into the mean machine then, voila! perfect milkshake for me! I did not realize milkshake was such a joy to do! :)

I added bananas the second time around and it tasted wonderful! I shared this to my boyfriend, and he did a version of it with his own "healthy" alternative. He used his protein shake powder instead of milk. It made it more chocolate-y, yes? But hey, it's more fun than drinking that protein shake straight up almost everyday, right?


You can also add whipped cream and top it with chocolate syrup! :)
  Ahh, the sweet smell of icy satisfaction.
Good book + yummy drink + cute little pet = Happy Easter!

Perfect summer cooler!

 
Furry dog blog posts soon! :)