Chocolate Overload!

Hi Everyone!

I absolutely adore chocolate and consider it possibly one of the tastiest things made by man. But eating the same sort of chocolate gets... dull after some time. So for all those chocolate lovers out there, here's a fun chocolate desert recipe which you can make easily at home!

This recipe was conjured up by my 12-year-old brother, Namit, and I in hopes of making a proper gourmet-style desert and so far, it seems to have succeded.

For this instructable I'm assuming that you have either a full oven or at least a microwave which supports convection mode. These recipes will NOT work in a normal microwave oven, so please do not try. Also, we're going to get really messy with the work, so make sure that you keep a clean table!

The dish is made up of 3 major ingredients: Ice cream, brownies and a cookie.

While all of these ingredients are really tasty in themselves, they work together to make something even better. The chilly ice cream complements the melted chocolate of the brownie and the cookie wraps it all together with something nice and crunchy.

Make sure to keep these things in mind:

1) You can change the volume of sugar in the dish if you want to, but I think the amount that I have provided pretty much strikes a balance between too much and too less.

2) Your results can vary on the type and size of the oven that you're using, so I've tried to provide a range of time and temperatures with which you can get these results.

3) If there's one thing to take away, please don't try to increase the amount of any of the ingredients. It's okay if you want to decrease some things, but increasing any of them can create problems.

4) I will be using the imperial system. In case you want to use the metric system, this is a good guide: https://omnivorescookbook.com/convert-grams-to-cup...

5) I've made sure that there are no fancy ingredients I'm using, so all this will be available near you (hopefully!).

Okay, first things first: these are the appliances you will need:

1) Lots of cups and bowls. Or you need to be really fast at cleaning them.

2) Oven utensils. All pots and pans cannot be used in an oven. You need to make sure that they are specifically maded for use in the oven.

3) A Mechanical Hand Blender is optional, but highly recommended. It's going to make your life much easier. If you don't have one, you can use a normal whisk.

Now for the ingredients (Exact measurements will be provided later):

For the cookies:

1) All purpose flour

2) Powdered Sugar

3) Unsalted Butter

4) Baking Powder

5) Salt

6) Vanilla Essence

7) Choco Chips!

For the brownies:

1) Dark Chocolate (be sure to stack up on this, it gets over fairly quickly)

2) Butter

3) All Purpose flour

4) Cocoa Powder

5) Baking powder

6) Sugar

7) Milk

8) Vanilla Extract

9) Chocolate Chips (Optional, but recommended :))

For the ice cream:

1) Dark Chocolate

2) Condensed Milk

3) Cocoa Powder

4) Cream: Ideally this should be whipped, but if you have some fresh cream refrigerating it will work surprisingly well

5) Chocolate Chips

So the first thing you have to do is keep your unsalted butter out for sometime to make sure it gets proper time to melt. This is a crucial step, or you're going to have a nightmare mixing it. It should take about 30 minutes, less in summers. If you really have no time, put it in your microwave for a couple of seconds, but you won't have the same texture.

Okay, with that done, understand that your butter to sugar to flour ratio should be 1:1:3. I recommend using 1/4th cup butter, 1/4th cup sugar, and 3/4th cup flour. Keep in mind to NOT use too much flour. If you think that you're using too much, remove it or you won't get a whiff of the sugar when you eat the cookie. Always remain on the safer side.

In this step we will put the Butter and Sugar together only. Whisk them around for some time and make sure that they come together seamlessly. Whisk them until they are nice and fluffy, and especially airy.

After whisking, your butter mixture should be like the one above. Now add the following:

1) Add your 3/4th cup flour (or propotional to how much you're making).

2) Add 1/2 teaspoon baking powder.

3) Add a little pinch of salt.

4) Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.

I'd like to mention that a lot of people don't know the difference between a tablespoon and a teaspoon. Please look it up, because the baking powder will make a huge difference on your cookies.

Now mix the entire thing together until it becomes dough-ey. Keep mixing them until it stops becoming powdery, after which you can get to the kneading.

Next, add your chocolate chips and knead the dough into a big ball. In case you're unable to do this, there are a couple of things you can do:

1) If you have a hand blender, many of them come with a special pair of kneading attachments. Use them for some time and then try again.

2) Add more of the butter-sugar mixture.

3) Sparingly, add some water to glue it together (this is the last resort, too much water can have adverse effects on your dough).

After your dough looks like the one in the picture, move to the next step.

Now you can start to tear small amounts of dough from your ball and shape them like cookies. Make sure each has at least a few choco chips, and add more on top. You may notice that your dough's getting some cracks on the top. That's perfectly okay! No need to worry, because those cracks will help you bake the cookie evenly.

There are two ways you can shape cookies: short and wide or round and small. I like making them round, but you can do it the other way too if you want to.

Here's a tip: if you're having difficulty moulding your dough, make it into a small ball like the one in the picture (I'm sorry for the bad quality, I took these at night), and then press them flat against a surface. You get the prefect shape!

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees celsius for about 5-10 minutes. Then bake the cookies for ~15 minutes. It can take longer, however! Don't worry if they don't bake in 15 minutes, they can take up to 25, or sometimes even 30! My recommendation is keep baking them again for 5 minutes at a time after 15 minutes if they're underbaked, and keep doing this until you get them like the one above. You're done!

Bonus: How do cookies bake?

Well, the baking soda that you put in your cookies is actually something called Sodium Bicarbonate. This breaks down in heat to form carbon dioxide in the equation:

NaHCO3 → Na2CO3 + H2O + CO2

The carbon dioxide gas makes the cookies rise, while the heat causes the flour to harden up. In the end, you'll end up with little air holes when you bite into the cookie, which gives them the characteristic texture.

When you buy your chocolate, it's going to be in a hard bar. But most recipes call for melted chocolate, so you're going to have to break it down to get it into a uniform texture to avoid lumps. Now some people like to do it by chopping the chocolate using a knife, but I think that grating it gives you better results.

The chocolate is going to be used in both the brownies and the ice cream, so take care!

Another thing that's common to both the brownies and the ice cream: melting the chocolate. Now there are two ways to do it:

1) Recommended: Heat some water in a bowl until just before it boils and place the bowl with the chocolate into the water bowl. Then stir your chocolate around using a rubber spatula or a spoon, until it melts.

2) Just heat it on the flame. Works, but may burn the chocolate.

Take 1/2 cup of your chocolate and put it in a container.

Now take another 1/2 cup of unsalted butter and melt it on the stove, then add the butter to the chocolate (again, a 1:1 ratio). Keep mixing it until you get a fine consistency.

After the mixture is nice and wet, add 1 cup of flour, 1/4th cup of cocoa powder and 3/4th cup of sugar. Again, you can take the ratios instead.

Now add 1/4th teaspoon of baking powder and 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence. Teaspoon, not tablespoon. Keep mixing it again. Your mixture should now become nice and thick.

To thin the mixture out, keep adding milk at regular intervals to make sure that it thins out. You'll need about 1/2 cup of milk. After this is done, your mixture should resemble the one above.

You can also add a bunch of choco chips, but that's only for fun.

Lightly glaze your container around the edges with oil to make sure the brownies don't stick after they're made. Then add the mixture and spread it out, make sure that it doesn't collect together at one point and is evenly spread out.

Now for baking, pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees celsius again, and then place the brownies in for about 30 minutes. Again, they may be done in between 20-25 minutes, so keep checking with a toothpick. Your brownies will not rise! This is necessary because brownies are supposed to be hard and fudgy and not soft like cake. If it does, you've gone overboard with your baking powder.

Bonus: Brownie science!

Brownies, unlike cookies, don't rise. When you mix milk and flour, protiens in them make gluten, which makes brownies elastic, or 'fudgy' and 'chewey'. This is why brownies seem to melt in your mouth and crumble even though they are chewey.

Now brownies have two different layers on them, a hard upper covering and the soft one which is the main part. Both of them have slightly different colors. The hard crust is actually formed due to the sugar and helps them bake better.

Okay, the picture above shows how your brownies are going to look just taken out. They may not look cooked at all! In fact, there's a test to find out if they're baked: Take a toothpick and gently prod it inside the brownie. If it comes out dry, you're done.

Then take a knife and cut the brownie up like in the picture above. I've deliberately cut it unevenly so that the big pieces can be eaten in the whole dish while the smaller ones can be eaten as stand alones.

Take a look in the picture to see how the two different crusts in the brownies look like.

The ice cream is the only part of your dish which doesn't involve baking. Start by taking 1 cup of your melted chocolate again, and add 1 cup of condensed milk. I'm sorry, but there's no substitute for condensed milk, so you'll have to try it at your supertmarket.

After that, put 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder. This time, it's tablespoons. This part of your recipe's going to be really messy! Keep mixing it around until you get a very nice, thick consistency. Take a taste of it. It's great!

This is very important: Keep the blender attachments and the bowl, along with the cream in the fridge for about 30 minutes before making the ice cream. Only then begin preparing the cream.

Okay, now that we're done with that, mix the cream around. If it rises and forms peaks, that's great! Even if it doesn't, it's all right: Your ice cream's going to taste awesome regardless.

Finally, we're going to add the mixture to the cream. It's going to be hard mixing it around and your blender will shake because the mixture's so thick, so crush the mixture into small lumps first. After that's done, take your hand blender and mix them together until you get this very nice brown color.

Finally, add your chips and mix them around before keeping the ice cream in the freezer for about 4-6 hours.

This is the best part. Take your best plate and put the brownie smack in the middle with the cookie. Then take out the ice cream, which'll be frozen by now and put it on top of the brownie. Then take a spoon and just dig into one of the best things you're ever going to eat!

Thanks for reading the recipe. If you like it, be sure to vote for me in the Baking Contest 2018-19!