Chocolate Cake – The Best Ever

If you like chocolate cake, this is the recipe for you. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever had a chocolate cake as good as this.

Chocolate cake cravings are one of those things that happens to me about twice a year. And when I say craving, I mean it comes on strong and sticks around for weeks until I satisfy it. Yesterday, Valentine’s Day, was the perfect day to bake up this recipe I’ve saved for months. As soon as I saw Jenn’s post, I immediately archived this recipe in my MUST TRY folder. That was a good decision!

I’d describe this cake as heavy, rich and super moist. It isn’t one of those spongy cakes and I’d almost say it was brownie-like, even fudgy; a completely and utterly fabulous cake.

Check out foodess.com for this Moist Chocolate Cake Recipe and for other delicious finds.

For the icing, I whipped up a Fleur De Sel Chocolate Butter Cream using 1/2 cup softened unsalted butter, 1/2 cup cocoa powder, 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla, 1/4 tsp. fleur de sel, 1/2 cup of icing sugar and approximately 3 Tbsp. of heavy cream. Add more or less cream to get your desired consistency or for a more traditional sweet icing, only use a pinch of salt.

Contest – Win 100 Macarons!

Who doesn’t want to win 100 macarons for next Sunday night? Seriously, these are absolutely free and will be in 6 assorted flavours. Why, you ask? Well, we’re doing a photo shoot featuring our macarons in Gastown that evening and after the shoot, we’ll have all these gorgeous macarons to share with someone. They can’t be wasted and I love to give! They’ll be famous macarons by then and ready to be devoured. The winner will be announced via twitter and our facebook page on Friday (17th) at 5pm. So, if you’re interested in winning these, here is what you need to know:

1) The macarons will be ready for you between 8:30 and 9pm next Sunday, February 19th. You’ll need to be downtown Vancouver during that time to receive them. We can come to you if you’ll be close or you can meet us (we’ll work that out).

2) These macarons will be best enjoyed that evening or over the next day or two. Maybe you’ll want to plan a little gathering?

TO ENTER the contest you can do one or many of the following (each will be an entry so you could end up entering several times to up your chances). YES, you can do these all and enter the context 4 times!

1) Like our facebook page

2) Follow us on twitter and retweet – RT@kitchening ‘s giving away 100 macarons to one lucky winner. The easiest contest ever! Details here: http://bit.ly/y1XtoR

3) Sign up for our brief seasonal newsletter

4) Order macarons online

Good luck! Remember, get those entries in, tell your friends and watch for the winning announcement this Friday at 5pm on twitter and our facebook page.

Featured in the Vancouver Sun

Mia Stainsby of the Vancouver Sun wrote an article about macarons that was in the paper today. She called it “2012 is the Year of the Macaron in Vancouver”.

She interviewed me (and several other local macaron-bakers) for the piece:

“You can’t just follow a list of rules,” Wintschel says. “You have to know the batter, when to stop beating, how humid the weather is. You can have it too runny or too thick. If it’s too thick, the surface will be bumpy. If too fluffy, it will crack. If too runny, it might not get the ‘pied’ or the ruffly skirt at the bottom. It’s touchy,” she says of preparing the batter. “When I was learning in France, there were days we had to turn the air conditioner off. For me, success comes with being observant.”

They can definitely be finicky, but they are oh-so-melt-in-your-mouth amazing, too. Go and check out the article!