Sugar cones with chocolate, peppermint and prunes

I wanted to make a dessert so I came up with this idea: mix together melted chocolate, crushed candy canes and sticky fruit.  You could use peppermints too, since candy canes aren't always in season.  I looked in our pantry and I saw the prunes that my Dad got from Sunsweet, which is where he works, so I decided to use that for my sticky fruit.

Then we crushed up the candy canes with a "mortar and pestle."  (That's a strange name... I thought it was a "pill crusher" because that's what a friend of ours used to crush up pills, but my Dad told me the real name.)  

I thought we could add pink peppercorns, because I really like them in my Dad's gelato.  I thought they would taste good in this recipe.

We used the mortar and pestle to crush up the pink peppercorns too.

I like cinnamon, so I thought we should use it in the recipe too.  I liked the smell of cloves and wanted to try that also.  But now there were too many ingredients to combine all together.  We decided to make a bunch of different cones with different combinations.  We put all the ingredients in glass bowls so we could tell them apart.

We cooked the chocolate in a double boiler because we needed to melt the chocolate.  A double boiler is to pots that go on top of each other.  Water goes in the bottom and chocolate goes in the top.  We did this so it wouldn't burn.  (When my Dad melted chocolate to make candy for a party, he cooked some without water in the bottom and it burned.  You could tell because it was lumpy.)

I broke up the chocolate bar into the top of the double boiler.

I needed to keep stirring the chocolate while it melted.  

We got our sugar cones ready.  (Notice the fairy book in the background.  It's my recipe book, where I write down all of my ideas.)

When the chocolate was melted, we put it in the bowls and stirred it together.

Then we used a spatula to fill the cones, and put it in the fridge to cool.  

All of the cones had prunes and chocolate.  Half of them had candy canes.  We tried a few different spices: cinnamon, cloves and pink peppercorns.  (We also tried adding pomelo zest, but my Dad and I both didn't like it at all.  It was too bitter!)

We liked ones with peppermint the best, especially ones that also had pink peppercorns or cinnamon.  Prunes were a good choice for the fruit because they were sticky but not too juicy.  They tasted good with the chocolate.

You can eat them by themselves or add ice cream on top! 

My first blog recipe: fruit tart with gingerbread-candy cane crust

This is my first recipe that I made for the blog.  Since my Dad does a lot of recipes, I thought I should come up with some of my own.

First, I wanted to combine chocolate, blueberries, raspberries and crushed-up ginger snaps to make a dessert soup.  But then just today I thought of using candy canes instead of the chocolate.

When my dad got home, he suggested that we did a tart, because he thought it would be more successful.

To make the tart, I added one candy cane and a few handfuls of ginger snaps to the food processor and we processed it until it was all mushed up.  Then we melted 3-4 tablespoons of butter in the microwave and slowly poured it in while it was mixing.  (We added butter so it would all stick together.)  Then I put it in little bowls and we used a big spoon to push it along the sides.

My dad cut up oranges, kiwis and strawberries into little bits.  I mixed them up and put them in the bowls with the crust.  I wanted to add marshmallows, but we didn't have small ones and my dad said the big ones probably wouldn't work.  So instead, we added little toffee bits.

We thought it was delicious.  Tomorrow I'm going to give it to my teacher.  I hope you and my teacher like it!


-Chef Grace