Well it’s that time again folks!  Time for another blog post from yours truly.  

This recipe is very very simple.  Anyone can do it!

Now what is Easter Bark you’re asking?  It’s simply that.  

Bark is usually almost like a peanut brittle, except instead of caramel, you use chocolate.  You can use any kind of chocolate you like, but I prefer white chocolate, because it allows you to dye the chocolate to an assortment of colors you’d like.  And they sell chocolate blocks at just about any supermarket.  And of course, food coloring is easy to obtain as well.

I unfortunately didn’t get to shoot all the progress pictures, because the kitchen was cramped with other Easter cooking (which had to be done in a hurry-so no pics there either.  Next time guys!), but I will step by step the process you will need to do.  And I did get a shot of the bark prior to sticking the pan in the fridge to harden overnight.

First, you need to decide how much chocolate you want to use.  You don’t want to get too much, because then your bark tends to be hunks of chocolate, and rather hard to break into pieces and to eat.  Plus, you may risk overloading your pan and having major spillage.  So I would say four boxes of any melting chocolate you can find (they have little boxes that have like, 6 cubes per box).  With this particular bark, since I was dying them two colors (lavender and pastel pink), I had to split up the chocolate.  Two boxes of chocolate per bowl works well.  And you don’t even need to use your stove!  You can melt the chocolate easily in the microwave.  

I would put it on for about 2 mins, BUT check the melting process after a minute and stir-otherwise your chocolate will start to burn!

And burnt chocolate is an iffy taste profile, and not pretty looking!

After a minute, when you stir, you’ll notice some pieces have melted all the way, some haven’t.  That’s where the other minute comes in.  It may not even have to go for the full minute.  You just need to get the melting process started.  After a bit of stirring, if it’s warm enough, the rest of the pieces should melt easily.

Once you’ve melted the first bowl, you can dye it whatever color you like.  For this one, I did a pastel pink first.  It will take about 5-6 drops of red food coloring to get a nice, pastel pink.  Of course, if you want a darker pink, just keeping adding a drop or two and stir until you get the desired color.  Set that aside and work on chocolate bowl #2.  Again, once the chocolate is melted, dye whatever color you wish.  For a lavender color, it took about 24 drops of red, and 20 drops of blue (yeah-it calls for that much!) and of course, stir to mix the colors.

Now for my bark, I found three tubes of easter themed sprinkles.  Little flowers (in pastel colors), pink pearls (very gorgeous) and just the usual sprinkles you find (except pastel colors).  Now you don’t have to do this, or even use sprinkles if you don’t want.  But I mixed a bit of all three sprinkles into the chocolate.  Just so when you break the pieces, you can see bits of color within the bark, and to just add more flavor and texture. Save the rest for another step.

Now comes the rather difficult part.  Scooping the chocolate into the pan.  You want to line a cookie sheet or pan with foil or wax paper.  So you can easily remove the chocolate bark pieces off the pan.  I say hard because sometimes you may doubt yourself.  You think, is this enough? Is this too much?  Why is it not spreading out into the whole pan?  It’s fine!  It usually tends to be just enough, once you add the other bowl of chocolate it will coat the whole bottom of the pan, and if it’s too much, double up the batch. (Just make sure you have enough space in your fridge-cause it does have to set overnight! The longer, the better for setting).  But I put one bowl of chocolate into the pan and smoothed it out with the same spoon I used for mixing.  Just take the back of the spoon and smooth the chocolate out.  Do that until it seems like you can’t smooth it out anymore (like it looks like you’re having noticeable spaces in the pan-in other words, if you can see foil, you’re thinning out and running out of chocolate).  But that’s why there is another bowl!  Scoop that out and smooth with the back of the spoon with the chocolate already in the pan.  It will be enough and it will smooth out evenly and nicely into the pan.  

Now if you want to marble the colors, simply use a butter knife and start swirling the colors together.  It’s not the most noticeable method, because chocolate is a little different textured than cake batters, but it should still look pretty and like the colors are melding together. Just have fun with it!

Now the FUN part: adding the candies! For my Christmas bark, I usually add broken up pieces of Oreos and cherry flavored, multi colored candy cane pieces (SO yummy!), but for the Easter bark, I left the cookies out-because the Easter candy was going to to be plenty enough!  And you can add just about ANY kind of candy or cookie you want to your bark.  Use your imagination and come up with some awesome ideas!

For my Easter bark, I decided to use speckled egg Peanut Butter M&Ms and Sweet Tart Egg shaped Jellybeans! All you do is open the candy packages, and start sprinkling them over the bark.  Once you do that, it is recommended to take the back of a spoon and make sure the candies are sticking to the chocolate, because they have to seize too.  Just kind of push the candies down into the chocolate, just to be sure they’ll stick. 

And that’s not all.  Remember the left over sprinkles?  Yep, the rest of them, all three, got added into the bark too.

Trust me, this is plenty Easter and festive.  And I’m sure this will be a big hit too! (And very, very colorful!) I will post the results of the “taste test” tomorrow.

And remember, you don’t have to be a pro in the kitchen, you just always have to always make it a pleasure.

(Pretty, isn’t it? :p)

The cooking venture started out like this folks:  two different batters.  One a yellow cake mix and another a chocolate chunk brownie.  Below are two pictures that show the two batters mixed up in different bowls.

I’m not the best person in marble techniques when it comes to baking, but I gave it my best shot with a butter knife.  And this is what the batter looked like when the two were combined:

Now, this particular ‘Brownie Cake’ as I will call it now, does take a bit of time to bake evenly and thoroughly.  For us, roughly and hour and 15 minutes.  You want to make sure whenever you bake anything, whether it be brownies, cakes, cupcakes, etc, that you want to stick a toothpick or a butter knife into the cake, and the knife has to come up fairly clean.  If there is any gunk on the knife, the baking material in question has to go longer.  Trust me, you don’t want a gooey cake to eat.  Otherwise, you should of just skipped the baking and ate the batter itself!

But, if you do the baking right, and your “Brownie Cake” cooks evenly and through, it should look something like this:

Please ignore all the knife sticks you may find in this picture.  We were a little off on the baking time, and had to check on the done-ness of the cake multiple times.  Now, when you bake in a bunt cake pan, you want to make sure you either grease it up very liberally or flour it very liberally.  Otherwise your cake will stick and it will come out in clumps, aside from a beautiful, whole cake.  There is a cooking spray that now has oil and flour mixed in, called Baker’s Joy (I think), and that’s what we used and it works great!  But don’t be disappointed if your cake doesn’t come out whole.  As long as the cake is cooked properly, no one will fuss about it.  After all, if this is your first attempt, accidents will happen and your attempt will not always be perfect.

Once we flipped the “Brownie Cake” out of the pan, this is what it looked like:

As you can probably see, there was a good bit of a marble attempt done on my part.  However, the brownie did tend to stick to the top of the cake, as opposed to mixing throughout the cake.  Which is OKAY.  It just means that myself (and possibly you) were successful in actually baking a brownie on top of a cake (how awesome is that?!)

I cut into the cake, of course whenever you bake or cook for that matter, tasting is a very important thing to remember.  If you never tasted anything throughout a cooking process or never tasted anything you baked, how the hell would you know how it turned out? Plus, if you’re a Southern like me and like to use liberal amounts of spices in cooking, you want to make sure you don’t overdo it, and tasting is the best bet.  After all, not everyone’s palletes is adapt to spicy foods.  You can always add, but you can never remove.  That is a BIG general rule in cooking.  So always taste, taste, taste.  Just be sure you’re not double dipping!  Use a different spoon every time you taste.  Otherwise, you’re spreading your germs, and you may as well just spat into the food itself. LOL!

Anyways, back onto the cake.  When I cut a liberal piece from the whole cake, this is what that piece, and ending product, looked like:

End Tasting Result:

This cake is definitely for sweet tooth loving people at heart!  This cake is not only super sweet and decadent, but moist.  The brownie ends up staying chewy (and because ours had chocolate chunks, you get little chocolate surprises mixed in!) while the cake stays moist.  Trust me, one piece will be enough, otherwise it may make you sick to your stomach from the overload of sweetness. 

Overall, this cake is a really, really good cake.  It is possible and I would definitely recommend trying it out if you want to do a spin on a classic, or you want to surprise someone, or you just want to do it to say, ‘Hey, I did it!’

I don’t think there is any way you can fail at it, so long as you follow the directions to mixing the batters and making sure the cake bakes through and evenly.

So, that’s it for this night of the blog.  And remember, you don’t have to be a pro in the kitchen, you just have to always make it a pleasure.

Yes, that’s right folks.  I am trying the impossible (or at least, I think it’s pretty impossible).  I am simply taking yellow cake mix (no frosting included) and trying to mix it with brownie mix.  We will proceed to make it look ‘marbleized’ (meaning we swirl the two together to almost make it look like marble-which will evenly distribute the two batters as well.  Creates pretty little swirls!) and then bake it off. 

I have never tried this before, but will be attempting this tonight.  As always, a general rule of thumb if you try this yourself is to follow the directions exactly.  Add however much water, eggs, oil, etc that the batters call for.  And also, remember, the cooking time will be a lot longer, since it’s a double batter batch (and two different baking batters at that!).  And I always say, if you’re unsure what the baking batter will do in the oven, always put a cookie sheet or pan under your baking dish.  Just in case the batter fluffs up and decides to leave a mess.  Trust me, it’s better to have a mess on your sheet, than in your oven!  Which can burn and cause a nasty smell throughout your kitchen!

I will be taking pictures to include, from what the two batters look like together, to the finished product.  And I will be giving my success rate and taste rating once it’s all said and done. 

So the question is, can you make a cake, with a brownie inside?  We shall see!

Welcome one and all, to my food blog, Sweet E Treats.  I started this blog after a good long process of wanting to start one and never working up the courage to do so.  I haven’t always been a fan of cooking.  In fact, I used to loathed it with a passion.  I would burn water, I was THAT bad.  And one day, simply by starting to watch Food Network, it opened my eyes into the passion of cooking.  And after a while, what used to seem tedious and unbelievably hard to do, has now become fun and effortless.  

I am not saying I am a Master Chef.  Not by any means.

But, I am passionate about trying not only ventures of cooking I have never tried to do on my own before, but also trying to create my own recipes that I cook up in this noggin of mine. I am even creative in my cooking ventures, from trying to make food related to Actors or shows/characters to even trying some crazy pretty combinations.

I have a major sweet tooth, so heed that. You’ll see a lot of sweets here.

And please, feel free to snag any of the recipes and tips here.  This is all for my own personal venture.  Because my father never lived to see or taste just how well I adapted cooking.  So, this is really started in his honor.

And also, you may know me on Tumblr otherwise known as beautylily.

So please, enjoy.