Sugar High Friday #11 - Coffee

my SHF entry for the month: mocha bars

I miss baking and cooking! Ever since school started this week, I haven't spent quality time in the kitchen with my oven, mixer and what not!

I think I'm suffering from a baking-deficit disorder. heh... and I haven't even had time to come online.

Only realised this morning that today was the deadline for SHF #11! Imagine my surprise. But thank God I had actually bought fresh baking ingredients yesterday as i was already planning on baking something for my dearest friend Dot. Yes, her birthday's tmw! Happy Birthday to you dear Dot!!!

Anyway, this month's SHF is hosted by Ronald of Lovesicily, and he chose coffee as this month's theme.

Since I was already planning to bake something chocolatey for Dot, I figured why not just throw in some coffee and come up with Mocha Bars!

I don't know about you, but there's just something about the marriage of both coffee and chocolate that really appeals to me. They just taste so good together!

I actually found a recipe for 'Chocolate Espresso Bars' in my Williams-Sonoma 'Cookies' cookbook. But seeing that I didn't have any instant espresso powder at hand, I thought it wouldn't make much of a difference if I substituted it with instant coffee powder. And so that was what I did. and viola, there popped up Mocha Bars from the oven.



Dot's gonna be tasting this tomorrow and I hope she likes it! I actually made a mini-cake outta it. For the frosting, I used modified another of my favourite recipe from somewhere (can't remember!). The recipes can be found below....

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Mocha Bars

3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
3 tbsp instant coffee powder
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 unsalted butter
60g semisweet chocolate
2 large eggs
1 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence

Mix the first 5 dry ingredients well and sift it; put aside

Melt butter and chocolate in a saucepan, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and let cool.

Whisk eggs and brown sugar in a bowl until well mixed. Slowly stir in the melted chocolate mixture and add in the vanilla. Mix well and add in the flour mixture. Make sure the batter is well blended.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius.

Pour mocha batter in to an 8-inch well greased square baking pan. Bake until the edges pull away from the sides of the pan and the centre springy to the touch, approx. 25 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack.

Frosting

1 and 1/8 cups icing sugar, sifted
2 and 1/2 tbsp. cocoa
3 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
1 and 1/2 tbsp. hot freshly brewed coffee
1 tsp. vanilla essence

Mix both icing sugar and cocoa. Sift together in a bowl and stir in butter, then coffee and vanilla. Mix well until frosting is smooth.

Using a spatula, spread a thin layer of frosting over the cake. Refrigerate if desired. Cut mocha bars into desired size.

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if you're wondering how it tastes like, well maybe it'll be best if you bake it yourself because I'm quite certain that my comments would be biased because I love mocha! hahaa... but well, if you really have to know, these mocha bars tasted phenomenal! I could taste both the chocolate and coffee in each bite. But for those who don't really want the coffee taste to be masked by the chocolatey frosting, then by all means, serve them 'naked' sans the frosting.