Mouthful of chocolate (and strawberries)

Sometimes relationships, work, family or even cooking and baking don’t come out as we want them to, but there is always one sure thing -reassuring or not- about life: some things are just meant to be and that, of course, includes food.

There are flavors that will always go well together, no matter how common, cliche or traditional the matching may be or how hard we want to fight them and discover something new. Chocolate and strawberries is for sure one of the greatest, tastiest and most unbeatable combinations of all times…We just can’t get over it, these two ingredients keep bumping into each other again and again and it seems as though they’re going to keep doing it for ever and ever.

When we get a taste -even if it’s a tiny tiny bite- of one single strawberry soaked in a gooey, rich melted dark chocolate, the senseless and egocentric original .vs. unoriginal fight falls apart completely. There’s no point in it, really: no need to fight something that tastes so good just because it’s been around forever.

Anyway, after this contained kind of apology of simplicity and the magical chocolate+strawberries combo (and flavor indulgence), I just want to offer you a recipe with no story or excuse other than the fact that it tastes sooo yummy. So here you go:

Chocolate-Strawberries Napoléons:

(This amount of ingredients makes 6)

For the tuiles:

For the cream:

2 cups of heavy cream
5 Oz. of chocolate (again, bittersweet is preferred)
1/3 cup of sugar
15 fresh, red, beautiful strawberries cut in halves.

Making the tuiles: 

In a bowl, put together the orange juice, the egg whites, the refined sugar and the melted butter. Mix thoroughly until it’s even.
Add the chocolate, flour and cocoa, and whisk well. Then, incorporate the almonds and keep mixing until you get a smooth, uniform mixture.
Put spoonfuls of the dough on a baking sheet and flatten them with the back of the spoon in order to get 5 cm round (or the diameter you want), thin, disks.
Bake these chocolate tuiles in the oven for around 10 minutes to 180°C (350°F). They will be ready when the center is -not excessively- dry.
Take out of the oven and let the tuiles cool.

Making the chocolate cream (while the tuiles are cooling):

Place the chocolate (cut into small chunks) in a bowl.
Boil 1/2 cup of heavy cream and pour it over the chocolate  in order to melt it. Whisk vigorously to get an even chocolaty mixture.
In another recipient, whisk the remaining cream with the sugar with an electric mixer until firm peaks start to form. 
Incorporate the chocolate mixture to the cream using a rubber spatula.
Put the chocolate cream that resulted from the process in a pastry bag (with the tip of your choice).
Now that you have everything ready, all you need is to assemble the napoléons: place one tuile on a plate and pipe a generous amount of chocolate cream right in the middle. Then, arrange the strawberries all around and put another tuile right on top. Decorate with some more cream around the edges of the bottom tuile.

Serve and enjoy immediately while it’s still fresh. If your eyes were bigger than your stomach and you have some tuiles (already baked) and chocolate cream left over, you can always store each separately and assemble more Napoléons later. Just keep the tuiles in a air-tight container to keep them fresh, and put the cream in the fridge. Remember to take the cream out of the refrigerator with enough time to let it thaw completely (whisk it and add a litle bit of cream if you need to make it softer), so when you assemble the Napoléons you don’t end up with a hard chocolate rock!

Tagged: almonds, Chocolate, cream, napoleon, strawberries, tuiles