Chocolate Mice

The Art.

    When we were kids, my mom would wrangle us into helping her make the Christmas treats for our friends and neighbors. This usually involved making trays and trays of the Traditional Greek Baklava that I posted last year, in addition to several hundred candy mice. By the end of the evening, the entire kitchen would be a sticky mess with maraschino cherry juice, and the table would be covered in rows and rows of chocolate mice. This is the first time I've made chocolate mice on my own, and it wasn't nearly as traumatizing. One jar of maraschino cherries will yield approximately 25 mice, which is a manageable number. The entire process took me about an hour and I think the payoff is as cute as can be! Just make sure you store them in a container to keep these creatures from stirring about your house on Christmas Eve.

The Science.
    To make these mice, I used chocolate Almond Bark to coat the cherries. Almond Bark is not chocolate at all, it's mostly composed of palm oil and sugar, with some cocoa powder. Because it doesn't have any cocoa butter, this confection has a higher melting temperature and cools much faster than real chocolate. These qualities make Almond Bark ideal for decorations and candymaking, although the texture and flavor are not quite as good as the real thing.  If you really want to make gourmet chocolate mice and use real chocolate, check out my Burnin' Love Sriracha Truffles post for suggestions.

         While we're on the subject of science, you may have noticed an odd-looking cookie in the photo to the left. It's decorated like a DNA gel, which we use in the lab to determine the genetic makeup of our mice. If you would like to make a genotyping gel cookie for your mice, you can ice a graham cracker with the icing technique I described for my Lemon Polka Dot Sugar Cookies.




The Recipe.

1 jar maraschino cherries, with stems
25 milk chocolate Hershey's Kisses, unwrapped
50 sliced almond pieces, in pairs
2 squares chocolate Almond Bark
royal icing

    Rinse the cherries 3-4 times in water, until the syrup is washed off completely. Lay the cherries out in a single layer on paper towels to dry. Lay out your Hershey Kiss "heads" and match up your almond slice "ears" to prepare yourself for easy assembly. In a small microwave safe bowl, heat the Almond Bark for 30 seconds. If it is not completely melted, stir and heat an additional 30 seconds. Be careful not to overheat it, or it will seize up and harden.
    Pick up a cherry by its stem, dip it into the Almond Bark, then set on waxed paper. Working quickly, attach a Hershey Kiss by pressing it onto the cherry, and insert the almond slivers between the Kiss and the cherry. Almond Bark cools quickly, so you want to have all of the pieces handy. If you need a little extra help, you can use a toothpick to apply more Almond Bark to stick things together. Once all of the mice have cooled, pipe their eyes and noses on with the royal icing. Allow approximately 15 minutes for the icing to dry before serving.

     Chocolate mice can be stored in the refrigerator for one week, or in the freezer for up to 2 months. However, they can be part of a holiday display at room temperature for a couple days without any harm. Get creative with your presentation! These mice can decorate cakes and cupcakes, or reside in a gingerbread house. You can even put them in little truffle wrappers and put them on the boughs of your Christmas tree, if you like.
   

Maple Bacon Cookie Sandwiches

The Art.

    Whenever I eat a hearty American breakfast, I love to slather my waffles in maple syrup. My plate inevitably becomes a primordial tar pit of tree sap, but I'm ok with that.  I consider it an homage to comfort food and cold weather traditions. I especially make sure to get a little bit of maple syrup on my bacon before I eat it, because all of the flavors and textures complement each other so well--crispy, sticky, sweet, salty. I've wanted to put these flavors in a dessert for a long time, in keeping with my tendency to put bacon in things where it doesn't belong. This time, I combined bacon crumbles and maple syrup into a rich, sweet-and-salty icing, then I sandwiched it between two crisp, buttery sugar cookies. To decorate, I piped some beautiful royal icing leaves on top (I promise they're not as difficult as they look). I recommend enjoying these rich cookies with a hot cup of black tea or coffee.

The Science.

    As if I needed another reason to love it, many studies have found that compounds within maple syrup have beneficial antioxidant properties. A recent study even shows that maple syrup's phenolic compounds can restore normal cell growth in some cancers [1]. However it is with a heavy heart that I tell you that some manufacturers "adulterate" their syrups with beet or cane sugars. These sugars are cheap and readily available, but they are less healthy sugars for the body. Fortunately, a research group in Quebec has developed a very sensitive mass spectrometry method to detect sugar contamination, by measuring the amount of malic acid in the sample and comparing it to the overall sugar content [2]. If certain sugars are more abundant, then the syrup has been sweetened. This detection method can now be used to assure quality control of the maple syrup that we purchase...and slather our bacon in.

The Recipe.

Cookies: Make one batch of square sugar cookies, and one batch of royal icing (recipes here).

Maple Bacon Icing:

2 strips raw bacon

1/2 cup butter, softened

3 cups powdered sugar

2 tablespoons Grade A maple syrup

     Pan fry the bacon until crisp, but not burned. Place it on paper towels until cool, then crumble into small pieces. Pour the bacon fat from the pan through a coffee filter into a small bowl, and chill until solid. In a medium bowl, beat together bacon fat and butter until fluffy. Gradually add powdered sugar while beating until incorporated. Beat in maple syrup and crumbled bacon.

Assembly:

     Once cookies have cooled completely, make cookie sandwiches by spreading the bottom side of a cookie with the maple bacon icing and smooshing it onto another cookie. (Yes, smooshing is a professional baking term.) To make leaf decorations, fill a piping bag with royal icing and add a #3 round tip. Trace the outline of a leaf onto the cookie sandwich. Before the icing dries, lightly pull the icing toward the center of the leaf with a small brush as shown in the photo. Finish the leaf by piping the veins and stem.

    Allow cookies to dry for at least one hour. To show you're a classy hostess, serve cookies on doilies with a cup of hot tea. Cookies can be stored at room temperature in an airtight container for 3 days, or in the freezer for up to 2 months.

1. Gonzalez-Sarrias et al. "Maple polyphenols, ginnalins A-C, induce S- and G2/M-cell cycle arrest in colon and breast cancer cells mediated by decreasing cyclins A and D1 levels." Food Chem., 2013. Vol. 136(2): pp 636-642.

2. Tremblay, P and Paquin, R. "Improved Detection of Sugar Addition to Maple Syrup Using Malic Acid as Internal Standard and in 13C Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS)" J. Agric. Food Chem., 2007. Vol. 55(2): pp 197-203.