CDKitchen 100 Challenge: Recipe 2

Yeah, I'm not gonna eat that sort of bear claw (despite Pedo Bear's desire for you to put his limbs in your mouth...)

Today we're gonna treat ourselves to a more delicious, consensual pleasure bear claw filled with an entirely different sort of filling: chocolate.


Bear Claws with Chocolate Filling

Ingredients

• Frozen roll dough from last post
  
• thaw that mountain of goodness out
• Flour, as needed
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• 1 egg, beaten (not stirred -- I will never tire of this joke)
• 1/4 cup of chopped pecans
  
• 1/4 cup of brown sugar
• 1/2 cup of organic semi-sweet chocolate chips

Now the recipe calls for shredded coconut and I absolutely detest coconut. I seriously, seriously, seriously, seriously, seriously dislike the stuff. One time I ate a cookie with coconut shavings and I spit it out as soon as I realized that crunchy stuff with a milky sort of taste was COCONUT, my ARCH NEMESIS. This common enemy has led me to have an alliance with a famous cartoon character: Angelica Pickles.

"Stupid babies... and coconut."

That aside, I think this recipe looks really easy, but then again I've never made bear claws before.

Gulp. This should be interesting.

First we're gonna start by taking out our mutual friend, Grandma's Sweet Roll Dough, made fresh last night and refrigerated overnight.

Gonna take off the excess packaging since I was terrified it'd dry up and haunt me for the rest of my life.

Gentleman, we have the technology.

Dust the (clean) countertop.

And now we're gonna pound it into eight little 4-inch circles.

Those don't look like circles...


Gah, I made them all different sizes.

After that, we're gonna take a small bowl and combine some butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips (Coconut couldn't make it to the party cuz he wasn't invited, see.)

I had to wait a bit before it sort of thawed down and then I managed to mix it up really good, like so:

Place 2 tablespoons of the mixture in the middle of each roll.

Fold in half and press the edges to seal.

(This sort of reminds me of a dumpling process.)

Place on a baking sheet sprayed with a cooking spray. I use Slipat, which has seen better days, but never needs any sort of spray! I highly recommend them.

Take some scissors and cut into the folded rolls four times to give it a sort of "claw" look. Make sure you do this on the sealed edge side and not the other side.

Hopeless Scissorhands at your service.

Take out a brush (I used a silicone one) and brush the tops with egg.

Sprinkle with pecans for that nutty, pretty look.

Cover with a plastic wrap. Great, more packaging. Gag.

And let it rise like the Undead.

It's alive, it's alive! Mwahaha-*hack hack cough*

Wait 30 minutes for it to rise properly. Use this time to preheat the oven to 350 F degrees. In the mean time, let's go do something fun like have a drink or something.

When the time is up, take off the plastic (this is crucial if you don't want your bear claws to taste like melted Mattel toys) and pop it into the oven for 20 minutes.

Proceed to back to your drink and become smashed (but not too smashed.)

Don't tell me I've had enough! I'll tell you when I've had enough.

Set up a cooling rack on the counter and check every now and then until the bear claws look a nice, friendly golden brown color (the color of bears!)

Viola!

Mmmmm.. Satisfied customer. Now pay up. (He ate the big one in one sitting; talk about an appetite!)

Some notes: The dough took really long to thaw. Next time I'll just leave it on top of the turned off burner to expedite the process.

Another thing that was hard to do was to get an exact size down for the bear claws. Oh well! Because I made one super big, I ended up using an entire bag of organic chocolate chips instead of the recommended amount. Mmm. Chocolate-y.

The dough recipe I used gave me too much dough to work with and I didn't have another slipat to use so I ended up just make 1 super huge bear claw and four medium sized ones. I'll make more later.

All in all: good, good recipe. Compliments to CDKitchen!

Look forward to my next post on blueberry fritters, y'all! Happy Valentines Day!

(Original recipe: Bear Claw with Chocolate Filling, via CDKitchen)