Look! Chocolate Butter

When dealing with a glut of Valentine's chocolates, the normal behavior would probably not be to search for things you can then add more chocolate to. However, when we ran across this idea for chocolate butter, we couldn't resist.

Pastry chef Stella Parks contributes often-genius ideas to Gilt Taste and last week's recipe was no exception. She wrote about champagne waffles for Valentine's Day topped with chocolate butter and blood orange syrup. While the whole sha'bang sounds truly wonderful, we thought the chocolate butter would be nice to have around to spread on top of english muffins or baguette with a little sea salt or slightly melted onto Irish scones in the morning.

Try the Recipe: Chocolate Butter

(Image: Megan Gordon)

Comments (6)

This looks AMAZING! I am currently obsessed with Nutella but this looks equally yummy :)

sounds like nutella minus the hazelnuts... have you made it? is it better?

If you read the list of ingredients, that's going to be some very bitter butter: cocoa powder, vanilla, and butter....no sweetener?!

I learned Julia Child's Queen of Sheba cake recipe with rum in place of the coffee. The frosting is thus 4 oz bittersweet chocolate melted with 2 tbsp rum, with a stick of butter beaten in. When a friend was pregnant, I made her a version without the rum -- essentially chocolate butter, and quite tasty (though tastier with the rum).

Sounds delicious! But my favorite version of chocolate "butter" is simple (and was the star of this year's Valentine's breakfast). Just take your favorite nut butter and some dark or milk chocolate (I use 2/3 natural peanut butter, 1/3 dark chocolate), stick in the microwave until the chocolate melts, and mix together until smooth. So good!

@liefie: I did make it (mine is photographed) -- I'm going to be honest: it's no nutella.

and @Decogirl, it is on the bitter side, yes. But I tend to like my chocolate quite quitter, so I was happy with it, especially with the addition of salt. However, a little sugar wouldn't hurt.