TWD--Fifteen-Minute Magic: Chocolate Amaretti Torte

Woohoo!  Today's Tuesday's With Dorie recipe as we bake our way through her wonderful baking book, Baking From My Home To Yours was chosen by Holly at Phe/MOM/enon.  Thank you, Holly!  I made this torte yesterday and served it up for Family Home Evening.  Bob and Tes always join us on Monday nights and besides everyone having a piece, two pieces went home with them and the torte is gone.   I rejoined The Biggest Loser online program today and am proud to say I only had one little bite of Kevin's piece of this delicious chocolate torte.   And I finger licked a couple of the lovely drips of glaze that pooled on the cutting board while the torte set.   Sigh.  I wanted more.  But I refrained. 

This really was quite simple to make and so good.  I'm still finding it hard to LOVE the bittersweet chocolate taste, rather than something a little sweeter, but this was still de-licious!  I chose not to have whipped cream on top, but would have liked a little almond extract in the glaze.  It was rich and we didn't think it needed whipped cream or anything else.  GREAT pick here from Holly.  You can get this awesome recipe on Holly's blog, Phe/MOM/enon.  Browse around her blog if you've never been there, she's "phenomenal" and so are all her yummy posts!

Oh, oh, I almost forgot.  I made homemade Amaretti cookies for this!  I could only picture these cookies on Giada's Food Network shows and I know they were darker in color and I never thought they were so meringue-like, but I went with it anyway, rather than searching high and low in the "little" town we live in and also having never seen this torte of Dorie's before, I don't even know if it looks "correct", but it doesn't really matter.  We all liked it--even Kevin! ; )   And instead of baking this in an 8 inch round pan, I used a springform pan because that is the only pan I have that is 8 inches.  And for the record, I didn't set the pan on a baking sheet either.  I baked it for 27 minutes.

The Amaretti cookie recipe I used, after searching the internet and looking at several recipes--all of which were different from each other--was a recipe I found on Martha Stewart's website and when I saw that it was a Mario Batali recipe, I decided you can't go wrong with him!  I followed the recipe completely, but decided not to sprinkle them with extra sugar.  They look a little different from the picture on Martha's site, but they were crisp and almond-y so I called it good.  I didn't read some of the P&Q's until writing this to see that Dorie suggested 2.75 oz. of cookies in place of the suggested Amaretti di Saronno ones.  I just used 18 cookies since mine were small.  I have no idea how much they weighed.

I took a bunch of pictures of the torte in process, but for some reason the color was way off on my camera and they don't look that great.  BUT, when it really mattered, I got some nice shots of the finished product.

Chocolate Amaretti Torte, anyone?

Just a small slice?  Okay.

I actually wanted everyone to have a good size piece because I wanted the thing eaten and gone! ; )

Thanks again, Holly.  This month IS gonna kill me.  Two more weeks and two more very chocolaty, NOT "light" desserts coming up.  I am gonna stick to this Biggest Loser thing and plan to only have a bite of each.  Sigh. 

I wanted to mention a quick THANKS to everyone who visits my blogs and comments, especially on Tuesdays.  I really enjoy this  TWD group and find it hard with all the other things I do, i.e.--BOYS and such, to get to all the blogs I want to see and comment on.  Just know that I do throughout the week get over to a lot and at least peek at what ya'll have been doing! ; )