You there! Yes, you! You with the computer! Do you like pancakes? Yeah? How about crêpes? Alright, do you like fire? Well then do I have a meal for you… I sometimes get the feeling that Hungarian food is a tough sell in America, maybe because the first thing people think of is not any particular dish, but of Hungary’s HILARIOUSLY ironic proximity to Turkey and Greece. BAH HAH HAH HAH, good one.

That ends today with this foolproof gateway drug to Hungarian cuisine: ladies and gentlemen, say hello to palacsinta. That’s PAUL-ah-cheen-tah to you, bub. Are you sick of the same old crêpe? Try these Hungarian pancakes. This particular recipe, Gundel palacsinta, takes its name from one of the oldest and grandest restaurants in Budapest and has everything you could want in a meal. Hell, it has everything you could want in a weekend: Booze! Fire! Chocolate! Cinnamon! Nuts! You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! The results, I promise you, will be nothing short of crêpetacular.

The recipe for palacsinta really doesn’t differ much from that of its French cousin or from any of the other folded, stuffed pancakes eaten throughout South Central Europe. The only difference is a splash of soda water added at the last minute. Does the carbonation really make the pancakes fluffier? Or does the added liquid just make the batter thinner? What do I look like, nineteenth century Hungarian physicist Lóránd Eötvös? It’s tradition, cut me some slack.

What does make palacsinta unique among all its neighboring pancakes are the fillings. The specific recipe I’m writing about is a pretty legendary one, a mixture of ground walnuts, cream, sugar and cinnamon topped with a liquored-up (and potentially flammable) chocolate sauce, but there are plenty of other sweet and savory fillings where that came from. Some other classics include a cottage cheese/sugar/cinnamon mixture (which can also be made with ricotta, as described here), or apricot jam, which I ended up making for some variety alongside the Gundel palacsinta. I also just happened to have a fridge full of another Hungarian favorite, leftover chicken paprikash – a stew of onions, paprika and chicken, and one of my go-to recipes (I usually make this version). I chopped the chicken small into pieces, rolled it up in a pancake and doused it with sauce.

The French might turn up their noses and ask “what is this crêpe,” but my point is that you really can’t go wrong with palacsinta. The pancake is forgiving; you’re eating it more for its texture than it’s taste, which is bland enough to go with just about anything. So keep experimenting until you come up with a winner. My chicken paprikash concoction wound up being a great success – in fact a cursory googling revealed that it wasn’t a new trick at all, but actually an old Hungarian standard by the name of Hortobágyi húsos palacsinta (that’s WHORE-toe-badge-yee WHO-show-sh to you, sonny).

Hortobagyi Husos Palacsinta

Gundel Palacsinta, sin fuego

The basic recipe for palacsinta follows, as described in George Lang’s The Cuisine of Hungary and confirmed by my great-grandmother. Recipes for the Gundel filling come afterwards.

Palacsinta – Hungarian Pancakes

Makes 8-9 pancakes

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup all purpose flour

¼ cup club soda

Butter for frying

Mixing this recipe is easy: combine the eggs, milk and flour, beat until smooth; add the soda just before making the first pancake. The cooking technique is where things get interesting. Set the heat to medium, add butter to the pan, and pour in ¼ cup or so of batter. Palacsinta are supposed to be very thin, so don’t use too much. As you add batter, lift the pan and tilt around in a circle so the batter just coats the bottom. It’s not that hard, but it does take some practice so don’t be disappointed if you end up with a worthless piece of crêpe on your first try.

A couple things that can make things easier are the right kind of pan, and the right amount of butter. A traditional crêpe pan is almost completely flat, with very low, sloped sides, so it’s easy to slide a spatula under the pancake. But not everyone has a crêpe pan cluttering up their kitchen, and as celebrity chef Donald Rumsfeld used to say, you cook crêpes with the utensils you have, not the utensils you want: any frying pan with sloped sides will do, but steer clear of big cast iron skillets with tall, steep sides… like the one in all of my pictures. I managed to survive because I kept the skillet well-buttered: started with about ½ tablespoon, and added another small chunk (say ½ teaspoon) before each new pancake.

Even if that fails, a hole-y crêpe is nothing to worry about and can be easily concealed with some artful rolling. There are a number of different schools of thought on palacsinta assembly. Most common is the cigar, popularized by the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer hires Dominican instead of Cuban cigar rollers at his friend’s crêperie, with explosive consequences. This is what I grew up with, because if you’re feeding a small army, say at Christmas dinner, you can pile the rolled crêpes into a casserole and keep them in the oven on low heat. We used to cover the top layer with sour cream, which goes well with our usual fruit or sweet cheese fillings and traps in moisture so that the pancakes don’t get dry and brittle in the oven. But what if you’ve got a really chunky filling? Or say you’ve got a sauce to pour over your palacsinta, and want some more surface area? Try gyro-style: roll two sides of the pancake in, and leave it kind of open at the top. Fold it in half like a taco. Or fold in all four sides, like a wrapping a present, until you’ve got a rectangle. Hell, go crazy: make it a rhombus.

Pictured: Hole-y Crepe

Since the palacsinta are so thin they come off the griddle very quickly, and as a result it really isn’t much work to crank out a stack of pancakes tall enough to feed a crowd. But in case you’re daunted by the amount of work, and are asking yourself “why do I have to put up with this crêpe?” (LAST ONE, I promise), I ask you to just stay tuned through to the end of the following recipe, which is spectacular enough to make it worth while.

Gundel Palacsinta

Nut Filling:

1 cup milk or cream

1 cup sugar

2 cups chopped/ground walnuts

¼ cup raisins

1 Tbsp cinnamon

Zest of 1 lemon

1 shot dark rum (~ 1 ½ oz.)

• Mix milk or cream with sugar. Bring to boil.

• Lower heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Once all ingredients have been added, keep stirring the mixture over the heat for a few minutes until it reaches the desired thickness. You don’t want the filling to be dry, but you also don’t want it soaking through your palacsinta.

Chocolate Sauce:

3 egg yolks

3 Tbsp cocoa

3 Tbsp sugar

1 cup cream

4 Tbsp bittersweet chocolate

2 shots dark rum (~ 3 oz)

(can substitute brandy instead)

• Melt chocolate in a small pot or double-boiler, add cream, stir to combine, and bring to boil.

• Remove from heat and add whisk in beaten egg yolks.

• Add cocoa, sugar, rum. Return to low heat, and stir until smooth (about 5 minutes.)

Serving:
Stuff your palacsinta and set them aside.

Put the chocolate sauce in a serving dish.

Now heat about an ounce or so of rum in a glass or a measuring cup – do this over a candle if you’re being romantic, or nuke it if you can’t be bothered, but just make sure the rum is warm or it will not ignite. Dress each plate with a small splash of hot booze and a dusting of powdered sugar, then quickly place a palacsinta on each dish, drizzle with chocolate sauce, and tell your squeamish friend to put away the fire extinguisher and hit the lights. As soon as you touch a match to each plate, the desserts will be engulfed in blue flame, and they should stay lit long enough for you to carry them out and present them ceremoniously to your awestruck guests.

Unless of course you’ve used paper plates… aw crêpe.

What is it with me and ooey gooey baked goods lately? Maybe that is a question with an answer so obvious it doesn’t even need asking. Because who doesn’t love an ooey gooey baked good? It is interesting, though, this spate of “ooey gooey” titled recipes. Clearly, the word is out.

These cookies, I have to say, might have been even better than the Ooey Gooey Butter Bars from a few weeks ago (oh my, was it only a few weeks ago?). Why might these be better? Because these are ooey, gooey, buttery, and chocolatey. Very, very chocolatey. Three kinds of chocolate chocolatey: unsweetened cocoa powder, melted unsweetened chocolate, and chunks of bittersweet chocolate.

This whole cookie, in fact, seems just to be a ploy to eat chunks of bittersweet chocolate, in some presentable manner. There are more bittersweet chocolate chunks than cookie in this cookie, which is part of what makes them so ooey gooey. And then, the cookie itself, which has hardly any flour, is also an ooey gooey wonderment. As for the chocolate, the recipe suggests buying chunks or chips of bittersweet chocolate. I bought bakers’ squares and chopped them up myself, which was a bit of labor, but very worth it (I think) because chopping yourself produces a variety of chunk sizes — some big chunks, some chip sizes, and lots of chocolate shavings which will more or less melt into the cookie and make everything all the more delicious.

Make sure you have time to chill the dough in the fridge for at least an hour — that’s what helps you scoop the otherwise almost batter-like dough. Other than the chilling time and the chocolate-chopping time (and effort), these are a breeze to make. A breeze totally disproportionate to the looks of amazement that will be on your friends’ faces as they bite into one, and the looks of calculated casualness when they bring them up — again and again and again — in the days to follow.

Ooey-Gooey Double-Chocolate Cookies

Makes 36 cookies

Adapted from the LA Times, adapted in turn from Milk in Los Angeles.

Ingredients

- 1/4 pound (4 ounces) unsweetened chocolate

- 4 tablespoons ( 1/2 stick) butter

- 3 eggs

- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

- 1 cup sugar

- 1/2 cup flour

- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder

- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

- 1/2 teaspoon salt

- 1 pound bittersweet chocolate (chunks or chips are easiest, but I used a baking bar I cut up myself for both economy and deliciousness)

1. In a bowl set over a pot of simmering water (or a smaller pot inside a larger pot), melt the unsweetened chocolate and butter. Remove from the heat and cool slightly.

2. In the bowl of a mixer with a paddle attachment, or in a large bowl using a fork, combine the eggs, vanilla and sugar. Mix just until incorporated and set aside.

3. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl. Set aside.

4. Add the melted chocolate to the egg mixture and mix just until combined. Stir in the sifted dry ingredients and mix just until combined, then stir in the bittersweet chocolate.

5. Cover the batter with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour to chill thoroughly.

6. Preheat the oven to 350º F. Line a couple baking sheets with parchment (ahead of time, since your hands are about to get sticky). Try to use one hand to scoop the dough with and the other to handle it, that way only one hand gets super-sticky. Scoop out dough to make cookies the size of your choosing – the original recipe said it made 18 cookies, but I wanted smaller ones and used about a tablespoon of dough for each, yielding 36 in total.

7. Bake until the edges of the cookies are just set and the center is still soft, 10 to 12 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through. Place the cookies, still on the parchment, on a rack and cool completely before serving (this is most desirable, but for those of us without cooling racks, I just left the cookies on the pan for a few minutes and then picked up the whole piece of parchment and placed it on a cool counter surface). They will be very soft, but will firm up as they cool.

Happy soon-to-be 2010, lovelies! Actually, truth be told, I’m a bit of a new year’s grinch — I find the holiday to get really overhyped and become really unpleasant the more parties I try to cram in to one night. Give me any old Friday night over New Year’s, any year (even the end of the infamous aughts). Last  year, I believe I spent midnight running off a G train in Williamsburg to a desolate loft party, and then restraining a friend from a fight in a Greek deli (while eating a delicious triple-decker grilled chicken club sandwich, I might add) at approximately four in the morning. Not the greatest track record.

In honor of the booziest holiday I can think of, I was going to post about this punch, which I made for my birthday party a few weeks ago and despite admonishing everyone else not to have more than one cup (advice few people followed), I also didn’t follow my own advice and promptly ingested too much of this liquor + lemon juice devil drink to remember to properly photograph it. So, take my word for it, kiddos. If you want some belated making out under the mistletoe, this is the punch for you.

However, if you’re going it a little quieter this New Year’s — say, a classy dinner party (or a classy dinner party before makeout devil punch) — then this cake is the thing for you. It is perfect for any festive (or not so festive) occasion, fast and easy, chocolatey but not chocolate overload (I am not one for chocolate overload) because of the unexpected afterburn of spice.

This cake is best made one (or even two) days ahead of time, to let the flavors meld and develop. Because it’s so rich, it will stay perfectly moist. Oh, and the original recipe had half the amount of spice that I’m listing below (including my vague increase from one dash of cayenne to two). You can do less than this and then taste; I like to feel the burn a little, I suppose.

Burn-related: the creme anglaise may sound a little daunting, but it shouldn’t. It is extremely easy, and extremely unctuously delicious, and therefore extremely soothing against the spiciness of the cake. However, if you are too daunted, or simply don’t  have time (about 20 minutes, plus 2 hours chilling time) to make it,  you can substitute whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Flourless Mexican Chocolate Cake

Adapted from Simply Recipes, via David Lebovitz

Serves…10, at least

Ingredients

- 10 oz. of semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped (I used a bar of Scharffen Berger)

- 7 tablespoons of unsalted butter, cut into pieces

- 5 large eggs, room temperature

- 1 cup of sugar

- 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

- 1 1/2 teaspoon of chipotle chili powder

- 2 dashes of cayenne pepper

- Pinch of salt

- Powdered sugar for dusting (optional)