Have you ever wondered how easy those video recipes really are? We’ve all seen them, a two minute long video with a delicious looking dessert recipe, but how often do we actually try them out? Well, I decided to try one of these recipes and see if reality matched the sweet image of dessert in the videos.
Tasty is the reigning authority on easy, delicious, and interesting desserts for bakers and novices alike, and so I took their Chocolate Almond Braid recipe for a whirl. It seems almost too easy and too delicious not to try. A crispy flaky pastry filled with gooey chocolate and covered in chopped almonds, it’s minimal ingredients and easy prep and baking time make it almost a no-brainer.
All you need is one sheet of puff pastry, a 3.5 oz chocolate bar, melted butter, and some chopped almonds; then bake it at 415 degrees Fahrenheit for 20-25 minutes. I followed the steps in the video closely, cutting the parts of the braid and folding them over the chocolate bar placed at the center carefully to mimic that of the video. I then covered it in a butter wash and sprinkled some almonds over the top of it. Going in to the oven, the dessert looked almost identical to the one in the video, and I was super confident that it would come out as easily as in the video. Coming out of the oven, however, was a whole other story!
The puff pastry was difficult to make stick to the chocolate when I was first folding the braid, and once it is fully baked it is deliciously flakey but the chocolate at the center isn’t gooey and stuck to the pastry itself. As well, the chocolate bar center doesn’t melt as easily as it does in the video, it gets hard and over heated in areas at the high temperature needed to bake the pastry. I used a milk chocolate bar that didn’t react well to the heat, so next time, I would recommend a different chocolate better for melting, and possibly baking for longer at a lower temp. The taste was much better than appearance in the end, proving that any pastry with melted chocolate at its center is bound to be delicious and popular. My experience with this endeavor? If you can get past the look of the pastry, it’s totally worth the experiment for a gooey and chocolatey dessert.
