Jan 18, 2011
Chocolate Butter
Along with boiled condensed milk, chocolate butter is one of the simplest - and the most nostalgic - home-made sweet treats of the Soviet period. Under conditions of total deficiency*, you had to be thrifty and creative. You know what we sometimes did with chocolate sweets? We spread some butter on a piece of bread, then cut a chocolate sweet into slices and put it on top of the bread. Or sometimes it was just bread, butter, and sugar on top. These simple pleasures were not as miserable as you might have thought - as everything was organic and natural. You couldn’t store products in the fridge for weeks and weeks and weeks like now: they spoiled. Butter was extremely thick, rich and… yes, buttery: the quintessence of butter. Bread was always crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, somewhat similar to ciabatta; the crust was slightly salty and pale golden. Another thing is that sometimes you could notice dirty fingermarks on a loaf of bread, so a common practice was to quickly roast each loaf over a fire in order to disinfect it, hehe.
This morning I spread a spoonful of chocolate butter on a slice of a multigrain bun and meditated about my childhood and all the flavours that are gone for good. But back then, how could I think that I would ever try mascarpone, and wasabi, and arugula?.. And that I would discuss all that with people from all around the globe? All changes are to the good…
*A riddle I invented as a child: “It’s round, green, and grows in Moscow. What is it?” - the right answer is orange, hahaha.
Chocolate Butter
Ingredients
150g butter, softened
2 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tsp powdered sugar
1 tsp powdered vanilla sugar
Mix all ingredients and beat with a fork until well-blended. To serve, spread on a slice of bread and sprinkle with chopped hazelnuts and chocolate shavings.
P.S. Our blog will be featured in Be@Home’s bi-monthly website review tomorrow!!
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Simple and delicious. I suppose you can also use it as icing for cakes and muffins
Thank you Three-Cookies! Wow I’ve never thought of using it as an icing before :)
Wow! this is the first time I see chocolate flavored butter! It’s kinda like chocolate icing without the large amount of icing sugar isn’t it?
Carine, well yes, it doesn’t use a lot of sugar at all, although of course you can adjust the sweetness to your taste. I think this also depends on the quality of butter - you know, that butter you can buy on a farmer’s market is somewhat sweet by itself and it doesn’t need lots of sugar at all!
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Now this is how one should eat butter. The simplicity of this is wonderful, great post.
Oh, chocolate butter sounds divine!
Thank you Lynne :) yeah and it was so nice to remember my childhood :)
Oh, the good old soviet times! As you said, one had to be creative and to be honest, some of the simpler things we had back then are still what I crave for from time to time. Is this butter what we called “cocoa butter”? I remember my aunt bringing us some from time to time.
Hey Gali, let’s feel nostalgic together :)) what are your favourite Soviet foods? As for the butter, in our family we always called it Chocolate butter, but of course strictly speaking it’s cocoa butter :)
I’m quite lucky that we have an Armenian shop around here that sells some essentials (condensed milk in those tins you can cook, wafers from which you can make that cake with the cooked condensed milk, etc.) What I miss most are the cheap ice cream “cups”, I remember walking around my grandpa and he would always buy those for us, they were something really cheap. I also kind of miss the old white bread that was shaped like a brick, in L’viv it wasn’t sold everywhere and we had to queue to get some. And obviously the candy, there used to be some amazing Ukrainian made candy but these days it’s the same brand but it tastes like… well… shit. Even the korovka doesn’t taste the same to me.
Alas I wasn’t around during the time of the 1 or 3 kopek bread buns but apparently those were worth it. They were already way more expensive in the late 80s. Still, that’s the classic that always gets mentioned around our family dinners.
Oh yeah, ice cream was completely different too! So buttery and thick! huh I know what you mean about that candy, same story here - the manufacturers admit they had to adjust their recipes to European standards. Which didn’t automatically make their chocolate taste like Swiss or Belgian of course. Now it just tastes like bad chocolate and smells of burnt oil.
I miss a chocolate cake called “Luna”. It was a dark chocolate sponge cake soaked in some booze. It was somewhat bitter even. Yum!