Ligia's Kitchen

Ligia’s Kitchen: Glazed Chocolate Orange Brownies

Video

This the 22nd episode of Ligia’s Kitchen, and let me just say this first: yum! 🙂

This Christmas, make super-tasty raw chocolate brownies with juicy, honey-dipped orange peels, glazed with thick, creamy chocolate syrup! It’s a decadent holiday dessert that’s perfect for Christmas or New Year’s!

The video is exactly 3 minutes long because we were challenged to edit a full recipe (that would normally take 7-10 minutes) to that length by Chow.com. It was a challenge issued to the YouTube Next Chef winners. We met the challenge dead on and walked away unscathed, albeit a bit dazed! 🙂 While the video fits within the 3-minute space, it would do much better as a 4-5 minute video.

Here’s the recipe!

Chocolate Glaze:

  • 2 cups raw cocoa powder
  • 2 cups water
  • 3 tbsp cocoa butter
  • 4 tbsp honey
  • 1 tsp mesquite

Brownie Mixture:

  • 4 cups flour from sunflower seeds
  • 1/2 cup chocolate syrup
  • 1 cup orange peels, diced and dipped in honey

Decoration:

  • coconut flakes
  • almond slivers
  • golden raisins
  • anise stars
  • chocolate glaze
  • pomegranate

Enjoy and thanks for watching!

LK-022-EN-HD
Released 12/20/11

Thoughts

Where’s the Netflix Shelf?

The more movies and shows Ligia and I watch on Netflix, the more convinced we become that Netflix lacks a vital feature. We call it the Shelf. Where is it?

The Netflix Shelf would hold titles we’ve seen and loved. It would contain two collections: a smart collection, which would automatically bring together the titles we’ve rated 4 stars or higher), but more importantly a manual collection, where we could add titles we’d like to watch again in the feature — movies and shows we really love, perennial favorites if you will.

Within the Shelf, we could sort titles by genre, keywords, actor or director (using the metadata added by Netflix staff or metadata we could add ourselves).

There were so many occasions we saw a movie, loved it, wanted to store it somewhere so we could see it again in the future, but didn’t want to leave it in the queue, cluttering up the list of titles we still haven’t seen. There was and is no place for them yet, and that’s regrettable, because it’s a lost opportunity for Netflix to create customer goodwill at a time when they need it.

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Video Log

Sasha’s gorgeous, dramatic eyes

Sasha is one of our adopted cats (she’s still a kitten, not yet mature). And she’s got these gorgeous yellow eyes. She’s incredibly expressive, all the time, and unlike our other cats, she loves to look into our eyes, for long periods of time. We adopted her when she was just a tiny bundle of fur (here’s what she looked like back then).

I recorded this video as she rested one day, while Ligia played with another of our cats (I think it was Zuzu). I loved how her eyes dilated and contracted based on what she was thinking as she watched the game. I hope you’ll enjoy it as well! I edited it so it’s dramatic — after all, Sasha is always dramatic. When she’s thirsty, it’s as if there’s been a year-long drought and she’s about to die. When she’s hungry, it’s as if she hasn’t eaten in a week. She loves to play it up. That’s our Sasha.

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Places

Piata Regele Ferdinand in Winter

The central plaza in the city of Medias (Southern Transilvania, Romania) is called Piata Regele Ferdinand (King Ferdinand Plaza). This is what it looks like in winter, during a snowfall.

That’s what it would look like this winter as well, if there were some snow around. I recorded this video almost a year ago to the day and so far, I’ve only seen some frost around. Just yesterday, it was into the low teens (Celsius) and super sunny — warm enough to do some light carpentry work outside.

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Thoughts

Where’s Google Photos in this drop-down menu?

If you use FeedBurner (which has been part of Google for a good number of years now), you probably know about the Photo Splicer feature, which allows you to merge your photo feed from services like Flickr, BuzzNet or Webshots into your site feed, providing extra content for your readers. It’s a great little option and I hope Google keeps it turned on for years to come.

My question for Googlers reading this is simple: where’s Google Photos (PicasaWeb) in that drop-down menu? Isn’t it about time for it to show up there?

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