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- So, you guys might have may or may not have
already seen this recipe on the Tasty channel
a couple of times.
I did a behind the scenes of it.
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Yikes.
I really want to give you guys more instructions
and more of a story on how to make this happen.
So the inspiration for this recipe comes from
a lot of New York restaurants were serving it
at the time.
It was pretty popular.
It was all over Instagram.
I was like, "Man, I want to figure out
"how to do that."
For this recipe, you actually do not want
to use milk chocolate, you want to use good chocolate
because you want it to be firm, you want it to be snappy.
You don't want any of those extra sugars
or other things that they put into candy bars
that can help kind of make the ball a little soft.
So you really want to get nice chocolate for this.
You want to melt your chocolate,
but you do not want to overheat it.
It will cause it to coagulate.
So the most important thing is that you need
to find the right containers, or molds, for the recipe.
I used refillable ornaments that I just got online.
You can find them on Amazon.
Basically they're these clear, plastic ball ornaments
and depending on how big you want
the chocolate ball to be, it can be anywhere from
four inches in diameter to around eight inches.
You really just need to figure out
what size you're gonna make, and who you're making it for.
That's probably the most important thing
and make sure you get multiple
because you're gonna make crack some of the balls.
The trick is to pour that amount of chocolate
into the ornament, close it really, really, really tight.
You really just want to like hold it and press it
so you do not let any of the chocolate escape
from the edges and just slowly rotate it.
But you also don't want to move too slow.
Sometimes what happens is that you rotate it
and it doesn't coat the whole ball,
it will cool down before it even coats the whole thing
and it's just kind of hard.
So you might just be like kind of doing
this weird like ballerina dance where you hold it
and look at it.
If you watch the behind Tasty, I do this like 300 times.
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So you kind of have to do that and watch it
and kind of tap it a little bit
to get it into the right spots.
After that, they go in the freezer.
When they go in the freezer, you want to make
sure that they're level.
That they won't just roll around everywhere
and every two minutes or so until they're set
you want to actually check them.
Make like, I would say like, four to six
of the chocolate balls, put them in the freezer,
expect some of them to break because you really
just need one.
The key to opening it is to really just make sure
that at first, you use your hands to kind of hold it
and warm it a little bit.
So you kind of see like this huge thing.
Sometimes it'll crack, sometimes it won't.
It really is a game of luck.
We're putting it on a heated sort of bowl
to kind of rub so that the chocolate melts
and you kind of get this hole for it to sit and stand on
to fill it with anything you want.
After that, you kind of put whatever it is on the plate.
The key here is to keep the plate, the ball,
and anything cold.
So if you're using ice cream, keep it in the freezer
until the last second.
If you're using berries, keep them in the fridge.
If you're using a brownie or a cake,
also keep it in the freezer.
Keep your plate in the freezer.
You do not want the ball to melt before anything happens.
Once you take that out, you kind of assemble
one brownie or a cake.
You kind of put some berries around it.
I like strawberries.
I like blueberries.
You can fill it with whatever you want, honestly.
You kind of put the ice cream scoop on top of that
and then you put the ball.
You kind of want to snuggle it over the sides.
If it's not fitting, you can either shave off
some more chocolate, take out some of the berries.
You just want to make sure that when the ball
is on the plate, it looks like nothing is underneath it,
it's just a chocolate ball on a plate
because that's the surprise.
Don't worry, if there's like little cracks
between the plate and the ball itself
just run a ring of berries around it.
It covers up most of the problems,
that's what I pretty much did.
That is your chocolate ball that is almost ready to serve.
The last and final bit is going to be
the really hot ganache that kind of goes on it
and turns it from chocolate ball to magic chocolate ball.
The chocolate ganache is just even parts milk and cream.
You are pretty much ready to serve.
So what you'll do is you'll serve the desert
to whoever you're making it for and you'll pour
in a circle motion over the top
and then boom, that's it from there.
You got money raining everywhere,
horns, fanfares playing.
What actually happens is that the chocolate
is going to melt the ball and cause a waterfall effect
where first it will make a little bit of a hole
where it first melts then the entire thing
should theoretically crumble and collapse
in a really beautiful, melty way,
and the walls will fall away revealing every single
beautiful thing that you put inside.
Hopefully it's colorful berries with ice cream and cake.
Maybe it's a wedding ring, I don't know.
Is that how I'm gonna propose?
Maybe, don't worry about it.
If my future fiancee is watching out there.
I should probably change up the method, huh.
Five layer brownie cheesecake
was probably one of my greatest architectural feats,
if I would say so myself.
I was actually studying engineering in college.
Not really a good student, to be honest,
but one thing I definitely did pick up
was the ability of how to approach a problem
and how to look at it from certain angles,
especially when things don't exist.
A lot of times we were asked to do hypothetical questions
like if you wanted to accomplish this,
how would you go about achieving it?
I learned that the easiest way is to break down
the problem into its parts and kind of
almost work backwards.
Cookie dough, Oreos, and brownies
are a very common combination,
and I wanted to take that further.
I really wanted to turn the flavor profile
of like a triple stacked brownie into something else.
I wanted to turn it into more of like
this spectacle desert that you could really wow
everybody at a party with.
I just absolutely love layers and clean layers.
So that was something that I set out to do
was to turn a triple decker brownie into a cheesecake.
The challenge with this recipe is that all of these elements
all bake at different times, different temperatures,
and have different thicknesses.
I kind of wanted to go after the vibe
of when you go to a cheesecake factory
and they set down a slice of this beautifully cut
and assembled cheesecake.
I really didn't know how this was going to go
until I made it and I had to do a lot of pre-planning,
and thinking, and being able to try to predict
how the food would behave in a way
that I had never done before.
I was hoping that the brownie batter would not get dry.
I guess that the cream cheese in the mixture
would give the brownie moisture.
It was really gratifying to pull something like this off.
Especially when you have never really done this before.
I guess I felt really happy, relieved,
that it actually worked.
After the brownie and cheesecake were set,
that's when I put the Oreos and cookie dough on top.
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I don't try to do recipes a lot of times
because I think I really enjoy the challenge
of getting it right on the first or the second try.
It's kind of nerve wracking to cut it open
because you really don't know how it's gonna turn out
until you actually slice it open into the layers.
To my luck, it really worked out well.
I was able to see all four elements in their entirety.
I love to spend time just thinking about the food
and really just trying to guess and predict
how food is going to behave.
Sometimes I really just sit down and write things down
and try to map out or draw out
how certain foods will look before and after.
So for this one, I thought about it a lot
and made some decisions.
That's the sort of approach that I like to take
because there's something really cool
about trying something that's completely new
and then somehow landing it on the first try.
So in my video, I combined brownies, Oreos,
cookie dough, and cheesecake.
What combination of deserts do you want me to attempt next?
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I tried to come up with an idea for a recipe.
What I really want to do is make people go like, "Wow",
and really show them something that they are familiar with
but maybe in a new way, or maybe something
that is new to them but in a familiar way.
It's always about taking an element of something
that people know, twisting it and making it cooler,
making it different, combining it with other things.
The end result is the stereotypical wow.
That's sort of usually the approach I take
when I want to really showcase food to people in a cool way.
So for the eight deserts in one sheet pan,
it kind of came from a time where it was the holidays.
I had seen a lot of videos kind of pop up
around deserts and baking and pie.
Food Network actually released this one video
that was pretty cool.
It was four pies baked in the same sheet pan
and to myself, I was like, "Wow, that's really smart,
"but can I take it even a little further?"
I know that pie is just one desert.
There are a lot of deserts out there
and a lot of baked goods that people like to eat.
My hunch was that around Christmas time,
around the Holidays, usually at these potlucks or parties,
there'd be a widespread of deserts.
Ranging from cookies to brownies to cheesecakes to pies.
I think this crazy idea came about because in my head
I was like, "Man, what happens if you kind of put
"all those deserts together?
"Like is there a way to take every single desert
"that everybody loves and turn it into just one thing?"
I think that's kind of how the idea was born.
I basically thought of what can I use
to serve this giant desert and how do I make sure
that everybody gets a piece that they want?
Sometimes when you bring a desert to a party,
not everybody likes brownies,
not everybody likes cheesecake.
Is there a way to make sure that no matter who you are
at the party, you're gonna have one piece
that's gonna speak to you?
That's how I sort of designed this eight deserts
in one sheet pan.
I wanted to sort of build it in a way
where if you cut it in a precise manner,
you would end up with just like a bunch
of different flavors.
You wouldn't really cut it just along
where the flavors met, but you'd be able to get pieces
or bars that would have two flavors, three flavors.
The golden crown is when you get that piece
with all four flavors in them.
The challenge in designing this was that no matter
what piece you get, the flavor should still go together.
So you kind of have to play this weird math
mix and match game of like do these two flavors
go together?
Okay, if this goes together with this,
then this must be next to here.
It was a lot of me drawing things on a piece of paper
and crumpling it up like you do in the movies
and throwing it in the trashcan and kind of restarting.
After a lot of trial and error, I manage to get
a certain layout of which deserts go in which area
in the pan so that no matter which piece you got,
it would always taste great.
I'm super, super proud of this dish.
I'd love it you would all make it this year.
A lot of people are intimidated by it
and aren't sure if all of the deserts would bake together.
But actually, I was able to make it on my first try
and I really think you could too.
Just really customize it how you want.
If you do make it, hit me up, slide in my DM's,
throw me a little pic.
Oh, God, that sounds so weird (beep).
If you do end up making it,
I wanna see how you customize it.
Hit me up, send me a DM, show me what you got.
Oh, yes.
Woo.
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