Chocolate Frozen Yogurt

This summer I have been playing with making frozen yogurt. It began with wanting a lemon dessert and having no lemons! I had a small can of lemon pop, mixed it with a small carton of yogurt and froze it! A great sherbet! Even better when I added sugared crushed raspberries!

From there I (and Jun) forged into uncharted territory - for us. The latest recipe-less yogurt was banana, cinnamon, peanut butter yogurt. As strange as it sounds - it was healthy and pretty good.

However, the time had come to start Googeling Frozen Yogurt recipes. And chocolate was the flavor we NEEDED! I found a cooking blog called Chocolate and Zucchini. I like both of those, and, actually, my grandmother used to make wonderful chocolate zucchini bread and it was just like cake, but...I wasn't sure what I'd find here - frozen yogurt with zucchini?

But, no! She has a wonderful recipe for Chocolate Frozen Yogurt.

However, her pantry and fridge are a little more exotic than mine. I would love to try the REAL ingredients, but...here are my humble substitutions.

Good quality bittersweet chocolate - the remaining box of too bitter chocolate in the cupboard supplemented by some of those semi-sweet chocolate chips I am hoarding.

Creme fraiche or heavy cream - Jun kindly allowed me to use some of her milk. It is 3.6% milk fat. That's about has heavy as our kitchen gets.

Raw cane sugar - I suspect I could find this in Japan, but haven't. I used regular old white, cheap, moist sugar.

Good quality unsweetened cocoa powder - I hoard this too, but I used my Hershey's cocoa. That's as good quality as we get here.

Sea salt - Ummm. Not sure where ours came from, but Ryu bought the cheapest he could. Now I have a whole kilo of wet (a pain to use and unable to be shaken) salt. (Actually, now that I think of it, I forgot the salt! Oh well!)

Natural Vanilla Extract - Good old imitation here, though would LOVE some of the real thing!

Greek Yogurt - Well, I have no idea what makes yogurt Greek, and have only seen Bulgarian yogurt here - and I'm sure it isn't Bulgarian, though Kotoshu has been on some of the commercials for it and HE's Bulgarian. Instead I bought the cheapest low fat yogurt at the store. I hate to eat it, but don't mind it in my yogurt concoctions. However, first I drained it (thanks for loaning me your coffee maker/filter, Ryu) to make it a bit thicker.

I used a cooking method I thought was easier. I combined the yogurt and vanilla in the freezer container. I put the dry ingredients in a small sauce pan and made sure the cocoa was lump-free. Then I added the milk and stirred constantly over very low heat. When the chocolate was about 1/2 melted, I took it off the heat and kept stirring till it was all melted and mixed in well. Then I poured it slowly into the yogurt while Jun and I stirred.

The blogger, Clotilde Dusoulier, gives good advice on how to be sure the frozen dessert is sweet enough and how to make it without an ice-cream maker! Good common sense advice!

I made half batch, as we are only three. Each time we stir it, we taste it. And we love each taste so far. I hope there is some left for dessert tonight!

I will be visiting this food blogger often, I think!