Stocking Your Pantry with Baking Essentials Week 4 – Chocolate!

Week four of eight in a series:

This is the week I’ve been waiting for in the series. This week is all about love. The love of chocolate!

Because no baker’s pantry is complete without chocolate chips, melting chocolate, baking chocolate bars and cocoa powder, let’s see if I can even scratch the surface about different baking chocolate options:

• Cocoa powder typically comes in two forms – Dutch-pressed cocoa and natural; the differences are explained well at Joy The Baker. The bottom-line and fast answer is, they aren’t interchangeable, so use whichever your recipe calls for.
• Chocolate chips – So many possibilities here, but typically semi-sweet is most used, followed by milk chocolate and then 60% or dark (at least that’s the darkest you can usually get in chocolate chips). Mini chocolate chips are a huge favorite this time of year, and many recipes let you experiment with mint chips, caramel and butterscotch chips, to name a few.
• Baking Chocolate Bars and Melting Chocolate – Baking bars as well as high-quality eating chocolate bars are used for many recipes in baking and then melting chocolate typically comes in big “barks”. Everything here from unsweetened, bittersweet, semi-sweet, milk chocolate and sweet baking chocolate.
• And don’t forget about White Chocolate – White chocolate comes in chocolate chip form and baking chocolate bars, to name two options.

This week, we’ll also stock up on fruit fillings and pumpkin purees, if you don’t make your own fillings from scratch. So, let’s talk about buying canned pre-made fillings versus making your own.

• Canned pumpkin is equally as good for you as fresh pumpkin. So, this is the option for me because it’s just plain easy. Plus, fresh pumpkin will yield a flavor nothing like what you have become used to in your traditional family pie recipe.
• Cherries are hard to come by this time of year, or actually impossible depending on where you live. Unless you buy frozen or plan ahead and freeze some from fresh in the summer.
• Blueberry pie filling is one filling I typically make from fresh or frozen, but my mom has always made amazing blueberry pies using high-quality canned pie filling.

Let me be the first to say I haven’t even begun to include every possible type of chocolate needed for your baking needs. So, as in past weeks, the shopping list below contains extra bullets for you to add where I may have missed.

And since Good Dinner Mom is all about coming up with favorite recipes, here’s a little thought you all might appreciate:

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Stocking Your Pantry with Baking Essentials Week 4 - Chocolate!

Following is a practical list of baking chocolates, fruit fillings and pumpkin puree. Extra bullets have been added for you to include additional chocolate and fruit goodies.

Author Good Dinner Mom

Ingredients

• Chocolate for baking:
• Chocolate Chips semi-sweet, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, mini chips, etc.
• Misc. baking chips like mint or caramel
• Cocoa Powder regular and Dutch-pressed
• Chocolate Baking squares - Dark semi-sweet and milk chocolate
• Pie fillings and other canned fruit:
• Pumpkin or Pumpkin Pie puree
• Blueberry Pie Filling
• Cherry Pie Filling

The beautiful pantries shown in this series can be seen here. I’m not paid or compensated to share the pantry photos or products in this series. I just love them and want to inspire you.