Porcini Mascarpone Risotto, marinated cherry tomatoes and Chocolate Cake

For my best friend's birthday, I wanted to make her and her new hubby, and my BF a special dinner. So the menu for the night consisted of:

Marinated cherry tomatoes with cheese
Porcini Mascarpone Risotto
Chocolate cake with chocolate ganache


Marinated Cherry tomatoes

I cup apple cider vinegar
1 TBSP oregano (dried)
1 tsp Black pepper
pinch of salt
lemon peel
1 pint cherry tomatoes
Feta cheese
Cheddar cheese

I purused the internet for some appetizer ideas and happened to see a couple of marinated cherry tomato recipes. Intrigued by this idea, I decided to take a combination of a couple recipes and do the following:

I added the apple cider vinegar,oregano, pepper, pinch of salt and a lemon peel into a large tupperwear container. I pricked each of the tomatoes on each side and threw the tomatoes in the marinade. Let it marinate for at least a couple hours. (the longer you can wait for this, the better, I would recommend you do this overnight if possible) Then I used toothpicks and skewered the tomatoes adding a little piece of feta and cheddar cheese on each end. I also poured a little bit of the marinade on top of the tomatoes after placing them on the serving dish.

Porcini Mascarpone Risotto

For the main entree, I chose a recipe from Cooking Light (huge shocker I know) and I pretty much followed the recipe to the T. The only thing is, if you are planning to use this recipe as a main course, I would recommend you double the rice amount. I chose to do this at the last minute since I thought one cup of rice was too little, and was very glad I did that! Between the four of us, we just had a little bit left over. I also bought extra broth and ended up using both cans of veggie broth for this recipe. This recipe is delightful, it tastes rich and and flavorful. The mascarpone does add a nice touch but it is not neccesary so if you can't find mascarpone, don't sweat it. I couldn't locate mascarpone in my local grocery stores so I had to trek to whole foods for this.

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1949716

Dark Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Ganache

And for the dessert, my best friend loves chocolate cake with chocolate icing so I decided to go all out and make her the chocolate cake with chocolate ganache from Martha's Stewart's website.

http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/dark-chocolate-cake-with-ganache-frosting

A couple notes on this cake.

For the cake, I used larger cake pans, if you do this, I would recommend lowering the cooking time to 25-30 minutes. I put my cakes in for 35 minutes and they were over done and came out too dry for my taste. Also, if you cannot find dutch processed cocoa (which I did not) you can just use unsweetened baking cocoa and just leave out the baking soda. I used Ghirardelli chocolate and baking cocoa for this recipe. The ganache tastes amazing and defintely helped to add some moisture to my poor cakes that were overdone. I don't know if I would use this cake recipe again, if I did I would definitely cook it for less time, but I would definitely use this ganache recipe again!