welcome I'm chef Eric Crowley owner of the culinary classroom in Los Angeles and today we are going to make a brandy chocolate sauce let's get started we are going to need three quarters of a cup of half-and-half two tablespoons of sugar two tablespoons of butter five ounces of chocolate chips these are semi-sweet chocolate chips and two tablespoons of brandy to begin with our sauce we're going to take our half-and-half and start to warm it up in a pan over a medium high heat going to add in our butter and our sugar and we're going to let this melt and we're even going to bring it up to a boil one of the things you'll notice here is that the milk or the half-and-half in this case it's going to start to boil around the rim of the pan I'm going to stir then this butter and get it to melt the sugar is going to melt at the same time once I start to get a nice bubbling going into this pan I will go ahead and add in the chocolate and basically stir the chocolate around until it gets melted really important that as the sugar is melting it's going to have a tendency to one to settle to the bottom of the pan it's not a bad idea to get your spatula and go along all over the bottom of the pan and even up on the sides if you're noticing that for example here on getting a little bit of caramelizing some butter actually got up to the side of the pan that's starting to turn golden brown that's fine i'm going to go ahead and lower the heat a little bit and let this start to bubble i'm actually going to cook it at a low boil for a couple of minutes and what i'm looking for is a little bit of bubbling i can actually feel with my spatula that the sugar is melted so I don't feel any kind of granular quality against the bottom of the pan so I can actually stop stirring the more you stir the more you're actually going to cool off the sauce because you wind up disturbing the surface tension you wind up cooling it off so you're going to leave that alone and you can see very shortly we start to bubble along here bubbles are going to start to come around the edges and then it's going to start to bubble up on the center of the pan too I'm going to let this cook for just a couple of for about a minute or so spatula is very important to want to utilize one that can really take a high heat this is a silicone spatula that can we stand 450 degrees a standard rubber spatula if you have a spatula at home that's made out of a hard plastic you might find that it'll actually start to melt when you wind up getting along the edges of the pan right along here so that's not going to be ideal you could use a wooden spoon as well but the spatula is really great to really cover the entire bottom of the pan and along the side of the pan so after two to three minutes have elapsed add in our chips stir that in let the hot liquid in here melt this chocolate you could utilize a bar form really important that you wind up taking the bar and break it up into chunks and then take those chunks and chop them up into really small pieces with your knife if you wind up utilizing really big chunks inside the pan they're not going to melt rapidly enough and you want to make sure that they get really nice and melted and you also want to make them you want to have them melt quickly so that's why chips come in really handy because they have a smaller size it turns out that the liquid is cooling off to rapidly and the chocolate isn't melted completely and the way to tell that is you should be absolutely smooth should have no lumps of chocolate in here at all then I can always put it back on to a low heat if I need to just to gently reheat this but I think we're going to be just by going to stir it together it's going to take just a little bit of stirring to get the half-and-half to blend up with the chocolate you can see when it does that it's going to have a really smooth appearance to it once I got that nice smooth look our chocolate sauce will be finished we're going to go ahead and stir in our brandy and for a little change of pace keep in mind that the alcohol is not going to evaporate in here while the sauce is off of the heat so for young children this may not be the sauce that you would want to serve I'm going to take some of this sauce and actually pour it into a little squeeze bottle I'm not going to need much always a good idea to go back to your pan and test your bottle and make sure that the sauce comes out before you go on to the plate I take this and just take a little zigzag like that take her cupcake can put it right on top of there to get a little bit more sauce we could actually rotate the pan and actually get a little bit drizzling on top of the cake like this really great on a vanilla cake could also be really great drizzled on some vanilla ice cream some caramel ice cream also would work really well with chocolate cake too thanks for watching be sure to click on other links so you can get other recipes if you don't see something that 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