Chocolate and

Quick Duck Confit

2010-11-29T19:21:00.000-08:00

3 hours - freezer to plate; I promise.

I love duck confit. And I usually only get it at Cafe Campagne once or twice a year. But last week I was at Bob's Quality Meats picking up the Thanksgiving turkey, and there was a package of 3 duck legs and thighs in the freezer case, and I had no other ideas for dinner, and it was cold and snowing and I was going home early. So. I bought the duck legs at 2:30. Home at 3:00. Duck legs in a bowl of warm water while I looked up a bunch of recipes on Mr. Google. Yes, I know you're not supposed to thaw poultry in warm water. Whatever. Turns out there are a few recipes that say you can make duck confit in 2 or 3 hours.

3:30 - mostly thawed duck legs in the cast iron skillet. Prior to the skillet, poke the skin with a knife to let the fat out, and salt a little, then put on the heat for 15-20 minutes skin side down. Then 10-15 minutes on the other side. Then in the oven to 350 - put the skillet in with skin side up for 30 min, (cover with foil) - turn over for another 30 min (still covered), then finish at 375 with skin side up (take the foil off) for the last 30 min.

I had my doubts, but this was really fabulous - the meat was tender and falling off the bone, the skin was crispy. . . . Bonus - while the duck is cooking, boil 5 small potatoes until tender. Drain and peel the skin off, then smash lightly, and fry until golden brown on both sides in some of the duck fat that you skimmed off during one of the times when you turned the legs over. Not health food - but kind of mental health food.

Serve with a champagne cocktail to celebrate your brilliance.

Figs

2009-10-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

When I haven't posted in a while I get kind of shy and awkward - everything I write sounds contrived. So I will just say that I am looking for an excuse to post these pictures, which I love. Figs are so Fall. Sensuous, sweet, soft, seedy. Fig paste and fig jam, especially with cheese. Goat cheese and figs; brie and figs; manchego and figs. Figs, dried, are also an essential component of the esteemed fruitcake.

But I think the things I love the most about them are their color, and the fact that they are willing to grow on Mercer Island. There is one tree in the orchard, on a gentle west-facing slope, and most years we get some. This year was good – hot and dry in the summer leading to a harvest of over 50 – other years more like 5. When they’re young, they are tiny little lime green buds – until really late in the summer, it seems like there is no possible way they can get ripe. Even in September when they are the size of golf balls, hard and still lime green – no way will they get ripe before the first frost. Then all of a sudden they’re tinged purple part of the way up, then purple all the way. Still green inside, then all of a sudden pink. That’s the point where I grab them – maybe they’d get riper, but maybe the raccoon would get them, or the crows, and really they’re very very good right at this point. With this year’s 50, I started with eating some fresh, of course, but then went right to fig jam, to fill some turnovers. Cut 20 figs into eighths and put into a medium saucepan, add 6 T brown sugar, and the juice and rind of a small lemon. Cinnamon if you want, but I don’t. Cook over low to medium heat, stirring frequently, until much of the liquid is gone and the figs are reduced to a thick and jammy consistency. Take your favorite pastry – either a pie crust or a puff pastry, and fill with the jam, fold over and seal, sprinkle with sugar, and bake in accordance with whatever pastry you used. In this one I used puff pastry – they always bake better if you pop them in the freezer for 10 minutes before baking.

Chocolate Dipped Hazelnut Shortbread

2009-09-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

This will be a shorter post than planned. Actually shorter than the one I just wrote and then lost into the void where all lost work goes when the internet and your computer conspire against you. ** Sigh ** We've all been there, and no amount of cussing and pouting helps. So, short version - not posting, not baking, not happy about it - especially the not baking part. So I baked these this weekend. Life is good again.

Chocolate Dipped Hazelnut Shortbread

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 T vanilla

1/4 t. salt

2 cups flour

1/2 cup toasted hazelnuts

12 oz. chocolate chips
3 T butter

Cream butter and sugar in stand mixer with paddle attachment. Add vanilla and salt, and stir in flour on low until incorporated. Add up to 1/4 cup more flour if the dough is really sticky. Form dough into a log, wrap in plastic wrap, chill one hour. Slice into discs, bake at 350 degrees F approximately 15-20 minutes until light brown. When cool, dip halfway into chocolate chips melted with butter. Place on clean parchment to cool, then put into muffin cups to store and serve. Better the next day.

Green Walnut Liqueur

2009-07-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

Hey there - so this looked like fun. And since the squirrels get all the walnuts exactly 11 seconds after they're ready, I thought it was the only real way to get any of them at all - that is, pick them when they're nice and green and appear to be of no use at all.
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2009/07/liqueur_de_noix_green_walnut_liq.html

This used a very expensive but ancient bottle of vodka - DL says use the cheap stuff, but it was sunday, liquor stores closed, and based on how long this bottle had been around it wasn't getting used any time soon. It is currently a wild shade of chartreuse. Supposedly drinkable when it turns a coffee brown, and supposedly perfect poured on vanilla ice cream. As with all good things, further research is clearly called for. Will report on the results in due course.

Ravioli - the perfect food

2009-06-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

Scout would have wanted me to not be sad, and to get into the kitchen again, where we both loved to hang out. He was particularly skilled at cleaning up the floor. The shortest measurable time period was from when the food hit the floor to when Scout leapt to his feet to scramble over and Hoover it up. Cheese was a special favorite. With that thought in mind, we made veal ravioli last weekend, and pizza the weekend before.

Having a 20-quart Hobart at the bakery for all the dough is a blessing and a curse - it makes the process so simple, but the capacity is so large that you have to make like a quintuple batch just to give the mixer something to work with. Which comes up to something like 10 eggs and 10 cups of flour for the pasta dough - yield is about 4-5 pounds of fresh dough. And pizza for a small army.

Both were yummy - the pasta dough needs to be thinner next time, though the thicker dough was easy to work with and prevented filling leakage. The pizza was nearly perfect - I have the dough and the toppings nailed, but continue my quest for the perfect sauce.

Fresh Pasta

2 cups flour

2 eggs

3-6 T water

Mix in a stand mixer until the dough pulls together and forms a ball - it should be firm and dry-ish, but not crumbly - too little water and it doesn't hold together, too much and you end up adding tons more flour when you roll it out. Let the pasta dough rest for 20 minutes, covered. Then divide into four pieces and process through a pasta machine (at home I use a small hand cranked Atlas) until desired thickness is reached.

Filling for ravioli

1 lb. ground veal

1 carrot, diced

1 celery stick, diced

1/2 onion, diced

1 lb ricotta

1/4 c parmesan

salt, pepper, fresh thyme - to taste

Sautee the diced veggies in olive oil - add the ground veal and cook until done. Cool. Put in food processer and pulse lightly to make fine crumbles. Put into a bowl and add the cheeses and seasonings. Use as a filling for ravioli, or manicotti, or stuffed shells.

Sauce at your discretion - chopped fresh tomatoes, butter and oil, etc.

A Tribute to Scout 1996-2009

2009-05-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Scout - In 1996 he was 8 weeks old and 12 pounds. A wiggly little package who loved us completely from the first day. The bigger of the two chocolate boys in the litter. He lived for treats and pets and hugs. And treats. Smiled. Ran. Just hung out. Rolled on his back in the grass and popped up like he'd just discovered the best thing ever. Played in the water. Pretty much always wanted to go in the car. Laid in the driveway behind the wheels of the truck so we couldn't leave without him. Chewed up one shoe in his whole life. Still had his first squeaky toy ever - all he did was carry them around. Except of course for the stuffed kitten - that one got a little chew now and then. Fetched, but not obsessed with it. For 13 years we never had to clean anything off the kitchen floor. Loved chicken, fish, blueberries, cheese. Would eat a salad as long as it had dressing on it. He had three basic moods - happy, tired, and hungry. After a nap or a meal he just went right back to happy.

I never knew I could love him that much. Scout - I think of you every day and love you so much. You were the best and my heart is bigger for knowing you.

March 2009 Daring Bakers! Lasagne

2009-03-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

First, the legal notices: The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

There - that should keep the search-bots happy, and establish that I did the deed and posted! I have not been able to keep up with the daring and gorgeous bakers, missing a # of challenges, but I still want to play! So, here is the lovely green pasta. . . .

You may notice that it is NOT in the shape of lasagne noodles, and you would be correct. Truth - this is ravioli from last fall. I have made this pasta a number of times before - I think my first spinach noodles were in the 90's, to be precise, and I LOVE them, but it was just not gonna happen this month. Instead, I used commercial no-boil sheet (Barilla = v. Italian), and made the Bechamel, which for me was the real challenge. I am usually willing to go with ricotta and mozzarella as a filling, but I love the Beschamel, and I am usually not patient enough to make it, thus the challenge. Oh, and not to nitpick or sound too cranky, but this whole exercise is not really baking - this is definitely a Daring Cooks challenge in my book. But whatever, it's delicious . . . .

So, here is the finished product - the Beschamel really adds a wonderful silky quality to the dish, and I love it - I used the recipe from the challenge, with the addition of about 8 oz. of Fontina cheese. And I made a tomato sauce with ground turkey, just because today is a Wednesday and there is no possible way to make the real ragu. So there. Still yum.

Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies

2009-03-19T10:21:00.001-07:00

I'm ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille . . . . Hee!
This is quite the seductive cookie - sweet, but not too. A little delicate in texture, but packed with chocolate flavor, with pools of molten chocolate throughout. Simple - no eggs, so it's instantly vegan, if you care about that sort of thing. Oh wait - it's full of butter - nevermind then. . . .

You know those 2# bags of Guittard chocolate chunks you can get at Big John's? They are the perfect perfect chocolate "chip" for these cookies - cut them in half though otherwise they are too big. I tried a batch with toasted hazelnuts too - fantastic, though they are better the next day after the flavors marry a bit.

Divine with coffee - I had two for breakfast this morning! So, to those of you who think I eat cake for breakfast every morning, I don't -sometimes it's cookies! :)

Recipe from Orangette

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

¼ tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

4 Tbsp. (½ stick) unsalted butter

2/3 cup granulated sugar

1/3 cup light brown sugar

7 Tbsp. unsweetened cocoa powder

1/3 cup plain yogurt, preferably not low- or nonfat

1 tsp. vanilla extract

½ cup chocolate chips, preferably Ghirardelli brand, either semisweet or bittersweet

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone liner.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.Place the butter in a medium microwave-safe bowl, and microwave briefly, until just melted. Add the sugars, and sift in the cocoa. (You can skip the sifting if you want, but my cocoa almost always has lumps, and I don’t like cocoa lumps in my cookies.) Stir to blend well. The mixture will be somewhat thick and pasty, like wet sand. Add the yogurt and vanilla and stir to mix thoroughly. Add the dry flour mixture, and stir to just combine. Add the chocolate chips and stir to incorporate.Drop the dough by generous tablespoons onto the prepared baking sheet. (I use my tablespoon-size measuring spoon to scoop and shape the dough into little domes. Rinsing the spoon regularly helps to keep the dough from sticking, and leaving the spoon slightly wet after each rinsing helps too.) You should be able to fit about 8 or 9 cookies, nicely spaced, on a standard sheet pan. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes, or until the tops of the cookies have crackled slightly and look set. Transfer the sheet pan to a wire rack, and cool the cookies on the pan for 10 minutes. Transfer them to the rack to cool completely. Repeat with remaining dough.

Checking in

2009-03-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

I lost my desire to post, to take pictures, and to futz around with new recipes - maybe the winter blahs? I am still baking, though to read this blog you wouldn't know it. A whole month of February goes by and no posts -- s'ok, February was not much to write home about, except maybe the sweet mini-vacation in Phoenix (36 hours of free time, one pedicure, one hike up Camelback, one lunch by the pool, one long walk, one glass of champagne, one bargain pair of running shoes at Big 5, one fig scone - kinda packed a lot in!)

Now I am actually feeling like I could start running again - I know! well, maybe anyway. In the meantime, and maybe directly related, I am making puff pastry in 7# batches on the sheeter! Forgot to take pics the last time I baked some but it came up perfectly - golden brown and even. Magical stuff.

Random notes - the flowers on this cake were just divine - ok , that's all for now!

Ricotta 101 - Make this!!

2009-01-28T15:52:00.000-08:00

Here is the feel-good recipe of the month, maybe even the whole year. Homemade ricotta cheese. It is empowering because what was once a mystery is now at your command, and it is a revelation to anyone who ever thought of ricotta as a mere ingredient as opposed to something delicious on its own.

Words cannot describe the unbelievable silky, creamy, salty, sweet smoothness of homemade ricotta - still warm-ish, slathered on crackers (also homemade - recipe to come).

Ridiculously easy, and the transformation from milk to cheese is nothing short of a miracle.

Heat 2 quarts of whole milk and 1 t. salt in a large sauce pan. When it comes to a simmer, add 2 T. lemon juice and stir gently for a minute or two - curds will form immediately and separate from the whey. Take it off the heat and let it rest a minute or two, then gently scoop the curds out with a slotted spoon and drain in a fine mesh sieve, or a coarse sieve lined with cheesecloth. Let drain a few minutes, then scoop into a bowl and let cool a bit. Eat slightly warm or at room temperature, plain, or sprinkled with pepper or herbs. Refrigerate any leftovers - (Ha ha ha - that's kind of an inside joke. Unless you double this, there will be NO leftovers!)

There is a pronounced lemony flavor when the cheese is less than an hour old, but that fades a bit into the sweetness of the cheese itself after that time.

I am trying this in lasagne soon, and will report out as soon as I do. I am also wondering if vinegar would work as well as lemon juice - chemistry say it should. More research is clearly called for.

Red Velvet Cake, and my high horse

2009-01-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

OK, I really should know better. Because whenever I say "never", the universe immediately starts conspiring to make sure that it happens sooner rather than later. And I have been saying "never" about Red Velvet cake for a long time - as in, we will never do this in the bakery because it is not our tradition and there are lots of other people who make it and really really I think it takes too much food dye and maybe that makes me a food snob but I just don't have the red velvet in my blood even though with all that floofy frosting it does look pretty divine.

But then, it started cropping up all over, including here, and I totally respect Ann's food sensibility and so I thought I really should make it just to have some factual basis for all the talk. So, even though I thought I was going to make this months ago, I finally made it last night and wow is it ever gorgeous! And the floofy frosting is more than one could hope for - not too sweet, light, perfectly spreadable but not too melty even when warm. . . . .

This was much praised at the office, the frosting especially, though the cake was moist and delicious too. Yes, I could definitely over-indulge in this!

So, apparently I should get off my high horse about Red Velvet Cake. Good lord, what could this mean for vegan and gluten free??!!

Happy New Year!

2009-01-12T19:38:00.001-08:00

Ah, not that much new, but still having lots of fun with the bakery. Well, really just recovering from the snow and the wedding show, etc. And I just wanted to put something new up, but I haven't taken any pictures in the past few days. This weekend we visited Bakery Nouveau in West Seattle. Wow. That is what every bakery wants to be when they grow up. Cherry-almond croissants. Pizza. Sicilian (thick-crust) pizza. Artisan bread. Eclairs. Chocolates. Raisin pinwheels. Chocolate hazelnut slices. Passion fruit dome. Brioche. Pineapple Brioche. Baguettes. Um, not that I did an inventory or anything, but Yum!
This little darlin' is mine, cute and delicious, if I do say so myself. But the ones at Bakery Nouveau are divine!

The 2009 Seattle Wedding Show

2009-01-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

January 3 and 4, 2009 - here is a picture of our booth. This was an amazing adventure. So many new things to learn. Working on developing a logo, working on design and copy for a brochure, physically getting everything printed, deciding on what display cakes to bring, how to set up the booth for best visual impact, what we needed in the booth, staffing the booth, moving in and moving out (in the snow!), how much cake to take, the best way to serve samples (there are actually more options than you might think! - sample cups, on napkins, in cupcake holders, etc). This was so much adrenalin, and fun, and exhaustion.

The cake in the very front of the booth was an inspiration - I saw the Martha Stewart Weddings magazine a week before the show, and was able to order feather butterflies from the same vendor she used, and we were able to put the cake together in time for the show. It was really fun/funny to have people walk up to the booth and shriek "ohmygod that's the martha stewart cake!!" And I caught one of my helpers nonchalantly saying, oh yeah, they took a picture of our cake for that magazine! I stopped laughing just long enough to tell her she can't say that!

Merry Christmas and buche de noel!

2008-12-25T16:17:00.001-08:00

Ah, the fabulousness of a lazy day, with nothing to do but walk the dog and cook and eat dinner! Last night was lobster and salad and fresh bread. Today is crab cakes and duck on the rotissiere. And if I eat enough of that, plus the aforementioned bread, and save room for the dessert, well, then, the fresh pasta with mushrooms might just have to wait until tomorrow!

We have suffered mightily over the past two weeks here in the pacific northwest, home of the green and soggy Christmas - my personal favorite actually. Tons of snow finally melting, shoveling muscles very sore, many cars (not mine tho) injured in the slip slidey conditions.

The buche de noel is easy and delish - as many or as few little decorations as you care to add. This one is pretty plain, but the rich chocolate roll is filled with white chocolate mousse and frosted with chocolate buttercreammmmmmmmmmm. That is not a typo. It is very good.

Ultimate Fruitcake

2008-12-10T14:42:00.000-08:00

This is a fruitcake to love, and to change people's minds about the whole fruitcake-hating thing. Which I have to say I don't mind the fruitcake haters too much because it leaves more for US, the smart and talented fruitcake lovers. This recipe benefits from lots of rum, and lots of yummy candied and dried fruit and nuts, with the candied cherries in there for a hit of color and tradition. Bake in a jellyroll pan, cool, remove from the pan, brush with more rum, then drape with a thin and lucious sheet of marzipan.

Check out Kim's posts at A Yankee in a Southern Kitchen for another really lovely recipe and some beautiful pictures!

The best part of this is baking it with friends right after Thanksgiving. I love the process and ritual of that so much that I wouldn't even mind if I ended up giving it all away, but of course I don't!

Ultimate Fruitcake

The Fruit and Nuts

8 oz. dried figs, stemmed and cut into pieces
8 oz. pitted dates – chopped
8 oz. candied orange peel
8 oz. raisins
8 oz. golden raisins
8 oz. currants
8 oz. candied cherries – cut in half
6 oz. almonds
6 oz. walnuts
½ cup dark rum

Cake Batter

2 ¼ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ pound butter at room temperature
1 cup dark brown sugar
4 large eggs

The Marzipan

½ pound almond paste
½ pound powdered sugar
2-3 T. corn syrup

The Syrup

1/3 cup corn syrup
3 T. dark rum

Method

Toss the fruit and nuts with the rum and let sit overnight.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees; butter an 11x17” sheet pan and line with baker’s parchment. Stir dry ingredients together in medium bowl (flour through cloves). Cream butter and brown sugar in electric mixer – add eggs one at a time and beat until incorporated. Stir in the flour mixture and beat until smooth. Scrape the batter over the fruit and nuts and fold everything together by hand – this may take a while, but be patient, it will all come together. Scrape it into the parchment lined pan and spread evenly, smoothing the top. Press a piece of parchment onto the top of the cake and bake 50-60 minutes or until the cake is just firm – do not overbake. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack. Take the top piece of parchment off right away.

Make the marzipan frosting – pulse the almond paste in a food processor with the confectioners’ sugar and corn syrup until it comes together. Knead by hand to form a smooth dough and cover with plastic wrap until ready to use.

Stir the rum and corn syrup together.

When cake is cool or just barely warm, flip it out onto a board or another cookie sheet and remove the baking parchment. Brush the entire cake with syrup until it’s all used up. Roll out the marzipan to make an 11x17 inch rectangle. Drape it over the top of the cake and press down to make sure it sticks.

If you really want it to look perfect and beautiful, trim ½” off of each side of the cake, but I don’t think that’s necessary. The cake can then be cut into 6 squares, about 5”x5” each, that make a great size to wrap up and freeze or give away. The cake is somewhat difficult to cut when fresh, but if you refrigerate or freeze it, it then cuts beautifully into small squares. It keeps in the fridge for several weeks or many months frozen.

Daring Bakers November Challenge!

2008-11-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

November's challenge was a caramel cake with caramel butter frosting. The author of the recipe is Shuna Fish Lydon (http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2006 … he-recipe/). The hostess of this month's challenge is Dolores at http://culinarycuriosity.blogspot.com, where you will find the recipe for the challenge. The rules required us to bake the cake and make the frosting - size and shape of the cake and any flavor add-ins optional. I made the cake exactly according to the recipe - did not add anything in vecause the caramel seemed like a great taste on its own.

I baked it on thanksgiving day - of course - because there's LOTS of empty oven space that day :) So I ended up using the tiny oven, which meant I used a 6" round pan and a small cupcake pan. The flavor on this cake was fantastic, and I would try to make it again, but it was a bit heavy and dense - I would have liked it to be a lighter texture.

Here is the completed cake.And here is the caramel sauce - very flavorful!

A small slice.

The iced 6" cake.

The little cupcakes.

Ginger Scones

2008-11-21T09:29:00.001-08:00

Oh yeah, we made Ginger Scones too! And sat with our lattes and gazed out the window for 10 minutes. These are really fantastic. I hear they're not bad as a hangover cure too :)

GINGER SCONES
400° F for 12-14 minutes

2 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar, plus additional for topping
1 T. baking powder
1 t. ground ginger
pinch of salt
6 T. unsalted butter
2 oz. crystallized ginger, chopped
1 egg
½ cup milk

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. Cut in butter until the butter is the size of small peas (it is fine to use the food processor for this), then stir in crystallized ginger. Mix egg and milk together. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the egg and milk mixture. Mix lightly until just combined. Turn out onto a floured board, knead for 30 seconds. Pat/roll into a round, cut into 8 wedges. Place on cookie sheet and sprinkle with additional sugar. Bake until golden brown.

I created this recipe after Mom and I visited Chris in Mill Valley and had something very similar at a café/espresso bar in downtown Mill Valley. I think it was called the Depot, and was located in the old train station. They used a star-shaped cookie cutter on theirs, which was nice because it makes for a lot of crunchy edge on each scone. These are interesting because they’re very delicately flavored – usually ginger comes with cloves and molasses and is very heavy and wintery, but these aren’t.

Baking Day with the Girls!

2008-11-20T15:02:00.001-08:00

Eeeeeeee! Sunday was absolutely the most fun day EVER. 60's and 70's music on the radio, and baking baking baking. We made 8 pounds of fruitcake, 6 dozen peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, the caramel pear tarts from the prior post, but in 5" shells instead of 3", and we split and filled and iced some little 6" cakes as pictured. The cookies were inspired by the discovery of tiny little peanut butter cups at Trader Joe's - they melted into the cookies instead of retaining their shape like chocolate chips, but this was not a negative! And, we did not bake the Panettone because we didn't have the secret ingredient extract at the bakery with us, but we will live to bake again another day. Recipes to be posted with pics upcoming.

Pear Caramel Tarts

2008-11-13T15:11:00.001-08:00

100 Best Foods in the World

2008-10-28T10:25:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday to me :)

This list is a work in progress - I am giving myself at least 30 open slots for new stuff!

100 Best Foods in the World

lasagna
BLT on toasted sourdough with mayo
risotto
french fries with ketchup
Italian chocolate with hazelnuts
Manchego cheese
YooHoo
marcona almonds
artichoke hearts
grilled sweet peppers
pizza margherita
nocciolo gelato
giandiujia anything, especially gelato
Reese’s peanut butter cups
raspberry jam
apricot jam
croissants
brioche
champapagne
pasta with pesto
duck breast with Chinese 5 spice
chicken fried rice
hot and sour soup
Coquille St. Jacques
lobster tails with melted butter
Dungeness crab with melted butter
almond pear tart
artichoke and parmesan dip
arancini – preferably with mushrooms
tortilla chips with lime
chocolate almond cake
porterhouse steak grilled outside
blackberry pie
roasted chicken with rosemary
mashed potatoes
salted cashew nuts
chicken with peanut sauce over spinach
Green curry anything w/ coconut milk
fried goat cheese rounds on a salad of wild greens
Homemade turkey on rye with stuffing, cranberry sauce and mayo
tuna salad with sweet pickles and lots of mayo
ginger scones
napoleons
new potatoes and peas in cream
macaroni and cheese
snickers bars
homemade potato chips
Dairy Queen soft serve vanilla cone dipped in chocolate
fresh mini doughnuts
herring in sour cream
fried egg sandwich with cheese, mayo and ketchup
rum cake
grilled cheese sandwich
grilled beef tenderloin
Rose’s Cheesecake – the Cake Bible
blueberries
noodle salad with egg roll and bbq pork
figs with manchego
orange hazelnut pinwheels from Macrina bakery
mezzelune stuffed with ricotta and herbs in a porcini sauce, garnished with shrimp
leberkasemmel with sweet mustard
Ritter Sport white chocolate and blood orange
seafood louie salad
duck pate
Sfoglie di riso
pappardelle with cinghiale sauce
Ravioli rose’, with ricotta spinach filling
stollen
guacamole
white chocolate mousse with raspberries

Camera's broken, but still eating!

2008-10-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

Pappardelle with wild boar ragu

OK - the Canon is in the shop - "lens error". Crap. though I am happy to have the excuse not to post any pictures - pulling them off the camera and putting them on the computer and then uploading to the blog site is a task that I dislike in a way that is way out of proportion to how much time it actually takes. I personally can't wait until the day that I just hold my camera up next to the computer and tell the photos to hop on over - wouldn't that be great??

Had potato chips and petit syrah for dinner the other night. Don't knock it until you've tried it! Ruffled, and salt and vinegar. You kind of have to make a potato chip sandwich with them to get the exact right blend of crunch and salt and tang. The salt and vinegar are too intense, and the chips are too thin, while the ruffled ones are too bland and too thick - together they are sublime! This always makes me think of sitting outside in a cafe in Italy at about 5:00 and having an apperitivo with some of those little dishes of chips and peanuts and olives - I LOVE that!

Last week we had dinner at il Fornaio - one of the best lasagne ever! Seriously - beschamel, a nice meat sauce, fresh pasta - it was really really good! But not as good as the ravioli pictured below - in Florence, near the central market - filled with ricotta and herbs with a light tomato sauce and pareggiano reggiano on top. This is clearly what the pillows in heaven are made out of!

Tomato Cheddar Pie

2008-10-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

This is from a Laurie Colwin column in the August 1992 Gourmet - I still miss her. I think her food writing was some of the first that inspired me, and during all my "I'm taking all of this stuff to Goodwill" phases, her books stay on the shelf, never at risk.

This pie is so good, kind of like a baked tomato sandwich. It is best if it is reheated in a 350°F oven so the cheese is melted and the pie is hot. The recipe says you can use canned tomatoes, but I never make it with anything but fresh, preferably ones you picked yourself. Or someone picked for you :)

TOMATO CHEDDAR PIE
Crust:
2 cups flour
1 stick butter
4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup milk

Filling:
2 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and sliced
or 2 28-ounces cans of plum tomatoes, drained and sliced
chopped basil, parsley or chives, to taste
1½ cups grated cheddar cheese
1/3 cup mayonnaise mixed with 2 T. lemon juice

Make crust as for biscuit dough. Roll out half and line a 9-inch pie plate with it, add the tomatoes, then the herbs, then 1 cup of the cheese, then the mayonnaise mixture and then the rest of the cheese. Roll out the rest of the dough and fit it over the top, pinching the edges to seal the crusts together. Cut several steam vents in the top and bake at 400°F for 25 minutes.

Hazelnut Frangipane and Pears

2008-10-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

Got the macro working!

Oh, and they were yummy too!

Take the tart shells as described in my August post, fill with hazelnut frangipane and bake 10 minutes at 350, then top with some pear compote. Vanilla ice cream on top is good, but not stictly required. Try not to eat them all at once!

Hazelnut Frangipane

1 cup toasted hazelnuts

3 eggs

6 T melted butter

1/2 cup sugar

Whirl hazelnuts in a blender until pretty fine - you should add the eggs after they are pretty well chopped up and that will keep the mixture moving. Then add the butter and sugar and blend until fine. Spread in pre-baked shells and bake until puffed and firm - 10-15 minutes.

Pear Compote

2 medium pears - bosc or d'anjou work great

1/4 cup raw sugar

1/4 t. vanilla

Peel and dice the pears. Put them in a small saucepan with the sugar. Cook over low heat until the pears are just tender - stirring as necessary to keep them from sticking. Add vanilla at the end. Use on top of the tarts, or over ice cream, or as a filling for a danish braid.

Chocolate and Fruit

2008-09-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

OK - we might as well get down to it because I KNOW I am in the huge minority here, but in general, I hate fruit and chocolate together. It's not so much the flavors, because that can be pretty good and I will get to that in a minute, but it's the textures - for example, a chocolate-dipped strawberry is just all wrong – the chocolate makes the strawberry taste sour, and the acid juiciness of the strawberry makes the chocolate go all grainy and nasty. Nope, nothing to like there. Other fruits fare similarly badly – I mean maybe banana isn’t so bad from the texture standpoint because it’s more creamy, but still, neither one enhances the other, really. And pineapple and other juicy and acid fruits produce the same results as the strawberries. And blueberries and chocolate – well that’s just wrong, because it puts two lovely things completely at war with each other and why why would you do that?? Chocolate and raspberries same thing – great apart, terrible together. . . .

BUT, BUT (and this was a big revelation for me) there are some fruit flavors, if not the actual fruit, that go actually really well with chocolate. Last year, for example, I made a chocolate chiffon cake with a blackberry coulis (I love that word – but I think it just means sauce!! – hee!!) ANYWAY – chocolate chiffon cake is like the end – it is SO good – way richer than angel food, but not super dense and heavy. It sat so pretty in a pool of blackberry sauce – sweetened of course so it didn’t fight with the chocolate – amazing!

AND, now, this year, I find that a lovely chocolate bundt cake flavored with orange essence and covered in an orange glaze is totally sublime! I mean who would have thought I would like something like that – la la la – it’s so great!

Pictures to come. . . . .

Chocolate Chiffon Cake
2 cups sifted cake flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 liquid melted butter
7 large eggs, separated
3/4 boiling water
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

One ungreased 10-inch tube pan

Preheat the oven to 325°F. In a large mixing bowl combine the flour, cocoa, all but 2 tablespoons of the sugar, baking powder, and salt and beat 1 minute to mix. Make a well in the center. Add the oil, egg yolks, and vanilla and beat 1 minute or until smooth. Add the boiling water and mix again.

In another large mixing bowl beat the egg whites until frothy, add the cream of tartar, and beat until soft peaks form when the beater is raised. Beat in the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar and beat until stiff peaks form when the beater is raised slowly. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter until just blended.

Pour into the tube pan, run a small metal spatula or knife through the batter to prevent air pockets, and bake for 55 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean and the cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center. Invert the pan, placing the tube opening over the neck of a soda or wine bottle to suspend it well above the counter, and cool the cake completely in the pan (this takes about 1 1/2 hours).

Loosen the sides with a long metal spatula and remove the cake from the pan. Invert onto a greased wire rack and reinvert onto a serving plate.

Serve with Blackberry Coulis and a dollop of whipped cream.

Blackberry Coulis

2 cups blackberries
1/2 cup sugar

Cook blackberries and sugar in small saucepan over medium heat until the fruit breaks down and the sugar is dissolved. Push through a sieve to strain out seeds, but press down hard so that the resulting sauce is thick with fruit puree. Yum.

Favorites

2008-09-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

Crab cake sandwich with fried egg and cheese. OMG - seriously. I could have this as my breakfast every single day and never be sorry there wasn't something else. Chanterelles - sauteed with butter and oil and stirred into pasta or risotto.

Eclairs - Darking Bakers' August Challenge

2008-08-31T10:12:00.001-07:00

This month we were challenged by Tony Tahhan and MeetaK to make Pierre Herme eclairs. You can see the recipe and technique on their blogs. I've made eclairs before, but it's always fun to have an excuse to make a dessert, and to try variations on a recipe. I waited until the last possible minute and made these last night! The pate a choux was easy - I like the food processor method. And I got 22 little eclairs - very close to what the recipe predicts. That said, I agree with other posters that they were too eggy and too soft. I don't know that there is any particular benefit from adding milk - so I will stick to my old recipe - four ingredients, perfect and crisp every time - 1 cup water, 1 stick butter, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs.

I elected to do my variation on the pastry cream filling - I added a few tablespoons of hazelnut praline to the pastry cream as it was cooling down. This is a very good recipe and I will make it again, though I have a tendency to want to shortcut the tempering process and nearly scramble the eggs everytime. Ah well, that is what the seive is for, no?

As far as the chocolate sauce, all I can say is hmmm. There are a damn lot of steps and ingredients to get something that is no better than ganache. OK, maybe that's not fair - is anything better than ganache? But you know. I would be interested to hear what others think, but it seems like a darn lot of steps to get essentially a chocolate ganache. I kept waiting for the secret to reveal itself, but I got nothing - add water and then boil it off? How about we start with heavy cream instead? Ah well, that's why these challenges are so fascinating - you get other people's view of the world!

I think I will definintely make the pastry cream again, and make eclairs more often, but i will use my own pate a choux recipe and a simple ganache for glazing.

White Chocolate Ginger Ice Cream for Dessert

2008-08-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

I've been reading blogs all along, even while claiming to be too busy/tired/out of memory to post anything. Finally got inspired (read, overcome with guilt thinking I am a slacker) and decided to cook, photograph, and eat, in that order. The mandarin orange bundt cake came out much better the second time, but I still have no photos for that, so more to come later.

Last week I had a good but ultimately less-than-satisfying crab roll for lunch - clearly, more crab was in order to scratch that itch. Dilemma - to buy the ready to go crab meat out of the shell, or buy the whole crab and pick the meat out? Thank god I chose the latter - apparently the guys a the fish counter wanted to reward me for making the right decision cause when I told them I wanted two whole cooked crab, they didn't pull them off the ice in the case, no, they pulled them out of the boiling water steaming hot!! Oh man oh man oh man. The crab was buttery and sweet - as good as I have ever had.

Crab cakes for dinner, with a tomato salad and fresh corn on the side. As Homer would say - can't talk, eating . . . .

For dessert I wanted something rich, but with fruit. So, I searched David Lebovitz's site for an interesting ice cream recipe and came up with the White Chocolate Ginger Ice Cream - simplified as a non-custard ice cream, with fresh figs. . . . .and balsamic vinegar. . . . . A little blurry, yes, but no less delicious!

White Chocolate Ginger Ice Cream

About 1 quart

2-inch piece fresh ginger

½ cup sugar1 cup milk
1 t. vanilla extract

2 cups heavy cream - divided

4 ounces white chocolate, chopped

1. Slice the ginger into very thin rounds, cover it with 1 cup of the heavy cream in a medium saucepan, bring to a simmer, then turn the heat off. Add the sugar and stir to combine. Let steep for at least 30 minutes, preferably in the fridge to cool it off.
2. Put the chopped white chocolate in a large bowl. Warm up the other cup of heavy cream until very warm but do not simmer or boil. Pour over the chocolate and stir to melt the chocolate. Add the cup of milk to this mixture and then stir in the vanilla. Put this in the fridge too.
3. After the two mixtures have cooled, strain the ginger cream mixture through a sieve into the white chocolate cream. Discard the ginger. Put the combined mix into an ice cream maker and then freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions.

More eating . . . .

2008-08-26T10:45:00.001-07:00

Dungeness crab roll from Pike Place Chowder

Orange ricotta brioche with currants - the Dahlia Bakery . . . .

Corn fritters from http://www.ayankeeinasouthernkitchen.com/ - thanks Kim!

Mandarin Orange bundt cake - no link, it was a disaster! But I think I know how to fix it. . . .

What I've Been Eating

2008-08-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is just a gratuitous pic to distract you from the lack of current ones . . . .

OK - I KNOW that 99.9% of blogging is the photos, but the one memory card died and the other one is full of wedding cake pictures and I just don't want to lose track of all the amazing stuff I am still managing to eat, even if I can't take pictures of it.

Roast pork with a blueberry-white-wine reduction. Green salad. Fresh corn.

Blackberries and cream and cake - layered together for a spontaneous triffle.

Raspberries - warm from the sun and cool from the shade.

Shrimp sauteed with garlic and butter and olive oil - parsley on top, fresh corn on the side.

Tree- ripened apricots - I've only had three, but I think they'll hold me until next year!.

Green curry rice with cream and corn and shrimp. OMG - really could eat this until I am sick!

Carne asada (steak) and carnitas (pork) tacos with green salsa from the taco truck in Monroe - hot and spicy and salty and perfect!

Insalata caprese with lots of fresh basil.

Summer Berry Tartlets

2008-08-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t commit to just one berry – I’m pretty sure if I had to pick a favorite berry, it would be blackberries, but I figure there’s still time in August and September to use those – so I went with raspberries and blueberries. These are variations on a couple of recipes, and make a perfect little dessert buffet, or breakfast, or whatever . . . . I am a huge fan of dessert and coffee for breakfast, and these seem almost healthy if you think about it. Heee!

OK – true confession time – I am going to give you the recipe for a fabulous all-butter pie crust that you can use for the tartlet shells, but I do not use it for these tartlets – I buy frozen pre-made tartlet shells (raw) and bake them fresh right before I assemble the tartlets. The shells are GREAT, and this is one of those “life’s too short” sort of things . . . .

Raspberry Tartlets

Tartlet shells (recipe below)
Pastry cream (recipe below)
Fresh raspberries

Garnish:
Mint leaves
Sweetened whipped cream

Assembly: Prebake the tartlet shells – approx 12 minutes at 400 degrees F. Cool. Fill with pastry cream. Top with raspberries. Garnish with whipped cream and mint leaves. The really swanky among you might want to brush the baked shells with melted dark or white chocolate, for an additional flavor hit. Also, brushing with chocolate ensures that the shells stay crisp if you want to assemble them a bit ahead of time.

Double Blueberry Tartlets

Tartlet shells
4 cups fresh blueberries
¾ cup sugar
3 T. cornstarch
1 T. lemon juice
1 T. butter

Garnish:
Thin strips of lemon zest
Sweetened whipped cream

Assembly: Prebake the tartlet shells as above and cool. Take half of the blueberries and cook them with the sugar and cornstarch until they are cooked and thick, low heat, approximately 10-15 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in the lemon juice and the butter. Let cool a little bit, then stir in the fresh blueberries and use this to fill the tartlet shells. Garnish with whipped cream and strips of lemon zest.

Pastry Cream

1 cup milk
3 large egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 t. vanilla
1/2 cup well-chilled heavy cream

Scald the milk. In a clean pan whisk together the egg yolks, the sugar, the cornstarch and the vanilla. Whisk in the milk and bring to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly. Simmer for 3 minutes -- it will be very thick --transfer it to a bowl and chill it, its surface covered with plastic wrap, for 4 hours or until it is firm. (May be made one day ahead.) Beat the heavy cream until it holds stiff peaks. Whisk the pastry cream until it is smooth, whisk in half the whipped cream, fold in the remaining cream gently but thoroughly.

All Butter Pie Crust

2 cups flour
12 tablespoons chilled butter, cut in bits
1/2 t. salt
5 tablespoons ice water (more as needed)

Pulse flour, butter and salt in a food processor until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the ice water and pulse until the mixture just clumps together. Form into two balls, flatten each slightly and wrap in plastic wrap or waxed paper and refrigerate at least 15 minutes until firm. If you really need to use these right away, you can probably get away with it if you roll the crust out between sheets of waxed paper or plastic, or flour the rolling surface really well.

Makes one double crust, or use in tartlet shells – roll out to about ¼” thick and cut into rounds to fit into 3” or 4” tartlet shells.

The best part about this recipe is that the formula can be adapted for any quantity. Just use 2 tablespoons butter for every 1/3 cup flour. So a small, single crust works out very well with 1 cup flour and 6 tablespoons butter, while a larger single crust would take a stick of butter and 1 1/3 cups flour.

See what I've been up to!

2008-08-05T13:41:00.001-07:00

http://buttercupbakeryblog.blogspot.com/

Raspberry Tarts ala Z

2008-07-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

This is great! Z does a great deal of the work, and I get to post the picture! We baked off the tart shells on Thursday the 26th of June, then painted the inside with chocolate to protect the crispiness of the baked shells. Then we packaged them up, and Z took them to eastern Washington along with a cooler filled with pastry creme, (some cookbooks list this as creme patisserie), raspberries, fresh mint, and piping bags. Then the assembly - pretty self explanatory really - fill tarts with pastry creme, arrange raspberries decoratively, pipe on some whipped cream, add a mint leaf or two and a shaving of chocolate and voila, you've got wedding dessert for 80 people.

Now I personally think you should always have a wedding cake, but this turned out wonderful. And we threw in a side serving of pine nut tarts!

Pastry Creme

1 cup milk
3 large egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 t. vanilla
1/2 cup well-chilled heavy cream

Scald the milk. In a clean pan whisk together the egg yolks, the sugar, the cornstarch and the vanilla. Whisk in the milk and bring to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly. Simmer for 3 minutes -- it will be very thick --transfer it to a bowl and chill it, its surface covered with plastic wrap, for 4 hours or until it is firm. (May be made one day ahead.) Beat the heavy cream until it holds stiff peaks. Whisk the pastry cream until it is smooth, whisk in half the whipped cream, fold in the remaining cream gently but thoroughly.

Danish Braid - Daring Bakers' June Challenge!

2008-06-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Cherry Cream Cheese Danish

June's Daring Bakers' Challenge - Danish Braid.

This is a lovely and versatile recipe - for the complete text see Kelly of Sass & Veracity, and Ben of What’s Cookin’? Thanks to them for being the host and hostess this month - the recipe was well written and the explanations were great, with one exception. You cannot make this "on the counter" if you don't have a mixer - it will be a huge stinkin' mess! You have to just put it in a bowl and mix it up by hand - the dough is not that big, and it can be done in a large mixing bowl with a wooden spoon with no problem.

I made it twice - once with lemon and vanilla in the dough, once with orange rind. Both times I made sweet and savory versions - cherry cream cheese for the sweet, but oh the savory ones were fabulous - the sweetness of the danish dough is a great counterpoint to the saltiness of a savory filling.

Below is the individual danish with goat cheese and carmelized onions. I also did a cheese/tomato/basil braid, and a shrimp braid. All of them were so good! Though I can't say that eating an entire recipe of this dough in one weekend is really wise . . . .

Lemon Glazed Cake

2008-06-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

This cake is a delight - very verstatile to change the flavors around - lemon, orange, almond, rum - you get to be creative with whatever is around. And frankly, I haven't baked it in a while - confession - this is an OLD picture. But I get tired of seeing the same old thing on my page, and I am flat out of time this week, so here ya go! Z and I are baking tomorrow, so there may be tartlettes to post later this week. Then, the Daring Bakers' Challenge gets posted on Sunday the 29th - whee!!! It's a good one!

Lemon Cake
350°F

3 cups flour
1/2 t. soda
1/2 t. baking powder
1 t. salt

1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 t. vanilla
Grated rind and juice from one lemon
1 cup buttermilk

Sift dry ingredients together, set aside. Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, vanilla and lemon. Beat with an electric mixer 3 minutes. Add dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Pour batter into a very well greased and floured tube or bundt pan and bake 60-70 minutes or until golden brown and cracked on top. Do not remove cake from pan until it is completely cool. It should come out perfectly.

Lemon Glaze: Mix confectioners’ sugar and lemon juice to make a thin glaze. Brush/pour over cooled cake.

S'mores

2008-06-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

I don't really like graham crackers - never have - I think it has to do with their early pairing with lukewarm milk out of the carton in grade school. Anyway, they're ok in a cheesecake crust, but that's about it . . . .

So, I have been feeling like I am significantly missing out on the "s'mores" phenomenon, but overall not feeling too terribly deprived, what with the entire other universe of desserts out there . . . . But still, in the back of my mind - you know . . . .

Yesterday at Trader Joe's (god I LOVE that place - now there's a place that should deliver) they had the whole little s'more set up - swiss chocolate, artisan vanilla marshmallows, cinnamon graham crackers, etc. I almost fell for the whole package, but I had a chance conversation with a woman in there when we almost backed into each other, and her solution was pure genius - just use a different cookie. (doh!) well, of course. Patrolled the cookie displays for 15 minutes - shortbread? gingersnaps? almond biscuits? All have promise, but finally I settled on the TJ brand of butter waffle cookie - an amazing little confection made of pronounceable ingredients!

It's pretty simple really - chocolate on one cookie, halved marshmallow on the other, a few seconds under the broiler, smash them together, let cool sufficiently to avoid second degree burns on the roof of the mouth, and then consume. They are sublime! Yes, all you 70%-er's out there, you can use dark chocolate! No campfire necessary. And I still have most of the ingredients left, so it's looking like s'mores again tonight. . . . .

Maybe I can get the macro function to work and get a clear picture!! But you pretty much get the idea from this one.

With macro functioning. . . . .

and just for fun, one more

Molten Chocolate Cake

2008-06-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

OK, first, I have to thank Ann at Velvet Lava for the inspiration for this dessert. I mean, her whole blog is inspired by the lava cake and the chocolate velvet cake, so after a few months of reading her posts, I finally got off the dime and made this recipe, which truthfully has been in the house for five years! It was in the newspaper in 2003 - well, what can I say, it's been busy around here . . . .

And I am way late posting, because I made these many days ago. But they are so very cute and so very delicious! The recipe - one of probably 127 of the recipes out there - is at the end of the post. There are lots of variations on how much chocolate, how much butter, etc. But I love it that you can make them early in the day and keep them in the fridge until the last minute and bake them cold. The one picture that didn't come out so well was the one I took after the kitchen towel caught on fire when taking these out of the oven! YES, full on flames! Crap. I stood there like an idiot, pizza pan in my hand with the little ramekins on it, thinking, hmm, is the pan steaming? why is my hand so hot?? I did't drop them though. Apparently, with an oven at 500 F, you don't need much towel contact with the heating element for it to ignite. I suppose there's a lesson there about using pot holders, but it's a lesson I will probably never learn.
Anyway, the recipe says to serve these in the ramekins, but I liked them baked for one or two extra minutes so they would pop out and be served on a plate - the lava effect is so much better if it flows across the plate. . . .

Molten Chocolate Lava Cake

3 1/2 ounces (7 tablespoons) butter
3 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
2 large egg yolks
2 large whole eggs
3/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons confectioners' sugar
7 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
Additional confectioners' sugar, for garnish
Whipped cream, for garnish
Have ready 4 half-cup ramekins.
In a double boiler, melt the butter and the chocolate together. Meanwhile, lightly beat the eggs and egg yolks. In a separate bowl, sift the confectioners' sugar together with the flour.
When the chocolate has melted, whisk the egg mixture into it, blending well. Gradually stir in the dry ingredients, until they are just incorporated into the batter.
Divide the batter evenly between the four ramekins, and refrigerate until ready to bake.
Before serving, preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until each cake has a high rounded dome and a single crack that oozes a bit of chocolate.
Dust with confectioners' sugar, and serve with whipped cream on the side.

Almond Cake

2008-06-04T12:57:00.001-07:00

Just thought I would share a lovely little almond cake recipe that is divine with berries! More recipes to come . . . .

ALMOND CAKE
325°F 50 minutes

10 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 ½ cups sugar
1 ½ cups flour
2 tablespoons milk (or orange juice)
pinch of salt
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon almond extract
(grated zest of one orange, optional)

Preheat oven. Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan. In a large bowl cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add flour, alternating with milk, in two additions. Add salt. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in almond extract and orange zest, if using. Pour into prepared pan and bake approximately 50 minutes, or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool on a rack before removing from pan. Dust with powdered sugar to serve.

Variation: Orange almond cake. Use the orange juice instead of the milk, and add the orange zest with the almond extract.

Shrimp Eggrolls

2008-05-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

There's a bit of history on this one. Last weekend we dismantled the broken hot tub and hauled it off. And when I say dismantled, I mean with a chainsaw and a sawzall. And when I say hauled it off, I mean two full trips to the dump, 1250 pounds worth. It was hot out too. Started at 11:00 AM. By 1:00 I had invited Bunkers and Pedersens over for dinner - MOSTLY because we enjoy their company and wanted to see them, of course, but partly because it would mean that we HAD to stop at some sort of reasonable hour. I'm a little hazy on what happened next, but at some sweaty, wet, ant-infested point in the day, I had an epiphany - I WANT A DEEP FRYER.

Not exactly sure how that relates to anything, but the dump is only about a mile from the Target store. So, after the second dump run, I got dropped off at Target and ran in - filthy, sweaty, hair sticking up, etc. - and got myself a little fryer! So cute!! And I am such a sucker because I bought the one that said "restaurant style" on the side of the box even though you know that this is nothing at all like what they have in a restaurant. Still, totally happy with being a sucker about these things. Didja see the little fryer basket?? I love it!

Then to the Safeway for, what else, potatoes and cooking oil. The first batch of french fries on Sunday was a little soggy. Monday, employing the double-frying technique from the Joy of Cooking, produced much nicer results. Tuesday and Wednesday were fat-free, but I continued to mull the deep frying possibilities. Yesterday I thought of Shrimp Eggrolls!

So, I just made this recipe up in my head and went and bought the ingredients at the market. Then I called Z and she googled a recipe for me to give me some ideas about seasoning the filling. Finely chopped shrimp, shredded carrots, snap peas and cabbage, minced garlic, ginger, and cilantro. Then I made some dipping sauces out of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar and chile sauce.

Deep fry them four at a time (in the way cute basket!) and serve with dipping sauce and cilantro on the side. Do not, under any circumstances, eat 6 of these for dinner, as you will have a bellyache for sure! :)

Tiramisu Wedding Cake

2008-05-20T13:55:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I made a wedding cake for a friend. It was the biggest project I had ever attempted and it went really well. Here is the end result. It was three tiers, the bottom layer was 12" square, the middle was 9", the top was 6". The cake was a white cake, soaked in a marsala and rum syrup. The filling was chocolate-coffee ganache. The frosting was a mascarpone cream cheese - very stressful on a 90 degree day! The hottest it has been here all year. Yipes. But it was great - I had frozen the layers after they were frosted - they thawed out between delivery and cutting (nearly 5 hours), and the cake was still cool! Here is the cake, with fresh flowers as the primary decoration.
Here is the middle layer, all filled and ready to get its crumb coat.
Here is the small top layer, with its crumb coat on and chilling for its second layer of icing.
The mocha filling - this is a 2:1 ratio (by weight) of heavy cream and bittersweet chocolate, with instant espresso powder providing the coffee kick. The coffee and bittersweet chocolate ended up being too bitter, so I did add a little confectioners sugar when I was whipping it.
Many many pounds of cream cheese mascarpone frosting - rum and vanilla flavor in here too.

This is the 12" bottom layer - I used chocolate to fill layers 1 and 3 - the middle layer got all cream cheese frosting, which ended up being a really nice balance. Each layer of cake was soaked with the marsala rum syrup.

The florist left hydrangeas and roses for decoration, and I used flower spikes to hold the flowers in place and keep them fresh.

Molto Mario

2008-05-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Wanted to put the food front and center - the story on this little bite of heaven is below. . . .

Last week we got to meet Mario Batali in person! It was so cool - he was funny and articulate and down to earth. He was doing a book signing (Italian Grill) at msft and since we sponsored the room set up, six of us got in for a brief meet and greet before the main event. This is the only picture we had the presence of mind to snap.

We talked to him about where he likes to eat - basically, he likes to eat whatever is local and good where he is, and simple is better. Since his family is here in town, they generally go out to a seafood restaurant and call it good - as he said, any restaurant with 30 kinds of oysters and 9 glasses of Washington and Oregon Pinot Gris by the glass is good. Elliots. Steelhead Diner. Etc. We told him about the 20 buck duck at Campagne in January. Then we all got to walk to the cafeteria together for the talk. Honestly I think we were all a little starstruck, but in a low key way. So, he got up and talked for nearly 30 minutes and took questions - funny funny stories, then big long lines for the book signing, which we were able to avoid because we all got our signed before!

Anyway, there were lots of good questions, but of course I remember mine. "so, Mario, what's your favorite recipe in the book?" Answer - "well, that's a lot like asking me what my favorite Talking Heads song is - I love them all. But, probably I would pick the Mortadella and Robiola" ( see pages 34-35 of the book) - deadpan delivery - "we made it on the Martha Stewart show last week and I think she nearly had an orgasm . . . . "

oh good lord - he brought the house down!

So basically, you take thin slices of mortadella, place a small piece of robiola cheese inside (a soft white cheese - we substituted brie with the rinds cut off) and top with a basil leaf. Then fold it into a packet and grill until the cheese is melted and the mortadella is crispy. Holy cow, absolutely sublime. He serves them as an antipasto, but I loved them on a bed of arugula with vinaigrette - it balanced the richnesss a little bit. We had a big dinner planned the night we made these, but they were so good we just stuffed the steaks back in the fridge and ate these and a bit of pasta and it was perfect!

A Spectacular Amount of Chocolate

2008-05-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

I'm NOT planning on eating all of this, but it just makes me happy having it in the house! I need some for Shasha's wedding cake, some for the butterfinger bars, and some for general well being. 8 days of sugar-free life has not made me feel materially better, though I have eaten more and probably lost weight. Still doesn't seem worth it ;)

This is 11 pounds (5K) of chocolate, Callebaut, bittersweet. You can get white or semi or bitter at Big John's PFI - less than $6/pound and it's 60% cocoa! And there's Guittard too, in full 10 pound bars, for less than $4/pound. AND, there are 2-pound bags of semi-sweet Guittard pieces (bigger than chips, but small and uniform, great for melting) for $7.50. God there's nothing I love more than a good deal on chocolate! Now to find a chocolate melter/temperer that works and had a decent capacity. And is not $500.

Shrimp and arugula

2008-05-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Well ok - this is clearly not chocolate related, but the "no sugar" thing has seriously enabled me to actually think about other kinds of food. The farmers market in Columbia City last week produced a fabulous bag of arugula and some hand made goat cheese. And Costco (yes, I know) came through with some fantastic shrimp. We have one huge rosemary bush that can easily give up 8 stems - I strip the leaves off and use them as skewers - here, we have only the "before" pictures because the "after" were (a) on fire when the skewers burned in the broiler, (b) so delicious we ate them all up. (c) all of the above. I still have rosemary ashes on the bottom of the oven!

I marinated these in orange juice and olive oil - perfect!

omg - no sugar!

2008-05-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

Testing my will - no sugar for a week! eeep! I feel faint. But, truth is I was feeling pretty comatose after a few pounds of butterfingers and a few cubic feet of cake! So, I thought I'd give it a run - just for a week. And I'm not insane about it - reading labels to look for 2 grams of sugar in the bread or anything. I've just excluded the obvious suspects - cake, candy, cookies, ice cream.

In some ways it leaves me nothing to eat, based on my usual diet. But in some ways it opens up lots of options, like sandwiches for lunch, and real dinners where I haven't spoiled my appetite. Hmmm. This is odd. Three days in a row with breakfast - day 1 = scrambled eggs and cheese; day 2 = oatmeal with almonds and raisins; day 3 = leftover pizza. Can't say I feel better really, not yet anyway. But I don't feel worse either.

My secret weapon is a package of Skinny Cow sugar free ice cream sandwiches - surprisingly good really, though they melt quickly . . . .

More Polka Dots

2008-05-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

I apparently have polka dots on the brain. Just finished with the cheesecake pops and it's time to make a prototype of Shasha's wedding cake. I baked the layers over the course of a week - high school math comes in handy, surprisingly, when you are trying to take a recipe that bakes in 2 - 12" round pans and convert it to square pans - so I baked one 7" layer and one 12" layer (square) out of each batch, then baked 2 - 9" square layers out of the third batch.

The final batch should have had a small third pan as the 9" pans were overfull. But hey, at least I did the math and knew what was going on!

Then, 5 cups of rum syrup, 5 pounds of mascarpone cream cheese frosting, and 5 pounds of whipped chocolate ganache

The assembly was pretty easy with the divider plates and the columns to provide support and a little extra lift - the space between the bottom and middle tiers will be filled with fresh flowers in the wedding version of the cake.

On this one, I decided to do the middle layer with chocolate just for fun after I realized that I didn't have enough cream cheese frosting - in the final product I will have to make even more cream cheese frosting because the entire cake will be white. And I had more than enough chocolate ganache.

The decorations are a shameless theft from the cheesecake pops, but hey, it works! Take some lukewarm molten chocolate, spread it on waxed paper, cover with more waxed paper and smooth out to a thin sheet. Then, when it is just cool enough to peel the paper off, but not brittle, cut rounds out with small cookie cutters. That's it - they stick naturally to the cream cheese frosting with no additional help.

All recipes are from the Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, modified per my little quirks - for example, she likes really bittersweet chocolate - I usually substitute semi-sweet. And for some reason she likes to make white or yellow cakes with either all egg whites or all egg yolks - I usually use whole eggs but just make sure the weight is the same - so her recipe for 11 whites or 9 yolks ends up being 5 whole eggs. This does not make the cake too yellow, and it has the benefit of using up the whole egg, which I consider a plus. Many of her buttercream recipes call for either yolks or whites, so it might all balance out in the scheme of things, but I generally don't use her buttercream recipes, so it makes sense to use the whole egg.

After it was done - probably 30-35 pounds (!), I emptied out the fridge to store it overnight, then took it apart for transport into work. So, happily, the architectural issues and transportation issues are all resolved since I now know I can build it and move it. Tonight I am going to a cake decorating class so the final product is lovely and level!!

Daring Bakers April Challenge - cheesecake pops

2008-04-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

OK - I should be right up front and tell you that I have a love/hate relationship with this recipe. I love the cheesecake, and the flavors were delicious and the end result was cute as heck, and it was a very good challenge, but in terms of return on investment I don't think I would do it again, because they turned out to be hard to eat and overall they were cuter than they were good. And they didn't stay on the stick - this may well have been my fault for not dipping all the way up to the stick, but I had visions of people dropping cheesecake in their laps!

I made a half recipe of the cheesecake in a 7"x7" pan - I wanted it to be deep b ecause I wanted to cut them into squares instead of scooping then into balls. The baking time was a little longer, but it came out terrific. So far, I love it.

I chilled it overnight, then took it out of the pan in its little parchment paper sling - easy, everything is working great! Then I tried to cut it. Hmmm hmmm hmmmm. Not so good. No matter what I did, the cheesecake stuck to the knife in big chunks - slender knife, hot knife, it didn't matter. What a huge mess! I was hating it at this point. And no, I didn't have any plain dental floss to cut it with (only mint!), though that might have worked.

So, I put the lollipop sticks into the squares of cheesecake and jammed the whole mess into the freezer and waited until they were really frozen. Then found that I had to trim the frozen pops to get a nice smooth surface, but that worked great, really.

I started dipping in white chocolate - I had an idea to use colored sugar to decorate, to coordinate with the ribbons I was going to use. At this point I had a "what was I thinking" moment.

This was not as cute as I had hoped it would be --not nearly as cute as it was in my mind!!

But I decided to just keep on working - I wanted to use orange sugar, so I added some orange oil to the white chocolate so the pops would be like creamsicles (later note - this was a great idea and the orange oil made the white chocolate fantastic!!) But I still wasn't in love with how they looked.

Then, finally, epiphany! Some of the ribbon I had was white and dark brown, so I had the idea to make the pops geometric, with contrasting white and dark circles - I dipped them, then poured a bit of chocolate on some waxed paper and I used a decorating tip as a tiny cutter to make the dots. These were the best yet - I really liked how they looked, and of course the flavors were great. It was fun to do, even though it was frustrating at times. Looking forward to next month!!

Mango Sorbet and Kumquat Syrup

2008-04-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Lots of baking going on lately, and lots of other stuff too. But the fun stuff has to do with baking. I was shopping last weekend and came across kumquats at Trader Joe's - so cute! I had no idea what to do with them, but then we were making a sugar syrup to enhance our Gewurtztraminer,

some of which is being bottled up into a dessert wine, (this is the label image, I love it! - the actual label says "La Dolce Vita" on it as well). Anyway, I got the idea to just slice the kumquats and put them in a syrup and cook them just for a minute to get tender. Delicious! Kind of orange marmalade-y. Apparently with kumquats the flesh is tart and the skin is sweet - I found the whole package to be pretty tart, and seedy, but they are perfect this way.

Then I scooped up some mango sorbet and topped it with the kumquats and syrup. I went out to the garden to pick some fresh mint to put on top, only to find that the April snow and hail had burned the mint black - it'll come back, but it sure wasn't available for photos! So I cheated and used a pinch from the basil that's in the house! I think vanilla ice cream with the kumquats would be perfect - like a swanky Creamsicle.

Clarification to the "butterfinger" recipe!

2008-04-17T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yipes. I was flush with success and confidence after the candy bar triumph - so it was pretty certain I was due to have my wings melted a little bit! On Tuesday I raced off to the store for more peanut butter and decided to make a DOUBLE BATCH of the bars. I mean, what could be more efficient, right? Well, you pretty much know the answer to that. Disaster. See pic below for what you don't want them to look like. This stuff was like epoxy with too much of the setting up agent in it - there was no controlling it!

And I wasn't sure why - there were a couple of different variables.

First, I made the mistake of watching the candy thermometer too closely, and actually pulled the syrup off at about 325 degrees - almost exactly what they recommend, but I could tell from looking at it that it was cooler than the original batch. But at the time I didn't know that this would be a problem.

Then, the peanut butter I bought was not the same as what I originally used - my fault for

grabbing the wrong kind in the store, even after I studied the shelf for 10 minutes. It was supposedly just one gram lower in sugar (still Jif), but it seemed quite stiff and not as nice as the regular kind. In my defense, I never buy peanut butter, and there are like hundreds of variations - Jif, Skippy, Adams, store brand, upscale store brand, and some organic brand. Then, each one has a low salt option, a low sugar option, a low salt AND low sugar option, and THEN you have to find creamy versus chunky versus extra chunky. Good lord, it was a miracle I got as close as I did.

So, anyway, when I mixed the peanut butter into the sugar syrup, it seized up and turned crumbly- absolutely unspreadable and completely different from the creamy caramely mass I had on Monday that I was able to spread nicely into the pan. Recovery efforts just made it worse, including some burned sugar and a pan that required 24 hours of soaking, plus some chiseling, to get it clean. Long story short(er) - I threw everything away and lay awake all night fretting about what went wrong - was it the wrong peanut butter? the wrong temperature? the double batch? Shoot, I could hardly wait to get home on Wednesday and try it again.

Wednesday - I made three batches! Kind of like a "Cooks Illustrated" sort of experiment. The first batch I cooked to about 340 degrees and it was nearly perfect - caramel-y and spreadable., but a little rough compared to how the first batch came out. See below.

The second batch I cooked to the recipe, 325 degrees - this would test if the earlier failure was due to double batching or peanut butter. Success!! I mean failure!! I mean it failed in the same way as it failed before, so at this point I was pretty sure I had identified the cause as being sugar that was not sufficiently caramelized. Then I cooked the third batch until the thermometer nearly went off the scale - 375 degrees. But honestly the syrup was just starting to turn amber, which is supposed to happen at a lower temp. But I had calibrated the thermometer in boiling water and it seems to be accurate. So. One of life's mysteries. The important thing is that this one was perfect! Smooth and creamy, pourable and spreadable, not crumbly. See picture below.

So the good news is I can use all three batches - the first and the third worked to make bars, and the second crumbly batch still tasted good, so I think I am going to mix it with chocolate and stir it into some vanilla ice cream!

OK, chocolate tempering to come up later this month, I may be getting that nailed down as well.

Home made "butterfinger-type" candy bars!

2008-04-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

omg. I heard that approximately 8 times when I shared these treats today. And I agree, if I do
say so myself. These are SO GOOD. Don't know what exactly inspired me to try this, other than that the croissants went so well and I know in my heart of hearts that the process of tempering chocolate is one I have to master. So, what better excuse? The process of cooking the sugar and corn syrup is pretty easy, though I did turn away from the sugar for a minute and cooked it way past the recommended 310 degrees - it was probably at 330 or 340 - starting to really color up as caramel. But the peanut butter stirred in saved it. The funniest thing about this recipe is it says it makes 96 pieces - ha ha ha! Not even close. Maybe 3 dozen.

Then there's the issue with tempering the chocolate. I DON'T KNOW what I do wrong, because it's either too hot or too cool but anyway it blooms on me - I'll keep at it. The chocolate coating is a mixture of dark and milk chocolate (sssshhhhh- I think that might be the secret ingredient!) Anyway, it's about perfect - not too sweet, not too bitter.

Here's one that came out very nicely though! And the macro function on the camera is working too!

Recipe to come later tonight.

Here is the recipe – I actually cooked the sugar syrup to something slightly higher than the recommended temp – not sure how hot because when I saw that the temp was way up I yelped and pulled it off the stove quickly, then tried to get the candy thermometer out of the syrup, then dropped part of the thermometer into the syrup, then had to restrain myself from fishing it out with my fingers (350 degrees – it takes the skin off!). So, I did not get a 100% accurate reading on how hot it actually got.

Do make sure not to undercook the syrup – it needs to be at least 310 – and you can safely go to 320 or 330 just to make sure it is firm enough. The link below is a pretty good reference.

Also, in the second paragraph of the recipe there is some nonsense about washing down the sides of the pan with a pastry brush. I see this in every recipe that involves cooking sugar and I personally ignore it – it’s never been an issue and the whole process seems like too much work to me.

http://candy.about.com/od/candybasics/a/candytemp.htm

Candy Bars
(Yields about 96 miniature candy bars)
1/3 cup light corn syrup
1/3 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup peanut butter
Spray Vegetable Oil (Pam, etc.) for keeping the knife lubricated in scoring
1 Pound of Tempered Semi-Sweet Chocolate for dipping

Greasing a 12-by-17-inch jelly roll pan (with 1-inch sides) with safflower, vegetable or canola oil. Place the pan into a slightly warm oven to warm the pan while making the candy. (Don’t allow the pan to become hot, only barely warm to give you more time to spread and score the candy later.)
In a heavy 2-quart saucepan, combine the corn syrup and water, stirring well to combine. Place over medium-low heat and add the sugar. Cook the mixture, stirring constantly, until it is clear and then stirring often until it reaches a full boil. Clip on your calibrated candy thermometer, raise the heat to medium-high and continue to cook – without stirring – until the mixture reaches 310 degrees (F). During this cooking period, should sugar crystals form above the boiling line, carefully wipe away using a damp pastry brush, but be careful not to touch the boiling mixture. Rinse the pastry brush well – and make certain to blot-dry the brush well – between each swipe.
Remove your pan from the warming oven and place on your work surface.
Remove the candy from heat and add the peanut butter, stirring to blend completely using a clean wooden spoon. Working quickly, pour the mixture onto your well-greased jelly roll pan, and spread as evenly as possible. Score the mass with an oiled, heavy chef’s knife into 1-inch by 2-inch pieces, cutting at least half way through the candy. (The more quickly you do this, the easier and deeper your scoring will be.) It is helpful to spray the knife with cooking oil occasionally to aide the knife in scoring.
Allow the scored mixture to cool at room temperature. When cool and hard, break them into pieces.
Place the cut candies into the refrigerator while you temper your dipping chocolate and allow to chill for 15 to 30 minutes. Remove the candies from the fridge and dip each piece into the chocolate, then place on parchment paper to allow the chocolate to harden completely (About 3 hours).
Store on waxed-paper sheets in an airtight container for up to two weeks (again - ha ha ha - mine lasted exactly 18 hours, including overnight!)

Chocolate Croissants!

2008-04-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

I have this love/hate thing with Chocolate Croissants - I want to love them, because they have two of my favorite things in them - chocolate and croissants.
But I end up not liking them, mainly because they're not sweet enough I think.

So, with a fresh supply of Dr. Oetker yeast - thanks mom! -

I decided to try croissants again at home, hoping for better results all around. Even though I feel like I have puff pastry down cold, and croissant dough is nothing more than puff pastry with yeast, I've struggled with croissants - not rising, butter leaking out onto the baking pan, etc. So, I took another run at them. I used the recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Pastry Bible, combined with a little bit of Julia Child, and the results were very good. I think the two hours in the fridge makes a huge difference in how easy it is to work. I ended up making about 2 pounds of dough and worked it 1/3 at a time, with the rest staying cold - it was perfect.

These are the unbaked chocolate and plain croissants. The dough went together well - better than my photos! I think I forgot to turn on the digital macro function until all the raw dough was baket, but anyway, you can see that they shaped up nicely. The yeast was past its pull date but it worked nonetheless, though a bit more slowly I think. Anyway, I used semisweet chocolate in the chocolate version, and it turned out to be just right - bittersweet is just too dry and, well, bitter, for breakfast. I did not increase the amount of sugar in the dough (only 2 T.) but I might double that to 1/4 cup next time.

Here is a finished pan of assorted treates - the scraps went to Scout! The unbaked dough is supposed to freeze well, and with the fat content I'm sure it does, but I didn't freeze any this time. The recipe made about 19 or 20 pieces that were fairly small by current standards, but I think just about right.

Strawberry Shortcake

2008-04-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

Lots of stuff contributing to the creation of this dessert. First, there was the white cake that kept staring at me from the kitchen counter - I had baked two 10"x10" square cakes, one white, using only the egg whites, and one yellow, using only the yolks. This was just for field testing for Shasha's wedding cake (more to come on that). Plan A is to make a genoise, but I thought I would give some of the traditional cakes a trial run too - the genoise have been giving me problems lately and not wanting to rise. Both the yellow and the white were very nice, though the white one did not rise like I expected - but I do think it did what it was supposed to do. And I think the yellow one rose more than it should have - it came up over the top of the 2" pan. So, anyway, there they were on the counter, wrapped up tight. I kept thinking of and rejecting chocolate type fillings. Finally, after reading three different recent entries about strawberries - from http://ayankeeinasouthernkitchen.com/, http://www.davidlebovitz.com/, and http://tartelette.blogspot.com/ - I caved and bought some strawberries - no doubt not the same quality as either Paris or South Carolina this time of year, but still, they turned out to be pretty darn good.

Then I made a creme patissiere, or pastry cream, for the filling. I doused the cake layers in a marsala syrup, filled them with pastry cream (lightened with whipped cream) and some sliced berries, and frosted with a whipped cream cream cheese frosting.

And then I had some leftover frosting, so I added little frosting runs down the sides for fun! Really fabulous. Again, no pictures of the inside - I am working on this!!! It only used half of the cake too, so there are many more options to play with.

The pastry cream is very light. It is made with milk as opposed to half and half or heavy cream and it doesn't really lose anything this way.

Pastry Cream – Crème Patisserie

2 cups milk

3 T cornstarch
½ cup sugar
3 eggs

1 T unsalted butter
Vanilla or rum or almond extract

1 cup whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks and lightly sweetened with powdered sugar

Whisk cornstarch and sugar and eggs in a 1 quart sauce pan. Scald milk (in microwave is fine) then stir gradually into the egg mixture. Turn heat on medium and cook, stirring, until it gets very thick. Take off the heat, beat in the butter and flavoring. Transfer to a bowl, cover with waxed paper pressed right on the top of the custard, then let cool at room temp 15-20 minutes and then refrigerate. After it is cool and firm, whip the 1 cup of cream and then whisk the cream into the custard to lighten it.

Use as a filling for a white cake with berries, or fill a prebaked tart shell and cover with fresh berries.

Chocolate and Caramel

2008-04-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

Oh! This stuff has such potential. Chocolate caramel mousse. With an artistic sort of a flair- you know, a jaunty little tilt to the whole thing. I have to thank Tartlette for the idea and recipe and the link to the pastry chef. There was a lot of "oh la la-ing" going on in connection with this post, and it wasn't necessarily limited to food. But, sadly, the execution turned out to be a little less than what you might have hoped for - but maybe consistent with Tartlette's experience with other recipes of his. In any event, the caramel mousse was a little gummy - too much gelatin I think! But the chocolate mousse was yummy - light and airy, though I wouldn't hesitate to go back to my usual Joy of Cooking chocolate mousse instead, since I can make that one with my eyes closed.

Anyway, the caramel was lots of fun to make - here it is ready to go into the champage flutes. And here is is again resting on its side to get the proper angle.

And another shot of the lovely finished product.

Bread of the Angels

2008-03-23T12:07:00.001-07:00

Pane degli Angeli

I’ve been looking for my favorite yeast lately – Dr. Oetker, a German brand that makes really superior bread and pastry. Nicer texture, more controlled rise, better gluten, and wonderful aroma. And, you usually only need to use half a packet, even for heavier doughs like whole grain or brioche. And I’ve been craving brioche lately, though for reasons explained below, that hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway, my usual sources for the yeast have dried up because they say they don’t sell through it fast enough. People are so funny – I haven’t found that yeast goes bad or that it falls flat even past the “sell by” date, but the whole obsession with “sell by” dates is a rant for another day. I finally found it in DeLaurenti’s, of course, though I don’t usually think of buying baking supplies there unless it’s fruitcake season. But that’s another digression. Anyway, right next to the Dr. Oetker yeast was this box of what looked very much like Italian yeast – oh, I was so excited – visions of pizza crusts danced in my head. And the name was just perfect “PANEANGELI” – bread of the angels!! Wow, with a name like that it’s got to be good! And the packaging was so pretty! And “Lievito” DOES mean yeast, it’s just that it apparently also has a more generic meaning – which turns out in this case to mean a premeasured mixture of baking soda and baking powder for cakes and cookies! And all of a sudden I have a box of 10 packets!

Now, in retrospect, there WERE some warning signs that should have alerted me, but the box was all in Italian and I kind of skimmed the words as I grabbed it, so I must have seen only what I wanted to see. I get it home and start to look more closely at it, and here are words like “dolce”, meaning “sweet” – still ok for croissants, right? And “vaniglinato” meaning “vanilla flavored” – well, still ok for brioche. . . . . And “istantanea” which of course means instant, which I took to mean “quick rising”. Well, in the end it I’m sitting there with these packets, a little annoyed at myself, but figuring I’ll find a way to use them. I love the Italians! Each packet has a recipe on the back! All different. And numbered so you can track them! And the web site for this product has a “recipe of the week’!

So I have to bake my way through them, of course. So far we’ve got Ciambelle, which are little rings, Crostata di Marmellata, or jam tart, and Torta al Limone, or lemon cake. It’s great, because they all taste really Italian – who knew there was a secret ingredient like this!

Jam Tarts

2008-03-20T11:14:00.001-07:00

Pastry crust filled with a tender almond cake and a dollop of apricot jam, or blackberry redcurrant jelly.

I had a naming contest for these at work. My personal favorite is “Jammy Cakey Tarty Thingies”, but it may be reduced to a simple “Jammy Cakes”. I took some tartlet shells and filled them with a bit of Almond Cake batter – a dense and moist almond pound cake – then I plopped in some jam (apricot in some, blackberry red currant jelly in others) and then put more batter on the top.

Funny how all my baked goods look the same – kind of round and golden. Anyway, the crispness of the pastry crust played off of the tender cake in a subtle but very nice way, and the jam was fabulous – next time I would probably add more jam, but I was trying to avoid the potential for them all to turn volcanic in the oven, so I used a bit less than I really wanted to.

Scout, my adoring fan!

Birthdays

2008-03-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Lori's Birthday Cake - This was a special request for "something apple". So, that left me with plenty of discretion, except that pie of course isn't for birthdays, and the size had to be big enough to feed at least 16 people, because unlike the rest of us greedy and cake-hungry souls who don't want to share, Lori always invites everyone on the entire floor!

This was my first run with this particular square cake pan - for some reason I am loving everything square these days - picture frames, rugs, and now cakes. This pan is fabulous - it's Wilton, either 10"x10" or 11"x11" square - really a perfect size for brownies or cakes. The apple cake is a carrot-cake-like concoction - lots of oil and eggs and sugar, a dash of cinnamon and some diced Pink Lady apples - nuts optional. It's very dense and moist. I made two full cakes and used them as layers - sandwiched and frosted with nearly 2 pounds (!) of cream cheese frosting! So the entire structure was somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 pounds! omg. OK, maybe 9 pounds. But still. And we did get close to 20 servings. Anyway, it was quite the cake.

Apple cake

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cups vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 cups apples, peeled and chopped

(optional - 1 cup walnuts or pecans)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients (flour, sugars, cinnamon, salt and baking soda) until thoroughly combined.
Whisk together the wet ingredients (eggs, oil and vanilla) and stir into the dry ingredients. Stir to just combine. Fold in the apples and nuts if using.
Spread the batter into a greased and floured pan. Bake 50 to 55 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Make sure the cream cheese and butter are at room temperature!

Mix 2 packages (8 ounces each) cream cheese, 1 stick unsalted butter, 1 teaspoon vanilla and confectioner's sugar to taste with an electric mixer. Beat until really light and fluffy. Spread over top (and sides if you want) of cooled cake.

Ravioli ala Bunker

2008-03-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

Far and away the best ravioli I've ever made - and I didn't even have to make them! A collaborative effort (read - Lisa bossing others around in the kitchen) with Gary and Tarri and Matt. These used a tomato pasta, just for the fun red color, but you could use plain or spinach as well.

Tomato Pasta
3 cups flour - all-purpose, unbleached
3 eggs
3 oz. (1/2 small can) tomato paste

To make the pasta, combine the ingredients in the work bowl of a food processor and process until well combined - it will be moist and mealy and hold together well - add a few drops of water if it seems dry - better too moist because you can always work extra flour in, but if it's too dry it's never going to be right. Roll it into sheets using a manual pasta maker (Atlas), and then fill with the herbed ricotta and walnut filling below, using a ravioli maker - actually just the plaque that lets you fill and form them by hand. So, even though they call it a ravioli MAKER, it doesn't really make them for you . . . . I have never used any of the other kinds though, and this is way better than shaping and cutting them individually. . . .

Herbed Ricotta Filling with Walnuts

1 -12 oz container of ricotta - firm/drained
a handful (3/4 c.) of fresh mixed herbs - we used flat leaf parsley, lemon thyme, chervil and basil
a handful of walnuts
1/4 cup finely grated parmesan
pinch of salt

Combine all ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the herbs are finely minced and the walnuts are no longer chunky. Fill ravioli. These need to boil for about 2-4 minutes. Serve with cream sauce and additional parmesan cheese - sprinkle with chopped parsley if you want.

Was finally able to post additional pictures - here is the ricotta we used, and the basket of fresh herbs! Absolutely use lemon thyme, it was fantastic!

Girls Baking

2008-03-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

We had a play-hooky-and-bake day on the 13th! So fun - started with a trip to PFI for chocolate, olives, cheese, almond paste, and other essentials, then to Bargreen's just for looking around (excellent source for pizza pans and peels, among other things), then for coffee, I think, then to the grocery store for eggs and a heart-shaped cookie cutter, then back home. So, no baking actually underway until nearly 1:00 PM. But when we got going, it went fast.

First, Nocciola Cheesecake to take into work - no particular reason. OMG - divine!

Then, truffle brownies, later to be cut into heart shapes, and the crumbs ingeniously rolled into cocoa dusted truffles!

Then, pine nut tartlettes - small technical glitches involving honey overflowing into the oven - that's what the foil on the bottom is for!

Then, at the last minute, heart shaped cookies with jam-filled windows! I know, I know, a bit heavy on the photos and light on text and recipes, but that's how it is sometimes!

Back by Popular Demand – Fruitcake!

2008-02-19T10:03:00.000-08:00

OK – this will never convert you if you’re a fruitcake hater, but let me tell you, you may hate fruitcake, but you will LOVE this, if you should ever be so lucky as to get some. This stuff is a tradition now, baked religiously the day after Thanksgiving, and on the occasional day in March when girlfriends from out of town arrive and they lobby hard for an off-season event.

The fruit is soaked in rum for at least a day before baking – figs, dates, raisins, currants, cherries and orange rind. Nothing fluorescent or green. The nuts are almonds and walnuts. There is enough batter to hold it together in a very low-key cakey sort of way, with cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg. This recipe is modified from the original – icky things like pineapple have been eliminated. And non-icky things that simply don’t belong in fruitcake, like macadamia nuts, have been substituted with more reasonable nuts.

It’s baked in a sheet pan, then brushed with rum syrup, and finally it is topped with a thin and lovely drape of marzipan. Rolled out by someone more patient than I am. We usually cut it into six pieces – about 6”x6” square. They’re better after a few days, assuming they last that long, and can be frozen for months without losing their quality. It’s fantastic cut into smaller squares and served with a cup of coffee or a port after dinner. Or, well, you can eat it for breakfast – fruit! Nuts! It’s healthy!!

Pine Nuts

2008-02-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

Yipes! I blinked and January was gone! If only that were true, as January was in fact a long and dismal 31 days. Cold and dark. And cold. Only the chocolate helped. Rum Truffle Ritter Sport, to be specific. Oh, and my new copy of Gina DePalma’s new book, Dolce Italiano – she’s the pastry chef at Babbo, and the book is fabulous. I’ve been reading it in small doses, rationing it out like dessert. OK, I don’t actually ration dessert, but you get the idea.

I had to immediately make the pine nut tart on the cover – unlike my usual m.o., I didn’t change a thing in this recipe and it was fabulously perfect. The crust, which Gina notes she is particularly proud of, is probably the best sweet pastry crust I’ve ever used. It is firm but tender – holds up to the filling but doesn’t shoot across the room when you try to cut it with a fork!

Also featured in the above photo (thank you Jon!) is Potatoes Anna – I’ve never made them before but oh are they good! Thin rounds of peeled potatoes, layered in concentric circles in a cast iron skillet and brushed with butter between layers. You keep the flame on while you’re assembling it, shaking the pan from time to time, then pop the whole thing in the oven to bake for 45 minutes or so, with a lid on. You can see how wonderful they look, and they tasted just as good.

So, anyway, back to the crust. It makes more than you need for a 10” or even an 11” tart – she recommends saving the scraps and when you have scraps from two, you can make a third. Well, my freezer organization simply doesn’t lend itself to anything like this – it goes in, it gets unidentifiable with freezer burn, I take it out thinking it’s pizza dough and end up with pie crust, or vice versa. So that doesn’t work. What does work is using the dough to make mini tartlets right away. I baked three small ones, and then, lacking any fresh fruit to fill them with (see, general griping about January, above) I filled them with Fig Jam, for a homemade version of the Fig Newton® – humbly, these are better!!

About that freezer - ours pooped out on us, and I am having to use up stuff. I found the ready made puff pastry that I had bought last year, and was inspired to try an experiment. I cut the sheet into 2" squares, and pushed each square into a mini-muffin cup, then filled each cup with the pine nut tart filling from above. 20 minutes at 425 - they are so good! And they're small, so virtually without sin. You'll have to make your own judgment about adding ice cream, but it doesn't hurt!

December - a whole month in one bite!

2007-12-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

OK, OK, it's been really really busy lately. . . .

First of all - Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Scout - the chocolate dog with a caramel bow. The bow is courtesy of a box of Fran's nuts and caramels, and it is a testament to just how much I've eaten recently that the box still has any left in it . . . .

The baking continues since November. First, Dusen Cookies - little jam filled butter cookies. They can be made with an almond cookie base instead of a sugar cookie base, but the dough is more brittle and hard to work with, and the flavor is not that much better, so sugar cookies it is.

These have apricot jam in some and blackberry red currant jelly in the rest.

Then, just for fun, a dark chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and meringue mushrooms -so cute!

For Bryan's birthday party on 12/22. . . .

And yes, I know I am apparently crappy at taking pictures of the inside of the baked goods - the chocolate cake above is a case in point. I don't know how that happens - normally I just don't have the camera out at the cutting and serving point, and then poof it's gone!

But, here I have tried to take steps in the right direction - mom's stollen, whole and cut up, covered with melted butter and sugar. Won't last long.

And this doesn't even begin to touch the savory items, such as the puff pastry filled with Dungeness crab and cheddar cheese.

OK - more next year! XO - L

Odds and Ends

2007-11-21T12:36:00.000-08:00

Seems appropriate to wrap up a short week by tidying up the desk and cleaning out the pictures I've kind of wanted to post but just didn't get organized enough to do.
A few weeks ago we stumbled on a quince tree - no one knows what to do with quince anymore, they're so old fashioned and definintely not available for instant gratification, but I love them - the smell is divine, they keep forever, and with a little sugar and some heat they get all soft and sweet and pink.

I poached mine until they were tender, pushed them through a sieve because they are a little stringy, and then made a crostata, the perfect Italian word to describe a lattice-topped jam tart. Since they don't really have pie this is as close as it gets - and as close as it needs to get as far as I'm concerned - nothing against pie, but I love these - kind of the foodie version of a pop-tart! Tender pastry, sweet fruit jam - mmm, perfect with a cup of coffee, healthy enough for breakfast (ok, my standards on that are admittedly not high) and fantastic with a bit of whipped cream.

The yellow Vespa - almost time for its first check up - I love this scooter! Over 400 miles so far.

And this pic from September - girls' weekend/lunch in the market - the shot just arranged itself and looked so pretty.

Back from Italy with Fabulous Pastry

2007-11-07T15:42:00.000-08:00

So I spent the last 10 days of October in Florence with my mom. We went with several missions in mind, most of them having to do with food, but also involving silk scarves, leather gloves, patio umbrellas, chocolate, - oh right, that's food again - and wine bottle stoppers with beautiful Murano glass tops. More to come on all of those things - there are great buys in Florence even with the dollar at a terrible exchange for the Euro. Did I mention the chocolate? Here's one sweet place - http://www.cioccolatobecagli.it/

But, the one thing I went over there for above all others was to figure out the secret behind the Sfoglia di Riso. This pastry is an Italian staple - at least in Florence. Sfoglia (plural - sfoglie) means folder. The folder in this case is an envelop of sweet puff pastry, folded over a filling and baked until the puff pastry is shattering and golden and the filling spreads out inside and marries with the pastry in a sublime and fabulous way. There are folders filled with pastry cream, sweet rice custard, apricot, ricotta, chocolate, and other things as well - apple, pineapple, blackberry - the list goes on. Anyway, I had happily eaten my weight in these, both in 2005 and earlier this year when we were there in June. But I couldn't turn up anything on the internet or in cookbooks - apparently it is SO easy or intuitive that no recipe is required. OR, it's simply something that no one makes at home - I mean why would you? you can go into any caffe or bar and get one, warm, freshly baked every morning, for about $1.10 (Euro 0.85). Either way, they were a mystery to me, so this trip I resolved to figure them out.

After several false starts, I managed to talk my way into a pastry shop near the central market - even though they thought I was a little deranged, they agreed to let me watch the production - so from 6:00 AM until 7:30 AM one moring of the vacation, that's exactly what I did.

Oh my god - it was possibly the most fun I had on the whole trip! A tiny little kitchen with one long marble table, a dough sheeter, a proofing cabinet, some ovens and some cooling racks - the mixers looked to be in the small room next door. I watched the sfoglie go together, as well as the morning croissants, which they call brioche - go figure. Matteo, the pastry chef, was very nice, stopping his lightening-speed assembly long enough for me to get one picture of the filling going in.

This weekend, I tried it myself. The results, while not perfect because the dough distorted a little on me, were completely authentic in taste and texture - I made a double large batch of puff pastry from Rose Levy Bernabaum's cookbook, which turned out to be about 4 times too much! But nevermind, it freezes. I made 7 pastries - 6 with pastry cream and one, the best by far, with a mix of pastry cream and dad's apricot preserves. I have the rounds cut out for 27 more in the freezer! Perhaps I will be throwing a breakfast party one of these weekends . . . . More to come on Italy later on.

Torta Setteveli

2007-10-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

"Seven Veils Cake" This cake consists of six different components, and nine layers, so the initial mystery is why it’s called seven veil cake, but it turns out that that’s not critical to assembly or enjoyment. The inspiration to make this was sparked by Ms. Adventures in Italy, a site I linked to just last week. Turns out we both have October birthdays, and that was basically enough.

Oh that and the picture there is just sublime. I will clearly be researching this next week when I am in Florence. But in the meantime, this is the way it turned out this weekend.

It was fabulous, and I am writing it here the way I made it, but lots of refinements are in order. The chocolate disks and chocolate cereal praline came out too hard, maybe some corn syrup is needed to make them soft even when they're cold. And frankly I think it could use another layer of chocolate sponge cake. More to come . . . .

The assembly – starting at the bottom

Chocolate sponge cake
Chocolate cereal praline
Hazelnut Bavarian cream
Chocolate disk
Hazelnut Bavarian cream
Chocolate disk
Chocolate mousse
Chocolate ganache, poured as a glaze

Oooh la la.

Chocolate disks and cereal praline – Cut 3 pieces of waxed or parchment paper and trace a 9” circle on each. Take 13 oz. (380 g.) of bittersweet chocolate – chips or pieces are ok, or chop some blocks – melt over low heat with 4 oz. butter. I used Guittard bittersweet pieces for this – bigger than chips but not by much. Heat gently until just melted – it should be just soft and have some body – not super liquid.

Spread approx ¼ to 1/3 of the mixture onto the paper to fill the disk you’ve traced out. Repeat to make a second disk. Stir 1 cup rice crispies cereal into the remaining chocolate and spread to form a third disk.
Then make a Chocolate Sponge Cake – use a 10” springform pan, lined with parchment or waxed paper - I used a 9" pan for a planned 9" finished product and found that sponge cake shrinks. Kind of a lot. I would just use a chocolate genoise and maybe bake it in a jelly roll pan and then cut out one or two rounds. But these are the ingredients I used. Technique is too long to include here.

3 eggs, separated
¼ c plus 1T sugar
1/8 t. cream of tartar
¼ cup cake flour
3 T cocoa
Pinch salt

Chocolate Mousse - from the Joy of Cooking – 2 egg whites, stiffly beaten; 4 oz. semi sweet chocolate, 2 T rum, ¼ cup sugar, 1 cup whipping cream, whipped. Make a syrup of the sugar and the rum. Melt chocolate with 3 T of the heavy cream. Stir in the syrup and let cool. Fold in beaten egg whites and whipped cream. This is the whipped cream going in - egg whites are already mixed in. Let chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

Hazelnut Bavarian Cream – 3 egg yolks, 1 envelope gelatin, pinch salt, ¼ cup sugar, 3 oz. hazelnut praline paste, 1 cup milk, 3/4 cup whipping cream, whipped. The technique for a Bavarian Cream is basically to mix the yolks, sugar, salt and gelatin. Scald the milk, and add the hazelnut praline paste to the hot milk, then cook the ingredients together as for a custard. Strain if necessary. Let cool in the fridge 1 to 2 hours, stirring occassionally, then add the whipped cream, which is what is shown in the picture.

Chocolate glaze – 4 oz. chocolate, ½ cup whipping cream, 1T butter – melt together over low heat – stir into pourable glaze. Don't have it too hot when you pour it on the torte.

Assemble by stacking the layers in a springform pan. Hold out 1 cup of the chocolate mousse and don't put the glaze on yet. Chill at least 3 hours.

Take off the spring form side, then ice the side of the torte with the remaining mousse. Then pour the glaze on. The chilled dessert will arrest the glaze so it doesn't run all over. You may need to work the glaze over the top and encourage it down the sides just a bit with an offset spatula.

Yeah, it was good.

Chocolate and Coffee

2007-09-17T16:13:00.000-07:00

Lately one of my favorite things is chocolate and coffee - not as in a caffe mocha, not as in a coffee flavored chocolate, but as in a cup of coffee with a piece of chocolate. Now I am reluctant to even wade in here, because emotions run so high on this topic, but I love milk chocolate, and no that does not make me common or a bad person or one with no appreciation of fine food - though the looks I get suggest all of those things and worse. Nevertheless, a good espresso or americano with a piece of milk chocolate on the side is heaven - the perfect balance of sweet and bitter. My current and long time favorite is Ritter Sport - the butter biscuit is divine and the milk chocolate with whole hazelnuts is sublime. Both are good for breakfast. The rum raisin, a treat for later in the day, is often just what the doctor ordered. And there's the cappuccino, and the marzipan, and . . . . well, pretty much all of them. On a memorable day last summer we bought one of each, broke them into squares, arranged them attractively on a plate and served them as dessert after a lovely dinner on the deck!

I will also happily eat dark chocolate, especially with a coffee like the one in the picture - an espresso macchiato, in Florence. But not dirt chocolate, which is my term for pretty much anything with a higher than 85% cocoa solids. Come on people - that is just awful. There isn't enough sugar or cocoa butter to have a decent mouthfeel or to really bring out the flavor of the chocolate. There - I could go on and on, but I won't. Well, maybe a little - it's like eating deliberately underripe strawberries with no sugar - why? They are more succulent and delicious with sugar - not to mention a bit of heavy cream, so why not enjoy life a little?

Like with this chocolate confection at Mamma Gina's on the Borgo San Jacopo in Florence. Go there. Drink a Brunello, eat a bistecca, and find room for this dessert!

Of course dessert in Florence naturally leads me to chocolate (or hazelnut, or gianduia) gelato - with coffee it is beyond fabulous. More to come on that topic - research is still underway.

Pear Extravaganza

2007-09-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

Pear-Walnut Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

It's pear season, and we have them and then some. Our own Bartletts and d'Anjous, and Dad's exotic varieties from Australia and Germany - Peckham's Triumph, Forelle, and others I can't name. They say that the Boscs are the best for cooking, and I can't honestly dispute that, but we don't have any of those this year and with 40 pounds of free pears in the fridge, I'm not buying any!

This pear cake was inspired by a recipe of Mom's for a tea bread - after reading it, it struck me that it looked a lot like my carrot cake recipe. I will post the recipe as soon as I write it out, but if you use a carrot cake recipe, just substitute ripe diced pears for the carrot, and reduce the sugar by about 25%. Everything else stays the same. You could also substitute ginger and nutmeg for the cinnamon that is usually called for, and of course you could use pecans instead of walnuts. Leave OUT the coconut, pineapple and raisins that some heathens put in their carrot cakes.

My all time favorite pear recipe is French Pear Pie - an odd little pie crust made with oil and milk, filled with wine-poached pears, gingered sour cream, and topped with a nutmeg-scented crumble topping. It's a bit involved, what with all the different components - I usually make the crust and poach the pears the night before, then make the sour cream and crumble topping the day I bake it. It is pretty easy if you make the crust in the food processor first, then make the crumble topping, then make the sour cream filling, reusing the bowl without having to clean it.

French Pear Pie

This is worth the time and effort.

FRENCH PEAR PIE

Pears:

1 bottle white wine

1 cup water
2 cups sugar
juice of half a lemon
4 bosc pears, peeled, halved and cored

Pastry:

2¼ cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon milk
9 tablespoons vegetable oil

Sour Cream Filling:

3 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1½ cups sour cream

Topping:

1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup chilled butter

Poach pears. Combine wine, sugar and lemon and boil 10 minutes, add pear halves and simmer 10-30 minutes until they pierce easily with a knife. Remove pears and reserve liquid for reuse.

Make pastry. Stir flour and salt together in a bowl. Combine milk and oil but don't stir. Pour all at once into flour. Mix and form into two balls. Roll half the dough out between two sheets of waxed paper – do not try this any other way or the dough will fall apart – and fit it into a 9-inch pie pan. Freeze the other half for use another time or make two pies.

Prepare filling by mixing all ingredients together.

Prepare topping by mixing dry ingredients and cutting in butter until mealy.

Arrange pear halves in crust. Pour on filling and sprinkle topping over. Bake at 400°F for 25-30 minutes or until pie is golden brown. Do not overbake.

This is Billie Moreland's recipe from her restaurant in Spokane. I waitressed there my senior year in college and was captivated by her desserts. She never gave out recipes, so I was thrilled to find this in a cookbook 11 years later. It was a favorite of customers when she made it and it was always cut into 6 enormous pieces – I think it actually serves 8 unless no one has had anything else to eat.

I have also modified the recipe to make a bar cookie - Plateau Creme de Poire - simply use an 11x17 cookie sheet and make the crust in a food processor with 2 cups of flour, 1/2 cup of confectioner's sugar, and one stick of melted butter - add a bit of water if necessary until it is the consistency of damp sand, then press it into the parchment lined sheet and prebake for 20 minutes. Then spread on the sour cream topping, pave with thinly sliced poached pears, and finish with a double recipe of the crumble topping. Bake for an additional 25 minutes. Let cool and cut into bars to serve.

Empirical testing has shown that pears poached in wine, even crummy wine you wouldn't drink, taste far better than pears poached in water - even if you dress the water up with lemon juice and sugar. Since we make our own wine, we have a fairly reliable supply of not-so-great bottles, extremely suitable for cooking. But a $4.99 bottle of Riesling or a $2 bottle of any kind of white from Trader Joe's is perfect, I promise. Heck, take a small glass for yourself if you want - the pears won't miss it!

Fruit Tarts

2007-08-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

OK - here is another non-chocolate post. Don't worry though, more chocolate ganache filled macarons are coming up, as well as a planned visit to Theo Chocolate upcoming in the very near future. But it's August and it's fruit season. And these bake very quickly, not heating up the kitchen. Not that that's been a problem - it was 60 degrees and pouring rain on Sunday. . . .

One thing that I'm learing quickly is how hard it is to photograph food and make it look beautiful, especially rustic type food that doesn't have the advantage of sugar paste flowers and food coloring and royal icing swags. That stuff, in pinks and purples and yellow and red and green, that stuff pops. These humble tarts don't really pop until you put them in your mouth!

But with your eyes closed, I'd put these babies up against anything. The first one is a plum tart with almond creme. The second is an apricot jam tart with frangipane and pine nuts. The difference between almond and frangipane? Well, for purposes of these recipes none - both use frangipane, which is almond paste, sugar, egg, and butter (maybe a touch of flour) that is used as a base or a topping and bakes into an almondy creamy wonder. Under the plums it stays soft and creamy. On top of the apricot jam it gets a lightly crunchy top crust and supports the pine nuts.

Either way the texture and flavor are perfect with fruit or jam, though I think I make it sweeter when I plan to use it with otherwise unsweetened fresh fruit, and less sweet when it is going on top of jam.

The puff pastry is a dream - I found it at Big John's, premade, frozen perfectly flat, two sheets per package. $7.50 for the all-butter, less than that for the half-butter. It's good, it keeps, it's always ready to use, there's no waste. The only thing you miss is the "oh my god I can't believe I pulled this off" feeling you get when you make your own successful puff pastry. But I can live with that if the trade off is having a fantastic dessert in 30 minutes from orchard to table.

Chocolate Macarons

2007-08-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

Chocolate and Almonds - Macarons

Macarons (the French kind made with ground almonds, not the coconut kind with two “o’s”) have been cropping up all over lately. You know how when you start looking for a new car and say all of a sudden you’re interested in a Volvo or some other brand you’ve never really thought about and all of a sudden you see them EVERYWHERE?

Well, it’s like that. First they were on Kuidaore http://brandoesq.blogspot.com/
Beautiful, but not my type, I thought. Then, as I clicked on random food blogs, there they were on Paris Breakfasts http://parisbreakfasts.blogspot.com/ David Leibovitz, http://www.davidlebovitz.com/ Our Patisserie, http://joakitchen.blogspot.com/2005/11/pistachio-macarons.html
and many many others. Then, as I Googled recipes there were – in addition to the chocolate ones – glorious pink raspberry ones, and pale green pistachio ones, and hazelnut ones. There was pistachio butter cream filling, chocolate filling, chestnut filling, peanut butter buttercream, and prune Armagnac filling. Just to name a few. It goes on and on – so far I keep chasing one link to another and have not run out yet. Good lord, there are Apricot ones . . . .

From what I read, they are addictive like few other things – many posts suggest a willingness to fly to Paris just to get one, and one post recounted how the author ate both of the ones that she bought as gifts on her trip home to London (a chocolate and a pistachio) – after all, neither of the recipients KNEW she’d bought them . . . .

And, they are a challenge to make. And they’re so dang pretty! So, last night I took my first shot. Summary – they are definitely worth making and I will do them again. Mine did not have the crackly top or the cute little feet that everyone talks about – I didn’t bake them quite long enough to sufficiently dry them out, and the feet only come if you fold the batter the exact right amount – I think mine were too fluffy. Also, the almonds need to be more finely ground – mine were a bit too coarse even after a long time in the food processor. BUT, a great start.

I made two different fillings - a dark chocolate ganache and a white chocolate buttercream flavored with Fiori di Sicilia – the exotic and delicious orange flower water that is the signature flavor of panettone. Wow, another exception to the chocolate and fruit thing – it was fabulous.

Chocolate and hazelnuts

2007-07-26T17:58:00.001-07:00

Hey – So, I have finally gotten off the dime on the chocolate/hazelnut confections. I love that combination so much, and the little ones I got in Germany were so good, that I wanted to try my very own. So, I came up with the thought of a milk chocolate truffle filling, coated with a layer of crushed hazelnuts and rice crispy things, dipped in dark chocolate. It was so perfect in theory . . . .
Wow, do I have a long way to go.

Luckily, I evaluated the rice crispy element and discovered that they lose their crispness and they have a plain/flat flavor that is terrible, even in combination with chocolate (at least the organic ones do – ok, I should have gotten the real ones, but Whole Foods only sells the cardboard ones). So, at least I didn’t waste a whole bunch of milk chocolate truffle filling. But if you roll the ganache in just plain crushed toasted hazelnuts, they’re really really good!

The truffle filling is a ganache made from 2 parts milk chocolate and 1 part heavy cream. I used Callebaut chocolate and the ganache comes out with a caramel-y flavor that’s very good. It is a little soft, so maybe I would back off the cream a little bit. I formed the filling into balls with a small ice cream scoop, but it was too soft to really handle so then I popped them in the freezer to firm them up a bit before rolling them. It would be easy and good to add an extract – almond, rum, etc., to the cream and flavor the filling that way.

The coating is another story – tempered chocolate could be my downfall. You have to temper the chocolate in order to have a glossy coating with a good snap. Tempering chocolate is hard. It has to do with heating the chocolate up and then cooling it back down so that it is still melted, but at some perfect temperature where the cocoa butter doesn’t separate from the cocoa solids and it hardens with a beautiful shine and the right texture. I am not qualified to explain how to do it, because apparently I can’t. If you fail to temper it properly, the chocolate hardens streaky and ugly, and not as crisp as it should be, though it is still very tasty. But not something you can put out for company. I have since read a lot about tempering chocolate, and short of a tempering machine there is no easy solution – you just have to be patient and accurate – traits I thought I had in abundance J. The good thing is, you can re-temper chocolate. You can also use the broken stuff in anything calling for melted chocolate, including brownies and chocolate gelato, to name a few things. . . . .

Risotto with Molé Verde

2007-07-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

July 11

Risotto with Molé Verde

OK – well, I have a million ideas related to chocolate, but that’s not what’s flowing right now. But traditional molé has unsweetened chocolate in it, right? So I’m going with the position that this entry is not disqualified.

This recipe was an accident, really. It started with a cooking magazine – I swear it was just three days ago and now I can’t find the magazine or remember which one it was – which inspired my need for a snack of quesadillas with roasted Anaheim chiles. Then, in a southwestern mood, there was a request for the mole verde to be used as a side with grilled beef porterhouse steak. Everything for the mole is fresh right now, and it’s been a long time since a trip to Santa Fe or since I have made tamales or anything that we’d normally eat the molé verde with, so it sounded really good. But we needed to run out for virtually every ingredient – oh well. . . .

This particular recipe is based on one from the Coyote Café Cookbook – it is fabulous, though admittedly a lot of work. But the flavor alone is worth it, and the quantity it produces allows you to have a big-ish dinner party or to freeze some of it for another meal or two.

After making the molé, it seemed like it needed rice to go with it, because rice really carries the sauce better than any other starch. So, why make ordinary rice when risotto is so good? Then, it was a fairly short leap to stirring in sour cream at the end instead of heavy cream, and topping it with a fresh pecorino-like cheese (goat milk) from the Bainbridge Island dairy that makes chevre, and with a huge handful of halved grape tomatoes on top. Stir the molé into the risotto right after the sour cream . . . . omg – I had it for breakfast today!

Mole Verde

9 tomatillos – husked and washed in hot water
6 fresh poblano (pasilla) chiles – roasted, seeded and peeled
2 cups romaine leaves – no ribs
½ cup cilantro leaves
1 ½ - 2 cups rich chicken stock
½ t. cumim powder
1 t. coriander seeds and ¼ t. anise seeds – ground in a mortar and pestle
1 small corn tortilla OR 6-8 corn tortilla chips

2 T olive oil or canola oil or duck fat

Preheat the broiler, or heat up a large cast iron skillet. Broil the tomatillos on a foil-lined cookie sheet, turning once, (or dry roast in the skillet) until lightly charred on both sides. Let cool and then place in the container of a food processor. Add the chiles, the romaine, the cilantro and the chicken stock and process until fine. Add the spices, then add the corn tortilla or corn chips and process again until fine. You may need to do this in batches until everything is combined.

Heat the oil or the duck fat in a large cast iron skillet until nearly smoking – add the molé and fry it, stirring, for 3-5 minutes. Then put it through a fine sieve in batches, stirring and pressing hard to make sure enough solids come through to make the texture of the sauce slightly thick – kind of the consistency of a regular tomato sauce.

The sauce should be used slightly warm or at room temperature, not hot. It is fabulous with tamales, roasted chicken, etc.

For the risotto I just used about 1 ¼ cups Arborio rice sautéed with some butter and olive oil, 4 oz. white wine and 4 cups of chicken stock. Then at the end I stirred in about ¼ cup of sour cream, took it off the heat and then added about a cup of the mole. Sprinkle on the grated cheese and the tomatoes when each individual serving is plated up.

Almond Pound Cake and Peach Ice Cream

2007-07-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

July 9, 2007

Directly contrary to the overall theme, there is no direct link to chocolate in this first post, but hey, sometimes there just isn't.

This cake/combination was inspired by two things. Always in the back of my mind there is the awareness of ingredients I have that might be pressed into service for some thing or another. It’s a just a matter of finding the right catalyst.
So, there are usually two things – the raw material and the inspiration.

In this case the inspiration was a food blog that originates in Singapore that I love/am in awe of – brandoesq.blogspot.com - she just wrote about a kumquat preserve pound cake with white chocolate (there's the chocolate!!) ice cream. She usually doesn’t give recipes, but the inspiration factor is high. Raw material is the two jars of Austrian jam we were given while we were in Germany – one of them is a combination of apricot and yellow plum, I think, though but I haven’t looked up the translation for the label yet. Anyway, this jam is authentic stuff – the label, as noted above, is only in German, and the flavor is fantastic. That said, it is unlikely the we would actually use a 9 oz. jar of jam anytime soon, seeing as how we have tons of my homemade stuff and that we just don’t eat much toast. So. The thought of stirring some jam into a cake batter was quite inspiring.

Then, the peaches looked great in the Columbia City Farmers’ Market – wanted to use apricots but they are at least 48 hours away from being ripe. And there just happened to be peach schnapps in the liquor cabinet, courtesy of a wild hair of Jill’s probably.

At this point (July 4) no taste test has yet been done – except of course for the clean up on the ice cream transfer from one container to another – that one seems like a keeper so far! Anyway, the pound cake seems like it will be good in a few hours when we have some with the fireworks, but I do think that the batter probably should have had some sour cream in addition to the listed ingredients. [Late note - definitely add 1 c. of sour cream, alternating with the flour - probably unnecessary to adjust the other ingredients.]

Apricot Almond Pound Cake with Peach Ice Cream

Apricot Almond Pound Cake

8 oz. butter
5 oz. almond paste
4 oz. apricot, or yellow plum, preserves
1 ½ cups sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
½ t. almond extract
½ t. each baking powder and baking soda
¼ t. salt
¼ cup peach schnapps
3 cups flour

Preheat oven to 350, butter and flour a fluted tube pan, or an angel food cake pan is fine too.

Cream the butter and almond paste in the bowl of the Kitchenaid – I was going to say “in the bowl of a stand mixer”, but I have a Kitchenaid and everyone knows what I’m talking about, I hope, and no one says I have to be brand-neutral here, so what the heck – cream the butter and almond paste until fluffy. Then add the preserves and the sugar and cream some more, then add the eggs one at a time and cream until very light and fluffy. Add the extracts, the baking powder and baking soda, the salt, and the schnapps – stir until just mixed in. Then add the flour and stir it in until completely mixed, but don’t overbeat. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until just golden brown and risen – about 45 minutes. Cool on a rack and unmold after about 20 minutes, while still warm but not hot. Serve slices at room temperature with a scoop of peach ice cream and a mint leaf garnish. The pic shows an apricot as well. mmmmm.

Peach Ice Cream

2 large peaches, skins removed and chopped fine
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
2 T peach schnapps (optional)

Blanch the peaches in boiling water for 30 seconds in order to be able to slip the skins off. Peel the peaches, then cut the fruit from the pit and chop fine – put into a large mixing bowl and put in the fridge. Mix the sugar into the milk and let stand in the fridge until the sugar is dissolved (I put the milk and sugar into a wide-mouthed mason jar and shake a few times to get things going. This is far better than heating the milk in order to dissolve the sugar). After the sugar is dissolved (30 minutes or so) stir the milk/sugar mixture into the chopped peaches, then stir in the heavy cream and the schnapps. The schnapps isn’t critical but it adds a nice flavor nuance and the additional sugar and alcohol keeps the ice cream from freezing too hard. Pour all into the bowl of an ice cream freezer and freeze according to directions, approximately 30 minutes in a Simac, which is what I have. Then transfer to a container and put it in the freezer for at least 4 hours until firm.

In the future I might disolve the sugar with the chopped peaches before freezing - it might help the peaches from getting an icy texture, though it was not a big problem with this ice cream.