S'mores

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

Chocolate Croissants!

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.

Back from Italy with Fabulous Pastry

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.

Chocolate and hazelnuts

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. . . . .