Daring Baker Challenge: Fraisier July 27, 2011

 Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.

 

Instead of the Daring Baker recipe, I used this recipe from Food Lover’s Odyssey. It uses genoise cake instead of chiffon, meaning the eggs aren’t separated but are heated and then beaten to make a foam, and it uses an ungodly amount of butter to make the cream stand up instead of gelatin.

I used half the amount of butter it calls for – the strawberries in the center of the middle layer did most of the work of holding the cake up.  My boyfriend and I picked the strawberries ourselves! And the blueberries came from the same farm.

The cake shrunk as it cooked, naturally, so my springform pan had a little extra room when I used it as a mold for the center layer. The result was the strawberries hanging kind of low. If I had started with the cream it probably would’ve worked better.

Regardless, it was delicious! Decadent and summery at the same time. We ate it on the Fourth of July. I would definitely make it again, but probably in the structure of a regular cake just to make my life easier.

Daring Baker Challenge: Mousse in an edible container April 27, 2011

The April 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Evelyne of the blog Cheap Ethnic Eatz. Evelyne chose to challenge everyone to make a maple mousse in an edible container. Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 27th to May 27th at http://thedaringkitchen.com! 

So yeah, it was supposed to be maple mousse.  But I got inspired to have a Red and Black party, so I made chocolate mousse in red tuiles.  I shaped the tuiles by putting some in mini muffin tins and draping others over the tops of wine bottles, so that they made bowls to hold the mousse.  They came out looking like rose petals.

I made my chocolate mousse from David Lebovitz’s adaptation of Julia Child’s recipe.  I tripled the recipe and, of course, made some minor changes, so mine came out like this – but be warned, this is for WAY more mousse than you really want to make.

1. 

   Mixing the chocolate emulsion with the custard.

   Melt butter and chocolate with coffee.

   • 4 sticks butter
   • 510g dark chocolate (fair trade!)
   • 3/4 cup coffee
2. Make zabaglione.  (A sweet custard with an alcoholic liquid.  Traditionally marsala wine; Julia’s recipe used rum; I used cognac and it was delicious.)  This is done by heating the ingredients in a double boiler until thick enough to coat a spoon, and then beating (an electric mixer is a good idea) off the heat (with the bowl in cool water, even) until lighter in color and thick enough that when you drip some, a trail remains.
   • 12 egg yolks (I bought jumbo by accident so I used 10)
   • 510g sugar
   • 6 Tbsp cognac
   • 3 Tbsp water
3. Make meringue.  Beat egg whites; when it’s all opaque, add the sugar.  Keep beating until peaks form but aren’t too stiff.
   • 12 egg whites
   • 3 Tbsp sugar
   • a few pinches of salt
   • 1 tsp cream of tartar
   • 2 tsp vanilla

Blurry picture of finished mousse.

Gently mix the first two together and then fold the meringue into that.  This means you’ll be eating uncooked egg whites.  If you’re not ok with that, make a Swiss meringue instead, which is where you heat the egg whites and sugar to 160F before beating them.

This mousse was amazing, y’all.  Totally worth all the different ingredients and components.  The zabaglione alone was amazing, I’ll definitely make that again.

I did run into a hitch – my chocolate emulsion broke.  I googled around about this and came to the conclusion that humans do not fully understand chocolate, because what I found didn’t make a lot of sense.  But basically, I think it broke because I heated it too much, and what ended up working was cooling it in the fridge, and then heating it again, very slowly.  I tried this trick where I took just a little of it and mixed it with some heated corn syrup.  That bit re-emulsified, but as I added more of the broken mixture to the fixed mixture, it got fixed and then I added too much and it all broke again.  So I guess that last addition of broken mixture lowered the temperature too much.  So, chop your chocolate and butter before starting, so everything can melt fast and evenly, and if you run into this problem, cool and reheat slowly.

Rose petal tuiles.

Now the tuiles.  I used this recipe without the almonds, and multiplied by 4.  These were really simple, and I had been so worried!  I used LOTS of red food coloring, and flavored them with cinnamon, but then added a little cocoa powder too because I wanted the red velvet color to come out right.  I didn’t add any liquid to the recipe to make up for this; maybe if I had they would’ve come out a little crispier, like I expected, but the texture they had was good for shaping them.  I’d skip the cinnamon next time; I wanted a red flavor to go with the red color, but I wasn’t crazy about the result.

Finally, I made some cayenne syrup to go on top.

• 1.5 cups water
• 1.5 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Boil until the thread stage, 130F.  Unfortunately, even though I stopped at the thread stage, mine eventually crystallized.  But it was a nice mixture of hot and sweet, and I love spice with my chocolate.

The official drink for the party was something that’s apparently called Devil’s Blood – it’s a vodka cranberry with black vodka.  I layered it by pouring the vodka from a measuring cup over the back of a spoon onto the cranberry juice, which worked well.

Layered cocktail.

S’more bars September 10, 2010

This summer, foodgawker was inundated with recipes for s’more bars and I’ve been dying to make some.  My friends’ housewarming seemed like the perfect opportunity.  But when I looked at the recipes (the ones that didn’t involve strange ingredients like granola), they were all exactly the same: it’s essentially a cookie dough with some of the flour replaced with graham cracker crumbs, topped by chocolate and marshmallow fluff and more of the same cookie dough.  I don’t know where it originated or I’d link to it.  Anyway, delicious as that sounds, I decided to try to go a little more traditional with it and use a graham cracker crust like you’d make for a cheesecake – just graham cracker crumbs and butter – topped with chocolate and homemade marshmallow.  I omitted the top graham cracker layer so I could flambe the marshmallow, because I don’t know about you, but I like my marshmallow seriously singed.

I based the graham cracker layer on this recipe, ending up with the following:

• 2 cups graham cracker crumbs (12 crackers)
• 1 stick butter, melted
• Bake at 350F for 10 minutes.

Based on the ubiquitous s’more bar recipe, put 6 Hershey bars on top of that.  I put this in the turned-off but still hot oven for a few minutes to melt them.

Instead of using marshmallow creme like the s’more bar recipe says, I made marshmallows according to Chef Thomas Keller’s recipe via Cooking For Engineers.  (The Keller link no longer leads anywhere, but that’s what CFE cites.)  It’s really easy: make a hard-ball stage candy while you bloom gelatin, then beat both together until it gets opaque and thick and voluminous.  Then I poured it over the chocolate and let it cool.  I didn’t use the whole recipe on the s’more bars – I saved enough to fill one of those short square Gladwares because it just made too much.  I still think I ended up with more marshmallow on the bars than I should have had, but I guess that just makes it indulgent.

I took the bars to my friends’ place and flambeed them, which melted the top of the marshmallow but didn’t get it really burnt like I like it.  I tried to take a picture but the picture put the fire out somehow!  Next I’ll try setting the reserved marshmallow on fire.

If I made the s’more bars again, I think I’d go with different chocolate – something darker.  I stuck with Hershey’s milk for tradition’s sake, but it really was a little too sweet for me.  I must be getting old.

Cranberry Pâtes de Fruit, the easy way June 3, 2010

Aren't they pretty with the light coming through?

When I was studying abroad in France, some family friends took me out to dinner at Apicius, a devastatingly good restaurant. When they brought dessert, there were a few things that they served regardless of what we ordered, and one of those things were these little square raspberry things coated in sugar. They were soooo good. But that’s not all; they were the mysterious puciunin that my then-boyfriend used to tell me about (his Piedmontese grandmother called them that). I had tried to figure out what they were, but try googling puciunin – hardly anything comes up. Sure enough, I saw them again at a store in the airport in France (and bought them, of course!), and that was when I found out what the rest of the world calls them: pâte de fruit. Fruit paste, in other words.

They’re not as schmancy as they sound: they’re just overcooked jam. But try these and you may start calling jam undercooked pâte de fruit, because really, what better way is there to eat your fruit? (I’m just so sad that a lot of the nutrients break down at the temperatures required.)

When I got home I tried making them. Several times. I never got quite the consistency I wanted. Puciunin should be a definite solid, but not rubbery. They’re not like jello, either. They’re just right. I made some apple ones that were a little too firm, some apple ones that were too soft, some strawberry ones that were too firm, some pineapple ones that were too soft.

The problem is that pectin is the gelling agent, and pectin is very finicky. It needs just so much sugar,

This is the dish held vertically. I'd like to see jam do that.

just so much acid, just so much heat. But the fruit you’re using has an unknown amount of sugar, acid, and even pectin.  I considered buying a refractometer and ordering the brand of fruit puree that you can use to eliminate these unknowns, but eventually it occurred to me that I could (more inexpensively) just buy some low-sugar pectin and see if that helped.  Low-sugar pectin is still kind of finicky, as you can’t use too much sugar with it, but trust me, these things do not suffer from a lack of sweetness.  I’ve also noticed that both kinds of pectin have an acid in their ingredient list, and so I wonder if the acid included in pâte de fruit recipes is actually necessary.

So the other night I found myself with a lot of cranberry juice left over from my cranberry fondant (yes, that’s how long I’ve been sitting on this post), and it was so delicious, except for the fact that the acidity or astringency or both made it undrinkable.  But I could tell that it would be delicious if I could get it under control!  I thought, you normally make pâte de fruit from puree, but juice could work.  It might not have quite the same consistency, and you shouldn’t make this substitution in a recipe you have without taking into account that the juice will have less pectin than the puree, but still…  And so, I gave this a shot:

1. 2 1/2 cups cranberry juice (not juice cocktail)
2. 2 cups sugar (Ok, to be totally honest, I didn’t write this down and I’m not sure if I actually used 2 cups.  But it must have been in the ballpark…I know, big mistake.)
3. a pinch of cream of tartar
4. a packet of low-sugar pectin

I boiled the juice and sugar for a few minutes and then added the acid and pectin.  Then I boiled more, and more, and more, continually testing it by spooning a little onto a pyrex pan kept in the freezer (my candy thermometer is being shipped to me

Here they are after being dipped in sugar. Though it's traditional, it really wasn't necessary.

with a bunch of my other stuff that wouldn’t fit in my suitcase).  In the end I sort of chickened out – it was just shy of perfect, and I knew if I cooked the pectin too far it would break down and not gel at all, so I stopped there, and poured the whole thing into aforementioned pyrex pan.  I let it cool on the counter and then stuck it in the fridge.  The next day, I cut it into squares and spread them out on a plate so the sides could sort of dry.  They don’t end up feeling dry or anything, they just get a little firmer and less sticky.  I think it would have been even better if I had had the patience to flip them over and let the bottoms dry, too.  Finally, I tossed them in sugar (sanding sugar is preferable, but I just used regular granulated).  This was the test: the bottoms ended up, not visibly wet, but wet enough that the sugar didn’t look white anymore.  The other sides stayed dry and white.  So I guess that’s the trick to keeping them from weeping and dissolving the sugar and getting sticky: cook them enough, and let them sort of dry out for a while first.

I wish I had added even less sugar, because the wonderful acidity of the cranberries is a little lost.  I also think I should have cooked them just ever so slightly longer; but still, I think these pass as pâtes de fruit, and that is a triumph!  Who would have thought my most successful try would be the one where I just used juice?

Daring Baker Challenge: Croquembouche! May 27, 2010

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

This challenge was so epic, I had to invite people over to see it.  And eat it, which they did – the whole entire thing.  I made 3 1/2 batches of pate a choux, 3 batches of pastry cream, and two batches of caramel for it.

Pate a choux:

This was one with too little egg - it didn't rise much.

This is a profiterole with too much egg - it's light and airy, but kind of flat.

This is an interesting kind of baked good that I frankly don’t understand the science behind, so if anyone out there does, please, enlighten me.  You boil water and butter (with a little salt and sugar), add flour and heat a little more, and then add eggs.  You end up with a completely un-airy batter that can be piped.  It contains no chemical leaveners, no yeast.  And then you bake it, and voila, it comes out almost completely hollow inside!

I’ll tell you what I do know: not enough egg will keep them from puffing; you can spot this problem if the paste is too dense.  It should have a pleasant, smooth feel between your fingers, not too thick and sticky.  Too much egg will make them too wet to hold their shape after being piped, and you’ll end up with puffed but squat profiteroles.  The batter should keep its shape.  The recipe said to use 4 eggs for a cup of flour and 6 tbsp of butter, but I ended up using a little less than that.  I beat some eggs and put them in a measuring cup so I could add a little at a time.  How much you use still depends on how much you heated the flour mixture, though, so I’ll say around 3/4 cup worked for me, but you have to kind of play it by ear.

Pastry cream:

Some of the cream puffs, filled with pastry cream.

I flavored two batches with chocolate and one with cream cheese and a little bit of sour cream, trying to go for a cheesecake flavor.  Most pastry cream recipes say to boil the milk and then temper the eggs, that is, add 1/3 of the milk to the eggs, whisking, and then add the eggs to the rest of the milk and continue heating.  I tried this and curdled my eggs.  I think adding the hot milk to the eggs didn’t heat them up as much as it was supposed to, and so they were untempered when I threw them onto the hot stove, poor things.  So I made my creams in a double boiler.  No fancy steps, I just mixed everything together (except the cream cheese, sour cream, and vanilla) in a double boiler and whisked for approximately forever.  I was worried that I wouldn’t get it to a high enough temperature to deactive the enzymes in the eggs that attack the starch, but I made them the night before and they never separated, so I guess it did the job.  I never really saw it boil, but I may have missed it because I was whisking constantly and whenever I noticed the bottom had suddenly thickened, I’d take it off the heat and stir like crazy.  It thickened to the point of coating a spoon, but then also past that, to the point of leaving a trail that doesn’t disappear.  So, if anyone has tips on how to do pastry cream the normal way, don’t be shy, but at least you know you can fall back on this method if necessary.

Caramel:

It was pretty while it lasted.

Our recipe said to make a dry caramel, that is, to just heat sugar till it’s caramel.  I tried that, but I guess I was stirring too much, because I ended up with crystallized bits.  So I went with a wet caramel after that, which is sugar and water (I used approximately equal amounts by volume, but it doesn’t really matter), heated until it changes color.  I stopped it at a fairly light amber, because caramel gets softer as it gets darker and I wanted mine to dry fairly hard so it would make good glue.  I cooked until I saw a light amber color, touched the bottom of the pan to the surface of some water I had standing by in a big bowl a couple of times, and then set the pan over a pot of simmering water in an

effort to keep the caramel workable for as long as possible.  I don’t know if the double boiler helped at all; I don’t really think it did.  It took me two batches of caramel to build the whole thing, not because I ran out of caramel, but because I ran out of time while it was workable.

I also drizzled some caramel on parchment paper the night before, thinking I’d break it into pieces and stick them into the croquembouche as decoration, but the caramel absorbed moisture overnight, so that the really small strands just plain dissolved, and the bigger areas got sticky and stuck to the paper (which they had come off of easily before). I wanted to do some more real quick before serving, but when it got to that time, I had burnt myself twice with the caramel and was a little bit over it.  Definitely have cold water around if you work with caramel, it gives second degree burns.

The inside of the cone.

Construction:

I made a cone out of posterboard and lined it with parchment paper, which I sprayed with Pam just to be safe.  I put the cone in a vase and dipped the profiteroles in the caramel and then put them in the cone.  My friend kindly offered to help and she arranged them in the cone so I could work faster and burn myself less. I made a hollow cone, which seems to be the thing to do.  Then I cut off the extra posterboard, inverted on a baking pan, and unwrapped the cone.  It stood!  Just long enough for everyone to start digging in.

This was a hit.  You wouldn’t believe the comments I got.  I have now been called a “wizard of food.”  So if you have the time and motivation, this dessert comes with a big payoff!  Just be sure to serve it right away – it’s not known for its long-term stability.

A different way to enjoy wine February 14, 2010

Careful with the quality of your chocolate - I thought I was getting good stuff but the ganache had a sticky quality that makes me suspect they added a thickener to it..

I’ve been groaning to myself about the state of the food blogosphere circa Valentine’s Day, but then I realized, I’m doing the same thing.  I made truffles, as I have every Valentine’s Day since my freshman year in college.  I can’t help the fact that they’re the perfect potluck base: I make the centers – a simple ganache (cream + chocolate, melted together, some add butter), this year I took Cooking For Engineers’ advice and used a 2:1 chocolate:cream ratio by weight – and everyone brings a topping.

But I also made something else that is not what you usually see on Valentine’s Day (or ever), although I must admit it is clearly V-Day themed.

You have to be careful when you pour them in the molds or you'll get those funny little edges.

I have a thing about pâtes de fruit, which will become clear when I finally get around to posting about my cranberry ones.  This time, I made them with red wine.  I used Juanita’s Allrecipes recipe for wine jelly as a starting point, but it’s a pretty loose interpretation.  Here’s what I did:

• 1 bottle red wine
• 1 packet low-sugar pectin (ie, pectin that can be used with low- or no-sugar recipes; not because I’m anti-sugar, but because this pectin can tolerate a wider variety of sugar concentrations, making it harder to screw up)
• about 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 1/2 an ice cube of lemon juice – about 1 Tbsp

1. Make a pectin slurry: I mixed the pectin with some of the wine so the pectin wouldn’t clump when I added it later.  If you’re using liquid pectin, don’t worry about that.
2. Boil the heck out of everything: I boiled the wine, sugar, and lemon juice, and then added the pectin and kept boiling until 1) a little put on a plate in the freezer solidified to my liking – when I pushed on it, it broke into two pieces on either side of my finger instead of letting me make a finger-shaped hole; 2) the bubbles were small and close together; 3) it was just shy of 220°F – it seemed like it would never get quite there!  The longer you boil, the firmer they will set, unless you go way too long and the pectin breaks down, in which case they won’t set at all (although your syrup will be pretty thick by then anyway).  I would love to tell you the temperature at which this happens but I have been unable to find it myself. If anyone knows, please comment!
3. Pan and chill: I took it off the heat and poured it into a greased mini-madeleine mold and a greased mini-muffin pan, then refrigerated.  They came out of the molds just fine.  So don’t think your baking pans are unitaskers!

The good thing about my bad molding technique is you can get a better sense of the rich color!

The verdict: They were quite good, but a little too tart.  I would either increase the sugar, at least for this particular wine (did somebody say Riesling candy? I’ll get right on that), or drop the lemon juice.  I have a sneaking suspicion that since all the pectin I buy has citric acid in the ingredients, we may not really need to add acidic ingredients anymore.  Perhaps lemon juice and such are just still in all the recipes from before someone got the bright idea to add it to the pectin.  Does anyone know for sure?  I’ll have to test it sometime.  Anyway, wine is already acidic so maybe it’s sufficient on its own.  My recommendation is to make this with a fruity wine and no lemon juice – I still like to err on the side of too little sugar because, even as someone with a huge sweet tooth, too much sugar can take some of the complexity out of the flavor.  And these are supposed to be sophisticated candies, after all!

Meringue cookies, or as much sugar as I could fit in two square inches January 20, 2010

Plan A for this endeavor was to make itty bitty meringue shells with cranberry curd, a curd I had never thought of until I saw this on Supper in Stereo.  But if this went exactly as planned it wouldn’t be much of an adventure, now would it?

I have a terrible history with meringue shells, but I figured if I planned ahead for lots of drying time and made them really small for minimal potentially sticky inner area, I might be able to pull them off.  I also decided to try Swiss meringue, which is supposed to end up drier than the French meringue I usually make.  Here’s a typology of meringue:

1. French meringue: the one I’m used to, in which you beat the egg whites a little bit, then add sugar, and just keep beating.
2. Swiss meringue: Whisk the egg whites and sugar in a double boiler until they get hot – I’ve seen 120F, 130F, and 160F as target temperatures.  Use 160F if you’re not going to bake it later, but otherwise I’d stay lower to avoid any risk of coagulation.  Then remove from the heat and keep beating until they’re the right stiffness.  This takes more sugar than the French way, is more stable, and is said to make a harder product.  Among those who know all three ways, it appears to be a favorite.
3. Italian meringue: Heat sugar and water to the firm ball stage, drizzle the hot syrup into egg whites that have been whipped to soft peaks.  This is widely regarded as an unnecessarily difficult way to make meringue.  I secretly think this is the method that’s actually French.

Apple Pie, Patis, & Pate says that the ratio of sugar to egg whites for Swiss meringue is 2:1 by weight.  (By volume, several websites say 4 Tbsp per egg white.)   A little acid, in the form of cream of tartar or white vinegar, is good for French meringue; I don’t know if Swiss meringue makes that obsolete, but I have some so I’ll give it a shot.  I also think cornstarch is a good idea because it absorbs moisture so the meringues don’t come out too sticky.  So my recipe ended up like this:

1. about 4 egg whites
2. twice that weight in sugar (around 240g)
3. about 1/4 tsp cream of tartar (they say 1/8 tsp per egg white, so I could have used 1 tsp, but…I didn’t)
4. about 2 tsp cornstarch

Whip to…

…well, my whites never got past the soft peak stage.  I was shooting for stiff.  I was using a handheld electric mixer and the poor motor was hot and I was so tired of mixing that I moved the bowl to where I could sit down and then finally I decided, this just isn’t going to happen.  I don’t know if my whites suffered from being frozen (something weird did happen to them that I haven’t seen anyone talk about before, my guess is freezer burn, but I threw that part away) or if I did something else wrong, but that was that.  So I piped them from a zip-top bag with a tip cut off onto two parchment-paper lined baking sheets, sprinkled a little powdered sugar on them for extra moisture-insurance (it contains cornstarch) and put them into a 200F oven for two hours.

Although the soft peaks meant they wouldn’t really hold a shape besides flattish blob, they baked beautifully.

View outside the kitchen

View inside the kitchen

They stayed quite white, and they have a completely dry, crispy outside with an inside not unlike marshmallow creme.  I baked them a little longer than I would like for myself so that no one would think I was going to get them sick with the soft center, though.  Next time I’ll bring them to a safe 160F when I’m heating them in the beginning and then I’ll take them out when they’re still marshmallowy on the inside.

The sight of these was especially cool because this was the day that we got our first heavy snow, and for a Florida girl like me, it was amazing.

I'll have to try again with whole pomegranate...I know it's possible!

Then it was time to make the curd.  I was planning on using cranberry juice (I don’t have a food mill so I thought whole ones would be too much trouble), and then on a whim I bought pomegranate juice instead.  I substituted that in for lemon juice in my my trusty lemon curd recipe, which I’ll post soon – promise.  I held back half the sugar so I could adjust according to how much the pomegranate juice needed.  I failed to remember that when you mix eggs, butter, and red liquid (like when I made zabaione one time), you get brown.  This brown was so ugly, I couldn’t even squint and see it as burgundy (like I could with the zabaione).  Nor did it taste particularly great.  So I tossed it.  Very sad.

I still wanted some kind of topping, though, so I thought about what could give me a pretty color.  Fondant is both yummy and white.  So I decided to make cranberry flavored fondant (I went back to cranberry because I was not impressed with the flavor of the pomegranate juice I bought, and I figured cranberry juice would be redder, anyway).

I used Joe Pastry’s recipe for poured fondant:

1. 496, so about 500g sugar
2. 113 g water
3. 85g corn syrup

Heat to soft ball stage (238F). Cool, stir.  Mix with 2:1 sugar: water syrup to pour.

Joe Pastry didn’t say whether he meant 2:1 by weight or by volume, and when he wrote about cake syrup (not the same thing, but I was hoping to find out if he tended to use one or the other) he mentioned the same ratio with “by weight” one time and “by volume” another time.  Maybe because it doesn’t make that much of a difference.  So I chose volume – out of character for me, but I cringe a little whenever I have to put my pot on my scale, even though I know my scale can handle it.  He said he used about half a cup of the syrup, so I used half a cup of cranberry juice and a cup of sugar.  Assuming I didn’t make a mistake in measuring my cranberry juice, this yielded about a cup of syrup.  I poured half a cup into a bowl and let it cool to 110F, then added the fondant.  There was no dissolving going on, so I put it on a pot of boiling water.  After a few minutes, the part of it that was liquid got above 110F, and I took it off the heat and stirred like crazy.  It was harder than making the fondant in the first place!  But eventually I got almost all of it “dissolved”.  Some little pieces stayed hard, though; I’m guessing those are the little pieces that got the hardest when I was originally making the fondant.  Maybe they shouldn’t be saved.

You can see the puddles of syrup that dripped off...

My ruby syrup mixed with the white fondant to make the perfect color for an Easter egg. I knew I’d end up with pink, but I didn’t realize it would be so pink.  I hope the male speaker in whose honor I’m making these won’t mind.  I dipped the meringues into the fondant, which worked just fine.  Then I realized that I had some cranberry syrup left over, and I dipped the already dipped meringues into the syrup to see if I could liven up the flavor and color.  It mostly dripped off of the shiny surface of the fondant, though.

I think the color and flavor would have come through better if I had used more cranberry juice – I should have used it in the fondant and in the syrup I mixed with the fondant instead of just in the syrup.  But I was so frazzled after going through Plans A through C that I’m just glad I ended up with something edible!  They went over well, but my original plan to have a curd would have balanced the sweetness of the meringue better.

Gadgets!! December 28, 2009

I took a picture of myself taking a picture of my new camera, with my old camera.

I’m really excited because I got a new digital camera for Christmas.  I know I like the model because…I picked it out.  Now you know what this means…prettier pictures!  Not by much, because it’s really my lack of photography skills that makes them bad more than the camera, but I think they’ll be a little prettier, still.  I can’t wait to take pictures, I’ll have to make up something to cook.

Also, I got a new candy thermometer (also for Christmas, also explicitly asked for).  My first glass one broke after many years of valiant service in fudge making.  Then I got one that just has a metal stem, but it needed to be so far into the candy to get an accurate reading that, well, I either used a different thermometer or didn’t get an accurate reading.  How much candy do they think I need?!  So now I’m back to the glass kind, although even this one says that it works best when it’s submerged two and a half inches.  Grumble.

What I really wish people would invent (and what they may have already invented, but probably with that same depth issue) is a candy thermometer analogous to those meat thermometers that you leave in the oven with an alarm on the outside that goes off at the right temperature.  For a candy thermometer though, the alarm should be able to go off when it hits the lower limit of the temperature and when it hits the upper limit.  When I use my meat thermometer with an alarm for candy (which I have done several times…enough that I seem to have broken it…whoops), I can only use the alarm to get it up to the soft ball stage, but not for when I’m cooling it down before stirring it.

My grandmother gave me a cookie press – I didn’t even have to ask for that one!  It’s a  nice set from Williams Sonoma, comes in a little tin that holds all the stencil-y things.  Just wait until the next departmental Cookie Social.  It’s just too bad that most of the fun holidays will be over, because I have a pumpkin shape, a Christmas tree, a candy cane, and so on.  There’s probably a heart in there somewhere, though.

Speaking of gadgets, I added a link to this blog’s RSS feed over to the right, and I’m thinking about adding links to social bookmarking sites. Anyone have any suggestions for which one(s)? I’ve decided to buckle down and blog more regularly so I thought I might do something to, you know, actually get readers . Coming up I’ll finally post some of my last adventures from last semester, and by the time those are up, I’ll be back at school making a mess of my kitchen again.

Penuche December 22, 2009

My class instituted Cake Friday, which, like the Cookie Social after colloquia, is to be interpreted loosely.  At least by me.  So instead of making a cake, I made penuche, which is like a brown sugar version of fudge.  Fudge is one of my all-time favorite things to make (and to eat, hence to make), but I had never tried penuche, and I decided it was time.  I used this recipe from cooks.com.   I only had about .7 lbs of brown sugar, so I used white sugar for the rest, and I skipped the nuts.

It turned out fine – I certainly don’t think we lacked for molasses.  Unfortunately, I’m posting this waaaay late, and I have since lost the pictures I took.  It was brown-sugar colored fudge, what can I say.

The trick to these kinds of things – besides paying attention to temperature – is to start panning them before they completely harden up.  You have to stir until they get thick and opaque, and then RUSH to get them in the pan or they will freeze up in a bizarre shape and that’s what you’re stuck with.  What’s happening is, your stirring is getting crystals to form and the more crystals that are there, the more crystals will hook on to those crystals, and then all the sudden, it’s all crystallized and it won’t stir anymore.  My guess is that if you don’t want it to ever set quite that hard, you shouldn’t cook it quite to the soft ball stage.  Then it will have more moisture left in it and I assume, stay softer.

Petits fours November 7, 2009

For being so dainty, petits fours can really ravage a cook.  They’re French for little ovens, which I guess was supposed to mean little baked goods.  The way I made them, they have three components: genoise cake, a jam filling, and fondant icing.

Sadly, when I wrote the draft for this entry I forgot to link to the recipe I used for the cake, and now I don’t know what it was.  I’ll edit if I find it.  Genoise is French for “from Genoa”, which is a place in Italy.  Go figure.  (Actually, I think we use English versions of French versions of Italian place names quite often.) Because I’m a linguist and linguists are into typology, here’s the basic typology of cakes:

1. I. Creamed cakes – leavened by creaming sugar into fat.  Thus, fat is necessary.
   • Example: pound cake
2. Foam cakes – leavened with foam.  This means they don’t need fat, although they can have it.
   • Angelfood cake – leavened with egg white foam; contains no fat at all.  People who conflate low-fat diets with morality are responsible for the name.
   • Sponge cake – leavened with egg white foam and egg yolk foam; contains only fat from egg yolks.
   • Chiffon cake – leavened with egg white foam and egg yolk foam; also contains oil.
   • Genoise cake – leavened with whole egg foam, lightly heated; may also contain butter.

So now you know where Genoise fits in.  I had never made one before and I was skeptical that whole eggs would create enough foam, but man was that a foamy cake.  Eating the batter felt like eating bubble wrap, and the cake snapped, crackled, and popped when I took it out of the oven.

I baked the cake in a 13×9 in. pan and cut it into 32 pieces.  Then I cut each piece if half and filled them with apricot jam, because that’s the kind I had.  (I have an obsession with apricot products, but I always find the fresh ones disappointing.  I’m told this is because good ones aren’t readily available.)

Finally, I had to make the fondant.  The cool thing about this dessert was that I didn’t have to buy any ingredients to make it, even though it seems sort of special occasion-y.  I had everything on hand already.  Fondant is just sugar, water, and some kind of interferent – in this case, corn syrup – and a flavoring – I used the classic vanilla extract.  You cook these (without the flavoring, which would lose its flavor in the high heat) to the soft ball stage, then cool to 140F, and then…well, the recipe I used said to put it in a food processor, which I don’t have, so I stirred it until it went from a clear syrup to a thick white mass.  Then I heated it until it was pourable and started coating the petits fours in it.  I had to keep heating it every so often, and when I heated it I stirred it to distribute the heat.  The heat made water evaporate and the stirring made the crystals get bigger and bigger, so it got to the point where it stayed hard even when it was hot enough to burn me.  Finally I realized what was going on and added some water.  That did the trick, but one time I added too much water and ended up with a thin glaze.  But after a few pours of that, it started thickening again and came full circle to about how it started out (except a little grainier for the wear).

Far left: poured fondant as it should be. Middle left: Starting to get too thick. Middle Right: Overcorrected. Far Right: Almost back to normal.

They were not the prettiest dessert at our social event, but I did get some rave reviews (even from people who didn’t know I made them, which is key).  I think each component was great, but that perhaps the fondant overwhelmed the rest.  I’ll have to give that cake a try in an application where I can appreciate it a little more.  Since they come out a little dry, it’s recommended to soak them in something.  I’m not so much for rum, but I bet some sort of fortified wine would be great.

Edit: I have no idea how I missed this in my previous searches for information on poured fondant (it comes up right away now), but Joe Pastry has a great post on poured fondant that explains how to avoid my problem: let the fondant cool and harden, and then mix it with half a cup of a 2:1 sugar to water syrup (I’m guessing that’s by volume?) over low heat (keep the mix below 110F to avoid messing up the crystal structure, which is, after all, the only thing that makes fondant different from syrup), and then pour!