New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookies: The Hype and The Truth August 16, 2011

Anyone who’s into chocolate chip cookies knows about the NYT recipes from Jacques Torres.  Some swear by it.  Last night, I was struck with cookie inspiration and decided to finally try it. My overall impression is that it makes for great texture, meh flavor. Here’s what I’ve found out so far:

No need to be so fancy

•  Flour: It calls for, by weight, half bread flour and half cake flour.  Depending on the flours you use (their contents vary by brand), I think this amounts to using all all-purpose flour.  Perhaps Jacques had some good reason for writing the recipe this way, but until further notice, I’ll assume it was just to look fancy.  I didn’t have enough bread or cake flour on hand (most of my bread flour is whole wheat because most of it goes to making, you know, bread), so I used all-purpose flour, and I was perfectly satisfied with the result.
• Chocolate: I hope I don’t even have to tell you that you can use whatever bits of yumminess you want in these cookies. High quality chocolate tastes good, but I used regular old chocolate chips and they taste just as good as they always do.
• Size: The NYT recipe wants you to make enormous cookies.  Well, sure, cookies the size of my head can stay soft for a while, but I like my cookies normal size, and I want a recipe that produces well-textured normal size cookies. So I test mine with somewhere around a tablespoon of dough per cookie.  The results are good: the success of the NYT recipe is not due to a size trick. It makes good normal size cookies, too.
• Timing: The NYT recipe says to chill the cookie dough for 24-36 hours before baking. What a pain, I wanted cookies last night! So I decided to find out if it really matters. I baked one sheet of the cookies last night right after making up the dough – I stuck them in the fridge for 5 or 10 minutes just because the preheated oven was making the room hot and I wanted them to have a fair chance. Then I put one log of cookie dough in the fridge to be baked tonight, and another log (it makes a lot of cookies!) in the freezer for a rainy day (like yesterday, and today…).  I will report on the results of a blind taste test soon. But already I can tell you, unchilled NYT cookies are plenty good. Not too flat or hard or crispy, pretty much just how I like them.

It succeeds in making a cookie that’s chewy, not crispy or cakey.

• It uses a little more brown sugar than white sugar, as a chocolate chip cookies should, in my opinion. Brown sugar is brown because it has molasses in it, and molasses has water in it, so it’s a way of making your cookie a little softer.
• I like to compare cookies to the Nestle Tollhouse recipe, which I’ve had memorized for I don’t know how many years.  My Nestle cookies always come out too hard when cool, and kind of greasy. Here’s approximately how to make NYT cookies from a Nestle recipe (all comparisons are by weight):
1. Divide the amount of butter in half.
2. Divide the amount of egg in half.
3. Subtract one fourth the total amount of sugar.
• It’s hard to tell that these are the differences between the two recipes, since they make different amounts.  That’s why putting recipes in baker’s percentage is so handy. But the result is that the flour, leavening, salt, and vanilla play a bigger role in the NYT cookies.
• Why less butter and egg: Cookies that are heavier on flour and lighter on butter stay soft better, but they run the risk of being too cakey and dry.  In fact, I made some like this once and compared that recipe to the NYT recipe.  It turns out that the only difference between the two was that the dry recipe used all white sugar instead of a mix of white and brown, and more egg.  We know that brown sugar makes a cookie wetter and softer, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, eggs make them cakey, even though eggs are wet. So I guess in order to increase the relative amount of flour in the recipe without ending up too cakey, the NYT recipe had to decrease the amount of egg.

My one complaint is the flavor.

• What I don’t know about is the sugar. Does it have to be decreased?  The combination of less sugar and more salt seemed to trick my taste buds into thinking I was eating peanut butter cookies, which I’m sure is right up some people’s alley, but I’d rather have the regular old sweet flavor. So my next task will be to replicate this recipe but with more sugar and less salt. (In Jacques’ defense, I had to estimate the amount of salt, because I was using kosher instead of sea salt, which is less coarse.)

All Coconut All the Time Ice Cream May 10, 2011

I have not yet taken pictures of this ice cream, but that’s no reason to deprive you of the recipe, which as far as I know, you will only find here.

Last summer, I made more ice creams than I told you about. Sorry. One of them was made solely and exclusively out of the following ingredients:

Coconut milk and coconut sugar.

I had calculated that coconut milk – the regular kind, not light or anything – has just about the amount of fat that I like in my ice cream, somewhere around 18%, like light cream. It has a similar sugar content to the milk I have in my fridge, which is probably a little different from light cream, but close enough that I kept the amount of sugar roughly the same.

So I made ice cream thusly:

• 1 can coconut milk (1 3/4 cups)
• scant 1/2 cup coconut sugar (my rule for sugar is to divide your amount of milk by 4, by volume) (yes, you can use regular sugar if you’re not hell-bent on all coconut all the time)

1. Dissolve sugar in milk, heating gently if necessary.
2. Cool.
3. Churn.
4. Freeze.

(I think I actually used 2 full cups of coconut milk and a full half cup of sugar that time, hence the two cans.)

The texture was good.  The flavor was good until I caught something…strange.  Not really bad – people ate it – but not what I want my ice cream to taste like.  Sort of a cooked flavor.  The coconut sugar has a pleasant caramelly flavor, but I think it’s the coconut milk that’s to blame.

So I intended to try again with a different brand of coconut milk, but I misremembered which brand I used last time and did it over with the exact same one.  Haha.  But this time, I tasted the coconut milk and decided it was still going to add that funny flavor, so I fought back with:

• the juice of half a lime
• some vanilla extract
• a dash of salt

It worked.  It still has a musky coconuttiness about it, but I liked the ice cream this time.  The lime was not detectable.  I suspect that even more lime juice would give an even yummier result, without compromising the texture too much.  I also suspect that the amount of sugar could be reduced a tad (indeed, most recipes I’ve looked up that use coconut  milk call for less sugar).

If you know your stuff about ice cream (and precious few people do, alas), you might wonder why I’m not using any sort of thickener to improve the texture.  That’s the beauty of canned coconut milk!  Not only does it have the right amount of fat, it also has guar gum already added to it to minimize the freaking out of Americans upon seeing their coconut milk separate.  Guar gum is the preferred thickener of the ice cream industry, and is made from a plant.  So this ice cream is really simple to make, and it’s vegan and dairy-free.  Now you understand why I’m so set on getting past this flavor issue, right?  I think if you add strong flavors to it you should be fine, and even if you don’t, coconut enthusiasts should enjoy this recipe with the splash of lime juice.

Things to try: chocolate coconut ice cream, lime coconut ice cream (don’t think I wasn’t singing “you put de lime in de coconut and shake it all up” while making this), pina colada ice cream, mango coconut ice cream.  Also, in the spirit of two-ingredient ice cream recipes, that ice cream made from banana and chocolate.  Bananas don’t usually excite me, but there are these chocolate chip banana bread muffins at a local coffee shop that are so amazing, I’m willing to give all banana-chocolate creations a try.

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.

Daring Baker Challenge: Entremet with Joconde January 27, 2011

Now you know what the margins of my notebooks look like.

The January 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Astheroshe of the blog accro. She chose to challenge everyone to make a Biscuit Joconde Imprime to wrap around an Entremets dessert.

It’s my first Daring Bakerversary!  I’ve been a Daring Baker for a whole year now.  Yay.

Normally I just post the pdf of the recipe and leave it at that, but this recipe needs some tweaks, I think.

It says to make the sponge cake batter first and then the decorating paste that goes under the sponge cake as it bakes, even though the batter runs the risk of deflation and the paste needs to be frozen for 15 minutes before baking.  That’s just silly.

So first, make the decorating paste.  But unless you’re planning to forget the whole joconde thing and make 3 dozen cookies out of it, for goodness sake don’t make as much as they say.  I halved it and had way too much.  Here’s half of the cocoa version (ie, what I made):

• 7 tablespoons/100g unsalted butter, softened
• 100g Confectioners’ (icing) sugar
• 100g egg whites (I used the kind in a carton so I didn’t have to worry about fractions of eggs)
• 85g cake flour
• 30 g cocoa powder (sifting this with the cake flour is not actually necessary)

1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Add eggs.
3. Add dry ingredients.
4. Pipe or otherwise make a design on a Silpat on a jellyroll pan.  I bought a Silpat especially for this, because parchment paper usually gets warpy in situations like this.  They say to put the jellyroll pan upside down; that’s fine, but it’s also ok to do it right-side up if you have an offset spatula.
5. Freeze for 15 minutes, till hard.

Meanwhile, make the cake batter.

• ¾ cup/ 180 ml/ 3oz/ 85g almond flour/meal
• ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons/ 150 ml/ 2⅔ oz/ 75g confectioners’ (icing) sugar
• ¼ cup/ 60 ml/ 1 oz/ 25g cake flour
• 3 large eggs – about 5⅓ oz/ 150g
• 2 tablespoons/ 30 ml/ 1oz / 30g unsalted butter, melted
• 3 large egg whites – about 3 oz/ 90g
• 2½ teaspoons/ 12½ ml/ ⅓ oz/ 10g white granulated sugar or superfine (caster) sugar

1. Whisk dries together (not granulated sugar).
2. Add whole eggs.
3. Add melted butter. (Another place where I disagree with the recipe.  I did it this way, nothing exploded.)
4. Separately, beat egg whites.  When frothy, add granulated sugar.  Beat to stiff peaks.
5. Fold egg whites into batter.
6. Take the frozen paste out of the freezer.
7. Pour cake batter onto jellyroll pan.  Spread into an even layer (using offset spatula if you have one).  Remember cake decorating technique: pour it all in the middle and then spread from the middle.
8. Bake at 475F for 7 minutes.  They said 15 minutes; clearly that was too long for my crazy oven, but I think that’s too long for anyone.  We’re talking about less than a half-inch of sponge cake here.
9. Cool for a couple of minutes, then flip onto parchment paper.
10. Cut into strips with the same width as the height of your mold (or the height that you want your joconde to be, if not the full height of the mold).

An unintentionally dramatic photo, with a flower pot from my Catalan friend in the background.

The fillings were up to us.  I made what was supposed to be a brownie, with my very own recipe! I looked at several other brownie recipes to get a general idea of how much chocolate should go into them, and then brownie-fied Smitten Kitchen’s Blondie recipe using MATH.  Here’s the Blondie recipe:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 stick butter
• 1 egg

Here’s the rationale behind my browniefication thereof:

• 1 cup flour minus 1/3 cup, to be replaced by cocoa powder
• 1 stick butter minus 1 Tbsp, to be replaced by the fat in the chocolate I use
• 1 cup sugar minus 2 Tbsp, to be replaced by corn syrup, which is more hygroscopic (will keep it moist)
• 1 egg

And my final brownie recipe:

• 2/3 cup flour
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder
• 7 Tbsp butter
• 30g dark chocolate
• 7/8 cup sugar
• 2 Tbsp corn syrup
• 1 egg

1. Melt butter and chocolate.
2. Add sugar, corn syrup, egg, and cocoa powder.
3. Add flour.
4. Bake at 325F for 30 minutes.

It turned out denser than I expected, but definitely not dry and definitely very chocolatey.  I never thought I’d do this, but I might add a little baking powder next time.

I also made champagne mousse using this Epicurious recipe.  I added a little extra champagne and that wasn’t the greatest idea, because it didn’t thicken much until I gave up and let it cool.  But it worked.  It was very sweet, probably due to the sweet pink champagne I used.  It doesn’t make very much.

I put a layer of my joconde sponge cake on the bottom (so the bottom of your slice is pretty!), then some strawberry jam, then the brownie, then a layer of the chocolate decorating paste (since I had so much extra), then the champagne mousse, and there was still room.  So I made some whipped cream with very little sugar, as a nice light finish to a very rich and sweet dessert.

Daring Baker Challenge: Cranberry Spice Stollen December 28, 2010

The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.

The Recipe: I altered the flavors and mix-ins.  I used 1 tsp of cinnamon, 1 tsp of cardamom, 1/2 tsp of allspice, and a 1/2 tsp of nutmeg.  I kept the vanilla and orange extracts.  For mix-ins I used slivered almonds, candied ginger, and Craisins, and I mixed them in differently.

Mix-ins, evenly distributed

1. Mix yeast and water, wait five minutes.
2. Add other wet ingredients.
3. Add dry ingredients.
4. Add dried fruit and nuts. (I didn’t yet.)
5. Knead.
6. Refrigerate overnight.
7. Let come to room temperature for 2 hours.
8. Roll into a big rectangle. (Mine didn’t make it to 16×24 in.  Also, I learned that rolling gluten-full dough on top of wax paper doesn’t work, because it shrinks and pulls the paper with it into lots of crinkles.  It worked so much better on a clean bare countertop.)
9. My way of mixing in: Put mix-ins on top of rectangle and then run a rolling pin over them.
10. Roll dough like a jellyroll, starting from one of the shorter sides so you end up with a long log.
11. Bring the ends of the log together, and fit one into the other.  Shape into a nice circle.


Dough ready for the oven.

12. Slash the outsides of the circle every 2 inches or so.
13. Let rise for 2 hours.
14. Bake for 40-50 minutes at 350F, rotating pan halfway through, until bread is 190F.
15. Cool.
16. Brush melted butter on top.
17. Sift powdered sugar on top.

My method of mixing stuff in was probably nicer to my hands and the gluten since there weren’t slivers of almond involved in the kneading.  But I did seem to underestimate how much to use.  I guess the bread rose enough that the amount of mix-ins got diluted.  It was good, though, and the flavors were not at all overpowering.  In fact, I wish I had tasted more cardamom.  But it was a really fun challenge, to make something so seasonal and have it come out looking like it should.  Happy holidays!

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.

Daring Baker Challenge: Baked Alaska August 27, 2010

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and
Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and
Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa
chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice
Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s
“The Perfect Scoop”.

The pdf with all the recipes is here.

Brown Butter Pound Cake

I had never browned butter before and was a little nervous about burning it, but it went fine.  I just put it all in the pan – didn’t even worry about cutting it up – and heated and stirred and heated and stirred until the milk solids turned brown.  Then got it out of that hot pan quick, because they get browner and browner really fast.

The annoying part is cooling the butter just enough to where it’s solid but soft for creaming with the sugar.  From there, it’s just a regular creaming method pound cake.  A breeze in my stand mixer .

Cake and ice cream layers

Zabaglione Ice Cream

I thought a French vanilla would go well with the brown butter cake, and I looked through The Perfect Scoop for something like that but a little more exciting.  Enter zabaglione ice cream.  Zabaglione is a poured custard made with egg yolks, marsala wine, and sugar.  I adore it.  We used it in the DB tiramisu challenge.  But Lebovitz’s recipe says to use 1/2 cup of dry marsala for a 1 quart recipe (he just substitutes it in for 1/2 cup of the dairy), and that seemed like a lot.  Alcohol makes ice cream softer, and I wanted mine to stay frozen during the baking and flambeing, plus I wasn’t sure if my guests would love the flavor as much as I do; some people don’t go for it as much.  So I used 1/4 of a cup.  This is even less when you consider that I increased the recipe to make 1.5 quarts.  I still tasted it, though; I think it might have been a little overpowering if I had used as much as he said, but a little more would have been fine.

Besides that, I followed his recipe, egg yolks and all.  I found that when I use light cream, as I am wont to do instead of all heavy cream or Lebovitz’s mix of whole milk and heavy cream, the yolks don’t make it too fatty.  I had some freezing issues due to not having frozen my ice cream maker’s core early enough, so I couldn’t judge this ice cream very accurately, but I think it turned out pretty well.

Unbaked meringue on the first one

Baked meringue on the second one

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meringue

I could make meringue in my sleep, which was good to know because I decided to wait until my guests had arrived to make it.  That was a Good Idea; I piped, baked, flambeed, and served one baked Alaska before doing the same to the next one, and in the meantime, the quality of the meringue had noticeably declined.  It was less satiny, starting to separate I guess.  But not too much – purely an aesthetic issue at that point.  Having the stand mixer do the beating for me made doing this mid-party less of a hassle.

I tried to do some pretty piping but I wanted to make sure to cover every little cranny since the meringue is an insulator for the ice cream, and that necessitated going over some spots multiple times.  But all in all, not too bad.

Don’t know how to make meringue?  Commit this to memory:

Beat room temperature egg whites with a few sprinkles of cream of tartar and cornstarch.  When they start to turn opaque, add sugar (1/4 cup or 60 g per white is customary for meringue shells; in this case, about half that much*) and keep beating.  Stop when they stick out pretty straight from the beater when you stop it and pull it out of the foam.

There, now you can make meringue in your sleep, too.

*1/4 cup or 60g per white is twice as much sugar per egg white by either volume or weight.  This recipe used slightly less than an equal weight of egg whites and sugar.  It was a nice amount.

Bake

Heat up the broiler and put the Alaska under it for five minutes.  My ice cream was definitely starting to melt at this point, which didn’t matter since my Alaskas were so horizontal, but one of those tower-type ones might have had trouble.

Flambeing

Flambe

I was kind of afraid to flambe them, because I had never done it before, but it’s so easy.  Just pour a little alcohol – at least 40% abv, I think; I used cognac – into a pan, heat it until it just starts to bubble, pour it on the dessert, and light it with a long match.  I had better luck lighting the pan of alcohol, actually, and then poured the flaming alcohol onto the dessert.  It sounds dangerous, but it went fine.  It looks really cool if you turn out the lights.

This part is unnecessary and actually not traditional for baked Alaska; mine were technically bombe Alaska because I did this.  But it makes a great show! And the leftover booze that soaked in tasted good.

The Summer of Ice Cream II: Cookies and Cream, twice August 25, 2010

Don’t know why it took me so long to post this…

Lower fat version on the left, higher fat on the right. The color difference is because I used different brands of cream.

You, lucky reader, are about to be let in on The Secret of Ice Cream.  It’s not in The Perfect Scoop (which I own and read, of course).  It’s not on foodgawker (my constant companion).  It’s in books like The Science of Ice Cream and The Handbook of Food Science, Technology, and Engineering.  It’s hardcore science that will make your ice cream soft.

The reigning messiah of ice cream, David Lebovitz (author of The Perfect Scoop, reigning ice cream bible) distinguishes between two kinds of ice cream: Philadelphia style and French style.  The former is based on cream and sugar while the latter adds to these egg yolks.  He gives a recipe for Philadelphia style ice cream but warns us that it will be icier than the French style.  What he doesn’t say is that there are other options.

It makes perfect sense, actually.  Ice cream aside, what are egg yolks used for?  Thickening and emulsifying things.  But they’re far from the only ingredients used for these purposes.  For thickening, you can use any of dozens of kinds of starches and gums, as well as gelatin and pectin.  (There are other chemicals that emulsify as well, but I don’t worry about that – yet, anyway.)  So it’s no coincidence that you can use all of these things to improve the texture of your ice cream, too.  But gelatin, pectin, and gums are needed in smaller amounts than egg yolks and starches, and lack the fat of egg yolks (it’s not a health thing, I swear – I just think an overly fatty ice cream isn’t as delicious), so I’d rather use them.

Unfortunately, ice cream scientists seem not to be very gossipy, so no one is helping me get the secret out, and as a result, there are precious few recipes to go on.  So, I took Lebovitz’s Philly Vanilla recipe and added an envelope of gelatin to it (and a row of Oreos, because I had been craving cookies and cream ice cream for at least a month).  It came out too thick for my taste, so I tried again with slightly less gelatin and light cream in place of heavy cream (I didn’t use his option of using part milk in either case), and it came out better, but ever so slightly too icy.  The experiments will have to continue, but my hunch is that more fat is not what’s needed.  Rather, more sugar or even more milk protein (which I could add in the form of nonfat milk powder) may be the key.  Or the full envelope of gelatin.  Or a different thickener (I’m considering ordering some guar gum).  I just try to see all these questions and the batches of ice cream they necessitate as the silver lining to the ridiculous heat wave we’ve been having here in Massafrickingchusetts, of all places.  I expect these temperatures in Florida, but in Florida I have air conditioning!

Yellow cupcakes with chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream frosting August 10, 2010

Two of the professors in my department just emailed me saying they have a KitchenAid stand mixer they never use and would I be able to give it a home and make it feel used?

Just take a minute to absorb that.

Within 48 hours, it was in my kitchen making cupcakes for them.

Yellow Cupcakes

The batter after mixing.

I’ve made yellow cake once before, and as I remember it was good, but it took an awful lot of egg yolks.  Instead of going back to that recipe, I just foodgawked yellow cake and found four recipes that looked good and came from reputable sources.  I ran these through my baker’s percentage program to make them easier to compare and then picked Smitten Kitchen’s, because it looked like an especially moist recipe, and not one that contained egg whites.  (Who puts egg whites in a yellow cake?  The Culinary Institute of America, apparently.  Shrug.)

I won’t copy the recipe here, but I will tell you that I used lowfat milk instead of buttermilk because that way I didn’t have to go shopping, and since I wasn’t going to have the acid of the buttermilk in the recipe to react with the baking soda, I replaced the baking soda with baking powder (the internets say amount of baking powder = amount of baking soda divided by three).  Baking powder contains both baking soda and an acid for it to react with – gotta remember to balance your acids and bases, or your cake won’t rise and will have a metallic taste.  Then I halved the recipe.  It made 48 mini cupcakes, exactly two pans’ worth.  I seem to have underfilled the cups, because most of them didn’t rise enough to make little tops for themselves, so maybe it should actually make less than that.

You’re supposed to bake the cake for 35-45 minutes, but the mini cupcakes baked in about 18 minutes at the same temperature, 350F.

The review: Wow.  First of all, making a cake with a scale and a stand mixer is a lovely experience.  Everything was so easy and fast.  Secondly, this is a great cake recipe.  Soft (cake flour is a good thing), moist, fluffy.  The tops are flat; I have no opinion on the optimal shape of the top of a cupcake, but now you know what you’ll get out of this recipe.  They’re losing moisture fast, though, so if you make them, eat them forthwith.

Some baked mini cupcakes.

Chocolate Swiss Meringue Buttercream

The meringue just after whipping.

Buttercream frosting and I have a shady past.  I tried to make it three times in a row to no avail.  First, a whole egg buttercream that fell flat.  Then, an egg yolk buttercream that was unacceptably salty because I used salted butter (normally you can get away with salted butter; not in buttercream!) and that really had too much butter in it, anyway (it got so hard in the fridge that I was able to pick up the entire mass by one edge and throw it away).  Finally, another whole egg buttercream that just never came together, no matter how long I beat it with my hand mixer.  It seemed to me that buttercream frosting was one of the few things that I couldn’t figure out how to make without a stand mixer.  So it was the perfect recipe to welcome my new toy to my kitchen.  But this time, I decided to make an egg white buttercream, because I imagined the meringue would be better at balancing out all that butter than the egg yolks had been.

I used a recipe from My Buttery Fingers which is based on a vanilla buttercream from Smitten Kitchen (whence all good things come, apparently!) and a chocolate espresso buttercream from Use Real Butter.  The only changes I made were to beat the egg whites to fairly stiff peaks before adding the butter, rather than adding it as soon as the meringue was cool, and to use 150g of butter rather than 180g, which Wendy suggested.  I think it was absolutely the right choice.

The recipe worked perfectly.  It’s normal for buttercream to separate into a chunky solid phase and a liquid phase before coming together again, but mine never even did that.  It was just perfect the whole entire time.  My hand mixer couldn’t quite get Swiss meringue to stiff peaks; I tried once for long enough that I ended up moving the bowl and mixer to a table so I could sit down, and all I got was an overheated mixer and soft peaks.  So expect to see some piped meringues in the future.

As for the flavor of the frosting, I think it was a nice amount of chocolate.  You could go chocolatier, but only if you want to really make a statement.  This was a nice, classic yellow cake-chocolate frosting combo.

Thanks, John and Ellen!

Flourless chocolate cognac cake/tarte August 8, 2010

Read on for my theory on why this cake looks like it got in a bar fight.

Two of the students (one former) in our department recently got married, and tonight we toasted to them.  I asked the bride what she’d like, and she said she likes anything chocolate.  When people tell me that, I think chocolate cake just won’t cut it – not chocolatey enough.  So I decided to make a flourless chocolate cake.  Before googling or foodgawking (foodgawkering? I can’t decide) for a recipe, I checked my bookmarks, because I keep a store of recipes I’ve seen and want to try.  Sure enough, I had a chocolate tarte recipe saved in my bookmarks that looked delicious.  The recipe is from Côté Maison and is in French, so I’ve translated it.

pâte sablée (already made – I didn’t use one)
156.3 B%       250 g crème fraîche liquide (I used heavy cream)
18.8 B%        30 g butter
78.1 B%        125 g chocolate
15.6 B%        25 g sugar (I added two tablespoons to this)
62.5 B%        2 eggs
37.5 B%        3 yolks
a little unsweetened cocoa powder (I used powdered sugar instead, but it melted into the cake by the time I served it)
32.5 B%        5 cl cognac

I added a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla.

I did it without a crust and doubled the recipe, which made a thin cake in a 13×9 in pan.  It served 12 people with a little left over.  Sadly, I don’t think the flavor of the cognac came through in the final product.  It tasted great in the batter, but I guess the cognac couldn’t take the heat.  If I make it again, I’d use a lighter cream, because I think too much fat can cover the flavor of the chocolate.   Here’s how I made it – mostly following the instructions, but you know me, I always have to change something:

1. Heat cream, butter, sugar, salt, and chocolate in a saucepan until everything is melted and dissolved.  Remove from heat.
2. Lightly beat eggs and yolks.
3. When cream mixture is cool, mix eggs, cognac, and vanilla together.  Pour into pan.
4. Bake at 350F (180C) for 20 minutes.
5. Cool, then sieve powdered sugar on top.

It came out moist, but cuttable (rather than needing to be spooned).  I should have checked it earlier, but thought it would need longer than 20 minutes (at slightly less than 350F) since I made twice as much, but then, I made it in a larger pan.  Twenty minutes was just right or possibly a minute or two too long.  It didn’t weep, so the eggs hadn’t coagulated, but I suspect it would have been a little smoother a couple of minutes earlier.

When I took it out of the oven, it had huge bubbles that sank into valleys upon cooling.  One of the sunken spots even caused a crack (the other, smaller crack is where I checked for doneness).  I think it went like this: the beaten eggs had lots of bubbles in them, and during cooking, they coalesced into big bubbles, which grew due to the heat into monster bubbles, which pushed a little of the batter out from under them, so that when the high spots sank, they sank even lower than the areas around them.  It did not make for a pretty cake.  (But everyone ate it anyway, bless their hearts!)  So take it from me: don’t overbeat your eggs – we’re not going for fluffy here – and let the batter sit for a while, maybe hit the pan on the counter a few times, to get rid of bubbles.

Overall, it’s hard to go wrong with a rich chocolate dessert, but I think this recipe could be improved upon.