my quest to create the perfect Princess Torte...

In my mind, the princess torte is one of the most elegant looking traditional cakes you can find. Looking at the finished cake as a whole, it looks very simple and unassuming. Almost innocent even. But the pastel coloured marzipan is hiding a cake that is so decadent and unique that you cannot hep but sit in (at least a little) awe at this confection.

I have attempted this odyssey of a cake twice now and while the taste of both of the cakes was different (I used a completely different cake base for each), they both turned out tasting creamy and delicious. However, I have to admit that my second attempt looked much much better!

As has been the trend lately, "simple" does not in any way mean "easy" (although with any luck, this will hopefully change with time). Traditionally, the princess torte has three layers of genoisie cake and in between the layers is strawberry jam and custard folded with whipping cream topped with a heaping (HEAPING) mound of whipped cream on top of the cake to give it a domed look when it's draped with the pastel green marzipan. The first time I made this, the only major problem that I had was in colouring the marzipan--I wanted it pink, but it turned this bloody-orange colour that wasn't very appetizing at all. Other than that, it received good reviews and I was eager to try it again. The only thing holding me back was the extremely high cost of marzipan, and the fact that my 14 year old brother likes to eat it by the pound it turns out (how NEITHER of us have ended up morbidly obese is completely beyond me!). So after being gifted a 3 lb log of marzipan from my grandparents, I just had to wait for my first full day off to pull this off.

I mentioned earlier how this cake was an odyssey. Well, this particular cake a grueling one. For a bit of an experiment I used Martha's White Cake recipe for the cake because when I made the first one, it didn't rise quite like I needed it to and when I cut it there was cake everywhere. Hopefully, this cake wouldn't be quite as fussy. Luckily the cakes turned out great and I would be able to pull off a four layered one this go 'round.

Making the custard was... in a word, soul-crushing. Never have I ever been so tormented by something so simple that I have been able to pull off in the past without any problems. It took me three tries, 11 eggs, and two recipes to get a custard that was not curdled to the point where it looked like scrambled eggs in water. Gross. The first time I thought it might have been the milk I was using, 1%. Changed the milk to half and half and tried it again. Same thing. This time though, before dumping the whole lot down the toilet, my mom tasted the glorpy substance and said that the vanilla tasted a bit off. So on my final try (although I have to admit, I would have kept trying until I got it right!) I used vanilla extract in lieu of a real vanilla bean and had sweet success. Praise the Jesus! Even though I would have kept on trying until I got it right, I'm pretty sure there would have been tears and possibly the throwing of an egg or two if that third try had flopped.

Whipped Cream: check! I can do that one no problem.

Arranging the cake went without incident, which was a nice change of pace for me. I was even able to mix in the right food colouring and roll out the marzipan without any major drawbacks! Although I feel I should note that if you have a silicone rolling pin, use that for the marzipan in stead of a marble or wood one. I will only make that mistake once... marzipan is very sticky.


When it was all finished, it looked (for me) nearly perfect. The taste was even pretty awesome too. What I like about this cake the most is how you think at first that it's kind of plain. The same vanilla tastes replaying layer after layer. But that's not the case at all! The strawberry jam is so tart that it compliments both the custard and the cake and then with the added zing of the marzipan, the whole cake comes together nicely with a very unique flavor that is neither bland nor predicatble. When it's been sitting for a while, all the creams and custards combine to make the cake almost seem like one big custard (and after it's been in the fridge for a while, it almost seems like a big slab of decadent ice cream cake).

The only thing I would go so far as to change with this cake, is to return to the genoisie cake base and forgo Martha's white cake. Because the cake is so custard-heavy, the added dryness from the genoisie is necessary to hold the whole thing together, while the white cake is too soft and dense for a cake that is already going to be quite dense.

Recipe:
White Cake
(Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cooking School)

1 c unsalted butter (room temperature, plus more for pans)
3 c sifted cake flour (plus more for pans)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 3/4 c granulated sugar
1 vanilla bean split lengthwise
1 c milk (room temperature)
8 large egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees (f). Butter two eight in round cake pans and line bottoms with parchment paper rounds. Butter paper and dust both pans with flour. Tap out excess.
2. Whisk together dry ingredients.
3. Cream the butter and 1 1/4 cups of sugar until light and fluffy (about 4 minutes). Scrape vanilla seeds into the bowl.
4. With the paddle attachment on and the mixer on "low", add dry ingredients in three batches alternating with the milk and starting and ending with the dry ingredients.
5. In a separate clean bowl, beat egg whites on low speed until foamy. Add cream of tartar and beat until soft peaks form. Gradually add remaining 1/2 cup of sugar, beating on medium-high until stiff glossy peaks form. Whisk 1/3 of the egg whites into the batter to lighten, then carefully fold in the rest of the whites.
6. Divide the batter between the prepared cake pans and bake for 30-40 minutes. Allow to rest in pans for 10 minutes after they have come out of the oven, then transfer to a cooling rack and wait until cooled completely before proceeding.

Pastry Cream
(Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cooking School)

2 c whole milk
1/2 c granulated sugar
1/2 vanilla bean
pinch of salt
3 large egg yolks
3 tbsp plus 1 1/2 tsp cornstarch
2 tbsp unsalted butter

1. Bring milk, 1/4 cup of sugar, vanilla seeds and salt to a simmer in a saucepan over medium heat, whisking to disperse seeds.
2. Whisk egg yolks and remaining sugar in a medium bowl. Whisk in cornstarch, one tablespoon at a time. Ladle 1/2 hot milk mixture into yolk mixture, whisking. Add remaining milk mixture. Pour mixture back into pan and heat over medium-high, whisking constantly, until mixture comes to a full boil and is thick enough to hold it's shape when lifted with a spoon (about 2 minutes). Stir in butter.
3. Remove from heat and pour into a bowl. Place plastic wrap directly on the surface (to prevent a skin from forming) and refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours.

5 favorite things...

I can be pretty indecisive when it comes to giving my number one most favorite thing ever. Usually I end up giving a "top three" in no particular order and that works out pretty well for me until I remember that I have a fourth and five and sixth item to add to that list. Because of this, and because when it comes to food I have a brand new favorite almost every day, I've decided to post my five favorite things of this week.

1. Cauliflower
Don't ask me why, but over the last two weeks I have fallen absolutely in love with this little vegetable. I've grown up eating it steamed with cheese sauce almost exclusively so I never realized its potential as an actual flavor. Flash baked in the oven with salt, pepper, and olive oil, cauliflower can take over the entire meal no matter how perfect or tasty the other elements are. It's a nice and hard vegetable but when cooked, cauliflower has a very rich and creamy taste that can add a needed zing to any white dish (and I really do mean white. Potatoes and quiches and cheeses... delicious!). I recently made a bunch of little potato souffles and sneaked cauliflower to the mix. That little bit of veg in the otherwise even-keel souffle definitely made the dish worth making again.

2. Meringue
When I was little I hated meringue. My mom made it and I always thought it was way too sweet and that it had a weird ethereal type texture to it... there, but not really. Lately though, I have come to really appreciate meringue. Swiss meringue would have to be my favorite--melting the sugar in the egg whites in a double boiler before beating them together to create pristine white shiny peaks in my stainless steel bowl. I am completely in love with the simplicity of meringue. But don't misunderstand me, "simple" never means "easy". Temperamental at heart, the egg whites will remain simply albumen if you get any water (or anything else!) in that bowl. But once you figure out a trick or method with meringue that works for you and treat it with its due respect, it will turn out beautiful every time.

3. ABBA
Seriously. Lately when I'm cooking or baking I'll pop in the Gold CD without even thinking about it or flip on Mama Mia on my computer to listen to in the background. It puts me right into the groove and I don't think about anything other than the particular task at hand, whether it's peeling potatoes, tempering eggs, or cutting pastry. I have no reasoning for this other than... I am a dancing queen...

4. Pistachios
Last weekend I drove to a Mediterranean grocery store in my purple spandex short shorts and bought a kilo of shelled pistachios. It's really difficult to find shelled pistachios in the city and I can't think of a singe reason why that would be. Since I bought them, however, I just want to put them in everything I make. Pistachios have such an interesting taste that changes with whatever you mix it with. And while some people balk at eating food that is green (other than leaves), I adore the rich and vibrant colour that comes about after you mix anything with these nuts. It's so original and makes everything you put it in taste like you've taken that extra little step to making something special.

5. Organic Cotton Spandex Short Shorts
I. Love. THESE. Every time I decide to set a day aside to make something particularly difficult or time consuming or oven heavy, I take out my soft plushy little short shorts and don them with a huge smile. They have got to be the most comfortable things in existence and as an added bonus, whenever I leave the house I have eyes following me (and my deliciously purple bum) wherever I go. Call it vanity if you will, but my excuse is this: working in a kitchen for a long time is hot work and you gotta keep cool, and also, there has got to be some way for me to measure my waistline while I make all this food! When the time comes that I can no longer fit into these little shorts, I will stop cooking. Either that or wear the shorts while running...

awkward laughs and big hair...

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes and Strawberry Cupcakes

I have mixed feelings regarding Martha Stewart. Don't get me wrong, she is a talented woman no doubt with booming enterprise spreading across North America... but whenever I make her food I always feel that the finished product is lacking in... something. After I spent some quality time with Martha and her cupcakes this weekend I realized what it was about her recipes that always just got to me: they have forced personality. I made snickerdoodle cupcakes and they tasted like a forced laugh that was almost awkwardly loud at a joke that's barely funny. The strawberry cupcakes that I made immediately following the snickerdoodle ones were small blonde girls with big hair just trying to keep up... for all that build-up there's not much goin' on.

After making more than a handful of Martha's recipes from both her cupcake book and her general cooking book, I've come to the conclusion that her recipes, while tasty, are lacking in any kind of oomph. I will concede to Martha that her recipes are very accessable for the "average home cook", but for me they have become dependable to the point of (gasp!) predictability. What I'm saying (in far too many words) is that when this food hits your palate, your eyes don't roll into the back of your head, your mouth doesn't drop open from shocked delight, and you make no noise that in any way shape or form can be described as orgasmic (in most western countries anyway!).

And yet...

And yet I love her great big book that describes the ins and outs of cooking to a perfect T. It's from this book that I've learned any technique that I claim to posess (with, I must admit, a few important exceptions). And in a way, I also like how she takes typically complex dishes and cuisine and simplifies it until it's manageable in a more day-to-day kind of way. HOWEVER, I must also say that this is, at the same time, what drives me nuts about her as well. I get a weird kind of thrill when I accomplish a dish that takes hours of careful preperation and perfect techniqe to pull off, only to be devoured in minutes (or in some cases, seconds). I much prefer that to cupcakes that take minutes to throw together and then loiter around the house for days like a European relative that doesn't speak any english.

Making cupcakes can be fun. They are cute and manageable and popular. They can be moist and decadent and a perfect addition to 5:00 am tea for a gaggle of nurses on the night shift (as mine were for), but these particular cupcakes turned out just about as boring and uninteresting as Martha herself (in my own humble opinion). It's entirely possible, however, that I am just bitter at these cuppies because for the first time ever (EVER!) my swiss meringue buttercream curdled when I added the butter. I'm thinking it's because I left the cold butter in the sun to get it to the proper "room temperature", but it passed that stage and went right on to "melted". How disappointing is that?!

So all in all, Martha's snickerdoodle and strawberry cupcakes can be described in one word: edible.

a test of stock...

Pluot and Pistachio Crumble Strudel (and an Apple Strudel too!)

I come from very thick Austrian stock. It's a potent and sticky stock that is quite often difficult to shrug off. Not that I would ever want to shrug it off at all, but it makes it very difficult to resist the urge to bake certain things. It also comes with a lot of pressure (mostly self-inflicted) to create the best of these things. Not the least of these things being a traditional Austrian strudel.

Let me begin this discussion of Austrian Strudel by saying that the most difficult and defining aspect of this dessert is the dough and not-as one might expect- the filling of the finished product. What makes this dough unique-and at the same time frustrating enough to make you want to pull out your hair by the roots and chuck said dough through a glass window- is the fact that when it is pulled and stretched it should be translucent. The dough needs to be worked and stretched until it is thinner than paper and and as big as a table meant to seat six people.

The very first time I made this I learned something very important about baking: if the recipe advises you to make two batches of something "just in case", not only will that something be as temperamental as a a cat being fed a pill, but also do be sure to actually make two.

The dough itself is the easiest thing you will ever throw together (seriously. A proboscis monkey could do this blindfolded). Flour, water, oil, and vinegar go into your mixer and you let the paddle do all the work. What you get is an innocent little ball of soft fluffy dough about the size of a fist. You throw the ball around for a while to work the gluten in the flour and then coat it in oil and let it sit while you watch tv for an hour. When Grey's Anatomy is over you can start peeling your apples (or in my case, peeling my apples and slicing my plum-apricot mutant hybrids) and putting together your filling.

Now the fun part. When you initially roll out the dough you will think that this process is easy. That I have entirely overstated the difficulty level here and obviously need to have my head checked. But once the dough gets too big to handle... BAM! Your first rip. Work through it. There is still hope. You now lay the increasingly unweildly mass of dough on your floured tablecloth and begin to really stretch it out. The rips and tears will really start to develop as you try to bend the laws of physics in order to create a sheet of dough only a few atoms thick.

Here's the really painful part: you have to move very quickly as you do all this because the dough will dry out to a crispy, unmanageable sheet that is completely useless if you take too long.

Ecited yet?

In all fairness however, strudel dough is one of the few things I have ever baked where you can clearly see progress every time you make it. And when you get to that point where it stretches beautifully and you can read fine print right through it (all without having a mental breakdown half way through), you will absolutely beam with accomplishment. This I promise.


The real test came when I invited my Austrian grandparents over for dessert and my diabetic grandfather snuck thirds while my grandmother quietly copied the recipe down. Obviously my own Austrian stock hasn't been spoilt!

a mistake i'll only ever make twice...

I enjoy eating seafood. In addition to this, Jamie Oliver has never failed me. Of my four year love affair with the cute Brit, all I can say is that I have tried many different recipes from many different books and the only ones that have consistently produced delicious results are the ones with a picture of him on the cover.

So when I talk about the sockeye incident of August 28, 2009 it was not an example of Jamie letting me down. Quite the opposite, it was a clearly a case of me failing Jamie.

The recipe itself is easy. Simple to the point of questioning its worth even. After all, salmon doesn't need much added flavor in order to make it fantastic. A couple of bulbs of fennel, two lemons, a handful of parsley, and some fresh tomatoes. Mix with olive oil and some salt and pepper, then stuff the salmon with the colourful produce. All the excess veg goes on top and underneath the fish so that you can eat it as a side with the meal. Really, the whole thing looks absolutely perfect before it goes into the oven. It's colourful and vibrant and looks as though it will be eaten within seconds of coming out of the oven.

So of course there has to be a "but".

All day long there had been a questionable smell lingering in the kitchen. You know the smell. Everybody knows the smell. It's potent and not one that is easily forgotten. Turned out to be coming off a dead rodent outside the kitchen window (pleasant, I know). So when there was a funny odor after I took out the fish I didn't really think anything of it other than I hate squirrels. I had also just bought the salmon the day before so there was no reasonable way the fish could have gone off in less than 24 hours. Right?

When I pulled the salmon out of the oven the smell was worse and I should have known right then to get out the plan B meal (Kraft Dinner). But I was in denial, and after all... the presentation of the fish was perfect! It certainly LOOKED edible...


After a few bites we all decided that no, it was definitely not edible. This fish belonged in the trash with all its fancy accoutrement. Maybe the coyotes would appreciate my effort.

The extra frustrating part about this story: I have done this before with seafood! A year ago I was asked to make a crab quiche and I didn't trust my nose when I opened the can of crab and found it smelling... repugnant. Again, the whole dish was chucked after it was tentatively tasted and deemed entirely unfit for human consumption. I'm lucky no one got food poisoning that time.

After all this I would say that while I may have let Jamie down, I think I finally learned my lesson and am able to say with my full and utmost confidence that from here on in I will ALWAYS trust my nose.

And always have a back up meal ready when preparing fish.

a Dobos Torte and a new blog...

Every month the Daring Bakers put out a baking challenge. Last month, that challenge was the Austro-Hungarian Dobos Torte. While there were countless beautiful and interesting interpretations and variations on this dobosian theme, I fell in love with the one created by Tartlette. Now, I don't know what it was exactly about this cake that I fell in love with, whether it was the almost rebellious concept of a white dobos torte (traditionally a cake with chocolate filling, covered in chocolate buttercream, and decorated with a caramel garnish) or the challenge in these beautiful little cakes that looked so simple on the outside, but were actually quite complex and different. In the end, that whole idea of making a cake that was almost decievingly simple made the decision for me. That and the pretty pictures...

I had to make mousse filling twice (the first go 'round was unsuccessful due to the honey making the mousse smell a bit too similar to old shoes) and that made the whole process special. The fact that the power went out right in the middle of making the swiss meringue buttercream made it pretty special too. The Rebel Dobos Torte made the cut to be the official first post and that gives it an added hint of special in my books. I was able to make pulled sugar decorations and not horribly disfigure or burn myself in the process and that make sthis experience extra special in my very humble opinion. And finally (I promise), I think it's pretty special that I was able to pull off this ass-kicking, finger-licking fancy pants torte(s) without even a hint of a mental breakdown!!

Special indeed.

My name is Erin and I have a passion for food. Simply put, it makes me happy. This is my attempt to appreciate food to its absolute fullest by making and eating as much of it as I possibly can in as many beautiful combinations as I can find.

For me, this is what it's all about: making and remaking something until I get it right. Or at least as "right" as I can manage without singing off any hair, slicing off any important body parts, or breaking down in tears. It's a process. Like everything else, I'm starting in the middle of it all and working my way to the edges. We'll see where this goes...