I AM ... The Secret Santa

This year for my Secret Santa gift I had decided that no matter whose name I pulled out of the hat, I would bake something for that person that I was sure they would love. This was mostly because I had stumbled on a lovely rack of packaging for baked goods at Michael's that I couldn't help but spend too much money on. It was all planned out perfectly, until the name I pulled out of the hat belonged to a woman who cannot have any gluten. I was a bit bummed until I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to make some more macarons. I could experiment and try out some of the fancy oils and extracts that I have collected (not hoarded!!). I settled on three different kinds of shells-- pistachio, raspberry, and vanilla-- and three different fillings--custard, anise buttercream, and lemon buttercream.

Making the macaron shells was easy enough, although after the 100th little cookie I did learn that there are definitely some tricks and shortcuts that make them a lot less intimidating. However, that being said, the best trick is to read the recipe fully before you even start (for some reason, I still haven't fully learned that one...). Layering your baking sheets will definitely make your cookies thinner and sexier, but you will have to adjust your baking time or else you'll be wondering why they're still raw inside after they've been in the oven for nearly an hour. And not all sil-pat baking sheet covers will allow you to effortlessly peel off your freshly baked macs. In fact, I would say stay away from the sil-pat mats all together and just use parchment paper for this one. So much easier.

Also, as tempting as it is to buy the expensive raspberry extract from the specialty food store because it MUST be delicious... just don't do it. Seriously. It's not delicious. I have never in my life tasted a raspberry that tasted quite that potent and... terrible. The extract made the macs taste very strong and alcoholy, but combined with the anise buttercream, they were really nummy.

Unfortunately too, I have to say that my lemon buttercream ended up tasting like lemony fresh sunlight soap. Stupid lemon extract. Next time, I will stick to lemon rind or lemon oil, I promise. Lesson learned. Mostly. The anise extract made for absolutely scrumptious buttercream that I ate by the spoonful. Dangerous.

Book Review: David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop

Since June, I have been on a mission to make every recipe in David Lebovitz's book on ice cream, The Perfect Scoop. I've made 16 recipes so far and... I really don't have anything to show for this other than a new respect for stretchy pants and a LOT of new friends.


From this, I have come to the conclusion that the one big problem with Lebovitz's book is that the ice creams in it are too good. I know, this isn't a very good review of the book. I should be unbiased and look at it from all angles like I would any book I was reviewing. But honestly, of the ice creams I've made from this book only two have lasted longer than hour. All the rest have been devoured within minutes of being scooped out of the ice cream maker. Even the ones that look more like ice cream soup than soft serve.

However, while I did fail by not taking any photos, I can say that I almost make up for it by scribbling notes in the margins throughout the book. SO, here is a list of the 16 or so recipes I completed from The Perfect Scoop and the notes (the ones I could read) in the margins:

Vanilla Ice Cream Philadelphia Style- My younger brother's favorite. Very creamy and easy to make.
Chocolate Raspberry Ice Cream (I added some blackberries too)- I really really liked this one. Chocolate and rasp/blackberries... best. thing. ever.
Anise Ice Cream-Super subtle, almost delicate. Grandparent's favorite.
Roasted Banana Ice Cream- My younger sister's favorite. Tasted fantastic with the Classic Hot Fudge Sauce.
Fresh Fig Ice Cream- Very very sweet. Almost a bit too sweet for me. Left me with a tingling tongue. Also, a bit crunchy.
Strawberry Frozen Yogurt- So simple, so good. The perfect tangy strawberry taste.
Raspberry Swirl Ice Cream- The Swirl was the best part. Decadent.
Raspberry Ice Cream- Mixed in left over swirl (from above) and made raspberry heaven.
Avocado Ice Cream- Odd. Tasted better in a milkshake, but overall... still in my freezer after two months.
Chocolate-Coconut Sorbet- I wanted more coconut. I wanted more chocolate. This one kind of fell short of both.
Mango Sorbet- OMFG so so so good. Seriously. I ate an entire quart in a sitting. Don't tell my doctor.
Cake-like Brownies- Disappointed. I like my brownies to be moist and light, and these were pretty dense and dry. Not quite what I expected in my brownies. To be fair, it could very well have been me.
Profiteroles- So simple, so light, so delicious. I made 30 of these and they were gone before I could even put ice cream inside them. I think that's a win.
Classic Hot Fudge- It was almost bizarre how good this sauce was. Better than anything I've ever bought in a store that's for sure.
Semi Sweet Hot Fudge- MMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

All idolizing and OMFGing!! aside, as far as cookbooks go, this is a gooder. Lebovitz creates recipes that are inventive and unique, but accessible enough for a home cook (I like to call myself a home chef... but let's not go there). The short anecdotes that go with each recipe are funny and eyeopening, if not down right cute. The new flavors and textures that you explore in this book (that aren't so bizarre as to being off-putting, but just different enough to keep you interested) guarantee that you will find a new favorite for everyone you know.

And the ones that you don't like... well, it's been three months since the avocado ice cream and everyone who tried it is still talking about it. Odd publicity is better than no publicity, right?

More Ice Creamy Deicioiusness

I love ice cream. Since I started making it myself every week, I've started liking it even more. This cannot be a healthy combination. Seriously.

The glorious thing about making my own ice cream is the freedom of flavour. Once I nailed the basic formula for making french ice cream (a rich, egg yolky custard base infused with whatever flavour I want topped off with pureed fruit)I realized that I could do anything. The sky is the limit! Honestly, this kind of freedom is a bit intimidating. With great power comes great responsibility and all. I will restrain myself from using liver pate or salmon roe in ice cream and calling it 'gourmet'. Euch.

When I have the opportunity to buy ice cream, I never choose strawberry. However the last two flavours I've made had a strawberry base. They're in season right now and you can't go wrong with fresh fruit in pretty much anything. The fresh part has this weird ability to make anything taste good.

Strawberry-Mint ice cream was probably the best. After infusing the milk with fresh mint leaves for nearly and hour, the milk had turned a bright green colour and the kitchen smelled deliciously fresh. This batch of ice cream was gone within minutes of coming out of the churner. The strawberry-anise seed ice cream needed to be stronger, but was very yummy nonetheless. I'll write up a post later about infusing milk or cream with fragrants and then you can do it too. It's really simple, but requires a fair bit of patience. Once you get it though, you'll have the world at your fingertips.

Is it possible to have a food enemy?

There are three foods in this world that I just cannot enjoy (aside from cheese, which I am slowly starting to appreciate and even admire). Olives, liver and white chocolate. Don't get me wrong, I haven't just written these foods off because of their smell or a single bad experience, I just cannot for the life of me get myself to enjoy them. The really unfortunate part of this is that I desperately want to enjoy them.

Except for olives. They're just yucky.

My parents both love love love liver. They order it at restaurants and drool over it at home. By rights, I should enjoy liver too. However, instead of salivating at the sight and smell of offal, my esophagus closes right up and I can taste the bile rising in my stomach. Delightful, eh?
Believe me, I've tried to eat liver. After reading in Julie&Julia about the delicate buttery taste of finely prepared chicken livers and seeing carefully put together dishes of liver on menus, I have tried my best to gulp down a forkful. Not successful. Not even a little bit. So even though I want to be adventurous and cook up a pan of chicken livers with something french and fancy sounding to go along side them, I cannot. This makes me sad.

As for white chocolate... I mostly just find this confection to be a frustrating pain in the ass that pops up everywhere I don't want it to. I still use the stuff. I think I'm deluding myself by believing that if I use it enough I will learn to like it. So far I have only learned that white chocolate can be very expensive and never to mix it with cream cheese no matter what the recipe says.

I made a cake this weekend, a prototype cake for a 50th wedding anniversary that I'm baking for in August. The only request was that the cake be lemony. So I got out my books (of which I have way way too many) and searched through them to find the very best sounding lemon cake. Of course it would have to be the cake with the white chocolate lemon buttercream icing that looked the best by far. Couldn't be the one with the regular chocolate buttercream or the one with the fancy italian meringue buttercream... nope, it had to be the one that called for the really expensive and hard to find white chocolate that made up the buttercream.

When the recipe specifically asked for Green & Black's white chocolate with Madagascar vanilla bean seeds I let myself think that maybe my disdain for white chocolate came from the lower quality white chocolate that I just bought from the bins at Superstore. So I (naively) phoned around to find this elusive brand of chocolate that turned out to cost $4.87 per 100grams at the community health foods store. Awesome. Not only did I have to shell out $15.00 on chocolate I wasn't even gonna like, I would have to go to the grocery store that smelled like patchouli, body odor and guilt (for eating pig) (I love pig).

Long story short, the cake was delicious. A buttery almond lemon cake that, while dense, absolutely melted in your mouth with the lemon curd that filled each of the layers. I didn't even mind the tangy white chocolate taste that came from the buttercream. When placed with the cake and the lemon curd, it all balanced out really nicely. But is it worth the super expensive imported chocolate? I gave out samples of the cake to people at work and they seemed to agree that yes, it was worth the money.

But I still don't like the stuff. I can't help it.

A Third Swedish Princess Torte for Easter

A huge log of fresh marzipan was waiting for me on the kitchen table early Easter morning. Its purpose: to cover six layers of genoisie cake filled with pastry cream and strawberry jam, topped with an enormous heap of stabilized whipping cream. My mission was to have this potentially elegant Swedish delicacy baked, filled, covered, wrapped in a pretty bow, and cooling in the garage before noon.

Shockingly, I did just that.

Making the cake itself was very simple. Beating whole eggs with sugar until the mixture had quadrupled in size and then gently folding in sifted flour (the key was to sift the flour over the egg mixture while folding at the same time so that I didn't end up with lumps of flour) were really the only two steps that needed to be taken to successfully (more or less) pull off the genoisie. The purpose of using a genoisie instead of a standard white cake is because this particular french confection is known to be really dry and somewhat tasteless until it is filled and sauced. Because the Swedish Princess Torte is so creamy, a more moist cake (like the Martha Cake I used for my last SPT) makes the final product dense and almost mushy. From all that I've learned, Swedes are anything but mushy.

The most difficult part about making the pastry cream and the strawberry jam was fending off the family that couldn't wait until it was in the torte before they got a taste.

Pastry cream has become one of absolute favorite things to make. This was after many pitched attempts that turned out looking just like scrambled eggs in water and tasting not too much better. When done right, pastry cream or custard takes on a smoothe texture and a rich taste that envelopes you like a warm hug and makes you smile against your will. Mixed with a fresh strawberry puree and you have simple bliss.

Once the cake was put together and topped with a generous (very generous) heap of stabilized whipping cream, I went about the task of colouring and laying on the marzipan. It's almond sugar paste and it's finicky. But I perservered and came away triumphant. Sure, it looked a bit like Shrek's head on a platter, but it was delicious nonetheless. Creamy and almondy with six (SIX!!) layers of cake that melted in your mouth. All done by noon.

Sometimes I am awed by my own awesomeness when under pressure.

Playing With My Food

I like to play with my food. Not in a mountain-out-of-mashed-potatoes-this-means-something kind of way, but more in a... how can I make this taste different or better or healthier or (forgive me) organicier. Because my family enjoys acting like a bunch of enablers, I got a book called Culinary Artistry by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. This book is laid out kind of like a culinary dictionary of flavours. You look up the word "lemon" and it will have listed all the things that compliment the lemon flavor of a dish from almond and raspberry, to honey and lime.

Which leads me to my discovery! You can make meringue with honey. You just substitute equal parts honey for sugar in your meringue recipe (or swiss meringue buttercream recipe, which is what I did) and voila! You have to be careful about what kind of honey you use though because some varieties are much stronger in flavour than others. I just used a little bottle of liquid honey that I found in my cupboard. A subtle honey taste that wasn't overly sweet.

There are lots of cool thing about being able to use honey as a sugar replacement in baked goods, the first of which being that it supports local industry (which also decreases the the output of harmful offgases and enegry produced in shipping sugars from places like Australia and Cuba). Honey is also a completely unrefined sweetener that retains moisture so that when it's used in baked goods, so the goods actually last longer than when regular sugar is used. The more you know, eh?

This all came about when I had made a lemon curd to fill my cakes with and wanted a buttercream that was a little different from the regular vanilla that didn't overpower the velvety lemon curd. So now I have a buttercream recipe that is sugar free. And I have to admit that it was pretty exciting coming up with this on my own. Playing with your food is bound to pay off sometime.

Honey Swiss meringue Buttercream
Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cooking School

1 1/2 cups sugar (OR 1 1/2 cups HONEY-- if you want a less sweet, more subtle honey flavour, use only 1 cup honey)
6 large egg whites
pinch of salt
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
1 pound unsalted butter cut into tablespoons and room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Combine suagr (or honey), egg whites and salt in a large heatproof mixing bowl and set the bowl over a pan of simmering water. Whisk until whites are warm to the touch and sugar (or honey) is dissolved, 2-3 minutes.
2. Attach your bowl to an electric mixer and beat on low speed until foamy. Add cream of tartar and beat on medium-high speed until stiff glossy peaks form and mixture is cooled completely, roughly 10 minutes.
3. Reduce speed to medium-low and add butter two tablespoons at a time beating to incorporate fully after each addition. After the butter has been incorporated, add vanilla. (If the mixture looks curdled, don't worry and just keep beating-- it will smoothe out on its own)

Pomegranates, Pistachios, and Those Teeny Little Oranges

I've never been overly concerned with the presentation of the food that I make. Creating artwork that will make people ooh and ahh when they see it has never been the goal. Instead, I've always preferred to make people's eyes roll back in their heads after they take their first bite. I do, however, realize the value in being able to make mouths salivate and eyes dilate when people see something that looks like edible paradise.

For the longest time I considered this element of food-- the aesthetics element-- to be overrated and unnecessary. If the food tasted like delicious perfection, than shouldn't that be enough? There are probably people who believe the exact opposite about food presentation, that if the food looks like sweet bliss, than it's alright if it tastes mediocre.

Since Christmas though, I've been wanting to try and create food that looks as tantalizing as it tastes. I've gotten inspiration from the MANY cookbooks that I received for Christmas as well as other blogs that emphasize the beauty and artistry in any kind of food you try to put together. One of my favorite blogs for this is Cannelle et Vanille, and that is where I got the inspiration to make these pistachio pavlovas with colorful seasonal fruit and lemon curd.

I had a bunch of leftover eggwhites in the fridge from a (failed) attempt at creme brulee the night before and knew that meringues would be eaten up fast no matter what. It was also an excuse to make lemon curd, something I will eat by the spoonful if given the chance.

Overall, the pavlovas themselves turned out to be quite good. The crushed pistachios gave them a subtle flavor that went really well with the pomegranates and the honey oranges. However, the intense citrus sweetness of the lemon curd combined with the sugary meringue was too overpowering for me. If I were to make these again, I would use a custard or creme anglaise instead of the lemon curd just to balance out the sweetness.
All said, however, they did turn out to be very pretty little desserts that made the table ohh and ahh.

thanksgiving pie politics...

This Thanksgiving I endeavored to make the pumpkin and apple pies that would follow the meal. This already was cause for a significant amount of consternation as it would mean that my grandmother wasn't making the dessert and it would be, by default, "just not THAT good". That was fine. I've dealt with this pressure before and I would have to put up with it again. I'm used to it.

To change things up a bit, I decided that it might be interesting to do a bit of a variation on the classic pies by topping the pumpkin pie with Italian meringue, and mixing in a few pears with the apples in the apple pie. Only a small part of me wanted to do this just to enrage my family of die-hard traditionalists. Maybe not that small...

I got the idea to top off the pumpkin filling with meringue from an old post by Tartelette and a desire to use my brand new kitchen torch for the very first time. I doubled the recipe for the pumpkin filling given by Tartelette, and used Jamie Oliver's recipe for pie dough, spiking it with a pinch of cinnamon to give it a little bit of extra flavour. That was all pretty standard. The dough rolled out nicely and the filling baked nicely after about 40 minutes in the oven (instead of the recommended 20). The interesting part came when I made the meringue. Now I have made French meringue for pavlovas and individual meringues, and I have made Swiss meringue for buttercreams, but I have never attempted (or seen the need for) Italian meringue. Bringing water and sugar to a boil and then up to 245 degrees (F) while beating the egg whites into peaks seemed a bit extreme. I mean, you need a candy thermometer to pull it off and meringue is supposed to be simple! Needless to say, I was a little bit aprehensive going into this.

But the desire to finally put to use my fancy new kitchen torch spurred me on.

And I was stunned at how easy it was.

I admit, it was a little bit annoying having to wait for the sugar syrup to get hot enough (it had to reach the "soft ball" stage), but once I poured it into the beaten egg whites, you could see the meringue taking shape almost instantly. The hot syrup cooked the eggs and it became a big, soft, fluffy, mass. Kind of like a soft marshmallow. And it tasted delicious. Absolutely decadent. I plopped the fluffy whiteness onto the cooked pumpkin pie, and then played with it until it looked just the way I wanted.

Then I got to fire up my torch and caramelize the edges. It smelled just like roasting marshmallows. Tasted like it too...
The reviews for this pie were mixed. I liked it a lot. It was traditional enough that it still had that same spicy pumpkin taste with a nice flaky crust, but the added soft meringue made whipping cream unnecessary and made the dish nice and light. Others, however, were not as keen on it as I was (my sister refused to eat the meringue portion of the pie in an effort to boycott change).
I thought the apple pie was pretty good too... I ate a huge piece of it for breakfast this morning.

my KLA-FOO-TEE...

"What's for dessert?"
"I'm making clafoutis."
"Sounds like an STD. Or STI if I'm being politically correct, but I'm sure it will be yummy... whatever it is!"
"It will be yummy. French."
"Hey, I'd eat syphilis if it was on a dessert menu."

Making a dessert that no one quite knows how to pronounce definitely has its advantages. The first of which being that your test subjects will usually have no idea what they're about to put in their mouths. You can also get the idea into your head that you need to create a dish called "syphilis" that tastes so absolutely delicious that all people will say that they would eat syph. Weird.

I used pluots again as the fruity aspect of my clafoutis. Traditionally, this dessert is made with dark cherries (pits and all), but because I'm having a love affair with the tart-suculent flavor and bright pink color of the pluots and wanted to use as many of them as I could before they went out of season.

This is my sister's favorite dessert. She gotten into the habit of begging me to make it at every possible opportunity. Because of this, I have used any and every friut at hand to crreate this dessert from blackberries to canned peaches (although I wouldn't recommend the canned peaches as they are far too bland and add nothing at all to the taste of the dish). From this, I learned that the more tart the fruit, the better the clafoutis turns out (and this can be true for many other desserts as well).

I've tried two different recipes or this dish. One was a fancy recipe involving heating the milk and cream over the stove with the vanilla before whisking in the eggs. The other was a far simpler method whereby you just throw all the ingredients into the mixer, mix for a while until frothy, and then pour it into your baking dish. The simple one I found in a food magazine alongside an ad for cream and I believe it is, by far, the better of the two in terms of ease, taste, and time. Taste being, naturally, the most important consideration!

Raspberry Peach Clafouti
(from a Real Cream ad in a magazine I don't remember)

1. Butter a deep 9 or 10 inch pie plate. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Beat 3 large eggs and 1/2 cup granulated sugar in a medium bowl using an electric mixer. Add 3/4 cup cream and beat until combined. Stir in 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 cup all purpose flour, and a pinch of salt.
3. Sprinkle fruit on the bottom of the prepared dish. Pour batter over fruit.
4. Bake in preheated oven for about 45 minutes or until set. Cover loosely with foil during cooking if top is browning too fast. Serve warm or cold. Serves 6-8.