Tag: dessert

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Puddings, Custards, Mousses, and Souffles The Book

117. Lemon Parfaits p.839

Unfortunately there’s no recipe for this available online.

This is the inaugural post for the Puddings, Custards, Mousses, and Soufflés chapter of the book. Part of my plan for this summer was to get around to working on this chapter, as well as the Frozen Desserts section. This recipe is the sum total of those efforts. It was very good, but there are still 75 recipes to go in those chapters, and I’ll have to do more than one per year if I’m ever going to finish this project.

The recipe starts by cooking lemon zest and juice together with egg yolks and sugar. Once the sugar is melted and the yolks tempered the mixture is taken off the heat and allowed to cool. The whites from the eggs are then beaten to stiff glossy peaks with cream of tartar and sugar. The meringue and cream, which has been stiffly beaten with confectioners sugar, are folded into the custard. The resulting mixture is then divided among parfait glasses. If you’re like me and don’t have parfait glasses, wine glasses make a perfectly elegant alternative. The glasses then go into the freezer for a couple of hours. Just before serving they’re topped with a bit of lemon zest.

I was very happy with this dish. I don’t eat a lot of frozen desserts, or desserts in general, but once in a while it’s a nice treat. We had a friend over for a summer barbecue, and it seemed like a nice occasion for a cooling dessert. The flavour was all clean clear lemon, it was bright and assertive with just enough sweetness to balance the acidity. I’m quite sensitive to over-sweet lemon dishes, and this one kept on the right side of the balance. The texture was the absolute highlight of this dessert though. Beating the egg whites and cream to very stiff peaks, and careful folding, allowed the dish to stay light and fluffy, but frozen. My dining companion described it as lemon scented air. It looked nice and substantial on the spoon, but melted quickly on the tongue, and practically disappeared before you swallowed. I loved that it left me with the a sense of cooling lemon freshness, without overwhelming me.

In general I like about three bites of ice cream for dessert, this dish whipped in so much air that those three bites managed to fill a whole glass. It was a lovely approach to dessert, focusing on flavour and texture over richness and substance. What a great kick off to this most vexing of chapters.

Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

109. Strawberry Shortcake p.813

The recipe is a variation on this one from epicurious. The main difference is that the linked recipe uses buttermilk biscuits, while The Book calls for the cream biscuits I wrote about the other day.

It starts with three pints of strawberries, hulled and quartered. This is the kind of recipe instruction that I consistently underestimate. I figure this job will take in around 5 minutes, but it’s really more like 20. I’m a chronic under-estimator of time in all areas of life, so I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. Once the strawberries are quartered they’re mixed with sugar, and lightly mashed with a potato masher. The idea is to get them to release their juices without destroying them. I managed to squish out a good deal of juice without breaking more than a few of them. The strawberries are then left to macerate for an hour on the counter.

When the strawberries are swimming in their own juices it’s time to whip the creams. Heavy cream and sour cream are beaten together with some confectioner’s sugar to the soft peak stage. Then the shortcakes are assembled.

The word cake has a specific and circumscribed definition, a biscuit casually topped with whipped cream and fruit doesn’t really fit it. If the biscuits were covered in whipped cream, decoratively layered with strawberries and allowed to set up in the fridge for a while, I’d buy the argument that these are individual serving cakes. As the recipe reads this is no more a cake than a meatloaf sandwich is a hamburger.

Still, this did taste pretty darn good, and it reeked of summer. Our strawberry shortcake growing up had a very similarly textured cake, but it was a large layered affair cut into slices. I fondly remember the adventure of trying to get the slices out in one piece, and the hilarity of mom’s face as strawberries and cream plummeted toward the dining room rug. I missed that in these neat little biscuits, but as I value the carpet in my dining room maybe it’s a compromise I can live with.

As with all deserts in the book, it was too sweet. I even cut back on the recommended amount of sugar on the strawberries because they were naturally sweet and perfectly ripe. 1/3 of a cup was way too much, I should have gone with a couple of tablespoons. The extra sugar helps to pull juice out of the fruit, but it was a bit much. I really liked the sour cream tang in with the whipped cream, which acted as a nice counterpoint to all the sugar on the berries. It worked in the same way the sweet acidity of good balsamic goes with strawberries.

As I said the other day, the biscuits were a great base for this dish. The whipped creams were a winner, and you can’t go wrong with summer fresh strawberries. The Book tried to mess with the perfection of July berries, and ended up taking away from their natural goodness. Summer just wouldn’t be summer without strawberry shortcake, and this version was certainly good enough to fulfill my seasonal need.

Categories
Cakes The Book

78. Ginger Pound Cake p.704

no recipe for this one.

I served substantial pieces of this pound cake following our Beef Wellington supper. If that sounds like a ridiculously rich follow-up to one of the heavier items of the British cookbook, you’re absolutely right. I served both the cake and the Wellington to one of The Boys and his lady friend. The last time they had us over they tried to plumb the depths of the English butter first cooking philosophy. Their opening volley was rabbit braised in a butter sauce, and asparagus gently floating in a butter pond. When we had them over, what could we do but wrap meat in pastry, and try to get as much butter into a cake as is humanly possible? The next round of this escalating war on our arteries has been planned, and intercepted intelligence indicates he’s got a duck wrapped in bacon, possibly stuffed with a rabbit ready to deploy.

This is quite a large cake, it fills a 10 inch tube pan and ends up about 6 inches tall. You really need a crowd to get through it, because as much as you might want to you’ll only be able to eat a little. The traditional proportions for a pound cake are a pound of flour, a pound of butter, and a pound of sugar, hence the name. This recipe does indeed include a pound of butter, a bit more than a pound of cake flour (at 4.6 oz / sifted cup), and a pound and a half of sugar (at 8 oz / cup) add six eggs into the mix, and you’ve got an appropriate retort to the buttered rabbit. Those proportions should tell you what you need to know about this cake. It was decidedly buttery, and a bit too sweet. In this case the more than traditional sugar level had a very good reason. When they call this a ginger pound cake they’re not fooling around. The recipe starts with 6 oz of grated fresh ginger, and they give explicit instructions about preserving every precious drop of ginger juice. Just to punch it up a bit they call for one and a half teaspoons of dried powdered ginger as well. The main flavour of the cake is not at all subtle.

Actually making the cake was very easy. I used my stand mixer, while the recipe calls for a hand mixer. There was a lot of creaming of butter and sugar to do, so I’d say go with the stand mixer if you have one. The method was straightforward, sift the dry stuff together, then cream the butter and sugar, stir in the ginger, and add the flour mixture and milk in alternating batches. This cake is already pretty dense, so building gluten would be a very bad thing. The recipe calls for cake flour, which is less prone to gluten formation, but it’s quite important to mix the flour in slowly and as little as possible. The standard recipe phrase “mix until just combined” really means until it doesn’t quite look combined and there are still some little chunks of flour, but it no longer looks like a swirled lollipop. The batter goes into a buttered and floured tube ban, and baked at 300 for up to an hour and a half.

The final cake was rich and dense, but managed to have a really excellent crumb. I was quite surprised by how good the texture was. Many pound cakes end up having a uniform, tiny, dense packed crumb. In this version there was a lot more texture, it gave the appearance of a much lighter cake, but had the mouth filling feel of the rich beast it truly is. The ginger in it’s various forms came through loud an clear. The sweetness of the cake mellowed its spiciness, and recalled the heavenly balance of candied ginger (if anyone wants to get me a Christmas present, a box wouldn’t go amiss). I served it with raspberries and whipped cream. The berries were a nice contrast, but honestly enough is enough with the dairy. I prefer a fruit coulis with a pound cake, but I guess with everything going on in this cake it would have been overkill.

I was really happy with the way this cake turned out. The texture was excellent, and the flavour was just what I’d hoped for. This cake would be best served at a function, or a pot-luck. You’ll never get enough people around one table to eat it all.

Categories
Cakes The Book

69. Almond Cake with Kirsch Cream and Lingonberry Preserves p.710

The recipe

In the comments for yesterday’s cassoulet someone mentioned that many of the recipes I’ve posted are heart attacks waiting to happen. This cake is no exception. With 8 eggs, 2 sticks of butter, and a bunch of almond paste it is no where near anyones definition of a light finish to a meal. The cake is dense and very moist, topped with Kirsh flavoured whipped cream and lingonberry preserves.

The cake recipe is a very standard method, but with funny proportions. It’s only got one cup of flour to 7 ounces of almond paste, 1/2 lb of butter, 8 eggs and 1 1/2 cups of sugar. The almond paste is replacing some of the flour, but why does it need 8 eggs?

With all the super rich stuff that went into it, the result is a super rich cake. With so little flour to provide structure it didn’t rise very much. The texture was like a very moist brownie that had been allowed to rise a bit more than normal. The almond paste did a good job of permeating the cake with almond flavour, but it could have been boosted with almond extract, or an almond liqueur.

The Kirsh whipped cream topping was a good concept. Almond and cherries are one of the magical flavour combinations of our world, and I’m glad to see it celebrated. The Kirsh gave the cream an alcohol bite that helped cut some of the richness. The cream was a bit potent to eat comfortably though. There were bites where I misjudged the proportion of cream to cake and just found it to be sour and unpleasant.

The lingonberry preserves were a very nice touch. Apparently this is a Scandinavian cake, and nothing says northern Europe like lingonberries. The average megalomart doesn’t carry these preserves so you’ll have to go to a specialty shop, or Ikea. Those masters of flat-packed over designed furniture sell a broad array of Swedish delights, including three different types of lingonberry preserves (one with chipotle).

This cake keeps forever, I divided it and froze half for a few months. The remains in my fridge were good for at least a week. This is a good thing, because the cake is so rich an average sized family would need that week to get through it. The lingonberry preserves were the best part of the dish, the cream topping was a nice counterpoint, but it was a bit too boozy. The cake’s flavour was fine, and the super moist texture had it’s own appeal, but overall I can’t recommend it because of it’s unconscionable ingredient list. A simple yellow cake with almond flavouring would have served the same purpose, and helped everyone to avoid an insulin coma.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

66. Mocha Toffee Cashew Bars p.694

The recipe.

Opinion varied wildly about these bars. We brought these to dinner with another couple. The guy loved them, my dining companion hated them, and the other girl and I were of mixed opinions. They’re built on a fairly dense espresso flavoured cookie base, then topped with chocolate and salted roasted cashews.

I thought things were going well until the cashews. The cookie base was rich, full of espresso flavour, firm and a bit chewy. All on it’s own it would have made a very good cookie. Adding chocolate on top was a perfectly good idea, espresso and chocolate do wonders together. Adding cashews didn’t seem like a bad idea either, but this is where the problems came in.

The recipe called for a quite a lot of nuts, 3/4 of a cup, which may have been a bit excessive, 1/2 cup would have been fine. The nuts were supposed to be chopped. I thought I’d chop them with a few pulses in the food processor, which resulted in more of a cashew dust than anything else. The real issue with the cashew topping was the salt though. It’s possible that I just picked up particularly heavily salted cashews, but I don’t really think that was the case. Adding this much salt to a sweet bar made things very confusing for the palate. There was definately something wrong with the flavour, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Eventually my dining companion pointed out that they tasted like trail mix. Once she said it my imagination filled in the little bits of dried fruit, and my ability to imagine this as a refined after dinner square to be sipped with a macchiato disappeared. The final effect of these squares is like a coffee flavoured energy bar.

I had some of the leftover bars as afternoon snacks, and they worked much better in that context. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the flavours going on here, other than the excessive saltiness, they were just poorly marketed.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

65. Chocolate Truffles p.696

The recipe.

This recipe has three ingredients, chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder. Almost by definition the success of failure of the recipe is in the quality of those ingredients, and the method of combining them. I used the wrong ingredients, and ignored parts of the method. They still came out tasty, if a bit ugly. The recipe calls for 56% cacao Valrhona chocolate, I ignored this and used another good quality dark chocolate with about the same cocoa percentage. I couldn’t find the Valrhona and decided the recipe was just being snooty. I’m not sure if it would have made a difference, but you should definitely use a chocolate you like the taste of before it’s used in the ganache.

The recipe is dead simple, the cream is boiled, and then poured over the cut up chocolate, it’s then gently stirred (in concentric circles starting from the centre, while standing on one leg, under a full moon). The resultant ganache is then cooled and piped into truffle shapes. After the truffles are frozen they’re smeared with bit of melted chocolate and tossed in cacao powder before serving.

I ran into a bit of trouble in the piping section of the recipe. I didn’t have the right size tip and found I couldn’t pipe and elegant looking truffle with the desired soft point on top. Even cooling the ganache for the recommended time I needed to put in in the fridge for a while to get it to firm up enough for easy piping. As you can see in the picture above I didn’t get anything near the elegant teardrop shaped confections I was going for. Real truffles are ugly and misshapen, and so are mine. I’m not going to let myself feel too bad about it.

The coating with chocolate and tossing in cacao powder step was much messier than I would have predicted. I think it takes a lot more planning, and forethought than I gave it. You need to reserve one gloved hand for smearing the chocolate and dropping the truffles into the cocoa powder, and one hand for extracting them to a sheet pan on the other end. Mixing this method up results in the dreaded club hand. I’ll know better for next time.

Although this was a really simple recipe I have hardly any experience working with confections. I found it to be more complicated than it seemed at first. But, I’m sure a second attempt would go much more smoothly. Flavourwise, they were good. It’s chocolate and cream, it tastes like chocolate and cream. Fancy chocolatiers seem to be able to take those same ingredients and make absolute magic happen. For me, this recipe produced tasty little after dinner treats, but there was nothing transcendent about it.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

49. Lemon Bars p.691

No recipe for this one. But they were so good I can’t help but giving you the recipe and them a five mushroom rating.

FOR CRUST
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

FOR FILLING
3 large eggs
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt

Confectioners’ sugar for sprinkling

MAKE THE CRUST: Put a rack in middle of oven and preheat oven to 350F.
Pulse together four, sugar, and salt in a food processor just until combined. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Press dough onto bottom of an ungreased 9-inch square baking pan. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

MEANWHILE, MAKE THE FILLING: Whisk together eggs, granulated sugar, flour, heavy cream, zest, juice, and salt in a bowl until combined.

BAKE THE BARS: When crust is baked, rewhisk lemon mixture and pour onto hot crust. Bake until just set, about 16 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack to cool.

Refrigerate bars, covered, until cold, at least 4 hours. Before serving, cut into bars and sprinkle with a thick layer of confectioners’ sugar.

I’m sure we’ve all eaten a million lemon bars, some insipid, some inspired. We all know the bad ones with their mushy oily crusts, and super sweet lemon topping that’s either sloppy pudding, or a Fruit Roll-Up. Worse is the health-food version with a cardboard dry crust that crumbles if you look at it, and artificial sweeteners. My ideal lemon bar is built on really good shortbread, where good quality fresh butter is a must. The topping should be a sweet-tart just set lemon custard that’s thick enough to stay in place but avoid gumminess at all costs.

This bar lived up to that ideal quite nicely. All of the shortbread recipes in The Book seem to come out beautifully, and this one was no exception. The lemon topping balanced the tart acid of the lemons with just enough sugar, and added zip to the smooth egg and cream custard. Add a bit of powdered sugar and it was good to to.

In making this recipe I learned the value of measuring your baking dish. It calls for a 9 inch square, and I grabbed something significantly larger without thinking it though. I spread the shortbread out on one half of the pan and baked it. When it came time to pour the liquid custard on top of it I realized I had a problem. I attempted to rig up a shield wall out of aluminum foil to keep the filling on the shortbread, but my wall breached during baking. I ended up with a deep pool of filling on one side of the sheet pan, and much less filling on the shortbread than I would have liked. It was still totally delicious with half the filling, and I can only imagine that it would have been better had I not messed up.

Lemon bars, you’re the second recipe in a row to earn your five mushroom rating. Kudos.

Categories
Cakes The Book

41. Orange-Poppy Seed Cake p.706

Sorry, no recipe.

I made this cake for a friend’s birthday party. The best way I can describe it is as a brunchy coffee-cake dressed up for dinner. During the day it works down at the espresso shack as that cute poppy seed loaf in the counter. It’s moist and rich with sour cream, and has a very pleasant fluffy but yielding texture. The cake has 2 tsp of orange zest mixed in, which are understated during the day, but they’ll sparkle at night.

After work the cake turns it up for an evening on the town. Most of the citrus flavour comes from the Grand-Marnier orange juice syrup it slips on. Paired with a flirty dollop of creme-fraiche, and a burst of berries to make the outfit pop it’s ready to go anywhere you’d care to take it.

This cake was simple to put together, it did require making a meringue, and some folding to keep the airy texture I was looking for, but it’s basically a breeze. Once the cake is baked little holes are poked all over and it’s bathed in the Grand Marnier syrup.

Grand Marnier is my favorite digestif, so I’m always happy to have it show up in desserts. The zip of the creme fraice was nice, but it was a touch heavy and coating. Serving this a la mode, or with whipped cream might have worked, or better yet with nothing at all. I had intended to top it with berries, but when I made it good looking berries were not to be found. No great loss as this cake stands up all on it’s own.

Categories
Cakes The Book

40. Warm Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake p.740


the recipe

I can’t say that I pulled this off with the grace or style of Julia Child, I hope that I honored her commitment to salvaging disasters with this dish. The concept here is basically an upside down cake. The bottom of the pan has a chocolate pudding layer, and then a cake batter goes in on top. The Book says that “When the cake is inverted on the a cake plate a few minutes after it emerges from the oven, it is instantly bathed with a rich, creamy, oozy frosting.”

My version did involve some oozing, but that was mostly cake batter spilling over the sides of my pan and onto the bottom of my oven, where it provided that smoky barbecue flavour that is so valued in fine pastry making. I think what ended up on the bottom of the oven was mostly the “pudding” part, and what was left mixed in with the top layer of cake. It came out as normal cake topped by extra moist yet somehow burnt cake. As the picture indicates it didn’t come out of the pan without a fight either. But, I forged ahead, topped it with some powdered sugar and hoped for the best.

I can explain the bit of burning and setting of the pudding that occurred, because I baked this before I got an oven thermometer. I now know that the oven is always 25 degrees hotter than I think it is. However, the spillover is inexplicable. I used the right size pan, and it spilled over within the first 5 minutes of baking. I’d go with a 10 inch plate if I were to make it again.

The recipe calls for seedless raspberry jam. I couldn’t find any anywhere, so I was reduced to running a jar of seeded jam through a fine mesh sieve. This was far more annoying than I ever would have expected.

I was pleasantly surprised when my guests and I set into it. The cake had a nice super-moist texture, and there was great chocolate-raspberry flavour. Unfortunately, like almost all deserts in the book, it was cloyingly sweet. My guests and my dining companion had nothing but good things to say about it, and when we talked about this cake yesterday she only remembered how delicious it was. I thought the book was just into sweet sweets, but it turns out other people are too.

Personally I wasn’t a huge fan of the cake, it didn’t work out anywhere near how I’d expected it to, and it left me with a lot of oven cleanup to do. However, it delighted my guests, and after all entertaining is about pleasing them and not yourself. I’ll have to give this a higher rating than I think it deserves out of deference to the palates of my friends.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

35. Cranberry Caramel Bars p.691


the recipe

I really enjoyed these bars. I brought half of them to a party, and they disappeared instantly. I enjoyed more of them over the next week, and brought out even more from the freezer a couple months later. All that to say, the recipe make a lot of bars, and they keep and freeze well. They’re filled with pecans coated in a buttery-tart cranberry caramel. This filling goes down onto a shortbread base, and the whole thing is drizzled with melted chocolate. They weren’t light, they weren’t particularly easy to put together, they weren’t cheap, but they were absolutely worth it.

Any bar that starts with a shortbread base is off to a good start in my book. It’s so simple, and invariably fantastic. The cranberry caramel tasted great. The butter and sugar were cut by the tart cranberries, which kept it from tasting too rich. The caramel allowed me to play with my candy thermometer, and convinced me I really need a better one. Because the butter goes into the caramel from the beginning it’s got to be monitored carefully. It needs to get hot enough for the sugar to caramelize, but not so hot that the milk-solids in the butter burn. Once the cranberries and pecans have been added and the mixture has been allowed to return to 245 degrees it has to be spread out on the shortbread base very quickly. The caramel is dense, sticky, stringy, and ferociously hot. An errant bit of pecan slipped off my silicone spatula and landed on my wrist. The candy Gods reminded me not to be too casual with a nice little burn.

After the bars have cooled you can add the chocolate. The book recommends snipping the end off a Ziplock bag, but there’s no reason you can’t use a pastry bag if you have one. I wish I’d been a bit more careful in decorating them, my random crosshatch wasn’t the most attractive, nothing wrong with it, but I could have made them prettier. The chocolate was nice, but certainly not necessary. They might have been better looking without it, and while the flavour didn’t detract at all I’m not sure it added much. Between cranberries, pecans, and shortbread there was a lot going on flavour-wise, and chocolate didn’t particularly elevate, or marry these flavours. I know the “add chocolate to make it better” school is strong, but in this case adding chocolate made them chocolatier, not necessarily better.

These squares would be a welcome addition to any Christmas baking repertoire, and work well for pretty much any occasion the rest of the year too. Because they keep so well, they’re ideal do-aheads. I thought the flavour and texture were great, really crunchy between the shortbread and nuts, with a gooey chewiness from the caramel. The caramel also acted as a glue, and counteracted some of the crumbling problems that shortbread is prone to. With or without chocolate these are delicious, reliable, and impressive squares. They probably merit a 5 mushroom rating, but they lost half a mushroom for attacking me.