Not as Simple as Apple Pie

With the holidays happening, and parties to attend, I was compelled to try something I'd been wanting to attempt for a while... Bouchon Bakery's Palet D'Or, the invention of Thomas Keller and his pastry chef, Sebastien Rouxel.  I've got that cookbook, after all, thanks to Eric, and I've sort of been working my way through it, though I've made pitstops to go back to awesome recipes I've already done.  (I've done the better nutters twice, the chocolate, praline, and cocoa nib tart four times, and the caramel nut tart and chocolate chunk and chip cookies more times than I can remember).

To be honest, they're all awesome.  Every single one has been a hit.  The only miss was really last summer when I redid the apricot flan tart as a peach flan tart and it wasn't absolutely stellar (with apricots, it was amazing as usual).  I think the peaches were too wet compared to apricots, and it made the flan a little weird.  In order for Eric to try it, though, I had to alter it - he's allergic to apricots, poor guy.

Anyway, back to the Palet D'Or.  Literally:  gold disc.

In real life?  A rich two-layer devil's food cake with thin layers of melted (and re-hardened) semisweet chocolate, rich chocolate cream and rich chocolate ganache glaze.  Lots of chocolate.  Lots of heavy cream.  Lots of egg.  A little sugar.

And gold leaf.

Holy crow.

I actually ordered gold leaf from a supplier in Syracuse, and I'm glad I did.  While it's obviously not necessary for anything but presentation, it just really completes the look and makes it a showpiece.

So, this is what is pictured in the cookbook.

And I think I did a damned fine job, especially for my first try.

I only had a round platter in white, which I wanted for contrast, so to avoid the whole thing looking like a weird eyeball, Eric suggested the plating idea.  It was such a hit at the party!  More of a hit, though?

How it tasted.  Look at this.

Not the prettiest picture with all the remnants strewn about, but gorgeous to anyone who tasted it.  It was amazing.  No other word for it.  So amazing that Eric, who's generally not a fan of chocolate cake nearly lost his eyes when they bugged out of his head while trying it.  So amazing that our friends, the party hosts, removed the piece that was left to keep fro themselves and give me back the platter when I was leaving.

Nothing like people appreciating your food when you bake.  Nothing at all like it.

The End of Pumpkin Season

I love pumpkin, and I love people who love pumpkin.  This year, I had the opportunity to try a bunch of pumpkin desserts, and I was in heaven.

First, for book club, I tried this chocolate pumpkin pie (except I make my own pie crust).

Then, for film club, I tried this pumpkin spice cheesecake.

Then, for the office, I made these pumpkin cupcakes with whipped cinnamon icing.  Turns out my office loves pumpkin as much as I do!  They were devoured by lunchtime.

So for Thanksgiving, I decided to do the pumpkin spice cheesecake again, this time to bring into the office the day before the holiday (Wednesday).

Fortuitously, on Tuesday before I baked the cheesecake, I heard to of the women in my office talking about ordering pie for the birthday of one of the attorneys... which was the next day.  So I told them about the cheesecake I had planned, and instead of ordering something, I made fresh, homemade whipped cream and accosted my cheesecake with my less-than-stellar but well-meaning handwriting.

Yes, my piping skills need work.  But that ended up irrelevant.

It snowed on Wednesday, and so when I left my car to go into the office, I was wearing my down jacket, which makes my naturally graceless self even more so, plus carrying my pocketbook, my lunch, the container of whipped cream, the cheesecake in a carrier, and my snow brush for the car.

Too much.

The cake carrier went off balance, slid, and hit the ground upside-down.  My good plate broke in half.  The cheesecake landed, thankfully still inside the top lid of the carrier, upside-down.

Still edible, but no more handwriting.  I was glad I'd gotten photos, so I could show everyone, especially Jonathan.   It made him smile, and everyone loved the cheesecake & whipped cream anyway.  It got devoured like the cupcakes, the best compliment a baker can get.

And that was it for my pumpkin adventures this season.  Today, Thanksgiving, marked the start of the next thing.  Apples.

Three pounds of granny smiths, to be exact.

And the result?  Yum.

 

My first ever time doing a solo stint replicating my mother's award-winning French apple pie.  Nailed it!

Fun with Fabric

I didn't make much this year for my nephew's birthday or the holidays.  I mostly bought my way through, since I had so much going on with the show and those 21 crazy apples.  I did make one notable thing, though, for my nephew's birthday.

See, my 4-year-old nephew loves to cook.  It started with his play kitchen, and then he took a cooking class.  He loves it!  For Chanukah, in addition to a science kit because he also loves science, Eric and I actually got him two children's cookbooks.  These:

He loves them!  He's already made runaway pancakes and chocolate mousse, both from Fairy Tale Feasts.

So for his birthday, we kept with the theme.  In addition to getting him this set of 100 cookie cutters from Bed, Bath & Beyond, I made him this adorable apron.

The fabric is vintage (but brand new), from a New York fabric shop that no longer exists.  It belonged to my friend's grandmother decades ago, and my friend was generous enough to give me a ton of great vintage fabric from her mother's remaining stash.  This was part of that stash, and I think it's awesome.  I already had the denim for the pocket in my own collection, and only had to procure the bias tape.

I've used more of the fabric from my friend too.  A lot of what she gave me is decor fabric, and as it turns out, we needed some.  Our house was built in 1954 and is pretty drafty, especially by the front door and the door to the attic.  So Eric suggested door draft stoppers.  Well, why not?  I had this terrific funky fabric that looks to be circa 1960s or 1970s, and polyester fiberfill, and just needed the gravel to weigh it down!  So off we went to purchase gravel (and pick up a money tree, rubber tree, and flower pot while there - we're such impulse shoppers!) and some more fiberfill, and I got to work.

While making these door draft stoppers for our own house, I decided to make extras... and list them!  If you need any yourself, since they're a great way to save on energy costs, you can find them right here in Fabric of my Mind.

Even More Baking: Cupcakes!

At Halloween, I saw an idea for mummy cupcakes, so I decided to try a new (to me) dark chocolate cupcake recipe.

I found one at the Brown Eyed Baker blog here.  For these, I used only her cupcake recipe and the Bouchon Bakery recipe for basic buttercream, my favorite buttercream of all time.  Unfortunately, I realized after making the cupcakes and butterream that although I did have Wilton eyeballs on hand (who doesn't?), I didn't have the right sort of tip to create the strips of bandage.  I tried winging it with a round tip and squishing down, but it wasn't quite as precise as I'd have liked.  I've since bought a flat tip for next year, because the cupcakes were definitely good.  And they were cute, they'll just be cuter when done right.

Meanwhile, back in September I was cast in the early December production of Snew White, obviously a takeoff on Snow White, at the Studioplayhouse in Montclair.  I played Evelyn Crabtree, assistant to the Evil Queen.  I figured, what with working with the Evil Queen and all, that it'd be fitting for me to go with a poison apple theme.  So I decided almost immediately that I'd do apple cake pops.  I have Bakerella's book and had done pops just once before, for a Mardi Gras party years ago.  To stay with the theme, I set out to find a good apple cake recipe to use for these pops.

This apple cupcake with brown sugar buttercream (I've determined that I really prefer buttercream that uses zero confectioner's sugar) recipe I found looked just about right, but I needed to test them for both taste and texture.  I made them first as cupcakes for a book club meeting, and they were a complete hit.  Somewhat more like dense muffins than cupcakes, they were really tasty and actually about as healthy as cupcakes are going to get, what with the 4 cups of apples in them!

Test successful.

All that remained was to make them into cake pops for my cast party on December 15.  Yeah, right.  I hit my first stumbling block in searching for the jumbo green diamond sprinkles that Bakerella suggests for a "leaf" on each apple.  Would you believe Wilton discontinued those?  Why on earth, with someone as popular as Bakerella pushing their use in her books and on her blog, why on earth, I ask you, would Wilton discontinue them?!  And I couldn't find anything truly comparable.  Finally, I found Wilton's sugar gems and spent quite a bit of time sorting through them to find the most leaf-like ones.

I was even good about it.  I made the cupcakes that Friday evening and the buttercream Saturday morning.  Saturday after our afternoon performances, I went home, crumbled the cupcakes, mashed in the buttercream, and formed 40-something little cake apples on parchment paper.  Into the fridge they went for the requisite time period, while I got my sticks, "leaves," and pretzel "stems" ready and dug out my candy melts.

Candy melts.  Ha.  A misnomer if I ever heard one.  I had (note:  had) a good number of red candy melts.  Tried to melt them.  Failed.  Decided my apples would be pale green.  Tried my green & white candy melts.  Better luck, but not by much.  I ended up with a candy melt paste that I had to spackle on to each "apple," which therefore no longer actually looked like apples, after I spent all that time shaping them into cute little apple shapes.  Ugh.  Sticks, candy melt spackle, pretzel stick stems, and after an even 40 I gave up.  I was exhausted, disheartened, and annoyed.  Why can Bakerella get her melts to hit a nice liquid and mine were a mess?  It's not like I've never melted chocolate before.  I make chocolate candies, for pete's sake.  I even tried adding a little vegetable oil based on a tip I found online, and it did very little.  Plus, I think that's kind of gross.

If any of you have any ideas, let me know, because I'm about ready to never make a cake pop again as long as I live.  If I ever do succumb and make another pop, I'm only using good chocolate to coat them, and the heck with cutesy shapes and colors.  I just can't do it.  Notice I'm not providing a photo of my pops.  There aren't any.  No way, no how.

Meanwhile, my fellow cast members & the show's crew loved them.  Of course.  Thought they were adorable and delicious.  Delicious, I agree.  Adorable?  Go figure.  One fellow actor actually said that I have a great "go to" when I get invited anywhere.  Hahahahahahaha!  Obviously, they looked easy and low-labor.

But I promised cupcakes in this post, so enough about my semi-failed/semi-successful cake pops, and on to more cupcakes!

My office holiday party.

I made that Bouchon Bakery tart.  But it just so happens that there is one single, solitary woman in the office who's allergic to hazelnuts.  Of course.  The one nut in the tart is her one allergy.  Sigh.  So I had to make something else as well.  I went back to the Brown Eyed Baker's dark chocolate cupcakes, but this time I topped them with Bouchon Bakery's peanut butter buttercream, the recipe for the filling in Sebastien Rouxel's Better Nutters.  Wow.  Rich and... well, rich... and wow.  Again, a hit.

I may complain and I may wear myself out, but I really do love baking.  I promise.

As Promised, Plum Kuchen

With recipe!

When I first mentioned making plum kuchen as an additional dessert for Eric's birthday, I got some quizzical looks.  Kuchen is a German word, after all, and not everyone knows what it is.  When I went online to try and show people, though, I discovered for the very first time that what I know as plum kuchen is not necessarily what others know as plum kuchen.  There were so many photos of cakes that looked nothing like my mom's version, and just as many different recipes to go with them!  I had no idea it wasn't a thing, but a variety of things.

My mom's version, the one I make, isn't actually a cake.  It's more of a plum pie or tart, in a delicious buttery crust.  And it requires Italian prune plums, which are only in season for about a half a minute in September.  For the last several years, I'd actually thought of it immediately after they were out of the supermarkets, and missed the season entirely.  This year, I thought of it early and made sure I kept an eye out... and when we were shopping for ingredients for the Bouchon Bakery tart, there they were!  My prune plums!

I snapped them up, stashed them in the fridge, and waited for Eric's birthday to roll around so I could share one of my very favorite desserts with our friends.

The Crust

For the crust, you need:

1 cup flour
1 tbsp sugar
1/3 cup butter
1 egg yolk
2 tbsp water
1.5 tbsp lemon juice

Mix all ingredients and press into pie plate.  Chill.

My one mistake here was not bringing the crust quite high enough in the pie plate.  You want it all the way up the edge.

The Filling

For the filling you need:

2 lbs of prune plums (about 24)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp flour

Mix the flour and sugar together, and spread half in the bottom of the crust.  Cut plums in half and circle tightly in the pie, alternating the direction of each concentric circle.

Pour the remaining sugar/flour mixture evenly over the plums.

Bake 50 minutes at 400 degrees.  And you get...

Utter deliciousness!  (and if you make the crust as high as you should, the juice won't pool around the edges like that)

I've Been Baking

Boy, have I!  I need to backtrack to September at this point, because of how much I haven't told you.

September was Eric's birthday, so of course I baked for that party.  And he had a request.  An intimidating, fairly arduous request.  He wanted a Praline and Cocoa Nib Tart from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook he got me for our anniversary last March.  If you don't know, the Bouchon Bakery is owned by Thomas Keller and run by executive pastry chef Sebastien Rouxel.  These are some big shoes to fill.  Huge.

That one little 8" tart required five different recipes to make.  And with French pastries, apparently, everything is a process.  Freezing for hours in between steps.  Baking, turning, baking some more.  And with Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel specifically, some interesting ingredients!

I'm a baker.  I've been a baker since I was a kid.  I come from a line of bakers, my mom won first prize for her French apple pie and her mother actually baked for schools.  Her sister, my aunt, baked for diners.  So I know my way around a canister of flour.  But trimoline?  (Invert sugar)  Glucose?  (Another form of sugar that's honestly a royal pain to work with; it's a stiff goo)  Cocoa butter?  (Good thing we make soap and our cocoa butter is food grade, since this is not easy to find at the supermarket!)  Hazelnut-almond praline paste.  (Huh?)  64% dark chocolate.  (Specifically 64%.  Did you know you can't find that in the supermarket?  Not even Fairway.  They've got 62%.  and 70%.  No 64%.  Damnit.)  And Feuilletine.  (WTH?)

Yeah.  Well, it's a good thing Eric's into molecular gastronomy because he got a good chuckle as I placed my first order with one of "his" websites to get this stuff.  At least I could find European butter, 40% milk chocolate, blanched hazelnuts, cocoa nibs, unsweetened cocoa powder, almond flour, and everything else I needed at one or the other of the two supermarkets I tried.

But Feuilletine?  Ha.  I tried Fairway, which has a stellar baking section, and is where I found the vanilla paste (as opposed to extract) for my foray into making Sebastien Rouxel's Better Nutters over the summer.  I tried calling a local restaurant supply store.  I tried local French bakeries to see if I could either buy it from them or get hooked up with their supplier.

Nothing.

Finally, I found a recipe for it online.  It's a pain to make, but holy crow, is it good.  It's kind of like crumbled up chocolate sugar cone, but better.  It just takes forever to spread really, really thin and bake just a couple pans at a time, since the recipe makes a ton.  On the bright side, the recipe makes a ton, and the tart recipe only calls for 60 grams of it, so I saved the rest in a cereal tupperware wa silica packet to keep it dry and crunchy.  For the record, feuilletine is also excellent on ice cream.

So that was recipe #1.

Then came the tart crust, called pate sucre.  It's amazing, and tastes a lot like shortbread.  Really, really great shortbread.  Recipe #2.

The base of the tart is a praline, and that's where the feuilletine comes in; it's an ingredient in the praline.  Yes, I spent hours making an ingredient.  Recipe #3.

And then the chocolate ganache.  That's where we get to the glucose, trimoline, and 64% dark chocolate.  Wow.  Recipe #4.

Then, the dentelle.  Crushed toasted blanched hazelnuts, cocoa nibs, and other goodness that turns into a crunchy crust.  Finally, Recipe #5.

The best way to make this tart, I've determined, is over the course of several days, in parts.  The dough needs to be frozen before and after being rolled out.  The praline needs to be frozen too.  So, yeah.  Days is best, unless you're getting up at 6 a.m. to start and serving it late at night.

So worth it.  So.  Freakin'.  Worth it.

I've done it twice since.  The pate sucre recipe is enough for two tarts and can be frozen for a month, so I used the other half of this first batch on a second tart for our Halloween party.

And then I made another batch, and brought the third tart to my office holiday party last Friday.  I don't think I need to explain what a hit it was.

The one thing that gets me is that when I roll out the pate sucre nice and smooth and lay it nicely on the cookie sheet in the tart ring, I roll over it, and get a beautiful, flat, even edge for my tart.  But then I've got to blind bake it before putting in the praline and ganache, so I follow Rouxel's instruction to use parchment paper filled with rice so it holds its shape.  The only problem with that is that parchment paper is crinkly and the dough is soft.  The paper mars the dough and ruins my nice, even edge!

Oh, geez.  As I was typing this, about to ask for input, I realized I should freeze the dough before doing that.  Frozen dough won't be marred by the parchment paper when it goes in the oven!  Don't mind me, I'm running a little behind in the brain cell department these days.  I plan to do the 4th tart for my book club meeting in January if I can get more hazelnut-almond praline paste and cocoa nibs, both of which I've used up.  I'll definitely let you know how it goes.

And my next post?  Plum Kuchen!

Christmas and New Year's at Our House

The food!  I haven't told you about the food.  Eric was in charge of Christmas dinner.  So...

Gotta have eggnog!  Man, I love eggnog.

Ravioli filled with black truffle & manchego, garnished with black truffle oil & herbs de Provence.  So good!

Lamb chops coated with foie gras and encrusted with crushed almond.

And for dessert, figs with grated manchego & powdered bacon.  I nearly exploded.

Then just a week later, New Year's Eve!  We hosted this year, a smallish party but a fun one.  In addition to stuffed mushrooms, mini hot dogs, and wings, Eric had fun with his dehydrator and made a dried fruit salad.  It had granny smiths, red delicious, pears, mango, kiwi, and banana.

And I did a parmesan pasta salad.

I also baked amaretto brownies and four different kinds of cookies - langues de chat, whiskey macks, gingerbread animals, and brandy snaps.

Want any of the dessert recipes?  Lemme know.  I wouldn't be able to promise recipes from Christmas, because Eric doesn't write anything down.

Our Weekend with Irene

Here in NJ, not too many miles from the Hudson River, we've just survived Hurricane Irene.  In fairness, this wasn't nearly as bad as hurricanes can be, and we didn't get it nearly as bad as they did down south or worse, the Caribbean.  Honestly, I think we slept through a good portion of it.  But not knowing what it was going to be like or how hard we'd be hit, we had to plan our weekend around it.

So I'll tell you what we did.  After moving all of the potted plants off the deck to the dining room table, lashing the garbage cans and grill to the deck, and moving everything else into the garage, we took a run to the supermarket for some non-perishables, stocked up on peanut butter and tuna fish.

At home, we did a ton of laundry as prep for a potential power outtage.  Then I made one of my misfits from the other sewing book Eric got me for my birthday, Hamish the Bat.

He's even cuter in person!  The wings are made of black felt I got to do my felties, like the classic zombie and zombie kitty I recently posted.  The body is an old orange and black mottled t-shirt of mine, perfect coloring for Halloween!  The eyes are buttons that I got last year from my nephew as a birthday gift.  And the mouth is just embroidery thread.

I couldn't stop with one and made Mad Hungry the wolf too.  His head is the same fleece I used for the elephant and the mouse, and his body was part of a black t-shirt.  Eyes, same batch of buttons as the bat.

Meanwhile, Eric baked us some loaves of bread to use with our peanut butter and jelly.

On Sunday morning, I forced Meg to go out for a walk, since she'd had her legs crossed ever since it'd started to rain the day before.  She hates rain.  Hates.  She thinks I'm torturing her when I make her go in the rain.  But such is life.

For brunch on Sunday, he used it to make us French toast.  I took the opportunity to rearrange my jewelry box too.  And when it cleared up on Sunday afternoon, we went for a walk.

Total damage:

Soggy, annoyed dog.

Deck plants in the dining room.

Twigs all over the deck.

One branch that nearly took out the garden.  But didn't.

And some casualties of the fruit-like persuasion.

Sunday night, True Blood.  In the end, not so bad!

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