Bakin-n-Bacon

Sharing chocolate with friends - what could be better?

A couple of weekends ago, I was invited to a dinner at an online cooking friend's home. Several of us dedicated Cook's Illustrated Bulletin Board participants gathered in the home of 2cool4MN's lovely home for a terrific evening repast.

Naturally, I made dessert, and of course for this group I chose Cook's Illustrated's Sour Cream Chocolate Bundt Cake (membership required to access the recipe - if you would like it, send me an email). 

This cake is very rich and chocolately, but that's a good thing! I used the Nordic Ware Bavaria Bundt pan, which is a little smaller than a traditional Bundt shape. This meant that gosh darnit, I had to make a small extra cake so I wouldn't overfill the pan. That turned into a few midnight snacks over the sink - one of my worst habits. If I have leftover cake or cookies, I will always arise like a vampire in the dark of night and eat them. That's one reason I try to bring leftovers to work so I won't be tempted when my willpower is nearly nonexistent.

Back to the dinner - it was fantastic, as one might expect from a group of food enthusiasts (I just can't bring myself to use the word "foodie"). Check out these great ribs:

here were also great side dishes to accompany these. Luckily I remembered to wear elastic waist pants.

Thanks to 2Cool for hosting this event, and thanks to everyone who showed up for a fantastic evening!

Health Care Reform

Okay, this post doesn't deal directly with baking or bacon, but since I do speak about making food yourself instead of relying on processed, packaged shlock, I feel I should weigh in on this important, pressing national debate. I have long felt that a huge problem with the unhealthy health care system is the fact that there seems to be no incentive for anyone to improve their health on a personal level (other than that it feels better to be healthy). Or maybe I should state it this way: there is no deterrent for living an unhealthy lifestyle. Eat too much, don't exercise, ignore the little problems until they become big ones, whatever - there's a pill or surgery or other procedure that can fix it, right? Let's have some more Twinkies, wash them down with a mega-gulp-sized Coke, and watch some more TV.

I'm certainly not saying that those things shouldn't be available to people, or that I never indulge in any junk food, or that I don't veg out in front of the TV (Top Chef is on tonight!). But I do try to balance it with healthy eating for the most part, exercising nominally, and getting regular checkups. But my while my reward for this is tangible in that I'm pretty healthy, I'm also paying for all those who aren't doing anything for their health by ever-increasing insurance premiums and so forth. And nothing in the proposals that I have read discusses this problem.

However, Michael Pollan to the rescue! He wrote about this very issue albeit from a different perspective (I realize my perspective is an ego-centric "how does this affect ME?" not "I feel badly for people who aren't healthy"). Here is a link to the NY Times Op-Ed piece: Big Food vs. Big Insurance.

What do you think? 

A Berry Nice Tart

I could have done a much better job in assembling these tarts to make them purdy, but let's face it - when you come home at 6:00 p.m., make lasagna, a salad and salad dressing from scratch, you get to a point where good enough is good enough. That's the point I was at last night as I assembled the tarts before sitting down to dinner. I really wanted to lay perfectly overlapping kiwi pieces that nestled just so around the edge of each tart, with the berries lined up in concentric circles inside the perimeter, but a) I didn't have enough kiwi, and b) I was hungry! So this is how they looked.

The berries were from my friend's raspberry bushes and were picked the day before, so it would difficult to get fresher fruit. Of course the kiwi is not from a local garden, but it was perfectly ripe. The pastry cream and tart shells were made the evening before, and I'm lucky I didn't burn the shells to a crisp because I got distracted watching Mad Men and forgot all about them until a commercial break. I really need a timer to hang around my neck, preferably one that slaps me when I ignore it.

Anyway, these tarts were yummy, even if they weren't the epitome of perfection.

One more thing - does anyone have a secret on how to expertly dab on jam to make them glisten? I heated some black raspberry jam, strained out the seeds and even thinned it with a little water, but I still ended up with this:

It really didn't improve the looks of the tarts at all, although it did add to the taste quite nicely. I tried to do the flicking/daubing technique that Cook's Illustrated discusses, but it still looks like a berry monster sneezed on the tarts.

The pastry cream recipe is from Cooks Illustrated (Sept./Oct. 2001 I believe), and it results in a great consistency for spreading in a tart shell. It's firm enough to hold its shape, but not at all rubbery. The tart shell is of course the great one by Flo Braker in Sweet Miniatures (linked at left I believe), and is an excellent cookie-like shell that is neither too soft or too hard (why is Goldilocks coming into my head?).

In his book Ratio, Michael Ruhlman suggests that for a firm pastry cream you should use 8 yolks to 2 cups of milk/cream. I think that would be too eggy for me, so I stuck with the 5 yolks to two cups of liquid ratio espoused by C.I., along with the 4 tablespoons of butter stirred in at the end. That's what really gives the pastry cream its silky texture. But then again, what isn't improved with copious amounts of butter?

One thing I do differently than C.I. is that I prefer to strain my pastry cream through a fine mesh strainer after cooking. Cook's instructs you to remove the chalazae (the spiral strands that connect the yolk and white) from the egg yolks before making the pastry cream, so you don't have to strain it. Well, the chalazae are only part of the potential curdling/texture problems in a pastry cream, so I skip this step and just strain the damn stuff. Really, it's more work and messier to remove the chalazae than it is to just pour the finished pastry cream through the strainer. Plus, any other stray curdled bits/undissolved cornstarch lumps will be caught if you strain, so that's what I do.

No matter how thoroughly I whisk the cornstarch thoroughly into they yolks, carefully temper the yolks and religiously stir the pastry cream, inevitably I end up with tiny bits of curdled yolk or cornstarch bits that could impart an unpleasant texture in the pastry cream. After straining, the cream is always silky smooth, so I'll stick with this old-fashioned, extra step.

Baking Season is Nigh Upon Us

With the hint of fall in the air, my thoughts are turning more frequently to baking. A friend's recent birthday offered the perfect excuse to pull out the stops for a decadant dessert.

This is a basic chocolate tart with a few embellishments. While I like to ooh and ahh over really fancy cakes and pastries (I still frequently drool over the photographs from Saveur magazine of the Demel bakery in Vienna), sometimes the simplest tarts can be stunning as well. And they are far easier to accomplish, especially when you have other pesky commitments like jobs, spouses, housework and pets.

This tart has a basic chocolate tart crust (I think I used Alice Medrich's recipe from Cocolat), and a simple ganache made with equal parts (by weight) of fresh cream and good quality 59% bittersweet chocolate from a local gourmet food store. I hadn't heard of the brand before (Cordillera), but it is one of the best chocolates I have eaten in a long time. It has a lot of fruity, maybe even floral, undertones. To gild the lily I threw in a couple of tablespoons of good bourbon (Woodford Reserve).

One nice thing about our move is that I can now easily find non-ultra-pasteurized cream, formerly known simply as cream.

May I digress but for a moment? I fondly remember the local creamery in my teeny, tiny hometown in rural North Dakota. It was just a couple of blocks from my parent's house, and whenever we needed cream we would grab the Tupperware pitcher and walk to the creamery. There, a creamery worker would take a ladle with the longest handle I had ever seen, dip it into a gigantic vat (hundreds of gallons) of fresh cream (fresh as in in the cow that morning), and fill our container with this thick, ivory nectar of the gods. I know that sometimes we see the world through rose colored glasses, but I know that the cream we purchased from that now-defunct creamery was thicker, richer and better-tasting than the cream now sitting in grocery store coolers, full of carrageenan and guar gum. Ah, the good ol' days. Maybe not everything was better back then (the fashions of the 70s were horrendous, for one thing), but that cream sure was.

Anyhoo, the regular, just plain pasteurized cream whips up much better than the ultra-pasteurized version, although the taste difference is not as pronounced as I hoped it would be.  I've found that it lasts a few days beyond the sell-by date, which is good since I don't always use it immediately.

The raspberries came from the local farmer's market, and were perfectly, delicately fresh.

OK, now it is confession time. I was going to just put the cocoa border around the edge and leave the beautiful, nearly flawless shiny center of the tart alone. I had gone to extra lengths to ensure a perfectly smooth top, being very gentle in stirring the cream and chocolate to not incorporate too much air, and painstakingly pricking the few bubbles that emerged after pouring by using a very thin cake tester to pop each tiny little flaw. I carefully leveled the tart in the fridge, sticking a skewer under the low side. However, all that work went down the tubes when I left the cake stencil on just a tad too long and it stuck to the middle of the tart. Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh! (Yeah, I sound like a pirate when I bake.) Surprisingly, I didn't swear much, though. I immediately went to Plan B, stuck a star tip on a pastry bag, filled it with the whipped cream I was going to serve the tart with anyway, and piped a quick border in the center. I added the raspberries and no one was the wiser. At least not until now.

The border, by the way, is from a Martha Stewart Spring cake stencil set. This particular border is supposed to look like grass, and of course you would use green sugar for it. The illustration shows little candy easter eggs in the center of the cake using this border. However, I thought it had a contemporary abstract vibe to it, so I used it for this tart. The other borders in the set, however, are pretty unambiguous like eggs and butterflies. This was a guy's birthday dessert and butterflies just didn't seem suitable. He really liked the tart (and so did I).