Category Archives: Bibliophilic

Polling…

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Eight or nine months ago, two good friends of ours (mine, N.’s, our department’s) got married.  Because they were in Canada at the time on a Fulbright scholarship, no one here in Oregon who adores them were able to share their celebration in person.

But they are back now, and I have conspired to throw them a belated reception in my backyard in a few weeks.  We will be grilling, but I know there will be plenty of chopping, roasting, sauteing, and baking as well.  I have plans, but I’d love to hear some input:  if you were going to an upscale backyard BBQ, bringing your own grillables and perhaps a bottle of wine, what would you be bringing?  What kinds of side dishes would you hope to eat?  What items should not be missed when we assemble our menu?

In which I attempt an Extravagant Apology

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With all resolutions already broken (is lasting until April/May admirable or shameful?) and all high-flying expectations for weekly updates dashed (how does Pioneer Woman do it?), all I can do is shamefully offer you a guilt, chocolate, and liqueur laced update.

More than twenty years ago, my mom acquired this cookbook.   Simple, humble, kid-friendly instructions (“stir real hard”), bright pictures of anthropomorphized food, and one recipe for each letter of the alphabet.  This was a cookbook intended to get kids into the kitchen with their parents.  This was a cookbook intended to make kids interested in cooking.  We tried out a few of the recipes, and my dad even became an expert in P: Pocket Pizzas, but then we got stuck on the X page and never looked back.

X is for eXtra Special Chocolate Celebration Cake.

This cake is good.  I mean, this cake is GOOOOOD.  Since finding it, with very few exceptions, this has been the cake my family makes for every birthday, every celebration, every party.  I’ve made it for Academy Awards parties, I’ve made it for my husband, my mom and I made it for my Rehearsal Dinner, and most recently I made a gluten-free, Ph-Ph version.  But then our friend S. invited us over for dinner, and through luck of the draw we were assigned to bring dessert.  I asked N. what I should bring, and he said “chocolate cake.”  I said, “well, the dinner is sort of Italian themed.”  N. said “chocolate cake.”  I told him that wasn’t really Italian, and he said “that’s their fault, isn’t it?!”  This was not a question, it was a proclamation.  I resigned myself to making chocolate cake.  It’s not that I don’t like it (in fact I love it; see list of occasions above!), it’s just that I’ve made it so many times, and it’s so easy, and it always comes out perfect, and I guess I was looking for a challenge.

Then I had a revelation.  I adore tiramisu.  N. wanted chocolate cake.  Why not blasphemously, worshipfully, impossibly, combine the two?  Chocolate tiramisu cake surrounded (just for fun) by chocolate-covered strawberries.  Yes. 

Here’s the basic recipe, and below are my additions:

3 cups flour

2 cups sugar

½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

2/3 cup vegetable oil

2 tsp white vinegar

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups cold water

Preheat the oven to 350F, grease and flour 2 9-inch round cake pans (I use cocoa powder instead of flour, which doesn’t leave white residue on the outside of this dark brown cake).

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients well, whisking or stirring until it looks a little pink from the cocoa powder.

In a small bowl (I just use my 2-cup glass measuring cup), combine the oil, vinegar, and vanilla.

Add the oil mixture and the water to the dry ingredients.  As the Alpha-Bakery cookbook advises, “stir real hard” for 2 minutes or so.  The cocoa sometimes clumps up, and you want a smooth, lump-less batter.

When batter is smooth, dark, richly delicious, pour even amounts into the two pans, tapping the bottoms gently on the counter once they are full to pop little air bubbles.  Then enclose them in the oven for about 35 minutes, or until a tester comes out just clean.  The tops will be springy and moist, and I have found that just the barest crumb clinging to the tester is fine, as they continue to cook while you let them cool for at least twenty minutes in their pans.

Here are my additions:

When the cakes were cool enough to liberate, breakage free, from the pans, I turned them upside down on my cooling rack and drizzled Kahlua onto the spongy, porous bottoms until it pooled a little rather than being instantly drunk in.  I continued to do this at intervals while the cakes cooled completely.  I probably used at least a ¼ cup all together.

While the drunken cakes continued to cool, I washed and dried a dozen or so strawberries and started some semi-sweet chocolate squares melting in a glass bowl over barely simmering water, which I robed the strawberries in.

My trusty stand mixer stood ready to receive:

an 8-oz. container of mascarpone cheese,

¼ cup of sugar,

a few tablespoons of amaretto

I whipped these into a light, creamy frosting.  I tasted some and swooned just a little.  With the bottom layer of cake gently centered on my cake stand (with parchment paper lining the edges, of course, to keep the stand clean while I iced the cake), I spread about ¾ of the cheese mixture on the bottom cake layer.  Since there was a little bit of chocolate left in my makeshift double boiler, even after receiving and coating all of the strawberries, I waited for it to cool off just a little, then drizzled it on top of the cheese filling layer, figuring a little extra chocolate wouldn’t hurt.  Then I added a pint of heavy whipping cream, a little more sugar, and a little more amaretto to my stand mixer and started it whipping while I carefully positioned the top cake layer atop the mascarpone and chocolate.

I iced the whole thing, top and sides, with light clouds of almond scented cream.  I probably added an inch of frosting atop and on all sides, then sifted a few teaspoons of cocoa powder around the top of the cake.

N. and I agreed (as did S. and her other guests) that this was the best incarnation of this cake I had ever made.  The Kahlua added the coffee flavor and liqueur touch that tiramisu seems to require, but it didn’t overwhelm the cake with sweetness.  One of the best things about this cake is that it has solid cocoa flavor without being tooth-tinglingly sweet.  The Kahlua was a buzz-suggesting addition and kept the already moist layers almost fragile-tender. 

The chocolate in the middle hardened as it cooled and made a crunchy layer on top of the creamy cheese.  The amaretto lent aroma and a warmth that was almost flavor to the whipped cream, and the mascarpone made it creamier without weighing it down.  We ate large, thick slices, tempering the richness with the fresh sweet punch of chocolate-covered strawberries, letting the juice trickle onto the whipped cream and add yet another dimension of flavor.

I have never been so glad to take home half a cake at the end of a party.

Breakfast for Dinner

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I have a curious relationship with breakfast food.  The heavy kind, the kind you get from a diner or a good bed-and-breakfast or a hotel, doesn’t sit well with me in the morning.  It’s too much, it weighs me down.  But it’s food I love.  Potatoes, eggs, bacon, quiche, pancakes, cinnamon rolls… the list goes on.  So I take full advantage of every opportunity I get to eat this kind of food later in the day.

Enter Friday, April 2nd:  for the third year running, N. and I are hosting a Breakfast for Dinner potluck.  We try to host one party per term, usually with some loose theme, and I think this one is my favorite.  My mouth is already watering at the possibilities.

Here’s a preview of my own menu for the evening: 

Ph-Ph rice pudding

Jalapeno cheese grits casserole

Cranberry donuts

Deviled eggs

Spiked hot apple cider

Mimosas

Yum.

Candy Girl

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Sometimes, it’s not enough to just cook beautiful, delicious food (she said modestly).  Sometimes, you have to make something really special, just because.

Something like this:

Yes, these are chocolate truffles.  Yes, I made them by hand.  I did not make them by imagination, though.  They were created thanks to the February issue of Cuisine at Home magazine, and an unintended modification to Elana’s Pantry’s nut butter balls.

I won’t go into a step-by-step written process, but here’s how it went:

First you have to make two kinds of chocolate ganache.  One contains bittersweet chocolate, heavy cream, and crème de cassis.  It gets poured into a plastic-wrap-lined loaf pan and refrigerated for an hour or so, just until firm enough to maintain a solid top surface.  The other contains white chocolate, heavy cream, and almond extract.  I didn’t have almond extract, so mine contained amaretto.

This gets layered on top of the dark chocolate and chilled.  I left it in the fridge overnight.  Then, when everything is firm and solid (as solid as ganache gets, anyway), you pull it out of the loaf pan by the overhanging edges of plastic wrap and cut the block into truffle sized squares.

While you are releasing and unwrapping and cutting, melt some additional chocolate, dark or semisweet this time.  Just pure chocolate this time.  When it was smooth and luscious and liquid, I used two forks to quickly dunk and coat each ganache square before transferring them to parchment paper.

This was a pretty systematic process, so I got thinking while I was working.  I had some crunchy almond butter from Trader Joe’s, and a few weeks before I had drooled over Elana’s nut butter balls.  Why not make some myself?  On a suggestion from her comments thread, I mixed the almond butter with a few tablespoons of powdered sugar in hopes of firming it up a bit.  Then I stuck it in the refrigerator to chill it and maybe make it easier to form into individual pieces.  While that was chilling down, I finished the first set of truffles.  I melted some white chocolate chips in the microwave, scooped the sweet goo into a plastic bag with one bottom corner cut off, and squeezed out a nice drizzle over the tops of my little soldiers.  Just to change it up a little, I rolled some of the smaller squares in shredded coconut.

Isn’t that gorgeous?  Now, I’m no Bakerella, but that looks pretty darn impressive to me!

After encasing each little chocolate triumph in mini muffin papers, I stowed them gently in Tupperware and took out the nut butter.  I rolled five balls.  It was decidedly not firm.  I decided to freeze the individual pieces on a plastic cutting board to solidify them before dipping them in warm melted chocolate.  I pushed the board onto what looked like an empty shelf in the freezer.  It was not empty.  The almond butter mashed all over a gallon freezer bag full of salmon.  I sat down on the floor and just stared at the delicious mess I had created.  How to fix this?  I scraped off as much of the nut butter as I could salvage and, in a moment of minor genius, added it to the bowl of melting semisweet chocolate chips I already had on the stove, ready to receive its next set of victims.  The almond butter melted in nicely, and I was able to pour my little disaster in a bread pan to cool and cut.  Remembering Elana’s suggestion, I sprinkled the top with coarse sea salt.  Brilliant.  Cut into squares, it was a perfect mixture of texture and sweet-salty contrast.

And the truffles weren’t bad either.

The tuxedo colored layers of ganache inside the slightly crunchy chocolate shell are visually stunning, and have a very subtle liqueur flavor that somehow enhances their chocolate-y richness.  They are impressive to look at, mouth-coating-ly opulent to eat, and better than anything you will find in a See’s candy box.  I brought small plate offerings to my officemates as thank yous for how supportive they have been toward me as I studied for my exam.  I read about and admire those people who can make mixed platters of sweets for holidays.  My Nana was always one of them.  Now, it would appear, I am fast amassing the skills and recipes necessary to do the same.  Maybe I should start taking orders.

The Week of Magical Eating: Day One

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With my exam over, and firm commands from my adviser to give myself a break for a week or two (she said a month, but she and I are both too dedicated and both such workhorses that I doubt that will happen), I can concentrate on the important things: food, and husband.  Fortunately, since he needs to be fed, these important things can work in tandem.  So I send my apologies to Joan Didion, and promise to report to you a Week of Magical Eating.  Some dishes will be fancy, fresh, and well prepared.  Some will probably be valiant attempts to use up leftovers.  Either way, I will try to check in with my results.

Day one, yesterday, also happened to be Valentine’s Day.  Neither N. nor I particularly support this Hallmark holiday, likely as a result of residual bitterness before meeting one another and deciding that no one but each other should ever be subjected to either of us again.  However, thanks to my rapidly ebbing stress and rising ability to enjoy normal activities like shopping and cooking without feeling guilt about not studying, I was able to secure ingredients for dinner on the special side.  Not for VDay, but for each other.

As a congratulatory gesture for passing my exam, one of my officemates gave me the ingredients for Kir Royale: champagne and crème de cassis.  This blackcurrant liquor smells sweet with the promise of a bite.  Mixed with champagne, it was much less sweet than I had imagined; my taste buds were prepared for something dessert-like, but the mix was delicious and fresh, and the color was appetizing too.

With our aperitifs poured, and an acorn squash halved, liberally basted with butter, honey, mustard, and shoved unceremoniously into the oven, I embarked on Jaime Oliver’s spinach and goat cheese risotto.  I’ve made this dish before, and was craving its fresh green notes and rich tanginess.  To make things extra special, and since between the two of us on a Sunday night we deemed it unwise to drink an entire bottle-o’-bubbly, I used champagne instead of white wine to deglaze my risotto pan after lightly toasting the rice and onions.  In the end result I couldn’t taste a difference, but I like to think the champagne contributed to the light tang of the final dish.

Piled high on a plate, it was creamy, it was luscious, with pockets of goat cheese slowly melting in amidst the kernels of rice that never lose their bite completely.  The acorn squash as a vegetable side, though it has a completely different flavor profile, works nicely with this risotto, I think, in part because the color contrast is so striking.  After an hour in the oven, the rind gets thin, flexible and yet crackling at the same time, and if you don’t mind burning the tips of your fingers, you can hold the caramelized edges with one hand while you scrape the flesh out with a spoon held in the other.

Nothing bitter here.  Honey, crème de cassis, goat cheese, sweetness layered on sweetness, but not enough to be cloying.  Exactly, perhaps, how Valentine’s Day ought to be.

Post-exam bliss. And chocolate.

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As I mentioned a post or two ago, this Friday I had to take an exam.  A very-big-deal exam, the outcome of which determined my ability to move on in the program.  And I passed it.  This means I am now free to move toward my dissertation, and that I am a doctoral candidate (well, almost, first I have to create and get approved a dissertation prospectus)!

Excitingly, in a project that does have food as a focus (although more the ways of eating it than the preparation and aestheticism thereof), I received some unexpected but delightful well-wishes in the form of food, when I went out to brunch with some friends/colleagues last Sunday morning.  As we crowded around our table at Midtown Marketplace, some with omelets, some with pancakes, me with a glorious hazelnut waffle topped with mixed berry compote, they began emptying pockets, purses, jackets, and loaded this impressive loot onto the table before me:

This was far more than I expected, and far more than I needed, but it was so brimming with love and support that I was quite overwhelmed.  The breakdown: Dove chocolates (bottom right), always a delicious and reliable standard.  I took the bag to my office to share with my office-mates, since they have had to listen to and encourage me throughout the process of preparing for this exam.

The Belgian chocolates (back right) were a selection of five fruit flavors blended with different types of chocolate (milk, dark, and white) and had some delightful combinations.  I shared these around the office as well.

The candied ginger spiked chocolate bar, which N. dubbed “crack,” was outrageous.  Spicy little chunks of candied ginger in smooth luscious dark chocolate; we finished the bar in two days… now all I want is to make my own candied ginger and wrap it lovingly in a truffle to recreate the experience.

The tea (middle left) is chamomile citrus, and is incredibly beautiful.  The ingredients are left whole, and enclosed in transparent little cloth packages sewn together with soft twine.  You can actually see the chamomile flowers, little strips of dehydrated orange zest, and the other leaves and blossoms used to create the tea.  With a drizzle of honey, it is the perfect not-too-indulgent bedtime beverage.  With the addition of a few shortbread cookies (back left), it becomes rather more indulgent.  These cookies were so rich and buttery that I thought they would leave my fingertips buttery, like the aftermath of a big handful of popcorn.  Just softened in the tea, they were lent an appealing subtle citrus flavor.

For true indulgence, the Ghiradelli cocoa mix is your best bet from this table of luxuries.  It is chocolate and hazelnut, so in essence it is like drinking a hot cup full of Nutella.  Incredibly rich and delicious.  I have only mixed it with water thus far, but the package recommends mixing with heated milk, which would only add to the indulgence!

Finally, the tall bottle in the middle is a Spanish sparkling white wine by Albero, which the bottle claims is made with organically grown grapes.  I have not yet popped the cork of this delightful looking treat, but when I do I expect to feel the same sort of rush of relief and unbelieving but effervescent bliss that I did yesterday afternoon, when my adviser and the chair of my examination committee shook my hand and told me “Congratulations!”