That time once again for all Mac-obsessed bakers to strap in and get with the piping.  Our challenge this month was to base a macaron on an April Holiday.  My son turns two on the 5th, but you have no idea how hard it is to make Thomas the train macarons.  In Boston we celebrate Patriot’s day, so thought of a red/white/blue cookie, but it seemed too obvious.  Rather, I went with an April Fools day approach.

The idea was to make macs with an ‘invisible’ center, in this case a clear lemonade jelly.  I couldn’t get the jelly to be totally translucent, though it came pretty close, given a certain thickness.

The shells were your standard macaron recipe, but with some powdered ginger thrown in, decorated with some candied lemon peel.  I wanted to try making these much more petite and bite sized, partially to avoid giant bites of jelly, but mostly just to practice a different type of piping.

Overall, it was fun to try something new, but given a choice, I’d have to go with a ganache filled mac 9 times out of 10.  The jelly may have been a bit too rubbery this time, though it tasted pretty good, and was big fun to cut up and play with.  It’s worth noting, now that spring is upon us, the secret to good lemonade is to add a pinch of salt.  Really brings out the lemon flavor in a surprising way.

So a hearty thanks once again to Deeba & Jamie and the folks over at MacTweets.  Always appreciate an excuse to play around with these.  Can’t wait for the round-up.

Let me start by saying, I don’t expect this post to land me in jail, but I’m not 100% on that.  In the endless search for new things to experiment with, ingredients, techniques, or kitchen toys, it’s a rare and beautiful thing to find one that’s illegal.  Unlike most countries in Europe, The US does not allow the import of Tonka Beans (at least those to be used in food preparation).  The general concern is that these seeds contain the chemical coumarin, which can act as a blood thinning agent.  Taken in large doses, it can be fatal.  Oddly enough, you would think it’d be important to define “large doses”, but I haven’t come across that yet.The best part is, when you google “Tonka Beans” the first few links describe how it is not allowed in the states, but the next few links are to online retailers willing to sell it to you.  My best guess is that such sales are intended only for use in perfumes, like those ‘water pipes’ they sell in student neighborhoods are “for tobacco use only.”

More importantly, some bloggers I trust have used Tonka Beans without being disappeared by the authorities.   Yet.

We were visiting family in NY this weekend though, and didn’t have access to an ice cream maker.  Rather than do something more elaborate, and with a bucket of farm fresh eggs on hand, it seemed easy enough to whip up some madeleines.  With willing partners in crime (much obliged, mom) it took all of 25 minutes to rip these out.  I don’t have the recipe we used, but any madeleine recipe available online would suffice.  We made lemon madeleines and simply replaced the vanilla extract with 2 grated beans. 

I expected something much closer to a cinnamon-vanilla flavor out of these, but at least to my untrained nose, it was almost closer to licorice.  Maybe we should have gone without the lemon, if only to get a clean flavor, but it still came through.  It was subtle at first, so for nothing more than poops and giggles and in the spirit of adventure, whipped up a little Tonka-Bean Glaze to drizzle on top.  (Nothing more than some milk – we were out of cream – with the left over Tonka nibs steeped in it, added to powdered sugar until it got the right consistency).

I liked it, but feel compromised as a judge, given how giddy I was when my beans came in the mail.  I’ll say this though, that much like the pink peppercorn ice cream, it would work great as a component in a more involved creation, than something that I’d order on its own. 

So that’s my story officers.  Do with me what you will now.

Just a quick one here.  My daughter is home sick from school and wife is out of town.  It’s gray and wet outside, so what do we do?  We cook.  Well if you consider making savory soda cooking that is.

This come from a back issue of Bon Appetite, and just sat there at the back of the line, waiting for its turn.  Totally unnecessary, but sometimes you just have to make something.  And WOW does the house smell good right now.  Overall it looks like a thin bourbon, but tastes almost like a spicy pimms.  The trick is going to be adding just enough syrup so it’s not too sweet, but still has enough kick to stand out as something different.

Besides, it’s nice to be able to use my seltzer machine for something else these days.

I’ve got a new muse these days, hopefully one that will smooth over the issues of “Sweet-lord what are you going to do with all that ________?!?” Normal people ask each other simple questions like, “I’m feeling peckish, wonder what we have to snack on?” My problem however has been “What am I going to do with this bucket of flan I just made?”

Enter Mary Cech, yet another CIA pastry instructor in Napa (I have to get myself there someday) and trained under a former muse, Charlie Trotter. She’s out with a new book, Savory Baking which includes, (there’s just no other way to say this) the coolest ideas I’ve seen in a while. Caprese profiteroles? Asparagus-sesame éclairs? Pear and Goat Cheese scones? I’m seeing now possibilities everywhere now. More importantly, it means I get to make stuff that my family can eat without nearly as much guilt and shame. (my wife may not fully appreciate how much sugar our kids have been getting).

Call this foray a baby-step in this direction then, not quite a cookie, not quite a cracker. I’m excited to try these on their own, maybe some with some citrus marmalade or creamy brie. Really, anything you can think of that might go with pistachios. Time to break out the reference book and get cracking.

(served last night with some great peach freezer jam, made last summer by our friend and donated to the cause.)

From the bottom up: Flourless Chocolate Cake, Matzo praline, espresso chocolate cheesecake, praline, flourless cake, ganache glaze, surrounded by chocolate mousse

Dad, am I a Jew?” says the little girl.  No honey, you’re just ‘jew-ish’. 

Such are the stale jokes of yet another mixed-faith couple.  Easter to me as a young boy meant pounds and pounds of chocolate, and gorging on enough jellybeans to swear me off the stuff for good.  Passover was when the lucky kids at school didn’t have to eat the ‘Sloppy Joes’ on soggy white bread.  What I’m saying is, we’re not that observant.

Simple on the outside...

It’s an ongoing debate, how we’re going to raise the kids when holidays compete, but for now it’s simply dying eggs and matzo with peanut butter this time of year.  We were invited over to a friend’s house recently for a more traditional Passover Seder than we could pull off on our own, and never one to miss an opportunity, I promised to bring the cake.

There are plenty of parve dessert options out there, but fundamentally we’re talking about a gluten free approach.  My job not being to enter into a Talmudic discussion of the rules, merely to adhere to them, we’re keeping away from cornstarch, rice, and hunting down sticker approved butter and chocolate.

And that’s really where we ended up, in a world of chocolate.  Rather than get too funky on a traditional holiday (no juniper berry spume this time), I started with a flourless chocolate cake base.  The recipe seemed different enough to be interesting, and was designed to lighten what is more typically a dense brownie (that had worked well in the past).  I should have forgone the whipped egg whites this time though, as I needed these layers dense.  The FCC sandwiched a thin espresso-chocolate cheesecake layer, acting as the creamy surprise in the middle.  To add some texture and as an excuse to keep it relevant to the holiday, I covered both sides of the cheesecake with a matzo praline.

This sandwich (FCC, praline, cheesecake, praline, FCC) was then frozen and trimmed to fit my 10” steel ring.  The sides lined with doubled up layers of acetate, and then the edges filled with a chocolate mousse.  The hope was to enrobe the whole thing, but I scaled the mousse recipe wrong, leaving the somewhat bumpy top exposed.  With little time left, and running out of ideas, I whipped up some sacher glaze (3 parts chocolate, 3 parts cream, 1 part butter), and poured it on top.

 (Full disclosure here, staring at the somewhat unattractive cake, and the bowl of failed mousse on the counter, it seemed so easy to just slap it on and cover it up.  It hurts to throw out that much chocolate.  The failed mousse however was just plain wrong (don’t experiment with agar agar unless you know what you’re doing).  Seeing this, I tried my best to scrape it out, but fear some may have gotten left behind.  My apologies for any small unappetizing chunks you may have found.)

 When all was said and done, this was an attempt to find multiple chocolate textures: dense flourless cake, creamy cheesecake, crunchy praline, pillowy mousse, and silky glaze.  If I was to do it all over again, I’d go with a different flourless chocolate cake recipe.  This dried out too quickly, and the cake just didn’t slice very cleanly.  Otherwise Happy Passover to all, and thanks to P & I for having us over.

The trick to being broke in Japan in your early 20s is to know the seams in the system, and how to live off $20/day without dying of malnutrition.  Having spent roughly 2-years there, split between Tokyo & Osaka, I can testify to the number of my people saved by late-night convenience store dinners.  Put aside any thoughts of those 7-11 hotdogs, stuck on hells own treadmill, or the stomach cramping plastic wrapped microwave burrito.  You too can live, nay Thrive, off the occasional $2 meal.

Chicken with garlic, ginger, scallions, honey, soy, and Hoisin sauce

Pardon the nostalgic rantings of a middle-aged man, fondly remembering his youth.  I’ve got 2 kids, a mortgage, dog, and am working towards being vested in a public sector union job.  I think my days of eating only junk-food and beer, and expecting to function like an adult the next day are pretty much over.  I don’t buy $1 steamed buns for breakfast at 10 in the morning after dancing and drinking all night long.  I put the kids to sleep and bake them in my own home.

More importantly, this would be my first entry into the world of “Bread Baking Day”, a group of bakers that collectively post their bread creations monthly.  Our challenge for March, hosted by Rachel at Tangerine’s kitchen, was to bake buns.  I get the feeling she was thinking more along the lines of a nice dinner roll, but lets wait for the round-up to see how far off base I was with this.

Good, but really needs a dipping sauce for the full effect

The recipe for this one came from Spice of Life, but there are hundreds out there to choose from, involving mushrooms, beets, pork, vegetarian, you name it.  This one then is for those of you that know what it is to smell these treats, fresh from the florescent lit display case (after waiting all day for you to stop by).  For those that haven’t had the pleasure, well, you’re probably better off eating a real meal instead.

Shortbread, caramel, orange segments, toasted meringue

Far be it for me to tweak any recipe offered from a 3 star chef.  But I’ve been on a kick lately that has been far to much fun to resist.  A few weeks ago the New York Times ran an article in their Recipe Redux series in which chefs take an old recipe for chocolate caramels and ‘re-interpret’ it.  From that one starting point they came up with Black-Sugar-Glazed Medjool Dates With Pecorino and Walnuts How they get from point A to point B is the really interesting story.  With that in mind, I decided why not travel pretty far from the original idea this month.  My apologies to our host for not following the rules very closely.  Chef Ducasse I hope will forgive me.

Chocolate 'soil', pink peppercorn ice-cream, orange powder, orange tuile

The Orange Tian recipe this month is in essence a pate sable crust with some stabalized whipped cream, flavored with orange marmalade and topped with segmented oranges with a caramel sauce.    

grapefruit caviar with mint

So, with a cookie/cream/segmented fruit/caramel starting point, let’s see where it takes us.  Tian, apparently is all about layers, so why not approach this like a lasagna, cookie, cream, cookie, caramel, cookie, etc.  What about a ‘deconstructed’ approach, with a bunch of lone elements on the plate?  Maybe a plate full of small entremont cubes?  Let’s just say the baking sketchbook was filled with structurally impossible, and technically challenging ideas that didn’t make the final cut.  

Shortbread

We start then with a simple shortbread cookie.  The pate sablee crust wouldn’t have worked here, as it was too crumbly for picking up with your hands.  Michael Laiskonis wrote a fascinating post about designing pastry to be ergonomic, Which got me to thinking this should be small enough and strong enough to eat by hand.  Likewise it should be no wider than the segmented oranges.

lemon caramel

The caramel was to be much more solid and thicker, but the soft caramel recipe I tried ended up as a giant plank of sugary concrete.  (my fault, not the recipe).  Rather I threw some sweetened condensed milk in the microwave for a series of 2 minute spurts (at half power) until it darkened and thickened enough to make a dulche de leche sauce, then added 1/2 tsp of lemon extract to give it some citrus charector. 

Chocolate 'soil'

The chocolate soil comes from the inspirational Eat Foo.  If we’re adding ice cream to the plate it had to be grounded, so it doesn’t just slide all over.  Besides, it adds a great texture, and made for a nice salty accompiament to the pink peppercorn ice cream.   

Grapefruit caviar

The grapefruit caviar came from an online magazine that Y turned me on to, Apicius.  In short peal a grapefruit gently and slowly seperate the individual citrus cell, stored in some more mint syrup.  Side note: don’t try to freeze this, it gets weird. 

Blood orange meringue

The meringue was just your standard egg whites and sugar, but with some blood orange zest added at the end. 

...toasted

And than blasted with my new (“for professional use only!” kitchen torch.  Holy crap is that a fun toy to play with 

Pink peppercorn ice-cream

The Pink peppercorn ice cream came from a Cannelle et vanilla macaron idea, but apparently has been around for awhile already.  The thought was that it would go well with citrus flavors, while adding another dimension.  I’ll say this about it, it’s certainly interesting as a component, but I don’t think I’ll fill a cone with it this summer.  

orange powder

The orange powder comes from The French Laundry Cookbook.  Zest oranges, blanche in some hot water, then dry in the microwave before pulsing in a clean coffee grinder.  

orange tuile

The tuile is your standard powdered sugar, eggwhite and cake flour tuile, but with some orange juice and orange extract added.  Just for color I cheated and threw in some powdered food coloring for good measure.  

For a better idea of what a genuine Orange Tian is supposed to be, go check out the fantastic intepretations at   

http://forkspoonnknife.blogspot.com/  

oonsky

http://cafebacaro.blogspot.com/

http://www.pigsinblankets.net/

Thanks once again to our host and all the mad scientist bakers out there.  Let’s see what April brings now.

They say the 100 pleats in a chef’s toque represent the number of different ways to cook an egg.  If that’s true I’ve got at least another 70 to learn, but this at least was a step in that direction.  More commonly known State-side as “floating Islands” Oeufs a la neige (translated from French as “eggs in snow”) usually consists of poached meringue in a creme anglaise sauce.

Like most of these projects, the appeal was mostly that I had never tried making this before, much less eaten one.  After a quick search online I found an interesting approach at an oldie but goodie foodie blog for a cardamom chocolate custard.  I’ve made an anglaise before, and while there are still a million variations I still want to try, I hadn’t gone chocolate in awhile.   The custard though was nice and thick, and so couldn’t be served the same as a thin sauce, particularly given the size of the bowls we were using.  I’m trying so hard these days not to kill or incapacitate my wife with heaping mounds of desserts, so what should have been islands in the sea came out instead as eggs on a pile of chocolate mud.   Not that anybody was complaining.

This recipe called for the meringue to be poached in simmering water as opposed to flavored milk like some others do.  Even with that, it just seems like a missed opportunity to use a straight meringue, not the most flavorful thing in its own right.  Perhaps it’s cheating, but since we’re already experimenting anyway, I threw in some Orange Blossom water and a little food coloring.

Poached in water, we lost a great deal of flavor and color, but they still came through with a little character, subtle but still there.  lastly topped it all with a little orange powder I still had left over from another project.  The custard may have been thicker than typical, more of a pudding than a sauce, but it tasted pretty good.  If nothing else, poached meringue is a new trick in the tool bag, maybe something that could add another texture to a more complex project down the road.

Some time ago I was asked, “what’s your take on liquor in desserts?”  At that time, my only association was a series of retirement/baby shower/engagement celebration cakes that my workplace would occasionally offer.  Yellow cake with a good inch and a half of white frosting, soaked in rum.  If the sugar overload didn’t send you spinning the illicit two shots in the bottom layer would. 

Lately though, I’m thinking of liquor, or wine in this case, as a way to add another layer of complexity, something that’s not as easy to pin down as ‘lemon’, ‘maple syrup’, or ‘chocolate’.  Besides, it’s how I justify to myself this hobby as a think for adults, otherwise, why not just recreate Reese’s Peanut Butter cups all week long.

We were invited to a friend’s house for dinner tonight, with the understanding (certainly not unwelcome) that I’d be bringing over dessert.  Something that had been on the list for sometime, and happened to be a fairly quick thing was a recipe from Fine Cooking for a Custard Tart with Wine Poached Grapes.  Simple Almond crust, with a lime & Sauvignon Blanc custard, with red seedless grapes poached in a wine, honey, lime broth, reduced into a thick syrup for brushing the top when it’s all done.

The wine comes through as a faint note, not too strong, and just barely in the grapes themselves.  Put a custard tart in front of me though, and I’m already a happy guy.  We were going to serve it alongside the wine itself, but as luck would have it the dinner was called off at the last-minute due to sickness.  

Now I just need to figure out what to do with this thing.

We have at least one suggestion

That time again, when folks start inexplicably making Macarons again.  MacAttack V is upon us, now with instructions to bake something floral, something bespeaking of the glory of spring, something to get us through the cruel taunting New England March that takes us from shorts and spf 50 to snow-pants and wind chapped cheeks from one day to the next.

Rather than try to shape macs like a daisy (wow is that hard), or serve them on ‘stems‘ (though this is something to come back to later), I wanted to revisit my earlier failure with hibiscus.  That time I ground up dried flowers as finely as I could (not fine enough it turned out), added them to the dry ingredients and went from there.  As I’m starting to learn, the shells will almost always taste of almond though, so how best to get a hibiscus flavor in there?

Enter chef Migoya who has a number of tapioca components in his “Frozen Desserts”.   Having virtually no tapioca experience though (either eaten or cooked), we charge ahead anyway.  Apparently it’s just a matter of soaking the pearls overnight, then simmer in tea, rinse, simmer, rinse, etc. until they’re no longer white or opaque.  Then it’s another process of rinsing in cold water, steep in more tea, rinse, steep etc. until they don’t stick together too much.  What I’m getting at here is the bucket of cold tea you need before starting this process.

Migoya has in the same book, and unrelated to tapioca, a very simple chilled hibiscus soup that I intended to use in place of the tea.  However after running the numbers, I would have needed about 5 more bags of dried flowers.  Undeterred, to get the color, I went with some Red Zinger for the simmer, rinse, steep phase, than added the chilled soup to the finished pearls to get them to the right consistency.  The soup recipe also gets us a handful of poached hisbiscus flowers that were easy enough to brush with egg whites, cover in sugar and turn into candied flowers for a garnish.   Before moving on from here, I have to say, the soup itself though is fantastic, closer to a flowery dessert sauce than something you’d eat with crusty bread, but I’m holding onto the 1/8 cup left-over hoping to use it in something soon.

 The shells got a tsp and 1/2 of Mango powder that I found online.  I tried something similar with cherry powder last month with weak results.  At this point though, I’m giving up on the powders, at least for macarons.  I think the stuff is best for frosting or in a sauce, but not really made for baking.  Not much mango flavor survived the oven.  To get something ‘mano-y’ on the plate then, I simply ran one over a mandoline and wrapped thin slices into a Mango Rose garnish.  

 As for lessons learned this time, I’ll say this about tapioca, particularly the sticky kind.  Just because you can mound it higher than you could with ganache, doesn’t make it any less likely to shoot out all over your hands when you take that first bite.  Moderation in all things.

adding mango flavor anyway we can

Just for further poops and giggles though, and with extra hibiscus soup on hand, I ripped out some quick white chocolate hibiscus ganache.  The soup already had a good amount of sugar in it, so the end result may have been a bit too sweet, even for a chocolate filling.  Other than that, the flavor just didn’t come through as strong as I would have hoped.  More chocolate than hibiscus.  Not bad, but not nearly as unique as I was hoping for.

a more traditional white chocolate hibiscus ganache filling

 So thanks again to the team at MacTweets.  Can’t wait for the roundup on March 20th, the official and soon to be much more widely celebrated ‘National Macaron Day’.