number twenty-five

Just one of the many, many, multi-layered buttery treats that passed through my lips during my two week stint in Paris.

Truffles. No pig needed.

Milk chocolate, framboise, and fresh mint ganache enrobed in tempered dark chocolate 

For this month's daring baker challenge, we were asked to temper chocolate and make two kinds of candy. I've never done either, and there were so many options, so I was feeling a little overwhelmed.  As you'll remember, my parents came to town for a weekend, and I enlisted their help. My father was hesitant, but he definitely ate his share of melted chocolate along the way.

Can you tell what temperature we're at? No? Me neither.

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

Tempering chocolate involves heating it to a certain temperature, cooling it, and heating it again. There's definitely some science involved about changing the structure of something...crystals or proteins or what have you...that I don't understand.  What I do understand is that it prevents blooming (which is the prettiest name for the ugly white streaks on your chocolate bar from being left in the car to melt and reharden) and it makes the chocolate shiny and snappy. Most everyone likes shine, but all people love snap.

If you read the directions provided by the daring bakers this month, you'll see that you can also temper chocolate on a marble slab. I, for one, don't have a marble slab. And frankly, the melt, stir, and stir some more method was very simple and straightforward. Except, as you'll see above, for when I got chocolate on my candy thermometer and couldn't see the temperature.

They may not be pretty, but they are scrumptious.

Also, apparently I have the wrong thermometer yet again. We were waiting and waiting and stirring and stirring trying to get the temperature to lower under 25 degrees Celsius, until my father said:

Wait. Maybe it doesn't register any lower.

He tested it under cold water, and he was right. Now I own a meat thermometer and a candy thermometer already. Is there a chocolate thermometer I'm supposed to own too?  Too many things.

Milk chocolate ganache enrobed in crushed almonds

Lessons learned along the way:

1. Refrigerate your ganache. The colder it is, the easier it is to work with.  Don't be afraid to put the bowl of ganache in an ice bath while you work with it. 

2. Don't temper your chocolate until you're ready to use it. It gets cold and then it gets hard to work with and you're back and forth over the double boiler trying to keep it that great slippery consistency. This is not mandatory, but it makes things easier.

3. These are really good. Plan to give some away so you don't eat them all yourself.

This one was a definite winner

Coconut chiffon cake, smothered in simple syrup, sandwiching pastry cream and strawberries, and all topped with almond paste? Um...yes please.

Blog-checking lines: Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.

This is another one of those fussy seventeen-part recipes, but like many others, much of this can be made in advance (simple syrup, cake, pastry cream base), refrigerated and assembled when it's time. (Plus, summer is an excellent time to have extra simple syrup around the house for iced coffee and mixed drinks.)

Also, this puppy has to sit in the refrigerator for four hours before you can eat it. So add that to your planning.  (There's nothing worse than not have enough chill time and serving your guests slump cake. Been there.)

I can't tell you how good this was. I just can't. I can only say that this graced the end of an impromptu dinner party and I was never so sad the next day that I shared a dessert with others.

After the party, only four skinny pieces remained. And for this one, you bet I licked the platter.

Make one by playing along with this recipe.

The only things I would change next time:

1. Find a way to make the top prettier. Rolled almond paste and powdered sugar just didn't do it for me. Some people dyed their almond paste, other people put more fruit on top (we used our extra strawberries--muddled--in the prosecco we drank alongside the cake), and some people added gelee. We'll see. Honestly, the sides are so pretty it might not matter that the top isn't.

2. Infuse the simple syrup with something fun like a vanilla bean or some mint leaves. Or not. The cake already has a lot going on, it's not that it needs more. It might just be fun to try.

Number twenty continues: World's largest continual chocolate waterfall

20 feet of streaming, splattering, sticky chocolate all for your viewing pleasure at The Candy Basket just outside of Portland, Oregon.

The website says it smells good, but I didn't think so. I'm not sure it's the freshest chocolate in the world. It was however, very tall, and it was very chocolatey. So, two out of three.

Here's the deal--this puppy is right off the highway (like right off, though the signage is pretty crappy so you have to believe that it's there and then it will magically appear), and you should stop there should you ever be traveling east on I-84.

Not only for the ever-ripe photo opportunity with the fountain, but because The Candy Basket makes really good candy.

I mean, we bought the obligatory $5 worth of bear paws and coconut bonbons, just because the kid behind the counter seemed nice and didn't even flinch while I took way too many photos with my phone, none of which turned out very good due to low light (and being a sub-optimum photographer--trying not to make too much of a scene in front of the fountain. Oh if I had just embraced the embarrassment of it all. It's a gimmick, after all, and it worked to get us into the store).

We ate the candy on our way to a campsite, and had to keep exclaiming how good it was. I wish we'd bought more. However, I didn't see the free sample sign until we were on our way out. The free samples being offered were sugar free jelly candy, and since I don't love Splenda, I didn't love them. Had I sampled some actual chocolate, we could very well have spent much more on candy that would have invariably melted in the car during our camping trip. So I guess it's a happy story either way. Next time, I say, next time I will buy more candy.

BTW. The "World's Largest" designation may be a bit dodgy. Anchorage Alaska also boasts a 20 foot chocolate waterfall, but I guess it's not "continuously running." The actual tallest chocolate waterfall--26 feet 3 inches--is in (where else?) Las Vegas.

Toy Society Drop Number 4: An ugly thing goes to Fremont (where it should fit in nicely)

When Joe and I moved to Seattle, some (gasp) eight years ago, we bought a Seattle city guidebook, a Frommers or Foders or Lonely Planet to show us around the city we had chosen as our home.  Having spent the previous four years in Anchorage, Alaska, we were thrilled to find the prices in Seattle incredibly affordable (Fresh produce year round! Dinner out for under $40!) and the city fabulously full of equal parts foody, outdoorsy, eco-aware, and non-conformist.

The part I remember about the guidebook: It broke Seattle down into neighborhoods, which is actually how Seattlites see/live/visit/talk about the city. (Portlandites may be fond of their double-letttered ordinals, but we've got 'hoods so distinct as to be mini-cities on their own.)  The part I remember about the guidebook: The page on Fremont.  The title was, and I kid you not: Fun, Funky Fremont.

Since then I can neither visit nor speak about this hippie/anything-goes spot perched atop the ship canal to Lake Union like an escaped Macaw without hearing (in my head) those three alliterative words.

For those of you who aren't from around here: Fremont is both fun and funky, but that's a little simplisticly put. Fremont very much has a live-and-let live attitude, and it's filled with hippies and artists and hipsters and vegans and all things West Coast. It is home to my favorite parade of the year--which is opened with hundreds of naked bicyclists festooned in full body paint peddling their way down Fremont Avenue.  It is home to the very iconic troll, who winks beneath the SR-99 bridge while clutching a VW bug, among a number of other public art installations.

Having said all that. I made what can only be described as something sort of ugly. One might call it a doll, but that would be a bit generous.  And last weekend, on my way to the Fremont Sunday market (a raucous and motley collection of "antiques," screenprinted t-shirts, and bongs being hawked alongside mini-donuts and falafel), I snatched the opportunity to re-home said ugly almost-doll.

This is my fourth Toy Society drop, dropped on the intersection of Fremont and 38th, on Sunday morning around 11 am-ish. When we returned, some time later, the almost-doll was gone. May he/she have found a loving home where he/she can be appreciated for all that she/he is and can be. Godspeed.

Photoshoot (or half of number 26)

These were all self-taken, with us driving around Georgetown looking for backdrops, parking (sometimes legally), setting up the tripod (in the wind, looking out for trains, avoiding the mud), and using the remote to snap the photos.

The dogs were not included, frankly, because it sounded too darn hard without having another person to photograph us.  However, this is a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, if the sun comes out, and you feel so inclined.

Two words: YUM and YUM

The March 2011 Daring Baker's Challenge was hosted by Ria of Ria's Collection and Jamie of Life's a Feast.  Ria and Jaime challenged The Daring Bakers to bake a yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake.

And it's wonderful.  The recipe is large and makes two coffee cake rings, and a lot of Daring Bakers split the recipe to make only one. I had planned on doing that as well, but in a last minute fit of generosity (oh! I'll bring one to work!) I made the full recipe. Let's just say that the second ring never made it to the office.

This recipe is a bit different than anything I'd ever seen--a yeasted bread roll filled with meringue.  And it's genius.  The filling melts and softens the bread around it--a gooey treat. But the meringue also crisps a bit where the slits are cut into the bread ring, allowing a tiny dried meringue crust to form in the oven.  Yum.

It's a straightforward recipe, very similar to making any kind of sweet roll, in that it's a soft dough that rises once, is assembled into a roll, and rises again before baking. The only difference here is the meringue filling--remarkably fun to spread out and work with---like baking with sweetened clouds.

I filled my cake with chopped Belgian chocolate, cinnamon, and strong, amazing East Indies nutmeg from Penzeys (which is my new favorite nutmeg, and since nutmeg is my favorite spice to bake with, that's saying a lot).

After you roll up the dough and form the circle, you snip deeply into the sides every so often to let the filling ooze out a bit to make the subtle crunch. A painting of egg wash, and the bread goes in the oven.

It comes out of the oven brown and lovely, and it's all you can do to let it cool enough to eat it without burning yourself on the filling.

The only thing I will change for next time? Nuts. This baby screams for pecans. And next time you can bet that I'll be answering that scream.

Number 19

Oh Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe.  Why did I not visit you earlier?

With your shrunken heads and your fetal deer in a jar and your taxidermic two-headed calf?

I mean, come on. You have two mummies and a full human skeleton. You have a taxidermy four-legged chicken.

You have stuffed dead things and fake things hanging from the ceiling in dusty, crazy-time splendor.

My favorite part, however, and the part for which I was woefully unprepared, are your old-timey carnival machines.  

There's the fortune teller with the glowing crystal ball, the one-armed bandit who dispenses tokens, the sex-appeal-o-meter, the strength-of-character-o-meter (measured by shaking hands with Uncle Sam), the Charlie Chaplin moving picture showcase and a number of old time peep shows.

You can bet that I'll be back, dear Shoppe, and this time with a fist-full of change.

Creamy crunchy February

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies. (This second link will get you the panna cotta too.)

I made the basic panna cotta recipe linked above, and then topped it with a port wine gelee. My first gelee ever, and let me tell you--don't be afraid of it.  Gelee is French for "adult Jell-O." (Or, with two cups of port in this recipe, this dessert is for adults. Maybe they aren't all that way. And to that I say, why not?)   And man is it yummy.

I will confess, however, that the panna cotta pictured above is actually my second attempt.  The first panna cotta was made on the same day as the florentines and it was made with the addition of pear puree and vanilla bean (like the recipe for the port gelee spells out).  It tasted lovely, but, alas, was not meant to be. The panna cotta separated into an icky watery lower layer and a beautifully set whitish upper layer.  Ick.  I asked my fellow daring bakers what I did wrong, and received no help. 

None. They may be daring, but they aren't helpful.

So then I poked about on the internets and learned that I haven't been giving gelatin the proper respect that it deserves. It is delicate, say the internets.  Don't get it too hot. Don't get it too cold. Chill your dish first. Let it cool to room temperature before putting it in the fridge. Coo at it while it cools. It can sense your lackadaisical attitude, and when it does, it won't set properly just to prove a point. 

Like the thugs on the corner, gelatin commands respect, yo.

So I was more careful the second time. And it worked a whole lot better.  See above. 

But the florentines. OH, the florentines. 

If I have one piece of advice from this month's challenge (besides Respect Yo Gelatin) it is this: Get thee some florentine ingredients. 

They are amazing, crispy, and luscious. They are also about the easiest cookies to make.  Just throw everything in a bowl, stir, and plop little piles on a baking sheet with loads of room for them to spread out. You can get fancy with the chocolate, or you can dip, or spread, or just eat the cookie with a square of chocolate on top (which we did the first night because it was late and the panna cotta had separated and I just wasn't up for anything else. And it was just fine.) 

By the way: I used Safeway brand milk chocolate bars, and I was scared and embarrassed to use grocery store chocolate but let me tell you: I am IN LOVE. So much cocoa butter in these puppies, you can't hold it without it melting immediately.  It kicks Hershey's butt.

So there. This month I learned the following helpful lessons which I now pass to you:  

• Respect yo gelatin.
• Make florentines.
• Don't judge chocolate by its wrapper. (I mean, do. Read the ingredient list. Is cocoa butter featured heavily? Then buy it. Yum.)

Number 4

I'm not a web designer. In fact, one of my lifelong goals is to never know enough html or css to have to make websites or answer questions.  I can parse my way through a page of code and find the bits I need to edit--photo sizes and links and the like--but every time (and I mean every time) I open up Dreamweaver I have to go running to my web guy at work and plead forgiveness and ask him to fix whatever I just broke. (I'm not sure why he keeps installing Dreamweaver on my computers...)

But, given a little time, and a willingness to be okay with good enough, I finally made us a website.  It's not going to win any awards, and it is missing a whole beak-load of examples of the amazing work that gavron has done, but it's a start, and it's happy enough that I can send people there without being embarrassed, which is the first step.

Something ugly this way comes.

My very first Daring Bakers' challenge: January 2011.  It works like this: the recipe and instructions are posted on the first of the month in a very exclusive/secret forum, the bakers dare to bake said challenge during the next 26 days, and then post their results on their own blogs on the 27th.  

The January 2011 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Astheroshe of the blog accro.  She chose to challenge everyone to make a Biscuit Jaconde Imprime to wrap around an Entremets dessert.

HUH?

My thoughts exactly.  Here's some background:

A jaconde imprime (French Baking term) is a decorative design baked into a light sponge cake providing an elegant finish to desserts/torts/entrements formed in ring molds.  A jaconde batter is used because it bakes into a moist, flexible cake. The cake batter may be tinted or marbleized for a further decorative effect.

Entremets is an ornate dessert with many different layers of cake and pastry cream in a mold, usually served cold. (Think triffle in a mold vs. a glass bowl.)

And. Yeah. Mine's not that pretty.

Here's how it starts--with jaconde pattern paste, mixed from powdered sugar and butter and egg whites, and colored and put into a pastry bag and piped into a pattern on parchment on the up-turned bottom of your jelly roll pan. This goes into the freezer for 15 minutes until it's hardened through.

And then you make a sponge that goes over top of the paste and into a very hot oven for a very short time.  It comes out looking like this:

Flipped over, it looks like this. Or, mine did. Yours might not be wrinkly like mine is, since I don't think it's supposed to be.

You then cut the finished jaconde to size, lining the edge of a bottomless mold.  See here:

After that I was on my own to figure out how to fill it.  So I made mousse: one with a pound of white chocolate and one with fresh blackberries and framboise.  And then I filled the jaconde with three layers of the two mousses--white chocolate in the middle and the berry on the bottom and top. I tried for a layer of the extra sponge in the middle, but it was so thin it didn't have much structural integrity. 

Lessons learned:

1) Go to Sur la Table and buy real baker's food coloring. The Betty Crocker stuff makes florescent stripes, and they're just not that appealing;

2) I guess I need to learn to make a mousse. It turns out I'm not a fan of mousse, so I've never bothered to perfect it...but mine ended up chunky and sad.  Even after the double-boiling and the delicate stirring and the chilling. Chunky. Sad.  (And so rich you couldn't eat it. And, dear readers, this is why I don't love a mousse.  Three cups of heavy cream, plus two eggs and two egg yolks = too heavy to bother eating.)

3) Plan for garnish. I finished the dessert after a frantic 4 hours in the kitchen (I think I used every mixing bowl I own) and had nothing to put on top of the ugly thing to distract the eye from the unappealing chunks in the mousse.  And, compared to the rest of the people who participate in Daring Bakers, I'm a serious amateur both in the baking arena and in the photographic styling.  Time to up my game.

Tune back in on February 27 for next month's challenge. Here's hoping it's prettier. Or at least less rich and therefore edible.

33 things to do before I turn 34

1. play with the daring bakers. this is a year-long commitment, as you get kicked out of the secret daring club if you miss more than two months. hmm.  started here.
2. learn to roller skate backwards. (I'm not actually ever going to do this. Let's be honest. Maybe it would be better just to learn to skate competently forward.)
3. etch some glass. Like this.
4. make (or pay someone to make) a real gavron website. done.
5. read more poetry.
6. make patchwork wall hangings. 
7. provide pro bono graphic design work for a local charity.
8. keep playing Toy Society quarterly.
9. play with my niece.
10. bake with my nephew.
11. roast the coffee beans. (this is a repost from last year, but dammit, it's going to happen this year. I swear.)
12. draw. add watercolor to said drawing. repeat.
13. make brioche.  this takes three days, people. and that is why, thus far, it has eluded me.
14. learn (and then do) to take better/prettier product shots. more light. more props. more patience.
15. make a ruffled shirt. one of these.  (done) maybe this scarf, too.
16. spray paint the cuckoo clock.
17. knit weight covers for the cuckoo clock.
18. three words. bunting. stamp. roller.
19. go to ye olde curiosity shop. (how have I not made it there yet?)  done.
20. continue the search for Roadside America treasures
21. knit or sew outfits for the posable artist models.
22. next holiday season: make these walnut ornaments.  heck. you might not have to wait until the holidays.
23. get tattooed. maybe.
24. make a cover for the sewing machine. the machine works so hard, shouldn't we keep it free from dog hair?
25. eat a croissant in paris. done.
26. have some family portraits taken. family = me + j + t + roo
27. witness my friend sayra's wedding. (yippee!)
28.                                           [<--- this space left intentionally blank.] leave space.
29. make injera. convince joe to make food to eat with said injera.
30. look to nature to solve a problem. (thanks to Second Sam for this one.)
31. continue working on Not a Book.
32. find a vintage typewriter to call my own. (this is a repeat too.)
33. find...and note...small bits of joy along the way.