Cutting Miss Daisy

I have to tell you, if a 2-foot long daisy cake doesn’t make you smile after this never-ending winter of monotony, then I just can’t help you.  Is it me, or does it seem to be going on and on?  Everyone I talk to just lights up at the proposition of the coming spring.  I myself feel more drawn to it this year than in the past.  I think it’s been a difficult season for many people and I for one am excited to bid it adieu.

In my effort to maintain happy thoughts of the green things to come, I offer you the Daisy Cake.  This cake really made me laugh while I was making it…some might say it’s because I’m not taking medication any longer, but sometimes when you are creating you find a precious and joyful quality, one that really, truly makes you smile.

Two factors led me to this cake, the first being seed starting.  Every year around this time, about 2 months before the last hard frost, I start seeds in containers indoors.  The past couple of years I’ve started flats and flats of seeds in an effort to economically populate the garden I started in the back yard.  Plants are expensive, and if you can be patient and plan ahead you can grow some really successful and beautiful plants, treasures you might not find at your local nursery.  I have one place in particular called Select Seeds where I get heirloom varieties of both perennial and annual flowers.  I love the older varieties (most heirloom seeds are from plant varieties dating back at least 50 years), and having an old Victorian has inspired me to look for plants that could have been in the garden a 100 years ago when our house was built. 

I’m finally running out of space in the yard and am only starting one variety this year, an annual called Verbena Bonariensis.  They grow to be 4 to 5 feet tall, and are lovely, slender stalks featuring delicate purple flowers.  These plants pair handsomely with golden sea grasses and will make your autumn garden sing.  Yes…I am waxing poetic about plants…I can’t help myself.  (These are the little purple guys in front of the tall grasses in the photo).

The second reason I came to this cake is because of one Mrs. Emily Sertz.  Last week when we attended Andrea’s baby shower, Emily loaned me a book published by the General Mills Food Corporation dated from 1973.  It’s called Cut-Up Cake Party Book, and it is fantastic!  Part of its charm is the day glow colors used in the printing (very of the time), and also that coconut was used as decoration in every recipe.  The concept of the book is cutting basic geometric shapes out of standard sized cakes, and building interesting cake sculptures such as a boat, or a lion or a the lovely daisy I made this afternoon.  

Although the book has you using coconut tinted with food coloring in conjunction with 7-Minute Frosting to decorate all the cakes, I tried to simplify it a bit and used food coloring to tint the icing to the desired colors instead of dying a bunch of shredded coconut and patting it on top of the icing (Plus it makes for a cleaner appearance without the coconut).  To make this cake, you will need a double batch of frosting.  The basic recipe comes out white, but what I did was keep the frosting in the mixing bowl and iced the petals first.  Next, I put the bowl back on the Kitchen Aid mixer and added yellow food coloring.  This frosting was for the center of the daisy.  And finally, I put the bowl back on the mixing stand once more and added blue food coloring to the yellow frosting and got a nice green color for the flower stem.  It was really very easy, but it did take some time.  It took a little over an hour to decorate the cake, but the icing is very forgiving and didn’t get too hard or become unworkable.

The other wonderful thing about this book is “user friendliness”.  Anyone can make these cakes.  There are templates for everything and most just require one or two round, square or standard rectangle cake pans.  You can also use any kind of cake you prefer.  I started with a basic “yellow” cake and changed the recipe around just a bit to get something with a little more kick.  Since you aren’t layering this cake with a flavoring or simple syrup in the middle, it’s imperative it be moist and packed with flavor…not just a bland old dry cake.  No, no, no…Taking a cue from the January citrus recipes, I added lemon zest, grapefruit zest and a wild card…freshly chopped thyme.  (Try it!)

The recipe for this cake is as follows (it makes two 9-inch round cakes):

2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans

1 1/2 cups cake flour (not self-rising)

1-tablespoon baking powder

1/2-teaspoon salt

Zest of 1 lemon

Zest of 1 grapefruit

1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme

1 3/4 cups sugar

3 large eggs

1-teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice

1-cup milk

1/4-cup sour cream

Follow this Yellow Cake recipe, but make ingredient adjustments based upon the list above.  Add the lemon juice and sour cream to your wet batter, and add the zests and thyme to your dry ingredients.

These are very refreshing and bright cakes, and to top it off, I used a lemon extract in place of vanilla in the 7-minute frosting.  The cakes held up nicely to the semi-precise cutting required and still had a delicate crumb.

Transporting this cake is the issue.  I had to build it on a full sized sheet pan, which is roughly 2 feet long.  The book suggests making it on large cardboard flats and then traveling with it inside of a box.  For me, taking a large box of cake on the train and subway to work isn’t an option.  Sadly, I had to cut off a part of the stem (which we got to eat at home) and only take the flower part of the cake into the office.  Hopefully I won’t be given too much grief for the missing stem.  I may be judged harshly since some of the folks at work are calling tomorrow the season finale of “Top Chef”…meaning my last Monday to bring in dessert treats.

I will be starting a new project at another company the middle of this week and I will be leaving my new friends behind for a while, but hopefully I will return soon…such is the nature of the freelance CG artist/baker.  We’ve eaten a lot of treats together and it’s been fun.  I was even getting requests as of last week, which made me very happy.  One of our producers (thanks Jen) asked for a Chocolate Banana Bread, and I thought it sounded quite yummy and different too.

I didn’t have a recipe for the bread on hand, so I scoured the handy-dandy internet and found someone else’s baking blog featuring a delicious version of the bread laced with cocoa, chocolate chips, ripe bananas and sour cream.  It turned out really good…and naughty.  It was pretty much like having cake for breakfast, but no one seemed to mind.  I know I didn’t.  The only thing I changed about this recipe was the addition of 1/2-tsp of salt.  I think all sweets need a little savory thrown in to bring out their sugary goodness. 

Baked goods have been a bright spot in an otherwise snowy white week.  I’m happy to say the sun was out today, and a flower cake grows in Westchester.  What more do you really need?  For me, nothing.  It’s just who I am.

Happy Chinese Valentine's Blizzard

My, my, my…what a busy week.  I never really think of February as having a lot going on other than an endless series of arctic blasts and our heating bill soaring through the roof.  Happily, this week proved me wrong not only with Valentine’s Day (which is today), but also with the celebration of the Chinese New Year, a “blizzard “and a wonderful baby shower gearing up for the arrival of Baby Jew.

Though I do admit to being slightly anti Valentine’s Day (purely from consumerist exhaustion), I definitely enjoy its color scheme.  Pink has long been one of my favorite colors.  I’m drawn to it over and over while shopping and when choosing plants to put in the garden out back.  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a “Spring” and a “Summer” according to the color analysis my Aunt Helen gave me in the 1980’s, or if it’s because I was a butterfly or bee in my former life.  Regardless, I like it and pink makes me smile.

Late last week I found a website for a company in Chicago called P.O.S.H. which sells vintage glasses and dishware (as well as reproductions cast from original molds).  I was on a search for antique milk glass cake stands, and they have a lovely assortment.  The one I ended up getting was pink.  Knowing that Valentine’s Day and spring were both on the way, I wanted a new serving piece on the shelf for those softer looking, potentially pastel desserts.

In honor of Valentine’s Day I decided to make Raspberry Almond Financiers.  These almond cake, bite size desserts are somewhere in the middle of a semi-sweet muffin or cake…actually a tea cake might be a nice description.  The point being that they are not overpowering.  What I like about financiers is they are petit fours, and meant to be eaten in a bite or two…simply and without guilt, almost like it never was there.  I’ve made them once before when I was in pastry class, but haven’t since because I didn’t have the proper pan.  This recipe calls for using two nonstick mini-muffin pans (of which I had one on hand), and is something I think most people might have around the house.  I will say that you should have both pans if you are going to make this recipe because the batter sets up very quickly due to the honey it contains.

Raspberry puree makes these little bites very pretty.  I did break my own rule and go out of season on this one. The puree is easy to make, you just take a couple of pints of raspberries, throw them in the food processor, puree and pass the mixture through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.  I also added just a little sugar to them because they were a little on the sour side.  Sorry California, but your winter raspberries don’t compete with our glorious summer berries.

This recipe has leanings toward the complex side.  Normally I make things that are full of simple steps, which lead up to something seemingly complicated, but this one is a bit of a pain to get the hearts looking correct.  A few dirty pans are involved because you need your food processor to make both the puree and grind up the toasted almonds. The pan used for almond toasting can also be used to make the browned honey butter the recipe calls for. 

The complexity comes in once you have filled your muffin cups with batter and start adding the raspberry puree.  Using a 1/2-teaspoon, dollop the puree onto one side of the almond batter and then use a toothpick or wooden skewer to “drag” it through the batter in a “V” shape.  I found this to be somewhat challenging to get right, and it makes more sense to drop two little dollops of puree onto each side of the muffin cup (forming the tops of the hearts) and drag the toothpick down and toward the center (forming the base of the heart).  Whatever way you choose, just prepare yourself for a little more concentrated work than usual.  Also, prepare yourself for imperfection on this one.  The recipe makes about 4-dozen, and I would venture a guess that about a dozen held their shapes and looked like proper hearts.  Luckily, they taste great just the same with a buttery, almond, honey and raspberry bite filling your mouth with Valentine’s joy.

As I was making the dessert I started thinking about Valentine's Day, and realized I didn’t know anything about why we celebrate.  According to the research I did, I discovered we had another martyr in our midst.  The legends of St. Valentine, the patron saint of lovers, always seems to end with his death...how romantic.  In various tales surrounding this mysterious figure he was either put in prison for secretly wedding soldiers to their girlfriends after a Roman law was issued banning young men from marriage (I guess single men are better army recruits), or just the target of persecution for helping Christians. He was also potentially responsible for the first Valentine being sent, signing “from your Valentine” in a love letter mailed to his girlfriend from prison.  War and prison seem to have a strong presence in his history, but I don’t really see many Hallmark greeting cards with Cupid in jail on the front.

On a lighter note, a “blizzard” hit New York earlier this week.  It was a great excuse to stay home for a day (and work).  It had been such a long time since I felt the twinge of “snow day” excitement coursing through my veins.  As a kid it was an excuse to go outside and play, but as an adult in the modern age you can do your work from home just as easily as going into the office.  As I sat working away, I was happily greeted by the smell of freshly baked cookies coming from the kitchen…cookies not created by me!  Brian had taken it upon himself to whip up a batch of oatmeal cookies.  The recipe is called Andy’s Oatmeal Cookies and what I liked about them was the replacement of raisins with a small amount of coconut and a decent amount of butter.  They were rich and satisfying without being plagued by the healthiness of the raisins (I’m not a huge raisin fan in general).  It was a very sweet and wonderful surprise.  I think I should stay home and work more often.

And if things weren’t exciting enough, the shower for Baby Jew was this weekend.  Our friends Andrea and Nathan (who’ve been featured on this blog in the past) have been expecting for some time now.  They are due in about 6 weeks, which seems absolutely crazy to me.  The shower was a lot of fun.  Brian and I were the only boys allowed…but we are really just considered part of the “girlfriends” who were in attendance.   Games were played; baby bellies measured, baby foods tasted and a lot of really generous gifts were floating around the room.  Both the grandmothers to-be were present, happily glowing and ready for the baby to come.

As a parting gift, Patricia, Nathan’s mom, gave everyone red envelopes filled with coins as a token of luck and prosperity.  Her family history and spiritual practices are aligned with Asian tradition and philosophy, and the envelopes are part of this tradition.  It made sense on a family, personal level, but also coincides with this week’s Chinese New Year celebration.   The red envelopes are often given to children and, not so hilariously, unmarried and unemployed adults.  I’m going to take my envelope as a nod to luck and prosperity in the coming year of the Tiger, and forget about the unmarried jobless part.

Who says February has to be boring?  A time of waiting for spring can also be a time of productivity.  There are things to bake, movies to watch before the Oscars air, home projects to be addressed while the weather is inclement and celebrations to share in with friends and loved ones.  Tonight Brian, Izabella and I (Jonathan is unfortunately flying) will go out for dinner at The Cookery to celebrate the martyrdom of St. Valentine, eat meat and be merry.  The place is a fabulous little Italian gastro pub in Dobbs Ferry, not far from our home. 

I know I feel fortunate to have people in my life to share these activities with, as well as having a “holiday” excuse to consume a high calorie diet.  Don’t forget to give your sweetheart a hug. I know I will.  It’s just who I am.

Aging cranberries put out for the birds

Super Bowl Quickie

Here I am, just in time to rescue you from the nightmare of “what to bring to the big Super Bowl party” dilemma!  No more frantic decisions between the nachos and the wings, the Natural Light or Coors Light, or even how to cart that big pot of chili on the subway and up five flights of stairs?  No, no my friends, the respectable answer is none other than Lemon Cornmeal Cookies.  I’m saying that with the straightest face I can muster.

I’m sure you won’t find it terribly shocking that I don’t “celebrate” the whole Super Bowl thing.  Yes, I like the commercials, but unless New York is playing, I doubt my remote will switch in the general direction of the game…and maybe yours doesn’t either but you have a good friend throwing a party just the same.  The way to class it up is with these fresh, lemony cookies.

After yesterdays busy, busy day of chocolate I wasn’t sure I would have the energy to make anything today, but the sun was shining brightly and I had a quick and easy recipe I wanted to try.  This won’t come as a shock to most people, but I get recipes emailed to me everyday…primarily from Martha Stewart related sites.  I always save the one’s I like in my inbox until I get a chance to try them out.  Now, I don’t always make everything I like (otherwise I would have no life), but periodically a very easy recipe comes along which seems a crime not to try.  This is the nature of today’s recipe. 

This cornmeal drop cookie is as easy as the recipe suggests and it took me no more than 25 minutes to heat the oven, mix the dough and get those babies going in the oven (I admit to cheating with getting the butter to room temperature.  I microwaved it for about 30 seconds…the French would not approve).  As has become my recent habit, I tampered slightly with the recipe.  In this case I added a couple of ingredients rather than making large adjustments.  Make the recipe as indicated, but when you are mixing the dry ingredients:  add the zest of one lemon.  When mixing the wet ingredients:  add a tablespoon of lemon juice.  And after you scoop the dough onto the baking sheet:  top with some colored sanding sugar…in this case I used a nice, sparkly yellow.  Additionally, using different citrus fruits in the same way would yield excellent results.

You still have time to get these in and out of the oven before the big game starts.  They taste like a lemon bar in cookie form, and what could be bad about that.  Show up on your friend’s or neighbor’s doorstep with a plate of these and you will be the belle of the ball…or the quarterback hero…or some other fitting term which denotes a glorious person in high standing.  These cookies are really fast and really delicious and beat the heck out of hot wings in my opinion.

I realized that though I spent yesterday enrobing items in chocolate, it’s still no substitute for making something from scratch with my own hands.  It’s just who I am.

T.A.T

My friend Nicholas and I just finished our Chocolate Truffles and Treats course at the French Culinary Institute, and I’ve got to say we were a lot like Lucy and Ethel in that long ago episode set in the chocolate factory.  Though the class was largely lecture, by the time we got around to actually making truffles and rochets we were a total train wreck. 

The class started out innocently enough with us learning about the origins of chocolate, the best zones for growing it as well as the way that chocolate goes from being a giant seed pod on a tree, through fermentation, drying, roasting and ends up in it’s wonderful parts of cocoa butter and chocolate liquor.  It seems a very similar process to the way coffee comes into being, and I found it very interesting.  In fact, the production lesson reminded me quite a bit of when Brian and I went to Hershey, Pennsylvania a couple of years back and took the “Chocolate Ride” at Chocolate World…a rollercoaster adventure through the life of a cocoa bean.  Of course this class wasn’t so much like a ride, but the information was still quite good.

After the initial introduction into our friend the cocoa nib (the nugget of gold that’s left after the pod is processed), the instructor, Chef Thomas took us through the lengthy, and I mean lengthy way that one tempers chocolate.  I vaguely remembered going through this when I took my pastry course a couple of years ago and I had the same response to it today as I did then. The answer:  “no thank you”. 

I may be a patient person, quite patient in fact, but tempering chocolate is a very, very specific thing.  It’s all about staying within specific temperature ranges to form beta crystals that ultimately allow you to coat items such as nuts, fruits or other chocolate and get the beautiful perfect seal of chocolate-y goodness.  Temperature, Agitation and Time…T.A.T. as Nick was calling it, is the key to unlocking the secrets of tempered chocolate.  The first two I can do, but the Time part takes a special kind of person.

I think it’s wonderful to be given a gorgeous piece of perfect looking, perfectly tempered chocolate candy, but I am just not the man to do it.  Tempering for me falls into the same sort of tedious realm as programming or writing scripts for the computer…when more science than art begins to take over I have a tendency to mentally check out.

Luckily for me I had my friend Nicholas to keep me entertained.  It’s something he is very good at, and he makes a wonderful companion for really any occasion.  In a sense, he’s like the perfect bag to match your outfit.  Anyway, we didn’t do any tempering of our own today, we just watched the chef take us through the process and then let us get our hands dirty with the chocolate he had melted.

There is a large machine at the school chefs use to melt and keep chocolate at a specific temperature.  It was very cool looking and I kept being reminded of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.  There was a spout attached to one portion which melted chocolate kept pouring from.  Augustus Gloop would have saddled right up and put his mouth underneath to drink from it’s luscious fountain. 

Some of the chocolate was taken from the machine and “worked” on a marble countertop to cool and develop beta crystals. It was then added back to the vat ‘o chocolate machine, mixing in and slightly cooling the remaining melted chocolate.  Back and forth, heating and cooling, “working”, developing crystals on a molecular level, this process happened to get all the chocolate in the machine to exactly 89 degrees, perfectly tempered, so we could use it for our candies.  

The first thing we made was quite lovely.  It was a chocolate bowl we created with a balloon.  You dip the balloon in the bowl of tempered chocolate several times over the course of 5-7 minutes, letting each coating start to dry and lose it’s sheen before dipping once more.  Afterwards, the balloons were placed in the refrigerator to chill and set-up.  At the end of the class we popped the balloons and were left with little bowls to fill up with candies.

Over the course of the 4 hour class we made chocolate and orange flavored truffles, but the chef also prepared slivered almonds in a simple syrup (sugar and water cooked down), tossing and cooking them in the sugar until they took on a golden hue and the sugar made a crunchy coating on the outside of the nuts.  The almonds were then mixed with candied orange peel and then tossed in the tempered chocolate.  We pulled them out and made small mounds or “rocks” called rochets.  Additionally, we used whole almonds in a similar fashion and tossed them in regular confectioner's sugar in the end.

Nick and I really got into the production, getting chocolate all over the place and trying to go as fast as we could to get as many rochets done in the time we had.  Suddenly it seemed like we were in some sort of speed competition with the clock and everyone else in the room just trying to make as many as we could as fast as we could… as well as make them the best because that’s just the kind of guys we are.    Our chocolate kept cooling and we would get help from the chef’s assistants around the room to get it back to the right temperature…we mixed too much chocolate into the nuts and then had to hunt down more nuts to balance out the chocolate, and by the time we were done we had enough candies for a dinner party.   Plus, we were forced to eat one or two or ten or twelve pieces along the way, and fortunately for both of us we really hadn’t eaten all day so by the time we were done gorging ourselves we were nearly ill.  I know I shouldn’t spill such secrets, but we were kind of pigs.  Lucy and Ethel would have appreciated it.

Coincidentally, (though this may seem a side tangent), Jaques Torres is one of the bigwigs at the French Culinary Institute (where we were today), and is famous around the world for his chocolates.  Apparently he was the one who found the Willy Wonka chocolate spout machine while on a trip to Belgium.  Many of his other chocolate making machines and wonders can be seen at his store located at 350 Hudson St. at King St.. which is close to where I’m currently working.  Yesterday, as our “High Calorie Friday” treat (as my friend Jack and I like to call it) we went to the Jaques Torres store to get some pieces of chocolate and a mocha as a pick me up from the long week.  Jack and I had seen Chef Torres there once before and he even spoke to me briefly as I fluttered about star struck.  Yesterday, we saw him once more, but this time none other than Anthony Bourdain was interviewing Chef Torres for his show “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel. 

Well, I nearly lost my @#$#@#$t!!!  I love Anthony Bourdain, more than even my love for Jaques Torres.  He is the original “bad boy” of the kitchen world and wrote a fantastic book called Kitchen Confidential I absolutely loved.  It’s all about the seedy underbelly of the restaurant world and was also one of the first tomes to denounce celebrity chefdom…he really hates on Emeril quite a bit.  Anthony laughs somewhat about his book now because of the celebrity status he achieved in his own right, but he is such a hilarious guy and I love his show.  I couldn’t believe I got to see him in person.  God, I love New York.

Such a busy, busy week of chocolate it ended up being from not only my class but Jaques, Anthony and a naughty chocolate buttercream I made Wednesday night to accompany Randy’s cake for her niece Elizabeth’s birthday.  Valentine’s Day is only a week away, and I’m not sure how much more chocolate I can take.  I’m sensing a diabetic coma lurking around the corner, waiting to grab me by the ankles and pull me under into the dark.  I need to go home and just sit at a salt lick for a bit to refresh my palette.  Unfortunately I know me, and what will ultimately happen is the opening of my chocolate bowl of truffles, one whiff beckoning me to have another piece, just one more teeny tiny little piece because they are so damn good.  And will I give in?  Yes.  It’s just who I am.

The frozen Hudson River near the Tappan Zee Bridge