Dessert By Candy

Michel Rostang's Double Chocolate Mousse Cake

The ubiquitous flourless chocolate cake never interest me, either to eat or to make. At first glance, this double chocolate mousse cake from Around My French Table may seem like another one of those. However, there is something rather unusual about it. If you take the time to read through the numerous variations on the recipe, you'll notice that Greenspan highly recommended baking this chocolate mousse cake in two stages to create two different layers of consistency. Now that's something to pique my interest.

A simple chocolate mousse enriched with butter and egg yolks and lightened with whipped egg whites forms the backbone of this cake. A portion of the mousse went through a first stage of baking, then chilled and topped with more mousse for another round in the oven. Like a souffle, the mousse rose in the oven to good height and subsequently collapsed during another overnight chilling. Since the bottom layer went through two stages of baking, it is more dense and fudgy to contrast with the light, airy, and delicate top layer. What a delightful study in texture!

Double 'Pommes' Salad

I love getting vegetable from my CSA Kawartha Ecological Growers. However, as most subscribers of CSA can attest, you often get vegetables that you otherwise may not put in your shopping basket at a grocery store. For me, that would be potatoes. Don't be mistaken, I love potatoes. However, since it's so filling and starchy with a high glycemic index, I don't typically include it in my diet. Potatoes are undeniably a standard in North American cuisine so it's entirely understandable why they make frequent appearances in my share including heirloom varieties of such pretty colour.

Our first winter share this season included over three pounds of Red Chieftain, an excellent boiling potato. I used a couple for the Ten Vegetable Stew but that still left me with two and a half pounds. Potato salad would easily use up the whole bag before more potatoes come my way this week. I made a few different potato salads in the last year and know how delicious this simple preparation can be. Classic potato salad made with mayonnaise is rich and fattening, precisely not what I have in mind recently. Enter the America's Test Kitchen! Their Amish Potato Salad interested me because the dressing is made with cider vinegar, hardboiled egg yolk, sour cream, sugar, mustard, and celery seeds. Just reading the list of ingredient already promises a luscious dressing without the heaviness of mayonnaise! I'm a bit picky about sour cream though. All too often, they are laced with additives and stablizers for longer shelf life. Whatever happen to plain and simple cultured sour cream?! Luckily, in my neck of the woods, natural sour cream can still be found without a wild goose chase. My preferred choice is Western Creamery's full fat sour cream.

Scone Perfection

If I have to rank my favourite baked goods, scones would be right up the top of my list vying for attention along side toasty walnut sourdough bread, pillowy biscuits, and buttery brioche. Luckily, I don't really have to choose. A well-made scone is a beautiful thing with its buttery flavour and tender crumb. Like many objects of beauty, the perfect window of enjoyment is fleetingly narrow. A scone is best enjoyed moments after it emerges from the oven. A stale scone is a sad sight indeed.

It's unfortunate that most coffee shops are littered with inferior scones that are dry as sawdust and tough as doorstop. If you've never encountered a fresh scone before, I can imagine why it's difficult to be enthusiastic about this unassuming pastry especially if it is not gussied up with chocolate, fruit, nuts, cheese, or herbs (not that I haven't done so in the past). Personally, I prefer the more classic unadorned version or simply strewn with a handful of currants. When pair with clotted cream, marmalade, and a steaming cup of tea, it can brighten up any dreary afternoon even if it's cold and dark outside. It's no wonder this is the quintessential British ritual.

Scones ought to be easy to make and most of the recipes are indeed so. It is nothing fancy after all. A typical recipe would likely call for butter rub into the mix of flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt before gently tossed with cream to form a dough. Pat it into a thick disk before cutting to individual pieces for baking. A gentle touch is key to tender crumb and the less you handle the dough the better. I have no doubt this method yields a delicious scone as I've made plenty myself. What you don't get is a scone that rises uniformly. You may end up with something lopsided or a bulge here and there.

Oatmeal Peanut Butter Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting

There are days when I just want to bake a really delicious cake without worrying too much about making it look glamourous. Like yesterday, for example. I want something with familiar flavours, something rustic, something rich that makes you close your eyes and go "mmm" with every bite. Of course, I want to satisfy my curiosity too by stepping outside of the realm of butter cake and quickbread. I was intrigued by the Oatmeal Chocolate Chips Cake in BAKED Explorations.

The boys at BAKED promised a cake reminiscent of an oatmeal chocolate chips cookie. Oatmeal often finds its way to cookies but it's much more rare in cakes. I think it has to do with how much water it absorbs. Cake batter is typically very moist and I can imagine oatmeal wrecking havoc on the balance. This recipe stirs my interest because you begin by soaking oatmeal in hot water and butter before incorporating the porridge into cake batter. The oats retain all of its nutty flavour but only a hint of chew so the cake remains tender.

When I rummaged through my pantry, I found every type of chips except for dark chocolate chips. Since the chocolate chips act only as flavour accent in the original recipe, I decided to substitute them with my last bag of Reese's Mini Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups for baking. I bought them at Hershey's Chocolate World in Pennsylvania and they've been discontinued since. Each piece is the size of my pinky fingernail but a perfect miniature of the classic candy. Now, I would imagine if you use half milk chocolate chips and half peanut butter chips, you can achieve comparable results. These baking pieces inspired me to top the cake with a cream cheese peanut butter frosting and roasted salted peanuts.

Vegan, The America's Test Kitchen Way!

I'm often often amused how America's Test Kitchen really appeals to my guy friends, a close second to Alton Brown's Good Eats. I think it must be the precision and the relentless pursue of perfection. I personally don't watch the show but every time I read the headnotes of their recipes, I am impressed by the thought process of which the author arrived at their final version of recipe. There are in fact plenty of parallels I can observe with the way we are taught in school for solving math, computer, and engineering problems. Their attention to detail is evident in the articulate directions that are useful to both novice and seasoned cooks alike.

On the other end of the spectrum, food blogs and reader submitted recipes are readily available all over the internet. As a home cook, how to tell the gems from the duds? I really wish I have a foolproof way to discern it myself. It really comes down to the reader's own cooking experience. Regardless of the quality of the dish itself, the art of recipe writing cannot be under estimated. I cannot tell you how many times I come across promising recipes that I never cook from due to inaccurate ingredients and ambiguous directions. I recently read a discussion on Serious Eats on recipe pet peeves. There are lots of practical tips on pitfalls to avoid. However, recipe is more than simply a set of steps. That is only the minimum requirement. Writers who infuse their recipes with charm, wittiness, and annecdotes that we can relate are the writings I return to again and again. That is the very reason why I don't cook too often from ATK's tried and true formulae.

Battle Doughnut Round 2: Farm Stand Buttermilk Doughnuts

It's good to return to BAKED Sunday Mornings! This week we're making Farm Stand Buttermilk Doughnut, a classic cake doughnut leavened with baking powder, baking soda, and buttermilk. Or in my case, round 2 of Battle Of The Doughnut (check out round 1's double ginger yeast doughnuts)!

I know there are plenty of fans out there for yeast doughnuts but I must admit that I much prefer cake doughnuts. The texture of deep fried cake is really appealing to me. As a novice to deep frying, I approached this recipe with trepidation. I had visions of splattering hot oil and lingering smell of burnt grease. To much of my surprise, deep frying was easy. As long as the oil remained at the specified temperature range, there was no smoke nor splatter. Why did I wait so long before attempting to deep fry? Just think of all those years of missed calories!

Since I made both yeast and cake doughnuts at the same time, it was rather interesting to observe how different they behaved. For the yeast doughnuts, all the leavening happened before the dough hit the hot oil. The fermented and shaped dough were light and delicate. As for the buttermilk doughnuts, as soon as it dipped into the oil, the transformation was dramatic. The dough sunk briefly to the bottom of the pot before rising lazily to the top all puffed up. It turned from 2D to 3D!

Pumpkin Cinnamon Roll with Maple Coffee Glaze

A no-knead soft dough enriched with milk, butter, sugar, and pumpkin puree. Rich buttery brown sugar pumpkin spice filling studded with toasted pecans. Sweet glaze seeped in every nooks and crannies perfumed with hints of maple and coffee. How can cinnamon rolls like this be anything but spectacular?

I was late to the whole no-knead bread party and only wish I tried it sooner. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the dough came together, requiring no more elbow grease than any simple one-bowl cake batter. The orange hue from copious amount of pumpkin puree was just so lovely.

I had these Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls both fresh out of the oven and re-warmed a few hours later. Have I not had the opportunity to taste the freshly made version, I would still highly recommend them. However, if you're lucky enough to experience it minutes out of the oven, you're in for an unforgettable experience. B was lucky enough to taste these cinnamon rolls after watching me fuss over them all afternoon. Typically, when your long-distance boyfriend make an eight hour drive just to spend a weekend with you, there are better things to do than to sit in front of a glass mixing bowl watching dough rise. It ranks only slightly better than watching paint dry. The fact that he hasn't stop reminiscing about these cinnamon rolls since is probably the best testimonial I can convey.

Savory Cheese & Chive Bread

This ought to have been my weekly submission for French Fridays With Dorie. Instead, I'm writing about another recipe I baked from Greenspan's Around My French Table. This week the group is making Gnocchi a la Parisienne, basically boiled nibblets of pate a choux finished in a mornay sauce. It would certainly be a fun dish to cook given my recent success with béchamel. Quite simply put, I cannot handle the consumption of this fats and carbs extravaganza. My racing season will begin in earnest by end of March and weight control weighs heavily on my mind. One may think that's a bit of hypocrisy since I churn out baked goods like it's nobody's business. The main difference here is the ability to share the calories. I can easily bring the baked goods to the office for the enjoyment of my coworkers. A casserole of pasta? Not so much.  In keeping with the spirits of French Fridays, I decided to make the Savory Cheese & Chive Bread.

This cake salé falls under the quickbread family so it was a cinch to make. The recipe suggests flavouring with a combination of cheese, chives, and toasted walnuts but it's really a springboard for all kinds of different add-ins. Changing things up with the choice of cheese, herbs, and nuts or boldening the flavour with shallots, olives, sundried tomatoes, dried fruit, cured meat...the possibilities are endless. Call me boring but I stayed with recipe's original suggestion using grated parmigiano reggiano, diced gruyere, diced aged cheddar, minced chives, and toasted walnuts. With my recent interest in whole grain flours and bread baking, I was far more curious to tweak the basic batter of this recipe.

Battle Doughnut Round 1: Double Ginger Doughnuts

There's something scary about a vat of hot oil bubbling away on the stove top. I'm also not a fan of having my house smell like a greasy fastfood joint. Both of these are strong arguments of why I never attempted deep frying until today.

The recipe for the upcoming BAKED Sunday Mornings is Farm Stand Buttermilk Doughnuts. I already passed on the last two for one reason or another so I'm itching to get back despite my reluctance to deep fry. In my ongoing quest for optimization, obviously I have to make the most out of this occasion. Making yeast doughnuts for a side by side comparison with those buttermilk cake doughnuts seems logical enough.

If you follow my blog, you probably already noticed that I've been cooking and baking many of Melissa Clark's recipes lately. It's no coincidence. I really admire her writing style and I've been devouring In The Kitchen With A Good Appetite like a novel. Her recipe for Double Ginger Doughnuts is just what I'm looking for as the yeast candidate in this Battle of the Doughnuts.

I like the use of freshly grated and ground ginger in the dough. The dough itself is barely sweetened with only 2 tablespoons of sugar. The sweetness comes from the ginger sugar coating which I enjoyed so much in stollen. I have my feet firmly planted in the cake doughnut camp myself mainly because all my prefer flavours are only available in cake doughnut at the local doughnut shops. When I took a bite of these ginger doughnuts minutes out of the fryer, I finally understood why people would use the word ethereal. They are so light and airy with a thin crunchy outside. It's really like biting into a little sweet yeasty pillow. For a first timer, I think my deep frying skill was decent due to obsessive control over the oil temperature. None of the doughnuts turned out greasy at all (that would be a sign of oil being too cold).

I mostly followed the recipe as written except for a minor glitch. My trusty standmixer has never been good with yeast doughs and did not get along with this firmer dough. I decided to knead it by hand which was in fact a lot of fun. The dough did not stick to my hands nor my rollpat even without dusting of flour. Sure, it was messy when I tried to work in the beurre noisette (another change I made) by the spoonful but it all worked out in the end. The recipe called for shaping the dough into logs though I made them into twists because they look more aesthetically pleasing. The shaped and fermented dough stuck just a bit to the wax paper lining but it was no big deal to pry them carefully before dropping into the fryer.

My deep frying set up is pretty simple. I bought a litre of Lion & Globe Peanut Oil (that's the peanut oil I grew up with, absolutely delicious peanut aroma) from my local asian grocer. I originally wanted to use my Le Creuset 5qt dutch oven but upon some measuring, its wide base requires a lot more than a litre of oil to be deep enough for frying. Instead, I used a 2qt heavy bottom stainless steel saucepan. It is wide enough to fry three doughnuts at the same time. Digital thermometer played a key role to help me control the oil temperature, especially in between batches. A pair of tongs easily accomplished the task of flipping and fishing out the cooked doughnuts. As for the dreaded greasy smell? I closed all the room doors, opened a crack in the patio sliding door (it was -10C outside so not the smartest idea), and kept the exhaust fan on full blast for the entire duration. You would not mistake my house for a greasy spoon.

At long last, I conquered my fear of (deep) frying. Come back this Sunday for round 2 of Battle Doughnut!

A Risk That Did Not Pay

As long as I cook and bake often enough, it's inevitable to occasionally produce dishes that are less than stellar. I've enjoyed a pretty good streak but it all came to a halt when I neglected an important rule of baking: don't improvise on a recipe until I try it once as written. With all the praise on Good To The Grain, I've been curious about this cookbook and baking with whole grain flours. That Figgy Buckwheat Scone recipe posted on 101 cookbooks sure looks amazing! I decided to give it a try.

Despite the scone being a simple short dough recipe, it was already late when I started baking. It would certainly be great to make the red wine and port poached fig butter for the filling but I was short on ingredient and on time. I decided to replace the filling with a compound butter made with orange rhubarb marmalade, keeping the ratio of compote to butter (3:1) as the original recipe. My jar of marmalade looked a bit thin and I had my doubts but I went ahead with it anyway. The bright tart flavour of orange and rhubarb was so enticing I just couldn't help myself.

I took great care in shaping the wet sticky dough and was chuffed how well I managed. Unfortunately, the second I took the scones out of the oven, my ego deflated like a leaky balloon. Instead of little round spiral rolls, I had a tray of flat bumpy cookie! The only two survivors that remotely resembled Heidi's photo were the two end pieces (as seen in the first photo). It's time to analysis.

The fact that the two end pieces stood tall is proof that the dough itself works just fine. Most likely, they survived because there was less filing compared to other pieces. That means the extra moisture in the filling is the culprit. I image that the poached figs compote is much sweeter too and it would caramelize quickly in the oven. Instead of caramelizing and firming up during baking, my rhubarb butter simply broke down the dough instead.

I picked the ugliest one of the bunch and took a bite. Then another. Until I was left with just a few crumbs on my finger tips. This thing tastes great! The nuttiness of buckwheat and the tartness of rhubarb all packed into a tender crumbly scone. I regret not following the original recipe as I think about what this scone could have been (like, pretty). I will definitely attempt this recipe again exactly as written and I'm confident it will be picture perfect next time.