Cupcakes!

I generally hate cupcakes. They're sugar bombs, lacking flavor or interest. Not enough chocolate. Not enough flavor. Shallow.

So of course I was assigned as Cupcake Chef in advanced baking. My task: invent a cupcake that I would love madly, passionately, without reservation.

Mission impossible? Perhaps. Cupcakes can't be savory, or they'd be muffins. So no hot wing bacon fat pork bombs. Not sweet. No duck fat cracklins, either.

If we can't do savory, how about alcoholic? I've never seen a rum baba cupcake before... is this allowed? Yes, if you boil down the rum.

So, away we went. A yeasted dough to accept a rum-sugar syrup. Rum-raisin buttercream (Swiss, for more fat). A tuille cup that you can pour flaming rum into once you've taken the cupcake home (!).

Was it worth it? Yes. Not especially sweet, but enough to qualify as a cupcake. As a plated dessert, impressive. Flaming rum descends wrapped in blue flames into the cup, from where it sinks slowly into the cake, impregnating it with enough rum to make this something you can't eat before driving. The raisins add a note of complexity and sweetness, and the tuille brings its own brief chocolate note to the concerto.

Were these something that the general public would go gaga over? I don't know. Maybe a bit extreme with the rum. Maybe nobody wants to get carded just to buy a cupcake. I don't care. They're my cupcakes and I like them the way they are.

Black swans

I made these almost a year ago, as an experiment. We had to invent a pâte à choux variation, or maybe it was just a dessert formula... I forgot. It's not important, though. I do remember thinking, "but what if this doesn't work?".

So, chocolate pâte à choux, chocolate pastry cream, and there they are - a fancy version of éclairs. They look good swimming across a blue plate.

Pipe some pâte à choux into "S" shapes, pipe some more with a star tip, just like a normal éclair. Slice in half horizontally, then slice the top piece vertically to make the wings. Pipe in some chocolate pastry cream, place the head and neck (the "S" curve) and press the wings into the pastry cream.

Voilá! Black swans. Maybe if I were a virtuoso pastry bag artiste, I could have somehow given the bird a beak. There has to be a way! Maybe with a mold and some tempered chocolate... but then might as well cast the bird in two pieces and assemble - chocolate would hold really fine detail, right down to feathers.

Now I'm wondering... what about making white swans with meringue, then alternating the black and white swans on a blue platter...

Baba-loooo!

My assignment: cupcakes. Forty-eight of them, all identical. This, my first task as chef for advanced baking, lands me with something I almost never eat. Cupcakes. Often sugar bombs, rarely containing enough chocolate, these things were inflicted on me as a child, to the point where I developed a real aversion to the things. So, my mission impossible is to take something I've eaten only rarely and transform it into something I will love, that people will rave about, that perhaps other cupcake agnostics such as myself will find good enough to redeem these things in their eyes.

So, I started with an idea. Not so sweet. It can't be savory because then it falls into the black hole of biscuitry, never to escape. But what if it were more European than American. Based on something un-cupcake like. Baba au rhum, for example.

Baba au rhum, first of all, is yeasted. That makes it similar to kugelhopf or any other rich bread. More in my territory that sweet cakes. Then the cooked bread gets dosed with rum syrup. If we were in Europe instead of a community college still firmly under the yoke of prohibition, it would get a final dousing of pure rum.  So, a bit of raisin frosting, a cup to hold some form of liquid, probably rum syrup that's been simmered to evaporate its alcohol. Of course, if some of these things did manage to escape the bounds of ARC, someone could conceivably heat a bit of rum, flame it, pour it in the cup, blow out the flame, drink, then devour the rum-soaked cake. Sounds good to me.

The firs' thing to do was test the recipe. Then put abitta rum in there. Taste. Needa bit more. Not sweet enuf. Make rum syrup. Too sweet. Slosh a bitta rum on. Yeah, that's tasty. Wait til the real thing is made with the raisin frosting and cup thing. For now, not a bad thing at all. Adultz only cuz thazalotta rum. Juzza itty bitty cakcup s'all I ate. S'all offizer, I dina drink a drop!

I think overall the dough formula works. With the sweeter frosting and syrup, this will take cupcakes into new territory. Not just for kids any more, silly rabbit!

Branzino dinner

Amazingly, one of our local supermarkets had fresh, reasonably priced branzino. Better yet, this is a farmed, sustainable fish - called striped bass in English. For some reason, the Italian name for the fish passed over the French and English versions.

By encasing the fish in a salt-egg white crust, you can bake it without the worry of pulling fish jerky out of the oven 30 minutes later. All the fish's moisture will be sealed in. The crust is a mix of egg whites and Kosher salt: 3-1/2 salt to one egg white by weight if you're someplace humid, 3-1/4 salt to one egg white if you're somewhere dry. I start by weighing the egg white in grams, then multiply to find how much salt I need. Don't worry about saltiness - you're using the whole fish, skin on. The skin will keep the flesh and salt separate. Stick some fresh thyme and bay leaf into the cavity of the cleaned fish, place it on a bed of Kosher salt, make the crust with some more Kosher salt, place it in a 375° convection oven for half an hour, peel off the salt (the skin will come off, too), fillet the fish and serve. Simple!

The velouté sauce is a bit less simple: blond roux, mushroom stock, some vermouth, some salt, some Pastis, some fresh thyme and bay leaf, strained.

The Israeli couscous is also simple - sauté some garlic in oil, toss in the couscous, stir it a bit, add mushroom stock until it's absorbed and you're ready to go.

The persimmon mousse needs some work - it was good, but it needed more persimmon, less cream, and more gelatin. The sugar content was about right - not too much but enough to avoid going too acidic. Luckily, our neighbor gave us a lot of persimmons so I can experiment.

Pies: One required. One fun.

I had to bake a pie for Thanksgiving, as part of a class. A complicated cake wasn't enough; there had to be a pie, too. So, I made my favorite French pie: Tarte Tatin. Then I made the required Good Old American Apple Pie (also a favorite).

So here they are, with a posting date before class. Just in case someone says that I missed another deadline. They're often rather vague and confusing. Late work isn't worth sweetened condensed armadillo spit, so it's best to turn in something crappy on time than something well done a bit later.

I also made a banana/ginger hand pie. But that's really outside the scope of this class.

J'en ai marre! La plupart des gâteaux faits dans ma classe contiennent des noix, des noisettes, des saloperies d'allergènes divers... et je ne peux pas les manger après avoir passé un temps fou à les préparer!

Crostadas

Before baking, looking like a bad attempt at an ogre's purse

After cooking, looking much more edible

Note the lower crust: cooked!

I've now started my dreaded baking class. This is the one where we make cakes, supposedly. Although right now we're deep in pie country. This is good, since pies are much more familiar, if not easier to make.

Our first assignment: the Crostada. These are to pies as slugs are to snails. No shell. No tin to provide support and structure. So these things will change shape as they bake, flattening as the apples inside liquefy. They're rustic so that's all right. It's also fine that you can't roll out a perfectly round crust to save the Earth from invading monsters from Planet 67. A rustic crust in this instance is a happy crust.

A crostada is a pie crust folded up like an ogre's purse over a fruit filling, brushed with egg wash and topped with streusel (not streudel. I don't know why they couldn't invent more dissimilar words. Must be another diabolical method to torture culinary students).

The crostada in the photos wasn't made in class. Although we used a fancy deck oven at school, the bottom crust was half raw. Uncooked flour is not what I want to taste in my dessert, so I decided to play with the thing at home.

This crostada went on a baking sheet on top of a pizza stone, with nothing to insulate it from the stone's heat. This did the trick, along with a bit longer cooking time. The lower crust was acceptably done, without the raw flour flavor.

The great thing about crostadas is that they can be any size, and someone less than skilled at rolling out perfectly circular dough can take shelter under the term "rustic".  It's rustic, not circular! It's planned that way! All is well. Eat!

Apple-Lime soufflé

My sanitation and safety class tends to finish early. Most people leave, but they're missing out. The instructor brings DVDs featuring French chefs and has been playing them after class. For some reason, I'm the only one fanatic enough to watch, but why not? I'm still getting out earlier than the class' scheduled end time, and I'm getting lots of ideas. The whole idea of this program is to become an almost-chef, so why does it matter if I learn cooking techniques in a non-cooking class?

The last video featured Michel Guérard, whose recipes were then given to a housewife, a grandmother, a macho type and two children to replicate. Granted, this was a French housewife, grandmother, French macho type and two French children. So maybe their palates were a bit more educated than you'd find here. Or not. The housewife seemed like someone whose habitual cooking tool is a microwave. The grandmother, on the other hand, seemed like an excellent cook although she couldn't quite get a handle on what M. Guérard was doing with his foie gras recipe. The macho guy grilled some chicken - airline breasts, a strange choice for a macho guy, but as long as he's messing with fire and smoke not altogether inappropriate. The housewife did some kind of fish, if I remember right. It wasn't a raging success. The kids got something interesting: apple-lime soufflé.

The soufflé had an ingredient that I doubt I could find here: Lait Gloria. This is apparently evaporated milk that comes in cans in France. M. Guérard discovered that it can be whipped and added to soufflés, where it adds another level of flavor and richness. His process was to cook down some apples, pass them through a tamis (strainer), mix the result with some lime juice, lime zest, egg yolk and fold it into a mix of whipped Lait Gloria and the more standard egg whites beaten to stiff peaks. Then pour the result into some ramekins, bake it off and enjoy.

After making crepe batter, I had a lot of extra egg whites. There was a lime sitting on the table, and some apples. Voila! Everything I needed to try that soufflé less the Lait Gloria that I'd have to do without.

Apple-lime soufflé
Ingredients

• 4 egg whites
• 2 egg yolks (use the other yolks for Hollandaise, aioli, whatever)
• 2-3 apples, cut into cubes and cooked down
• 1 lime,  juice and zest
• sugar
• Calvados (apple brandy)

Process

1. Preheat oven to 425° F.
2. Grease four smallish ramekins, set aside.
3. Cook down the apples with some sugar and Calvados. I added the Calvados because something had to step in for the missing Lait Gloria.
4. When the apples have cooked down, uncover the pot and let them cool.
5. Squeeze the lime and plane its zest into a bowl with a bit of sugar.
6. When the apples have cooled, add them into the lime juice, then add the egg yolks and whisk all this stuff together vigorously.
7. Beat the egg whites and a bit of sugar to stiff peaks.
8. Fold the apple-yolk mixture into the egg whites, and immediately transfer the fluffy stuff into the ramekins, then zip everything into the oven. If you're smooth, you can put the ramekins on a cooking pan. If you're not, they'll slide off and break on the floor. The cooking pan makes it easier to zip everything in and out of the oven, but if it's just going to end as a heap on the floor, it's not a crime to quickly put the ramekins in the oven individually.
9. The soufflés should be done in 12-14 minutes. Check through the door - if you open it, they'll fall faster than the stock market after Bernanke's latest bad news. When done, they'll look dry, they'll hopefully have risen, and they'll be starting to brown on top. 

As soon as you remove them from the oven, soufflés fall. That's just the nature of the beasts. If you stop for photos, they'll pretty much have fallen all the way before you attack.

The result of mixing the lime and apple is that the soufflé has a crisp, green apple taste. The limes aren't even apparent - they just seem to intensify the apple flavor. I didn't add a lot of sugar, so without the richness of the Lait Gloria the soufflé felt a bit thin. Like a low calorie version. Still, it was a more refreshing version of the dish than usual. This is probably something that will need some more experimentation before it's ready for prime time, but with a bit of work could be made into a great light dessert for an autumn meal.

The rare and elusive Beckyjo pie, captured

These pies go fast. They're not easy to spot, sitting at or above eye level on top of the deli case at Corti Brothers Market. This pie was Blackberry Pluot, a mouth-pleasing mix of tart and sweet with the emphasis on tart, overlaid with a buttery note for richness.

When I arrived after noon on a Saturday, only two pies remained. Naturally when I left only a lone pie sat waiting (probably not for long). These things are selling like hotcakes, even though they're neither hot nor cakes. They're hand pies, and come in sweet and savory variations with an emphasis on the sweet (at this time). You can read more about them here.

Bad weather. Good cookies.

What do you do when it's June, but temperatures are running twenty degrees below normal and it's pouring rain, you're confined to indoors and there's no outdoor dining in sight for the next few days? Make cookies, of course!

These use a positively decadent amount of chocolate chips. They melt, they ooze, they stick to your fingers and have to be licked off. You will eat too many warm cookies and ruin your appetite, then eat too many again for dessert. You'll add some more to go with your coffee. In the process, you'll forget about the weather and sit back with a smile on your face and stretch marks on your belly.

Put them out and watch friends eat a normal amount, then sidle up to the cookie plate and slyly pluck another cookie as clandestinely as they can. Then another. Then they'll try some kind of sleight of hand, making the cookies disappear without appearing to move. Eventually, you'll catch them at it and they'll reward you with a classic grin and a half shrug, probably the same thing they did as children when caught in the same act.

So, here's the magic formula. It transforms skinny people into round people, makes them forget about the rain, and gives grown adults an excuse to lick their fingers. It's adapted from a cookbook recipe, now evolved so far that it doesn't have a lot in common with its origin. This formula uses a food processor, since I don't have a fancy stand mixer with all the attachments. You can also make it in a mixer with a paddle attachment, being careful not to overmix.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
Food processor method, metal blade

yield: about four pounds of cookie dough. The quantity of cookies is up to you - some like small cookies; use a teaspoon to portion and round the dough by hand for 2"-3" cookies. Use an ice cream scoop for 4" cookies. I like the small cookies since I can eat more of them.

If you have a decent scale that weighs in tenths of ounces, you can put this all together in a food processor bowl, pulsing to mix ingredients as you go and zeroing out as you add ingredients. Less washing up this way. Don't use the food processor to mix the chocolate chips since it will grind them up - dump the dough into a bowl and mix them in by hand.

Ingredients

• 1 lb 1 oz (4 cups)    All purpose flour
• 0.25 oz    (1 1/2 tsp)    baking soda
• 1/2 tsp    kosher salt
• 8 oz        unsalted butter, cut into 1 oz. pieces (2 sticks)
• 10 oz (2 cups tightly packed) dark brown sugar
• 5 oz granulated sugar (or use all dark brown sugar)
• 2.25 oz (2) large eggs
• 1 oz (2 Tbsp) dark rum
• 1 tsp Vanilla extract
• 24 oz dark or extra dark or mixed chocolate chips (two packs is 23 oz - good enough)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 300° F.
2. In food processor bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt, sugar. Mix using metal blade.
3. Add room temperature butter to the food processor bowl and mix.
4. Add the eggs, dark rum and vanilla to the food processor, pulse until mixed.
5. Transfer to mixing bowl, fold in chocolate chips by hand.
6. Form the dough into balls, size according to how large you like your cookies. The balls will melt into cookies in the oven.
7. Place the balls on parchment paper covered baking pans, leaving space around them so that the cookies won't touch when they melt.
8. Place baking sheets on the top and center racks of the oven and bake for 28 to 30 minutes, until the cookies are a bit browned (or more browned, according to your taste).
9. Remove cookies from oven, allow to cool on baking sheet for 30 minutes. I like to tilt the cookies by overlapping them so that air can circulate beneath them.

You're done. Restrain yourself. Remember that the chocolate is molten when the cookies come out of the oven, and will be painful when it sticks to your fingers and lips. Best to wait a few minutes before giving in to your cookie-eating urges.

Store the remaining cookies in an appropriately marked cookie tin, assuming that you, your friends and family did not eat the entire batch.

Food porn or art?

Everyone would likely agree that the top image is art or illustration; the lower image, however, might fall into another category. It's sensuous, glossy, hard to identify...

I'm still kind of unclear about what exactly transforms an ordinary photo into food porn, despite having browsed through a cookbook prominently featuring this style of photography. Or is it an entire style of food?

Is it things with lots of butter, sugar, chocolate? Rich foods with flavor profiles set to make your toes curl? Things you shouldn't be eating but can't resist? Aphrodisiacs? All of the above?

Funny how you don't notice that the glaze is dusty until after the photo... kind of hard to dust off an eclair, and I didn't want to spend hours in Photoshop fixing it. Are real porn stars dusty, too?