The cupcake craze is still in full swing in Palo Alto, where we can choose from Sprinkle’s or Kara’s Cupcakes (which originated in San Francisco).  I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the cake from Sprinkle’s on the couple of time I’ve tasted them.  I finally decided to try out Kara’s a couple weekends ago — after hiking up Half Dome the day before, I felt like I could afford a little treat.  While picking a cupcake may sometimes be a difficult decision, this time it was easy.  Fleur de Sel cupcake — “chocolate cupcake with caramel filling, ganache frosting and fleur de sel.”  Killer combination!  And while it was indeed a wonderful melding of flavors, with the sweet caramel, the rich chocolate, and the salt to cut through it all, the cake itself was disappointingly dry.  Honestly, I felt like I could do better.  So, the next weekend, if I do say so myself, I did.

I made the devil’s food cake recipe my grandmother used to use, adding a bit of extra chocolate, and topped it with a very dark chocolatey buttercream adapted from Mark Bittman.  I based the caramel on a recipe from — you guessed it! — Smitten Kitchen.  This was definitely the best caramel I have ever made in terms of cooking it the right amount of time (a feat I’m sure I will never repeat), but it was a bit runny for the filling, so I need to work on that.  Despite being a bit messy from the runny caramel, the flavor of these cupcakes was a hit, and I’m sure I’ll be making them again.

And finally, a word of warning. If you have extra chocolate frosting and caramel filling at the end, by no means should you alternate dipping a (clean) finger in each one and licking it off until you run out of fingers. If you start doing that, you may never stop. Not that I would know.

(more…)

For this month’s Daring Baker’s post, the theme was cheesecake, and we could modify the basic recipe as much as we wanted.  Oh, the freedom!  I wanted to make something special for Easter, after having given up sweets for Lent, and I found this brownie mosaic cheesecake from Smitten Kitchen — regular cheesecake with chunks of brownies mixed in, and a chocolate graham cracker crust.  I planned to use the base recipe from Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake, chosen by Jenny Bakes, our host this month, but mix in some matcha green tea powder, which I’ve been wanting to try, and chunks of brownies as in Deb’s version.  I ended up using a base recipe more like Deb’s — when I got ready to make the cheesecake, I realized I’d forgotten to buy heavy cream, but if you want to try Abbey’s cheesecake, you can get that version from Jenny’s site.

Matcha is a very finely ground ground green tea used in the Japanese tea ceremony.  Lately, it’s been popular in baked goods for its vibrant green color.  As it turns out though, it’s incredibly expensive (if anyone knows a cheaper place to buy matcha online, please let us know in the comments!).  Instead, I ended up buying Double Green Matcha Tea from the Republic of Tea.  It’s in individual tea bags and is a combination of matcha tea and regular green tea.  I then ground it up more finely in our coffee grinder, but I still couldn’t get it as fine as real matcha, which I think is why the final cheesecake has visible flecks of tea in it and is only slightly green.  The tea only subtly flavors the cheesecake, but I think the bitter note helps to cut the richness of the cheesecake, and I really liked the addition.  For the brownies, I just used a mix, since they were only a small part of the final product, I didn’t think it was worth making them from scratch.

And finally, thanks of course to Jenny for hosting, and be sure to visit the blogroll on the new Daring Bakers’ site, to see what everyone else whipped up!

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

(more…)

This month’s challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

We had several options for how to treat this challenge. We could make a traditional tuile — a French almond cookie shaped over a rolling pin to resemble the roof tile for which it is named. We could also make a chocolate cookie version, or a chocolate version that is more like a candy, made of just melted dark chocolate and ground almonds. We needed to choose one of these batters, shape it, and then serve it with “something light.”

I’ve made one version of tuiles on the site previously, which I shaped as cups to serve ice cream. This month, I ran out of time to try one of the true cookie versions of the tuiles, so I decided to go with the simpler chocolate version — just melt some chocolate, mix in some ground almonds, pipe into the desired shape, and then lay over a rolling pin to curl. Inspired by Karen, I thought I’d make them butterfly shaped. I didn’t have the materials to make a stencil like she did, but I thought a butterfly was simple enough I could freehand it. Boy was that a bad idea! Because of the almonds, the batter is a little thick, making it hard for me to pipe or spread it evenly, and I’m not very well-practiced at piping anyway. My plan was to make a butterfly, then let it cool kind of wedged between two glasses so that it’s wings curled up. Well, the few times I could actually get something shaped sort of like a butterfly, I messed it up while I was trying to curl it. In the end, I decided to just make round tuiles and shape them over a rolling pin. They weren’t as pretty as I hoped, but they still tasted good. Hopefully, soon I’ll have some more time and will get a chance to try making some stencils and trying some of the many elegant ways of shaping tuile cookies.

For my “something light” to serve them with, I combined two recipes from La Tartine Gourmande to make a raspberry mousse. This was delicious with the dark chocolate, and definitely something I will try to make again. (Don’t worry, I used frozen raspberries so as not to pay $10 for a half-pint of out of season, low on flavor berries!) I think it was actually relatively light in fat, and it definitely tasted appropriately light (but still delicious!) for cutting back in January!

Before I share the recipes, I must remind you — check out what the other Daring Bakers have been up to this month. And thanks again to our hosts, Karen and Zorra!

(more…)

So in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve gotten a bit behind on my blogging events. I missed last month’s Daring Baker’s event (though that Filbert Gateau sounded delicious, I just ran out of time), and I’m several weeks behind on Whisk Wednesdays, too. (I do have several Whisk events that I’ve cooked but haven’t found time to write up yet.) Part of my problem lately has also been that our camera isn’t working right — more on that later, but that’s why the pictures this time are not quite up to par, and why everything was taken with a flash. However, I was very excited to participate in this month’s challenge — Chocolate Eclairs, with a recipe from Pierre Hermé.

From reading the other posts that are up so far, it sounds like quite a few Daring Bakers had previously mastered eclairs and didn’t find this to be too much of a challenge. I’d never made choux paste (pâte à choux) before though, so I was pretty psyched to try it out. For this challenge, we were supposed to use at least Pierre Hermé’s recipe for the choux paste, and then at least one other chocolate element: chocolate pastry cream and/or a chocolate glaze on top. I went with the chocolate glaze, but stuck with a more traditional vanilla pastry cream (custard) filling (recipe from Joy of Cooking), as I thought both chocolate elements might be a bit over the top. (And, honestly, I just didn’t have enough chocolate in my stash — GASP! — and didn’t want to go to the grocery store.) I decided to make mini éclairs, again because I think a whole one can be too rich, so I now have a nice stash of bite-sized éclairs in my freezer, you know, for unexpected guests, or late night chocolate cravings.

As I said, this was my first time making any kind of cream puff dough, so I was thrilled when my éclairs actually puffed up as they should. There might have even been some dancing around the kitchen, though you’ll have to ask Matt about that, as I admit to nothing. Really, the only part about this recipe that was a bit challenging is that I under-filled the bottoms of my éclairs a bit, and so they wouldn’t always keep their tops on (how rude!). Other than that, the filling and the glazing was a bit tedious, but everything was pretty successful, and the finished products were mighty tasty!

Thanks to Tony Tahhan and MeetaK at What’s for Lunch, Honey? for hosting this month. If you want the recipe we used, I’ll link to it on someone else’s blog once a few more posts are up. (Most of it is in the pictures below actually, though if you want to make them you might want a few more details.) And, as always, check out the blogroll to see how everyone else fared!

(more…)

Yeah, I’m way behind the curve on this one, but whatever. I’ve been reading for a while about the wonders of macarons (not to be confused with American macaroons). I finally bought some recently at La Baguette, a French cafe at the Stanford Mall. I’m sure they were somewhat (ok, hugely) inferior to the famous ones you find on the streets of Paris, but I thought they were still pretty tasty. They’ve been in the back of my mind for a while now of something I need to try, but they are notoriously difficult to get right. They must be mixed for exactly the right amount of time so that they have a perfectly frilly “foot” at the bottom, but are not too dense. Some say they must be left out for up to a couple hours before cooking to develop a “skin” to help form that beautiful domed shape and ruffled foot, etc., etc.

So when I finally decided to try my hand, I of course carefully looked back at all the detailed directions I had seen of what to do to produce the perfect macaron, right? No, of course not. At 10:00 pm on a recent Saturday, I felt a sudden urge to bake. I was getting started kind of late, so I didn’t want anything that would take too long, but any type of cookie I had made before just didn’t seem exciting enough. I was sure David Lebovitz would have a recipe for macarons, and of course he did. Last time I tried something from his site it turned out pretty well, and I had all the ingredients on hand, so I was good to go. These actually come together pretty quickly, so 45 minutes or so later (including cooling) I had myself some very un-authentic macarons. (Though apparently I should’ve let the flavors meld overnight instead of eating the entire plate that night … I’m only barely exaggerating.)

The good news? Despite my inattention to detail (the tops are peaked, they are too narrow and tall and shaped somewhat like acorns, many of them cracked on top, but miraculously, some of them do have a decent-looking foot) they still taste pretty delicious, even if they don’t look anything like they are “supposed to.” The even better news? I’m sure I’ll be trying these again (perhaps with a more creative flavor), and when I get it right, I’ll fill you in on the results!

If you want some more details on what to do to have adequately-tasting but ridiculous-looking macarons, here’s what I did wrong that I will correct next time:

• Since our freezer is still filled with Honey-Lavender-White Chocolate Opera Cake, I halved the recipe. This meant folding the dry ingredients into only one egg white, which was very difficult to do.
• Fold the ingredients together more thoroughly. I was super-worried about overmixing, but based on these tips, I think my batter was too stiff. (Hence, I ended up with the peaked-top acorn-shaped cookies.) Apparently the batter should “flow like magma”, not hold any shape you pipe it into exactly.
• Pipe out bigger circles. (This could’ve been partly from the too-stiff batter.) I realized after the fact that David says 1″ circles and about a tablespoon for each cookie. (I just read the 1″ part the first time.) I don’t know, maybe when you move to France your definition of an “inch” shifts. At any rate, my 1″ circles were way less than a tablespoon, and I think they should’ve been a bit bigger and also flatter. Though the almost-bite-size result was kind of cute.
• I used leftover ground almonds from the opera cake, which I realized later had a little bit of flour in them. I don’t know as much about baking chemistry as I would like, but my guess is that’s probably not kosher (sorry, I know that’s a terrible pun, I’ve been hanging around Matt too long), so next time I will add a bit of the powdered sugar instead of flour to keep the almonds from turning to butter.
• Let egg whites come to room temperature. I have no idea what effect it did or didn’t have on the end result (in fact I saw one recipe saying to keep the egg whites chilled), but next time I’ll follow what most recipes seem to say and use room temperature eggs.
• Don’t grab unsweetened instead of bittersweet chocolate from the pantry for the filling. (Yep, that’s how little attention I was paying. Amazing, huh?)