Gastronome

….aka, Andi & Brian’s other wedding cakes! I’ve had the pleasure of dining with Andrea many a time - and she’s ALWAYS ready (and gunning!) to share “the chocolate thing” on the dessert menu with me - especially when it’s cake. When she asked if I’d make her cakes, I knew that I needed to dream up an interesting and tasty chocolate thing. I had a few ideas (and was definitely inpsired by this chocolate that Robert gave me), and this was the one that grabbed her when we were reviewing the options. Their wedding cakes wound up built from two layers of chocolate cake which I stuffed with a whipped ganache spiced with ancho, chipotle and cinnamon, and then coated in that same gorgeous glaze that I used on Mo & P’s wedding cakes. The cake, ganache, and glaze are all based on recipes from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. So many congratulations to Andi & Brian!
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…aka Andrea & Brian’s wedding cakes, part one. (Yes, two kinds of cake. They’re food people, and dear to me, afterall!) Brian asked specially for rum cake - like a rum baba. Having never made a rum cake, I turned to my favorite baker-of-ethanol-laced cakes for advice. Eric kindly gave me his family’s old recipe for rum cakes - his favorite growing up, too! They were a big hit - but be careful. If you eat a few with your morning coffee, the sugarcrash aftermath is wicked.

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I have been craving two things with great constancy of late: the Cantonese dessert dou fu hua, and hot milk tea with ginger.

dou fu hua is a silky custard made of soymilk, ladled out of a wooden bucket in wide scoopfuls and served in a light ginger syrup. The name means something like “blossom tofu”. It has a texture similar to creme caramel, but without the egginess — just the clean freshness of good soy. You can only get dou fu hua on weekends, during dim sum hours, and only if the dim sum kitchen is beneficient. I am blessed with a beneficient dim sum kitchen nearby, but dim sum every time I want this dessert seemed too decadent. And sometimes I need my fix on ordinary week days.

This led me to a quest for the ginger syrup, which in turn brought me back to the hot milk ginger tea, as it turns out that a syrup suitable for dou fu hua is eminently suited to the making of hot milk tea. Now if only someone would post a recipe for tapioca bubbles, I’d be set…
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Winter baking has its pleasures, but summer baking has Fruit. Namely blueberries, in this recipe from the June 2005 Cooking Light. Blueberries and lemon, together in an incredibly moist cake that you can nevertheless eat with your fingers. The almond paste also adds a little nutty something something. I’d never baked with it before but enjoyed the sticky scent it gave off as I mashed it into submission. The magazine warns against substituting marzipan, which is too sweet. Me, I haven’t been able to go near marzipan ever since I watched a mystery movie where Diana Rigg used it to disguise deadly poison. But I digress. I just had a slice of the cake with a tall glass of milk, and I’m bringing the rest to Crissy Field tomorrow.
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I’ve never eaten baked fruit in my life, but tonight I made my first baked fruit dessert! After flipping through Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, I felt confident enough to wing my first galette as a surprise for my husband (who loves fruit pies, tarts, and other hot fruit desserts).

A galette is basically a rustic, open-faced pie; fruit is heaped in the middle of rolled-out pie dough, which is folded up over the fruit. I had frozen peaches and a few fresh apruims (apricot-plums!) on hand, and a TJ’s pie crust in the fridge. I dropped a handfull of rum-drizzled bread cubes on the room-temperature pie dough for flavor (in theory the bread sops up juices from really watery fruit - I did the rum just for flavor), heaped the fruit, pleated the dough up very rustically (read: hapzardly), based it with melted butter and dusted the whole thing with raw cane sugar. Baked in a pre-heated 425°F oven for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 375°F and bake for another 20-25 minutes, until brown. I let it cool a little before serving.

The result? My husband tried it then re-proposed marriage to me, so I’m guessing it turned out pretty good!

We get the Penzey’s catalog monthlyand found this delightful recipe in the past issue. After spending another $40 dollars on spices, we had this dip with pineapple and strawberries. It also goes very well with cantaloupe.

The one change I made to the recipe was I leave the fruit bare, instead of dusting the fruit with sugar, and put a full tablespoon of sugar in the dip. My suggestion is that you start with a little sugar and add slowly according to your own taste.

Cinnamon Fruit Dip
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese (room temperature)
1 tsp Cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp sugar

Mix together until all lumps are gone. Chill for about an hour and serve with fruit.

I made this tasty cake last weekend and then got too distracted to post the recipe (it’s from the May 2005 issue of Cooking Light). All who sampled it liked it very much. I used a metal baking pan purchased especially for the occasion, but the magazine says if you use a glass one just reduce the baking temperature to 325 degrees and start sticking the toothpick in after 25 minutes. My frosting was just a little runny, and I realize now that I let the cream cheese soften even though the recipe didn’t call for that. And I’m not entirely sure I added the powdered sugar in batches either. Tricky delicious frosting.
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A handy dish to have made if one happens to have been invited to a chocolate-themed party. The April 2005 issue of Cooking Light says this pudding is high in potassium, but more importantly it was so yummy I wanted to suck it up with a straw. I thought it had just the right amount of malt flavor, but if you want it stronger you can always add more.
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As promised to various folks here is the recipe for the brownie recipe i came up with for COPIA. This is the recipe that went to the semi finals. and honestly i think it should have won, but you know how it goes. back to the drawing board next year a new recipe will be had.
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* For the Lactose Intolerant *

I modified this Cooking Light Dec 2004 recipe to be lactose intolerant friendly. Why should dairy-digesters have all the holiday cheesecake fun?
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