Don't Cry Over Fallen Cupcakes

Don't Cry Over Fallen Cupcakes is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

Have you ever had a bad baking day? If you have, you'll know that they can be as devastating as a bad hair day from hell. Most people don't bake only for themselves. At least, I don't. I've always been very aware of the people I bake for, and I firmly believe that the touchy-feely idea that people can taste the emotions you had while making the food is true. So when I have a bad baking day, it's almost always when the product is going to someone--or many someones--I care about. On top of that, these people usually know I went to pastry school and was a pastry cook, and so should be capable of making a decent cake. All in all, bad baking days are a dogeared and food-splattered recipe for extreme embarrassment in the cookbook of my life.



This past Saturday, I was making the birthday cake for a very dear friend of mine's birthday party. I wanted it to be spectacular, because the birthday girl is pretty darn spectacular herself. I ended up deciding to do cupcakes, and I set out to do two different flavors as soon as I woke up Saturday morning, a chocolate cupcake recipe from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri and a white chocolate cake recipe from Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow of Fran's Chocolates. I'd had success with the devil's food cake recipe in Malgieri's book twice last fall, and one of my chefs at pastry school used to work for Fran Bigelow and helped with the production of the photos and drawings in the book (if I remember correctly, the hands in the drawings at the beginning of the book are hers), so I trusted both books to have good recipes.

Now, as I said, I've had way too many bad baking days before, and I really wanted to get it right this time. Most of my misadventures in the kitchen have been centered around birthday cakes. I actually swore off making them for a long time, thinking that it was my old, malfunctioning oven's fault that the cakes never turned out right. Also, I knew that the other main cause for substandard baking is my tendency to cut corners and get lazy when I'm cooking in my own kitchen. This was never a problem in school or at the restaurant or the B&B, so now I make very sure now to do things deliberately and professionally when I bake.

I was off to such a good start. Other than some worry over the way the batter for the chocolate cupcakes turned out, I felt very organized and in control of the situation. The white chocolate cake batter turned out to be gorgeous, this billowing silky mass that I'm guessing is what Cloud 9 must be made out of. But the dark chocolate cupcakes...well, I can't tell you for sure whose fault the disaster was on that one. Was it the recipe? Was it my paranoia of over baking them? Was it the unsweetened chocolate I used, that was maybe a little past its prime? Without making the recipe again, I can't say for sure.

The batter was weird, very watery, but I assumed that was because the author's stated intent was to make very moist cupcakes (they were, indeed, very moist, almost fudgy, which I can't fault at all). It was very hard to get into the cupcake wrappers cleanly, even pouring it from a measuring cup with a pour spout, because it was so thin it just ran down the outside of the cup as soon as I tipped it downward. The chocolate also was an issue, as it didn't melt but stayed in little tiny flecks. I wanted to blame the recipe on that one, too, because he instructed to melt it by pouring boiling water over it (and thus, in my mind, creating an environment perfect for the chocolate to seize if it didn't emulsify right away), but then the same thing happened later with a different recipe and the same chocolate. I feel like I underbaked them, but they were in the oven for ten minutes longer than the recipe said, so...I'm still perplexed.

They looked and smelled beautiful in the oven, but fell when they came out, quickly and drastically. I wish I had a picture of those chocolate sinkholes. I was disappointed, mostly in myself because I knew that's where the blame should probably land, given my past track record. But then the white chocolate cupcakes went in, and they looked and smelled so beautiful that I wasn't too worried. After all, cupcakes are easy to hide under mounds of frosting.

Back to the white chocolate variety. I had high hopes these would outshine my failure with the dark chocolate ones. I knew that using a cake batter for cupcakes was risky, but I thought the problem would be overbaking them, not underbaking them. So, once again, I pulled them out way too soon. These, unlike the chocolate ones, ended up being beyond repair, because I waited too long to decide to put them back in the oven and never managed to get them to bake all the way through.

Cue mental breakdown. Tears were shed. Oaths to never bake again were uttered. It wasn't pretty. Bad baking days never are.

Fortunately, Baker Bee rode up on his white horse (i.e. rolled out of bed) brandishing a shiny whisk and saved me, despite my ranting and raving and general foul mood. While I took a soothing shower, he made another batch of cupcakes, this time using a recipe from our trusty copy of Joy of Cooking, which is where I should have gone for my cupcake recipe. Other than the chocolate not melting properly, his were cupcakes--high rising domes of very cake-ish cake.

I was feeling a bit down in the dumps about my lousy cupcakes. The white chocolate ones, despite tasting fabulous, weren't something I could serve to anyone (except Baker Bee, who thinks they taste like the perfect pound cake of all things). My chocolate ones were visibly inferior to Mr. Bee's, which is fine in other areas of cooking but I like to think that I got some sort of useful skills out of pastry school that I can contribute to our kitchen.

Time was running out. I turned to the quickest thing to frost them with that would look impressive: torched meringue. It just looks cool, and it's one of those things like ganache that really isn't hard to make at all, but if you don't know how to make it and brown it you wouldn't know where to start. We had meringue on my wedding cake and everyone loved it. So I started piping it on Baker Bee's cupcakes. I played around with it a bit, remembering the way that piping meringue on top of meringue produced an interesting visual contrast. It looked fun and festive, but what would I do to make the fallen cupcakes not look like ugly stepsisters beside them?

Then it came to me. Earlier in the week, I'd had this strong urge to make Obama cupcakes--faux Hostess chocolate cupcakes, but with the white squiggle writing "Obama" in cursive. Not an original idea, but I really wanted to do it...and then didn't. But on Saturday I had 18 cupcakes with gaping holes staring up at me, and a Kitchen Aid bowl full of Swiss meringue, and...well, you do the math. The fun twist I came up with was to fill the hole with meringue and mound some on the top of the cupcake as well, then torch it before dipping the top in the ganache. That made the meringue a lot more stable, and possibly imparted a hint of toasted marshmallow to the flavor (more research is needed to confirm this). Plus, it made the cupcakes look like they had risen and stayed that way, which wasn't a bad thing at all.

On some of them, I tried to pipe the white squiggle, but the meringue wasn't behaving properly when piped that thinly (hence the bad handwriting on the cupcakes...normally, I'm pretty good at that--oh boy, there goes the old ego again), so I just left a lot of them dressed in only their glossy ganache. Baker Bee thinks I should figure out how to make them fall again in the future so I could make filled cupcakes again, and although I pointed out that there are techniques for getting the filling inside the cupcake, I think it might not be a bad idea.

At the party, I stacked them tiered-cake style with the help of a few cake stands. All together, they looked great. Not perfect, but that's coming from the mouth of a self-critical perfectionist. I was happy with them at the end, and they provided a great sugar high for the rousing round of Cranium and custom vampire-themed Mad Libs. (If you look closely, you'll see that one of the cupcakes was meant to be a vampire.)



The funny thing is that even though both batches were chocolate cupcakes, and I used the same meringue on both of them, with the only difference being the ganache, they were both very, very different cupcakes, both good in their own way. A lot of people seemed to think my fallen ones with the ganache were better, and they certainly were more intense on the chocolate, but the day after I went to have one bite of Baker Bee's cupcakes with a huge crown of spiky meringue on it and ended up eating the whole thing.

Here's the Swiss meringue recipe I use out of my notes from pastry school, in case you're in need of a good one. The beauty of Swiss meringue as opposed to Italian and French is its stretch, gooey, marshmallowy consistency. Technically, Italian meringue is more stable, but Swiss meringue holds up very well on cakes in my experience, and I love the texture of it. The meringue on the gelato coppetta I wrote about in my last post was undoubtedly Swiss, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Swiss Meringue
(printable version)

Egg whites 8 oz (250 g)
Fine granulated sugar 1 lb (500 g)

Procedure

Place the egg whites and sugar in a stainless steel bowl or in the top of a double boiler. Beat with a whisk (more near the end than at first) over hot water until the mixture is hot about 120°F.* Transfer to the bowl of a mixer and whip at high speed until stiff peaks form. Turn down speed to cool.

* I learned to test the temperature this way from my chef at pastry school: dip your finger in, and if you have to pull your finger out immediately because your cuticles feel like they're on fire, it's ready. The warmer the egg and sugar mixture gets, the more stable the meringue will be.

Cuisinart Dough Blade

Cuisinart Dough Blade is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

We've had a Cuisinart food processor for years, and I've been using the standard blade for making pie dough for quite awhile with fairly decent results (I usually make an all-butter, 50% whole wheat dough, so it just can't compete for texture with lard/shortening all-white-flour crusts). For some reason, we never really paid much attention to the "Dough" button on the device, and had all but forgotten about the dull "dough blade" that came with the food processor.

I wanted to bake a couple of pies last week for a party, so I decided to give it a try. Never again. The dough didn't mix properly, and I ended up with large patches of too-moist mixed with large patches of completely dry dough. It was bad enough that I reverted to the standard blade for my second batch, despite some small hope that things might improve after setting up in the fridge for a few hours. As you can see from the bowl on the left in the photo, it didn't help -- the dough fell apart into too-wet and too-dry chunks as soon as I tried to break off a chunk to roll out. Because I needed both batches of dough for two covered pies, I ended up "rescuing" the bad batch by adding a little water and re-processing it in the food processor, mixing it into the good batch. Needless to say the additional processing resulted in crusts were not the best I've made (still pretty tasty, though), and I will be hiding the dough blade somewhere so I can't find it and make the same mistake again.

For those who are interested in the recipe, it's a modification of a double-batch version of the basic pie crust recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone:

• 1.5 cups whole wheat flour
• 1.5 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 pound cold butter
• 1/3 to 2/3 cups ice water, as needed

Add the flours and salt into the food processor, along with the butter, cut into rough chunks. Pulse until the butter is integrated (but not completely pulverized) and then slowly drizzle the ice water in through the top of the food processor as it is running. The dough should be fairly dry, but stick together if you try to shape it. Wrap it in plastic wrap and put it into the fridge for at least an hour to hydrate or it will crumble to pieces when you try to roll it out.

Rainbow Cookies

Rainbow Cookies is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

To finish off writing about the Christmas treats I made, here's my last big project of the season (that I managed to get to: Rainbow Cookies from Sherry Yard's fantastic book The Secrets of Baking.



These were hugely popular with everyone who received them. How could they not be, looking that adorably festive on a cookie tray? Everyone wanted to know what they were, and thanks to Yard's engaging storytelling in her second book, I had details to give them on their Italian origins.

They're very pretty, of course, but they taste much more sophisticated than you might expect. It helped that I used a couple of aging bars of very dark Michel Cluizel (my absolute favorite chocolatier in the world) chocolate in the glaze, but the cake's sweetness and almond flavor are very light and subtle. It was only when I tasted one that I realized there was no almond flavoring in the recipe, only almond paste and almond flour, and I think from the photo in the book I was expecting something with the concentrated flavor of the extract.

The only other modification I did to the recipe was to add apricot brandy to the simple syrup I soaked the cake layers with. In my opinion, that was an Incredibly Good Call, and I would even add a little more next time. The whole effect of the "cookie" was good, but the almond cake needed something extra to stand up well against the chocolate glaze. That could've been the due to the chocolate I used, but I wouldn't want to use anything less potent in the future.

I'll definitely make these again--I'll probably have to, considering how much everyone liked them. Next year, though, I'll cut them in smaller pieces. Mine were pretty small, but I found these were best one bite at a time, and more than once I noticed people wanting to split one.

Sourdough from scratch

Sourdough from scratch is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

I figured that I would finally come out of my hive and talk about the sourdough bread I spent a week working on while I was snowed in before Christmas. As you may have inferred from other posts here, I'm basically cooking my way through The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which I think has to be about the best book around if you want to learn how to bake professional quality artisan bread at home. I apologize if my photos aren't as good as Tiger's usual ones -- these were taken before we started using better lighting.

Because I'm cooking from a book, I don't think I can reproduce the recipe in this blog without a copyright violation, so you'll have to bear with me until I can come up with a few of my own recipes before you'll see many ingredient lists. With that said, I love this cook book, and think it's a necessity for any home baker's bookshelf.

The Barm (also known as a starter)

One of the best starters that Tiger remembers from pastry school is started with organic grapes (which are covered in wild yeast). When we couldn't find the particular recipe, we turned to the internet and found a good set of instructions. I got myself a pound of grapes from Whole Foods (they have to be organic and unwashed/treated -- the non-organic ones don't have enough wild yeast still living on them).

The recipe is fairly easy, so I'll let you read the details on your own. Basically, you squish up the grapes (throw out any bad grapes and brush off any dirt, but don't wash them) and let them sit for a few days. Once they start to bubble, you strain out the skins and start feeding it with bread flour. Once you have a good seed culture, you can alter the flavor by your feeding schedule. I find that feeding the sour by weight is more reliable than by volume, but the most important part is to make sure that the ratio of flour and water are the same. The Bread Baker's Apprentice suggests that you can double, triple, or quadruple the barm -- the higher the ratio of flour and water to starter, the less sour your final bread will taste. I like to use this for sourdough, so I usually feed at 1::1 (usually 8 oz of starter, to 8 oz each of water and flour) unless I plan to store it for awhile in the refrigerator (in which case I'll often do a triple volume feeding).


You should also know that storing your barm in the fridge will help produce a stronger sour taste. This is because the bacteria that produce the sour flavor generally work slower than the yeasts in the barm, but the cooler temperatures will slow down the yeast and let the bacteria catch up.

Firm Starter
With many artisan breads, you make an overnight starter (there are actually three main variants of this, based primarily on the amount of liquid: biga, poolish, pâte fermentée). With non-sourdough breads, you would usually just mix up flour, water, yeast, and occasionally salt. With this bread, you make the overnight starter with the barm instead of yeast. Once you mix the barm with flour and water, you let it sit on the counter for around 4 hours, and then toss it into the fridge overnight to improve its flavor. This part is important because it allows the sour flavor to develop.

Dough

On day 2, take your firm starter out of the fridge and cut it up into a bunch of small pieces to warm up for an hour. I put mine on a silpat and covered them with plastic wrap to keep them from drying out. Next, you mix the firm starter in with your other ingredients. Though the recipe calls for about 20 oz of additional white bread flour, it also says that the other flours can be substuted. Following the advice in the baguette recipe from the same book, I decided to substitute about 1/4 of the bread flour with sifted wheat flour. I like King Arthur Flour's white whole wheat flour, so I sifted it to remove some of the larger pieces of what bran (which can cut gluten and make proper rising/shaping more difficult). The (now mostly) whole wheat flour will add a bit more complexity to the overall sourdough loaf, and make it slightly healthier.



Understanding gluten development is one of the most important parts mixing good bread dough. If the gluten does not develop properly, you won't be able to shape the dough, and when it proofs, it will stretch outward instead of upward, resulting in a very dense loaf. The trick is what's called the "window pane method", which is demonstrated in the two images to the right. The first image shows dough that is not yet ready -- notice that it breaks easily. The second shows dough that stretches thinly and allows light to pass through fairly easily. A few breaks are OK, especially when using even a little whole wheat flour, but the dough should be able to stretch fairly thin.

I've found that a good test for the time left for gluten development is to take a small piece of dough (usually the same one I use for the windowpane test) and roll it around between my hands to knead it very quickly. This way, you can stretch it again and see if more kneading will improve the gluten development, or if you have reached a point where more kneading will actually start to break the gluten strands because they have been stretched too tightly.

Once your dough is ready, it goes into a big bowl, tossed with a little oil (I just use a good organic spray oil), coated in plastic wrap, and left to ferment (i.e. rise) for several hours. The wild yeasts in a homemade sourdough rise a lot slower than commercially available bread yeast, so this phase takes 3-4 hours instead of the 1-2 that is more common for other bread types. You can do this at room temperature, but I happen to have a "bread proofing" mode on my oven and I prefer to use that.

Shaping

After the dough has risen and approximately doubled in size, carefully divide it into two pieces (being careful not to punch it down any more than necessary) and shape them into whatever shape you prefer for your loaves. In my case, I used a couche (well, actually a fine-weave kitchen towel because it costs less and works just as well) and shape into a somewhat elongated loaf. Once again, these get spritzed with a little oil, covered in plastic wrap and are set aside in the proofer (to actually proof this time) for several more hours.


I've determined that it takes about 30 minutes for my oven to heat, so about half an hour before my proofing time is up, I turn my oven up to 500° F and make sure that my baking stone and a large hotel pan are in place. The hotel pan (or other large metal pan) is another trick from this book to help emulate a professional baking oven by providing steam -- more on this later.

Once the oven was hot, I started boiling water for the steam pan, and removed my bread from the proofing drawer to slash. Carefully roll the proofed loaves off of the couche and onto a baking peel that has been prepared with cornmeal.

Slashing the bread not only provides an attractive look, but also breaks the tight skin around the loaf that you get from properly shaping. This exposes the moist insides of the loaves and encourages them to rise upward in the oven, instead of spreading out.

Baking
Once the oven is hot, your loaves have been slashed, and the water is boiling, you're ready to bake. Slide the loaves off of the peel onto the baking stone, toss one cup of boiling water into the steam pan, and close the oven door. The steam will provide a humid environment that lets the bread rise more before the crust sets, as well as contribute to a much crispier crust once the steam has dissipated.

The book suggests that I should open the oven door several more times at 30 second intervals, spraying the sides of the oven with water each time. However, I've discovered that it's very easy to shatter the light bulbs in an oven with a little misplaced water. Instead, I've noticed that the water in the steam pan doesn't boil off quickly enough and I am left with a humid oven that doesn't let the crust harden enough, so instead of spritzing, I just shake the steam pan around a bit to make its water boil again. I've found that it's more helpful to use a large thin-sided hotel pan instead of the cast iron frying pan I was originally using, both because of its larger surface area, and because it heats up much faster. About 90 seconds after putting the bread into the oven, reduce the temperature to 450° and bake for 10 minutes.


After 10 minutes, remove the steam pan if it still has any water in it, and rotate your loaves 180° for even color. Bake for another 10-12 minutes until the loaves are done, and remove them to a wire rack to cool for at least 45 minutes. This is the most difficult time for me -- the house now smells like wonderful fresh bread, but I know that it's still technically cooking inside and won't be nearly as good. It's worth the wait, so let it sit.

Between the grape-based starter and the recipe, this is the first sourdough I've made that actually tastes sour. I'll definitely be making it again (or some variant of my own so I can share the recipe).

Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut

Rainbow Cookies is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

At the beginning of Life of Pi, the narrator promises that it is a story to make you believe in God. When I got to the end of the book, for a moment I thought that the book had failed in its purpose. However, after a moment of trying to puzzle out what the author meant, I realized it was one of the most brilliant arguments in favor of believing in God, and one that particularly appealed to the writer in me.

So let me begin this way: These are macaroons to make you believe in coconut.

* * * * *

I hated coconut all my life. I don't mean I disliked it; I truly thought there wasn't a single thing worth eating that came from those hard, hairy, brown things. To be honest, I was a picky eater when I was young, but coconut was on its own level. I hated the way it squeaked between my teeth. I recognized it from the first bite of any unfamiliar food. Chewy yet not, sticky but not soft, the appeal was entirely lost on me.

It wasn't just the texture that bothered me. One of my most vivid memories from my trip to Turkey involves coconut, this time in liqueur form. My mother and I devoted a week of our trip to a blue cruise, bay-hopping around south-western Turkey on board an eight-passenger gulet, a wooden sailboat, though if the sail was ever employed during our trip, it was only once.

Our captain could steer the boat one-handed, the other hand occupied by a can of Efes Pilsner. All of my American no-drinking-and-driving mental programming made this amusing to watch, but not concerning. He obviously had the hang of it, and really there wasn't much to run into other than small islands. I figured one of us would see the island coming and grab the wheel. He already let us do that whenever we wanted.

He didn't speak as much English as the other crew members, but he was a likable, relaxed guy all around, friendly and happy. One of the things he seemed most excited about was Wednesday night.

"On Wednesday, we party!" he would repeat to us at odd times, without any explanation.

Considering we were floating on a beautiful blue expanse, rarely sharing a bay for the morning, afternoon or night with more than one other gulet, we thought it was a joke. Who were we going to party with? We were already lounging and tanning (well, not me), swimming, eating and drinking amongst ourselves. I wasn't sure what would change that short of a hot tub dropping from the sky onto our tiny deck.

Wednesday came, and we piled in a taxi van to cross the peninsula to Marmaris. Surprisingly, we made it there alive and spent the afternoon shopping in the bazaar. I found a bracelet at a silver shop there, one so unique that I'm never able to describe it to anyone in detail, which I would subsequently lose in the back of another taxi when we returned to Istanbul.

We returned to our boat, once again surprised to be alive, but tired from the day's trip. The captain greeted us and urged us to join him for the party at the discotheque on the shore.

As a group, we looked at the scrubby, dry, isolated coastline.

Still, the invitation to party was repeated, and it was very tempting to see just how a discotheque was managing to hide in the middle of nowhere. It turned out that "discotheque" was a slight overstatement, at least in my mind. A wooden fence around an outdoor bar didn't quite match the image in my mind. We sat down on cushions around the low table in one corner, chatting with the owner (who seemed to be good buddies with our captain and the captains of the other gulets anchored in the bay) while his sons minded the bar. My mother, who was doing her best to be a bad influence on me during my college years to combat my stick-in-the-mud tendencies, tried to get me to smoke from the hookah. Tried, but didn't succeed. At one point, I looked through a crack in the fence behind me and saw a gigantic shadow of a scorpion. My gaze zeroed in on the very small scorpion throwing it, but it certainly made me question the wisdom of sitting nearly on the ground there.

The coconut in this story--I hadn't forgotten!--arrived then, in small, skinny glasses filled with a dubious pink liquid. I tried to refuse, and learned they were on the house. I took a tiny sip, and my nose wrinkled immediately. Coconut. Jolly Rancher and Coconut in burning alcoholic form. I set the glass down and forgot about it...until another came.

Now, I was pretty used to guys flirting with me in Turkey by then, including the one I usually describe as a Turkish Antonio Bandaras but better looking. I hadn't had any of the bad experiences with it that you hear about from women traveling in foreign countries, just entertaining ones, so I had no problem with it. A glance over at the bar made it pretty obvious why I was getting free drinks. If they'd sent over an endless supply of Diet Coke (I can't believe I drank that), that might have been different, but coconut? I wasn't impressed.

But it turned out that they were making up new drinks just for me, and my mother reminded me that it was rude to refuse hospitality like that, as long as it was harmless. So, I drank both drinks. Or, at least I'm pretty sure I got through them all, since I vaguely remember singing for other drunk people in the "discotheque" under the stars.

The moral of the story is that foreign travel may broaden your palate considerably, but some foods just never have a chance. Coconut did not receive the same invitation into my eating life that many of the other foods I encountered did. Over the next few years, though, a few coconutty things slipped into my diet, like fresh coconut cracked open on the beach on my honeymoon in Costa Rica (it was okay) or coconut milk in Thai curries. Nevertheless, I was fairly certain I'd never like anything that proudly proclaimed a coconut-heavy favor.

* * * * *

With that in mind, cue my disappointment with being assigned to make the coconut macaroons at my first cooking job. I was assisting the American-style baker in the restaurant's bakeshop, and despite the fact that everything I'd tasted of hers then (and now I can say everything since then, too) was the best I'd ever had of those items before, there was no way that I was going to like the macaroons.

Who likes to make food they don't like at all? Not me. Not unless it makes someone close to me very, very happy, and even then I'll get grumpy and complain about it. That aside, I was going to be working with coconut every week, smelling it, touching it. I wasn't pleased.

Still, it was my job, and I did what I had to do while she instructed me how to make the macaroons. I pulsed the coconut in a food processor. I mixed the gooey ingredients in a large bowl. I got my hands all sticky and slimy scooping small mounds of it onto the sheet pan. (My technique had yet to develop then.) They went into the convection oven, and I watched them carefully, turning them so they acquired a golden brown that surprised me, since all the macaroons I'd seen were giant, white balls with shreds of coconut sticking out of them every which way. But they still weren't going to taste good. No way, no how.

Oh my goodness I was wrong.

The differences I'd noticed before all served glorious purposes. Grinding the shredding coconut did away with the stringiness I hated about it. The small size made for the perfect marriage of warm, squishy insides and golden crunchy/chewy outsides. After one taste, it became a ritual for me to eat one hot macaroon every week as soon as possible to when they came out of the oven. They're delicious cold, and actually take on a nice chewiness if stored in an airtight container for a few days, but when they're fresh and warm, they're heaven.

But it wasn't just the macaroons that I came to love. Soon there after, the assistant pastry chef gave me a taste of his coconut sorbet as it came out of the mixer, and I've adored coconut sorbet ever since--as long as it doesn't have shreds of coconut in it. I've even been known to order drinks with coconut rum in them.

Consider this my public apology to my Turkish bartenders for not liking their drinks.

* * * * *

Since we're talking about apologies and forgiveness, I'll confess that I told a bit of a lie at the beginning:

These aren't the macaroons that made me believe in coconut.

I know, I'm sorry, but the recipe isn't mine. I can't bring myself to share the recipe without permission. Something in me doesn't quite want to share it, either, which is strange because generally I'm all for sharing my recipes and knowledge. But these are special. Magical.

However, I'm not going to tease you and then leave you empty-handed. I've been working on a number of variations, tweaked and changed enough that I won't feel like they're not mine to share. Raspberry-Pomegranate, which tastes like a jam sandwich cookie, but with the texture of a coconut macaroon. Cocoa Nib-Creme de Cacao, a grown-up chocolate chip cookie. But the most successful so far was a fusion of two of the variations I've tried: the macadamia nut center and the lime-rum macaroon.

My second run of these today yielded great results. The zest of two limes seemed like it would be too much, but the lime flavor was perfect--blending enough with the coconut to be subtle, but definitely there. I wanted to post the recipe itself tonight, but I have a few things to work out first. I still want to amp up the rum flavor, and the macaroons are spreading too much, most likely due to the fact that I'm still getting used to my oven, but I need to rule out flaws in the recipe before I post it.

In the meantime, I'll demo the technique, which you could probably apply to other macaroon recipes out there.

	First, pulse the coconut in a food processor. You may have to do it in more than one batch, depending on the size of your recipe and the size of your food processor. Add the coconut to a large bowl with the flour and the sugar and mix thoroughly.
	Drizzle melted butter over the coconut mixture, then use your hands to work it evenly in, rubbing any clumps with drier parts of the mixture until you don't see any more clumps. (I apologize for the fact that this photo resembles "yellow snow". This is definitely okay to eat.)
	Whisk egg whites, cream, corn syrup, rum, and lime zest together.
	Pour the wet mixture in with the dry mixture and stir with a spatula--or better yet a bowl scraper--until combined.
	Form the the macaroons with a small scoop and place them in even rows on a Silpat or parchment paper.
	A note on the macadamia nuts: they should be salt-free and toasted. Two or three minutes in the oven at 350 degrees is plenty. Also, if you toast the macadamias immediately before making the cookies, watch them in the oven carefully, because the nuts will heat the macaroons from the inside and speed up the cooking process.
	To put the macadamia nuts in the center of the macaroons, press one into the cookie while it is still in the scoop, and then fill the empty space behind it with the coconut that gets squeezed out the sides. Make sure the bottom of each macaroon is flat and clean.
	Bake the macaroons at 350 degrees for 18 minutes, turning the pan around after the first ten to color them evenly. They should look golden brown and crispy, but not turn dark brown. Cool on racks, and make sure to eat one while they're still warm.

I paired the lime macaroons with a grapefruit sorbet I'd randomly decided to make up a mix for last night to use up some aging grapefruits. They worked quite well together even though they weren't made for each other. The cold and the natural flavor of the grapefruit cut the sweetness in the sorbet, and so it was a counterpoint to the sweeter cookies, rather than competing for the same sort of attention.



Stay tuned...I hope to have this recipe perfected in the near future! They'll only be Macaroons Based off of Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut, but I hope that they'll taste good all the same.

The Christmas Unicorn

The Christmas Unicorn is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

I had more people to give gifts to, so I made another round of Christmas cookies this week. I wanted to do a half batch of the icing and tried to wing it with the corn syrup and milk measurements so as not to dirty more dishes, but it didn't set up quite as well, so next time I will be meticulous with my measurements! I was also hampered by the fact that it was the middle of the night. But a few turned out to be cute despite my best attempts to ruin them, so I thought I'd share.



My best friend loves unicorns, and when I was going through my cookie cutters, I found a unicorn one. After my success with the Dala horses, I wanted to try one in a similar style. There's another photo of him here.

(It seems like an odd connection, and it was to me in the making of it, but I just remembered that the unicorn was a symbol for Christ in the Middle Ages, so it's not as incongruous as I thought.)



The more ornaments I decorated, the more they started to look like hot air balloons. I think that will be one of my next cookie cutter shapes.

Cranberry Meringue Tart

Cranberry Meringue Tart is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

Ever since I first saw the picture of the cute little Mini Cranberry Meringue Pies in Martha Stewart Living a couple years ago, I've wanted to make them. Their photo showed one sliced down the middle, exposing the jewel-like filling and the lightness of the meringue to full effect. I never got around to it, but this year I decided to try all new recipes for Thanksgiving, and this went to the top of my list.

I made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes like forgetting the egg in the citrus pate sucree (I put it to the left of the food processor and the rest of my mise en place to the right) and experimenting with a store-bought carton of egg whites for the meringue when I didn't have time to make a second batch. However, even without that egg, the pate sucree was possibly the best tart crust I've ever made, and several people complimented it. It uses both lemon and orange zest, a flavor combination that I used in my wedding cake years ago that really seemed to punch up the flavor.

But there was no blessing in disguise in regards to the meringue, unless I count the reminder that things never go well when I try to cut corners. At least this time it was in the spirit of experimentation and not just out of laziness, as usual. I used the Trader Joe's 100% egg whites, and I knew that they weren't going to be ideal when I saw how cloudy they were, but I went ahead and made the meringue. The foam ended up looking, well, very insipid and watery, not the airy dollop of heaven that I wanted to recreate from the magazine. By the time I was done, there was no time left, so the mediocre meringue went on the tart and I did my best to torch it, even though it didn't want to brown properly.

Despite all of that, I don't think I've ever had a dessert disappear so quickly at a big family event or gotten quite so many compliments and questions. I kept being surprised that people liked it, because I wasn't entirely pleased with the mouth feel of the cranberry filling, as pretty as it was. It had that gross texture that comes from too much cornstarch, so next time I make this I'll either decrease the cornstarch or experiment with some of the alternate thickners my husband has been playing with in his attempts at molecular gastronomy, now that we have a kitchen that we can actually cook in again. The xanthan gum marshmallows he made last week were a huge success, so I'm reading up on hydrocolloides now, too.

As I said above, I picked out a number of new holiday recipes to try this year. When I ate meat, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays, and I've been trying to recreate that experience in a vegetarian way for eight years now, with varying amounts of success. This year, though, inspired by the new kitchen, I decided to try to find some new flavors to turn into new traditions, rather than continue to try to recreate the omnivore's version of the holiday. Pretty much all of them (other than a new twist on the savory seitan and mushroom dish I've come up with to stand in for turkey) came from Martha Stewart--I rarely turn to her during the rest of the year, but the recipes in the holiday issues of the magazine are always really appealing to me, so much so that I keep them in their own binder on my cookbook shelf.

Cauliflower Gratin with Endive was delicious--cheesy without being greasy at all, and the Israeli couscous scattered in the bottom of the pan absorbed the sauce but held its shape in a texturally interesting way.

Stuffing was always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, so it took a lot strength to turn my back on the plain old crouton, celery and sage type stuff we always had. The Cornbread, Wild Mushroom and Pecan Stuffing I settled on was so good I just wanted to hold it on my tongue and not swallow it, or even chew it.

We used maitake, hedgehog and oyster mushrooms--I'd never cooked with hedgehog mushrooms, and they were extremely tasty!--so it wasn't inexpensive. Otherwise, I would've made another pan straight away and wolfed it down at home. I have plans to try it with less expensive mushrooms soon. The pecans were a revelation. I've often put walnuts into savory cooking, but I think this was my first time using pecans that way, and they complemented the mushrooms very well.

It seems like we made another new dish, but I can't think of what it was, other than the seitan stuff, where the newness of it lay mostly in my husband's interpretation of how to cook it based on my instructions I yelled from the shower. That and he tried a trick for quickly browning onions by adding baking soda to them that he read about somewhere online. It worked. But it also made the onions completely dissolve...which had the effect of coating the seitan in the onion pulp and frying it onto it. Not what we were going for, but I think I'll do it again next time we make it.

Black Bottom Cupcakes

Black Bottom Cupcakes is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

I've wanted to have a food blog for a very long time--and I suppose I sort of did for awhile when I was in pastry school--but up until recently the state of my kitchen prevented it. The "vintage" side-by-side range/oven perched atop the cramped, sad formica counters were not exactly practically or aesthetically conducive to it. I wasn't able to enjoy cooking very much, and I couldn't take pretty food pictures, either. But we've gotten far enough through a remodel that I think I can start having fun.

Tonight I made Black Bottom Cupcakes for--as the Toasty Chef calls him--Mr. T's birthday tomorrow. I can blog about them tonight because Mr. T doesn't know about this blog yet. Sneaky, right? We're headed down the coast for a writer's retreat all week, and while we'll have a kitchen where we're going, I wasn't sure what equipment I'd find once I was there, so I figured I'd better come with cake in hand.

I looked through a couple cookbooks in search of a tasty-yet-portable cake that seemed special enough for Mr. T's birthday. Nothing seemed appealing to me that looked stable enough for a five hour car ride and didn't need ingredients I don't have on hand. I was paging through The Joy of Cooking when I came across a recipe for Black Bottom Cupcakes. I used to make Black Bottom Cupcakes back when I was a pastry cook. Scratch that--I used to de-pan the cupcakes after the baker I assisted made them. Which meant I'd never made them before. After checking that I did have cream cheese in my fridge and considering the superior portability of cupcakes, I decided that tonight I'd fix that--even though I've never thought the name "Black Bottom Cupcakes" sounded particularly appetizing, or consistent with the end product, for that matter. The chocolate part isn't just in the bottom, and I think anything with cream cheese in it should advertise that fact proudly.

All in all, I think they turned out very nicely, and they're a fairly simple cupcake to whip up despite the fact that you have to make two batters. I think the baker I used to work with must have swirled the cream cheese part around in the chocolate cake batter, because the boundaries between the two are much more clear than I remember hers being. I like the look of mine better, but swirling would probably improve the texture of the cupcake overall by breaking up the rich center a bit.

Where I went wrong: 1) Despite the fact that I know better (out of sheer fear of ruining a huge batch of cream cheese frosting at work when the job fell to me), I got impatient and beat the cream cheese with the sugar before it had warmed up to room temperature. Not a huge problem because I was baking it, but my worst habit in the kitchen is impatience. 2) I baked them for just a little too long, so the edges are a little crisper than I'd like.

Still, the cupcakes are super moist. I'll definitely make them again.

The Joy of Cooking scores another point. I always feel so domestic turning to it rather than my fancy-shmancy gourmet photo-filled cookbooks.