Individual Apple Bread Puddings

After the success of the waffle and chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, I decided to have fun and make another plated dessert at home. I had slightly stale sourdough bread and some lovely but somewhat bruised apples so I made bread pudding! I made each mini pudding in a well buttered ramekin so I could turn them out onto plates a bit like a baked Charlotte.

I topped the warm bread puddings with vanilla-yogurt cream, apple caramel sauce, and some crushed oat and walnut "nougatine". I put quotes around nougatine because typically it's made of slivered almonds coated in caramel; this is a granola-y version. This breakfast-y but still very dessert-y plated dessert was delicious and, perhaps, a bit whimsical (beiWng breakfast inspired and all that)!

Thanksgiving Desserts (Number One)

I made apple pie with a crumble topping. It was delicious. Sort of a cross between a crumble and a pie. The cinnimon-y, buttery topping was crumble-like and the apples were tender but held together in a pie-like manner. I served it with an apple caramel sauce. So good! Although it could have used some vanilla (or, perhaps, cinnamon) ice cream.

Glazed Pumpkin Scones

I'm sure I've mentioned these before. They are Alice's Tea Cup's famous pumpkin scones. I've made them before and they didn't work quite right. This time around I paid more attention. They add absurd amounts of spices. I'm sure they taste delicious with a 1/4 cup of each type of spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, if I remember correctly), but that quantity of spices costs a lot of money. The first time I cut down the spices and the dough was far too moist. This time I used about 1/8 cup of each spice and topped each up with 1/8 cup flour (so there was still the same amout of dry ingredients). I also added about 1/8 cup extra flour since it was a damp day. That was about right and the dough was usable, though still on the wet and sticky side. It was a bit of a pain to work with, but the scones rose and cracked perfectly (they look just like the ones at Alice's) so I wouldn't add any more flour.

The Best of 2013

It's that time. The time to look back over the previous twelve months and see where you've been and what's happened in your life, both good and bad. For me 2013 is the year I started grad school. It's also the year I made a wedding (okay, anniversary) cake for a real couple, crafted a TARDIS out of chocolate cake, made hundreds of chocolates for the holidays, and so much more. So here's to 2013.

French Toast with Caramel Sauce

I forgot to post this last year. When our friends came round (and we baked cookies) the girls had a sleepover while the parents got some alone time. Alaina and Tegan are great kids and I wanted to surprise them by getting up early and making a special breakfast. Unfortunately they are morning people (at least Tegan is) so I couldn't really surprise them. But I still banned them from the kitchen, so at least the type of food was a surprise.

Plated Dessert for the Jewish Holidays

I made this dessert (honey milk chocolate semifreddo on apple almond cake with caramel apple sauce, milk chocolate almond bark, marzipan and nougatine) for the Yom Kippur break-fast meal this year. Yom Kippur was in mid-September, but I guess with all the excitement of starting school, I forgot to post this.

The beautiful thing about this dessert is it could be for almost any Jewish holiday! I had been away from home for Rosh Hashanna so I decided to use the traditional flavors from that holiday--apple and honey--as inspiration for my dessert. Since some of my cousins can't eat gluten- the whole dessert is gluten free and is therefore suitable for Passover (obviously if you keep Kosher there are other considerations besides leavened goods and flour, but in my household that's pretty much the extent of Passover.)

Belated Birthday Desserts

In addition to the two cakes, I made quite a few desserts for my party:

Toasted coconut brownies

Mini Brooklyn blackout cupcakes with cream cheese frosting

Chocolate, chocolate chip cookies

The brownies were delicious with desiccated coconut giving them a lovely texture. The Brooklyn blackout cupcakes were delicious as usual and the zing of the cream cheese frosting was complemented the deep, dark chocolate cake nicely.

The cookies were surprisingly good. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, the recipe was from Nigella Lawson and she really is a domestic goddess, but I love the chocolate chocolate chip cookies from Death by Chocolate. These might actually be better than the latter. The taste was a little sweeter (which I'm not sure is better or worse...it's just different). But the texture was perfect: a little crisp around the edges but still soft and nearly gooey on the inside (without being under baked).

Milk chocolate caramels with Maldon sea salt

Chocolate, peanut butter and oatmeal candies

The caramels and the candies (which are technically no bake cookies, but I think they are more like candies) were both gluten free (as is typical for candies) and were delicious. In fact, the caramels were perfect, which made me really happy because the last time I tried making them they came out yummy but the texture was all wrong and they didn't hold their shape. The cookies/candies, which came out a little crumbly and difficult to shape, ended up richly peanutty and quite sweet with a hint of chocolate and a nice texture from the oats.

Because there were two excellent chocolate cakes, the cupcakes, cookies and brownies didn't get much attention but we sent them home with people as favors and heard good things about them after. Interestingly the candies were popular even with the cakes as everyone's focus. I suppose the small size and the complete lack of similarity to cake made everyone reach for them. Both were well received but the caramels were definitely the star (well the German chocolate cake was the star, but the caramels were the non-cake star). All in all, everything was yummy and there were plenty of leftovers to enjoy after we weren't so stuffed from the amazing food!

Two Chocolate Caramel Candies

During that class I forgot to post about we made two different caramels. The first was a light, chewy-but-soft caramel with slivered almonds mixed in. They remind me a bit of nougatine (though not nearly so brittle). Since it was a chocolate lesson, we dipped the nutty caramel cubes in tempered chocolate, just to coat the bottoms. They were delicious, but a little too sweet for my taste. I prefer a darker and slightly chewer caramel.

Happily, that's exactly what the second caramel was. It was a layer of rich, dark, chewy, sticky, caramely goodness sandwiched between thin layers of bittersweet chocolate. It's a good thing they make us leave some of our candies for events/the restaurant. If I'd kept it all I would have eaten pounds of it! (As it was, I ate quite a bit.)

Olive Oil Cakes

Ligurian Lemon Cake

Olive oil cakes are cakes made with olive oil in the batter...shocking, I know. They are incredible! The oil makes them moist but doesn't weigh them down too much. Plus the lovely flavor of the olive oil comes comes through in the cake, in contrast to most cakes where you add vegetable oil so that you won't be able to taste the oil. Now that I've said oil so much it has stopped seeming like a word (at least to me as I'm the one typing it) I'll get on to describing the whole dessert.

My favorite of the two desserts was the ligurian lemon cake with raspberries baked right into the cake and topped with bruleed Swiss meringue (although I could have done without the meringue). We served this with a very clear raspberry sauce, an almond tuile, and incredible honey almond gelato. I think the tuiles were a little out of proportion for the plate, but they did taste good so I don't mind too much.

Beaumes-de-Venise Cake

The other cake we made was not my favorite of the night but one of my favorites of the unit. It was a beaumes-de-venise cake with has grapes baked into it; served on a rectangular cookie made out of linzer tart dough; with an uncooked grape compote (to me that's more of a grape salad, but semantics aside, it was delicious), fromage blanc sherbet, more of the raspberry sauce (I may have left this off), and a cocoa nib caramel tuile. I liked the first dessert more because I loved the combination of tart lemon and sweet raspberry in the delicious, moist, rich but still light cake and the honey almond gelato was to die for. Still though, the grape cake (with a hint of beaumes-de-venise, also know as muscat, wine) and all its accompaniments were excellent. I'd be extremely happy if I got either of these desserts in a restaurant.

A la Minute Cakes

A la minute desserts are desserts that are baked to order. These two warm cakes were delicious. The first, a warm chocolate fondant (I don't know why it's call a fondant...it has no resemblance to the fondant you use on cakes and doesn't even have that as an ingredient), was delicious. It's basically a warm chocolate mousse cake. We served it with pistachio creme anglaise, chocolate sauce, decorative curls of tempered chocolate, and vanilla-raspberry swirl ice cream. The pistachio creme anglaise was a bit too green and not nutty enough for my taste. Other than that, I liked everything.

The chef's plating of the warm hazelnut cake.

Shockingly, I liked the non-chocolate dessert more! The warm hazelnut cake was delicious, the texture was perfect, and it unmolded much more easily and neatly than the fondant. We served it with white peach compote, vanilla salad, a hard caramel coated hazelnut, and salt sorbet. The peach compote was actually made in the sous vide machine so that the sweet white peaches were infused with basil and balsamic vinegar (I believe...I didn't actually make it). Because the peaches weren't cooked except for a few seconds so that the skin would peel off easily, they were still somewhat firm instead of being peach mush. The vanilla salad is not actually a salad, it's that giant ball of tuile. It's basically an abstract shaped flat tuile that is "tossed" when it comes out of the oven to shape it into abstract shaped tuile ball-like shape. It's interesting looking and really simple to make. Now I know you're thinking about that salt sorbet and wondering when I'm going to explain that...sorry I made you wait, I just want to make sure you keep reading. Salt sorbet is exactly what it sounds like--it's sorbet flavored with salt. It didn't taste salty, per se, instead it tasted like the milk left over after you've eaten a bowl of kix. Yes, I know that's oddly specific, but we all thought that (except for the people who have never tried kix--if you are one of those people you absolutely must go get a box and try it--and even they said it tasted like cereal milk.) The chef gave the students who made the sorbet the recipe, which isn't in our book, I must get it from them or from him. It's so unusual and so delicious I have to make it again. Anyway, everything on the plate was good alone and it all worked together, I was very happy with it.

My plating of the warm hazelnut cake. It's a strange plate,
 but I think I did a pretty good job with it. If you look
closely you can see the caramel tail/spike on the hazelnut...
I think it looks really cool.

Pate a Bric Day

Asian Pear Sping Rolls

The third plated desserts unit is organized interestingly, each day we use a different dough or technique in a variety of different ways. Today was pate a bric day. Pate a bric is sort of a cross between fillo dough and a crepe. It's slightly salty and a bit thick (still quite thin, don't get me wrong), so I prefer fillo and I don't think anything we've done with pate a bric can't be done with fillo. In fact, you work with it the same way you work with fillo, you have to keep it covered so it doesn't dry up and you coat it with melted butter (typically clarified butter) before you do anything with it.

We made two things today: Asian pear spring rolls and mango purses. The former were definitely my favorite. The sauteed spring rolls filled with slices of Asian pear were excellent on their own. Served with raspberry swirl ice cream and raspberry gastric--a sauce made with raspberry vinegar and butter. We used caramel decorations to mimic chopsticks.

The mango purses were good. We served them with a sake sabayon and sorbet. The purses were fine, but what was really good was the sabayon and the sorbet.

Mango Purse

Panna Cotta

I'm not a fan of panna cotta; it's too jiggly. But considering that, this did taste nice. It is made with buttermilk, sugar (in the mixture and as caramel on top), heavy cream, and gelatin, so really it can't taste too bad, even if the texture is too wiggly for my liking. This was topped with mango compote and reisling granita, which was incredible!

By the way, a granita is a frozen dessert similar to a snocone. It's made by freezing a not-too-sugary typically alcohol based liquid solid and then scraping it to create flakes of icy goodness.

Nougatine Basket with Marzipan Fruit

We made nougatine baskets to hold our marzipan fruit. It's not the easiest thing to work with, but it looks pretty cool. Basically, nougatine is caramel with toasted sliced almonds in it. It's moldable when it's hot but hardens very brittle. The problem is, it doesn't stay hot enough to work with for very long. We used royal icing to decorate the baskets. I think the icing was too thick and dry and very difficult to work with. But that could be me; I'm not great at using royal icing. Regardless of my difficulties with the nougatine and royal icing, one it was filled with my marzipan fruit, it looked pretty darn good!

Hot Apple Charlotte

This was the most amazing thing! The butter caramel sauce was nice and the vanilla ice cream was delicious, but that was nothing compared to the charlotte. These individual size charlottes are made with heavily buttered white bread around the outside and are filled with a buttery, chunky apple compote. When you bake them the butter basically fries the bread. Holy cow they were good! By the decoration on top is isomalt, a type of beet sugar, that has been melted and drizzled onto a silpat to make a pretty spiral.

Pineapple Tart Tatin

This was nice. My puff pastry disk (that is under the baked pineapple with caramel) was pretty much perfect (the best I've ever made it!) The pineapple was a little under baked, I think, but it was still nice. The caramel swirl on top was pretty, the pineapple caramel sauce was nice, and the pate a bric cup with ice cream and a pineapple chip was an excellent complement to the wart tart tatin.

Caramel Mou

My chef calls these caramel mou ooh ooh, because they are just so good. She's completely right; they're incredible! They aren't quite caramel tasting, but they are very chocolaty. They have an incredible soft (but not too soft) and slightly chewy texture. The sea salt on top brought out the subtle sweet caramelized sugar flavor, which worked perfectly with the dark chocolate that was a major component of the recipe. I think the closest thing I can compare this to as far as texture (and taste to some extent) is good quality chocolate fudge. Yum!

My partner and I didn't quite cook the sugar mixture enough so, unfortunately ours came out slightly soft and cracked a bit on top. I tasted some that came out perfectly and I think ours tasted just as good, the texture just wasn't quite as great. And trust me when I say that the not quite perfect texture didn't stop me from eating it!

Florentines

Are these a cookie or a candy? I'm not sure. I've heard them called cookies, I usually think of them as candy. However, the way we made them makes me think more cookies than candy. Instead of a layer of caramel and nut mixture coated in chocolate, it was a layer of sweet tart dough covered with the caramel and nut mixture. While I miss the chocolate, I have to say, these are really good!

Dobos Torte

This was a very unusual and delicious cake. It is a five layer cake made with pancake like plain cake and chocolate buttercream. I think the buttercream was a little bit too sweet, if I made it on my own time I'd leave out some of the sugar, it was still nice though. The top is decorated with icing rosettes that a final layer of cake wedges coated with caramel lean on.

Spiked Pecan Sticky Buns

Oh wow these are good!  I mean what wouldn't be good about spiked pecan sticky buns? They are sticky and sweet and nutty and just a little boozy; need I say more?

What's nice about them is the dough is actually the same dough we used to make orange cinnamon swirl bread. Two very different breads with one batch of dough. Excellent!

The sticky buns before unmolding them. Look at that brown sugar swirl!

Tarte Tatin

I've never been a huge fan of tarte tatins. I mean I thought they were nice and all, but I never really thought they were that great. This was that great!  Seriously, if restaurants made tarte tatins like this, I'd order them.

Basically a tarte tatin is an upside down apple tart made with puff pastry crust. So I'm not sure why this was so much better than I'm used to. Presumably it has something to do with the fact that we made this very traditionally and most restaurants don't--while easy, the traditional method is time consuming and does not produce a terribly elegant final product.

First you sautée halved and cored apples in a pan (they should all fit when they are squeezed in next to each other) with butter until they start to get brown, add sugar, let the sugar turn to caramel, add calvados (or another liqueur), flambée them, and let them continue to cook, cut side up, until they are soft but not fully cooked through. At this point make sure all the apples are cut side up--rounded side down--in the pan. Then put a disk of puff pastry (obviously it's better with homemade puff, but defrosted store bought would work fine) on top of the apples and tuck it down the sides a bit. Put the whole pan in the oven and bake until the pastry is cooked. Unmold it as soon as it is cool enough to work with, but before it has cooled down too much. To be sure you can get the whole thing out in one try, heat the bottom of a pan over a gas burner on medium/high for 30 seconds to a minute. With a sheet pan held to the pan flip over the pan, and voila, a tarte tatin. Just slice and serve, perhaps with vanilla ice cream. Yum!