mix, mix… stir, stir

Sophisticated, elegant, delicious, impressive and intimidating; maybe it is the creamy decadent center or the elegance of a beautifully brûeléed top that cracks into pieces when tapped with a spoon that fuels the intimidation factor of this dessert. The truth is it is an easy dessert to make and if you love crème brûlée you owe it to yourself to invest in the tools to be able to make it at home.

photo by David Peterman

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie assignment had us all playing with fire. Marni of Mevrouw Cupcake selected Crème Brûlée, which translates to “burned cream” as our recipe this week from Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours. One thing I had forgotten about crème brûlée is it can be made a day or two in advance and held in the refrigerator and then right before serving caramelize the top. How perfect is that for entertaining?

The specialized tools needed are small ramekins for portioning, and the shallower and wider they are the more delectable caramelized topping each serving delivers. That is really all that is needed, but a blow torch is great to have for caramelizing the tops, a broiler works, but a torch is much more fun and adds a great “wow” factor if you are entertaining! As much as I love fancy kitchen shops and all the specialized tools designed for cooks, this tool is best purchased at a hardware store. The hardware store torch is so much more powerful than the small kitchen torches and that means it will be fast. The longer you have a flame hovering over these custards the more likely it is the centers will melt while trying to get an even caramelization over the top. Additionally, if you want to brûlée anything larger like the top of a pumpkin pie, or a marshmallow icing on a cake, the little torch just won’t get the job done. When you aren’t torching things in the kitchen you also have a fully functional torch for doing whatever it is people do with torches. Mine has come in handy when I have needed to heat and bend metal for example. Go for the big guns, you won’t be sorry.

Dorie’s recipe was very straight forward, but the baking instructions confounded me. Baking at 200 degrees F took a very long time. I think my tiny little custards baked for 80-90 minutes and after an hour I bumped up the temperature to 225 degrees. To be fair I will admit to baking my custards in a water bath out of habit, and didn’t register that she skipped the water bath at this lower temperature. Most of the other crème brûlée recipes in my book collection suggest baking at 325-350 degrees F in a water bath and the custards should set in about 20-25 minutes.  I decided to use a fresh vanilla bean rather than extract for flavor and because it took so long for the custard to set all the vanilla bean seeds settled to the bottom of the ramekins which was rather unfortunate. In the future I will stick with a hotter oven and a water bath.

Initially I used brown sugar on top, but found it burned before all of it fully caramelized. For the next round I used granulated sugar which resulted in a much nicer caramelization. I coated the tops of the custards enough so the sugar created a fully white surface, but not so thick that I couldn’t still see the hint of yellow custard below. Touch the flame to the sugar and keep it moving over the entire surface so as the sugar begins to melt and bubble it doesn’t burn. Once the surface is a beautiful caramel color, it’s done. One word of caution, countertops don’t generally take well to direct flames.

Water bath or bain-marie

This cooking method is used to protect delicate foods like custards, sauces, mousses, and cheesecakes, from curdling or over baking. A gentle heat is the best way to achieve a tender end result and the water acts to temper the oven or stove top heat. The item to be cooked is placed in a larger shallow pan that is filled with hot water. The water in the pan can’t exceed 212 degrees F (once it hits 212 it boils away) so the temperature of the water directly in contact with the food is lower than the actual oven temperature, creating a more gentle cooking process. Interestingly the type of pan used for the water bath effects the temperature of the water according to Harold McGee in his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.  The mass of the pan makes the difference; a thicker cast iron pan accumulates more heat than a thin metal pan for example. He states that water in a cast iron pan in a moderately hot oven will reach 195 degrees F, a glass pan will reach 185 degrees F, and a stainless pan only 180 degrees F. He then points out that to get custard to fully set it must reach at least 185 degrees F. One last point he shares is placing a towel in the bottom of the water bath prevents the water from circulating under the dish. The trapped water can reach a boil resulting in the dish getting bumped around. His suggestion is to use a wire rack rather than a towel.

 I prefer very small ramekins for serving crème brûlée because it is such a rich indulgence of heavy cream and egg yolks. Along with the delicate custard I like to serve crispy cookies to round out the presentation. As delicious as crème brûlée is, four of five bites is not quite enough to satisfy my dessert expectation. The molasses spice cookies I served alongside the crème brûlées were a nice match.

If crème brûlée is your favorite thing to order at restaurants, dig through your recipe collection and pull out all the crème brûlée variations you inevitably have at your fingertips, or visit Mevrouw Cupcake for Dorie’s recipe and give it a try. It’s easy and you will no doubt have fun with the torch.

I hear plum cake and just can’t help but to think of little Jack Horner.

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner,
Eating his Christmas pie,
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said, “What a good boy am I.”

photo by David Peterman

There is no need to stick one’s thumb into this cake for a plum, as they are perched right on top and get beautifully caramelized while baking. I embraced fall and selected Italian Prune Plums that are now showing up at the farmer’s markets in my area. They are small little gems, so I decided to make small little cakes to suit them.

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking group selection of Dimply Plum Cake was selected by Michelle of Bak-en. I can’t say this is a recipe that ever jumped out at me when flipping through Dorie’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours, and it just proves that personal biases can lead one to miss out on some great things. Though it is difficult to select a recipe that is less interesting when there are dozens of recipes that are highly enticing on other pages, I will try to remember to expand my interests now and again just to see what surprises await.

This cake is interesting in that it is “hearty,” as in a bit dry and crumbly, but oddly in a good way. For me it worked in the mini-muffin format, but I am not so sure how I would feel about it as a plated dessert requiring a fork. Though served warm with a little vanilla ice cream could be another magical surprise. As a mini-treat the solid structure of the cake makes it easy to eat from the hand and would be an excellent nibble to serve at a party of finger food or for an afternoon tea. This recipe gave me great inspiration to make all sorts of cakes in mini-muffin tins with a delicious dollop of something paced on each one. I think a cardamom rosewater cake with a dollop of thick fig jam in the center would be delightful.

I knew I wanted to add a hazelnut garnish, but never like to garnish with something not in the dish, so I added 1/3 cup of chopped hazelnuts to the cake batter. The garnished nuts were given a little bath of simple syrup before placing them on the cakes and baking. The hazelnuts worked really well adding a nutty flavor and the crunch was lovely in contrast to the baked plum. The other deviation I made was adding a 1/2 teaspoon of allspice in addition to the cardamom. I have been reading a lot about allspice lately and just couldn’t resist adding a touch. I had a tendency to want to fill the muffin tins a little too full and it worked better when the cake did not rise over the top of the mold, so half-full of batter is all that is needed. Of course for the tiny cakes the baking time is reduced, I pulled them out after about 18 minutes.

photo by David Peterman

Allspice has been my spice obsession of late. Allspice is the dried berry of a large evergreen tree called Pimenta dioica that grows in Jamaica, West Indies, and Central America. Jamaican allspice has been long held as the premier product for its higher essential oil content which is primarily made up of eugenol. The name comes from the spice tasting like a combination of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. Allspice crosses between sweet and savory cooking beautifully. It is an essential ingredient in Jamaican jerk seasoning as well as being  used frequently in curries, pickling, and even ketchup. The warm sweet aromas of course are a natural match to sweets and baked goods. I tossed a few berries in a pot of potato leek soup over the weekend with delicious results.

I highly recommend buying whole berries and grinding them as needed to best preserve the flavor and aroma of the volatile oils. Whole berries also makes it easy to infuse the flavor of the spice in soups, mulled wine, spiced cider, and poaching liquids for fruits, where the ground spice would make the liquid cloudy and less visually appealing. If your interaction with allspice has been limited to holiday pumpkin pies, I hope you will explore the warm peppery flavors it can bring to all sorts of dishes.

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking adventure continues with more cookies. I wasn’t sure how these cookies would stay together with chunks of bittersweet chocolate, semisweet chocolate, and white chocolate, in addition to peanuts, and only a third cup of flour, even less cocoa powder and a couple of eggs acting as a structural binder. Impossible. The ingredient list just didn’t look structurally sound. It is deliciously confounding, and maybe I shall have another to further analyze the situation.

photo by David Peterman

Not only are these cookies structurally sound, they are so delicious. They taste like the cookie version of a Dairy Queen Peanut Buster Parfait. Sandwich a couple of them around some vanilla ice cream and you might have to pay a flavor royalty fee to DQ! The recipe also called for raisins, but I omitted them out of respect for David’s aversion to raisins, and no harm was done to the end result. I used honey roasted peanuts that I raided from David’s personal snack supply, which he wasn’t too happy with initially but seems to be enjoying his peanuts in the cookies just fine.

These powerfully chocolaty cookies deserve to be made with really good chocolate. With so many varieties of chocolate involved it is important to incorporate the full spectrum of chocolate flavors or the end result might border on sickly sweet. What I mean by the full spectrum is chocolates that are distinctly different from one another based on how sweet they are. If you are interested in the differences and learning how to decipher chocolate labels, read on… but first you need to know you can find this fantastic recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours and I would like to thank Claudia of Fool for Food for selecting such a winner of a recipe for this week.

Deciphering Chocolate Labels
The common terms used in describing different types of chocolate are cocoa powder, unsweetened, bittersweet, semisweet, milk, and white. It seems reasonable enough that these terms alone would sort out the different types of chocolate on the market, and in some situations that’s the case, but too often there are big differences between two chocolates that are both labeled “semisweet” for example. In a few instances the labels are pretty clear; with unsweetened chocolate you know it’s going to be bitter chocolate with no added sugar, but beyond that it can be a bit of a mystery.  The way to determine the difference between one bar and the next is to decipher the formula of cocoa solids, sugar, and total fat in the chocolate.

This has become easier with the increasing variety of specialty chocolates available on the market these days. More information is available on the chocolate packaging as manufacturers work to distinguish their product from all the others on the shelf and we consumers benefit from this additional information because it gives us some data to work with that is consistent across the board rather than relying on terminology that is open to interpretation. The data I am referring to are the numbers such as 58%, 61% 70% that are very common on chocolate packages anymore. You might also see a series of three numbers like this, 60/40/38. This is the key to knowing what you are buying. One company’s bittersweet might be another company’s semisweet, but when you are dealing with the numbers, the terminology doesn’t really matter.

The three ingredients in chocolate are cocoa solids (also called cocoa mass or cocao liquer), sugar and fat. Cocoa solids are simply cocoa beans ground into a fine paste. The numbers indicate the composition of the chocolate with regard to the percent cocoa solids, percent sugar and percent fat. A bar labeled 70% indicates that 70% of the weight of the chocolate is cocoa solids and fat, therefore 30% is sugar. A 62% chocolate will have more sugar and taste less bitter. When the numbers are shown as a series of three, such as 60/40/38, the first number is the percent cocoa solids, then the percent sugar, and the third indicates the percent fat. Knowing the percent fat is important when melting chocolate to dip candies or coat molds because the greater the amount of cocoa butter the better the melted chocolate will flow.

Referring to the percentage of cocoa solids in a chocolate is a more accurate indication of the sweetness of a chocolate than relying on a term. However, it does not determine the flavor because like coffee beans or wine grapes, cocoa beans are very complex and the flavor is influenced by where the beans grow, how they are fermented, roasted and processed in to chocolate. The best way to determine what kind of chocolate you like to eat is to taste a lot of it!

Milk chocolate is milder because it has added milk and a high percentage of sugar. Because of the added milk and large amount of sugar, the ratio of cocoa solids and cocoa butter are lower. This makes milk chocolate softer so it won’t have the crisp snap that a 70% dark chocolate has.

White chocolate doesn’t actually contain any cocoa solids at all, which is why it doesn’t taste like chocolate. It is made from purified cocoa butter, milk solids, and sugar. It has as soft creamy texture rather than the crisp snappy texture of dark chocolate.

Cocoa powder is made from the left over cocoa bean once the cocoa butter has been extracted. It is really a by-product of cocoa butter. It is this left over part of the cocoa bean that has all the flavor and color, so it provides a very intense chocolate flavor when added to foods. Cocoa powder is naturally very acidic so some cocoa powders are treated with the alkaline agent, potassium carbonate, to neutralize the pH. This is referred to as “Dutched” cocoa powder because the inventor of the process was Dutch. Dutched cocoa powder has a milder flavor and a darker color.

I hope this helps you sort out your chocolate choices the next time you are standing in front of a dizzying selection of chocolates trying to decide what to buy.

Parchment paper and cheese cloth are two things I like to always have on hand in the kitchen. Not that I use cheese cloth everyday, but often it’s a handy solution for an impromptu straining or infusing task, and I really hate trips to the grocery store mid-recipe.

photo by David Peterman

With all of my stock making lately I have been going through more cheese cloth than normal, so when I was at a fabric store recently it occurred to me to ask, “Do you sell cheese cloth?” Yes they do, and for a fraction of the cost of the packages sold in the cookware isle of grocery stores! Even better, I had a choice between a lose weave, or a tight weave. I just bought two yards of 36″ wide tight weave cheese cloth for five dollars! What a deal.

More delicious cookies are piling up in the kitchens of the Tuesdays with Dorie online baking clan. This week we indulged in Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops. Oh yes, it was off to the candy isle to stock up on a big carton of whoppers!

photo by David Peterman

I love malt and whoppers so I knew these would be a big hit with me, though I also know from experience that desserts with candy mix-ins run the risk of being cloyingly sweet. I am not a fan of the sickly sweet stuff, so I hedged my bets with extra bitter 70% dark chocolate chunks in place of the bittersweet chocolate or chocolate chips that Dorie calls for. I am happy I did. The cookies are rich and chocolaty, and the sweet hits of melted malt balls are nicely tempered by the bitter chocolate chunks. Additionally, I topped them with a light sprinkling of Murray River Flake Salt as a final counterpoint to the sweet candy and a flavor enhancer to the chocolate.

The biggest factor for these cookies slipping from “ooh-ahh” reviews to “eh” is baking time. They are a bit of a cakey cookie and the difference between soft and gooey or dry and cakey could be as little as an extra thirty seconds to a minute in the oven. Error on the side of underdone and they will be “ooh-ahh”‘ good.

photo by David Peterman

So now that I have a big jar of leftover malt powder in my cupboard what do I do? Oh, sure I could make more cookies, but it’s not like the extra whoppers are going to even last until tomorrow, so I thought I had better come up with another plan. My need for a future-use plan is due to the last time I had a jar of malt; it languished in the back of my cupboard for about five years and the remaining contents was so rock hard I finally tossed it out a few months ago. Feeling a bit guilty, I decided to put it behind me and move on. Then this recipe comes along forcing me to face my demons! I vow to use the entire jar of malt and not let a single bit go to waste. Or should I say every bit will go to waist!

The first thing that came to mind is a spicy malted hot cocoa. Like it or not the air is starting to have that crispy nip of fall, at least here in the Northwest where we never really even had summer this year, and hot cocoa is one of my favorite cold weather treats.

Wed. 8/17 - I have updated the recipe now that I have been drinking it for a few more days. I decided it needed more malt and more cocoa.

Spicy Malted Hot Cocoa Mix
1 cup malted milk powder
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons ancho chile powder
1 1/2 teaspoons allspice
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Combine all the ingredients together and mix well. Store in an airtight container.
To make a spicy hot beverage, heat one cup of milk and whisk in 3 Tablespoons of Spicy Malted Hot Cocoa Mix. Relax and enjoy.

This has a pretty good kick, so if you don’t like spicy cut back on both the ancho chile and cayenne pepper. Hot cocoa is the perfect place to use a high quality dutch processed cocoa powder if you can. After tasting this, I am not the least bit worried about that extra malt powder languishing in the cupboard this time. I may even need to buy another jar before the winter is over.

Thank you to Rachel of Confessions of a Tangerine Tart for this week’s recipe selection. You can find the recipe for Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours.