My loss, your gain

I’ve been dithering for years about entering the Scharffen Berger annual chocolate adventure contest, never quite pulling the trigger until finally, this winter, I got myself together enough to do some testing and submit something.  I have to admit I didn’t love this year’s theme of sandwich cookies, but I went for it anyway, never really expecting I had a chance.  And, of course, I didn’t, because I didn’t even get an honorable mention.

But my loss, as the title says, is your gain, because I already have the pictures taken and the recipe written up, and since Scharffen Berger has no further claim on it, you all can have it instead.  The point of the contest, besides using their chocolate, is to incorporate at least one “adventure ingredient”, which this year included coconut milk or coconut cream, sweet potato, tapioca or tapioca flour, tequila, banana, chili pepper, pine nuts, corn meal, Sumatra coffee, fresh ginger, yerba mate tea, and cacao nibs.

I ended up using coffee and coconut milk in a sandwich of coffee-flavored shortbread rounds, rolled in coconut and pressed around a coconut milk and milk chocolate ganache spiked with coconut rum.  They’re good, but apparently not good enough. Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Coconut Mocha Buttons
Makes approximately 3 dozen cookies

For coffee shortbread:

2 tablespoons coffee liqueur
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons finely ground Sumatra coffee
1 tablespoon instant coffee
8 ounces (16 tablespoons) cold, unsalted European-style butter, cut into tablespoon-sized cubes
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons cornstarch
Unsweetened, finely shredded coconut for rolling

For coconut milk chocolate ganache:

8 ounces Scharffen Berger Extra Rich Milk Chocolate, finely chopped
4 ounces (1/2 cup) coconut milk (not low-fat)
1 tablespoon unsalted European-style butter
1/8 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons coconut rum

Combine the coffee liqueur, vanilla extract, Sumatra coffee and instant coffee in a small bowl.  Allow to sit for 5 minutes.

In a food processor, blend the butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and salt until a fluffy paste forms.  Scrape down the bowl and add the coffee mixture, processing again until fully incorporated.  Whisk the flour and cornstarch together in a medium bowl and add to the creamed butter, pulsing just until a ball of dough begins to form around the blade.

Divide the dough in half and shape the first half into a roll 1 1/2 to 2 inches in diameter on a sheet of parchment paper.  Sprinkle several tablespoons of coconut along the edge of the cookie dough and roll it through the coconut until fully coated.  Tightly wrap the roll in the parchment paper, repeat the process with the second half of the dough, and chill the wrapped rolls until very firm, 2 hours to overnight.  (The dough can also be further wrapped in plastic or a zip-top freezer bag and frozen up to a month.)

While the dough is resting, prepare and chill the ganache filling.  Place the chopped chocolate in a medium mixing bowl.  Combine the coconut milk, butter and salt in a liquid measuring cup and microwave just until simmering.  Pour the hot coconut milk over the chocolate and whisk until the chocolate is fully melted and the ganache is glossy, then whisk in the coconut rum.  Allow to cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate until ready to assemble the cookies.

Preheat oven to 325 F and line several baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.  Remove one roll from the refrigerator and, using a sharp knife, slice off rounds 1/8 inch thick, rotating the roll a quarter turn between slices to preserve its round shape.  Place cookies 2 inches apart on the baking sheets and bake until the coconut is golden and the bottoms of the cookies are just beginning to darken, 12-15 minutes.  Remove cookies to a wire rack to cool completely, and repeat with the second roll.

When the cookies have cooled and the ganache has firmed up, place 2 teaspoons of ganache on the bottom of one cookie and place a second cookie right-side up over the filling, gently pressing down just until the filling reaches the edges.  Repeat with remaining cookies.  If not serving immediately, store cookies in refrigerator for up to a week.  Leftover unfilled shortbread keeps very well in an airtight container at room temperature for several weeks.

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Hurry Up and Wait

I’m starting to suspect I’m the winter equivalent of Typhoid Mary.  All too often have I moved somewhere and it’s suddenly weather they haven’t seen in over a decade, and I regret to say it’s happened again.  Sorry, Pacific Northwest.

Part of me opens the door to the whole three inches out there and wants to laugh uproariously, since this feeble dusting is not enough to cause so much as a hiccup back east. The rest of me is in a snit because here it’s enough to cripple the infrastructure and set off paroxysms of “We’re all gonna die!” hysterics, and His Lordship, the monster and I need to hit the road tomorrow to spend the holidays down south with our families.  Someone is damn well going to pay if we’re socked in until Monday, I assure you.

I’m also cranky because I actually managed to get organized enough this year to finish up all the cookie baking and card writing, and I can’t get to the post office to mail a single item.  The one year I was planning on not taking advantage of the loosest possible definition of the holiday timetable (I’ve been known to temporarily adopt the Russian Orthodox calendar when necessary), and all my good intentions go to waste.  Sorry, Secret Santa giftees, you’re going to have to wait a little longer.

Their loss is your gain, though, since I have nothing to do but blog and pack, probably in vain.  It may ruin the surprise for my giftees, but I’ll share this year’s holiday cookie selection a little early in case anyone’s looking for some inspiration.  Each one is an easy and great last-minute entertaining choice if you’re not already committed to a lineup.  As I said, I know people get touchy about holiday food, so if you absolutely must make Grandma’s pfeffernusse, I totally understand.

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Sidewalk Table and Jacarandas Not Included

Your dentist is going to hate me.

This week’s Sunday sweets blogging was partly pantry-clearing and partly nostalgia-tripping.

For our anniversary last year, His Lordship and I took a greatly-postponed honeymoon trip to Argentina. The idea was to show him where I came from, visit my pasta-producing grandmother, and consume unseemly quantities of amazing — and amazingly cheap — local food products, particularly artisanal ice cream in my case and grass-fed beef in His Lordship’s case.

Regular breaks for beverages and a nibble at cafes during our outings were a daily feature of our life during the trip, because it’s a daily feature of life in Buenos Aires for everyone. There are at least two on every block, and in the busier areas it’s probably closer to half a dozen, all serving a million variations on coffee and a comprehensive assortment of light meals, pastries and snacks.

They’re open from morning, when you can start your day off right with cafe con leche and the standard tres medialunas, until the ungodly hours of the night, when you can stumble in for empanadas or sandwiches at the end of or as a break from your club-hopping rounds. No one will bat an eyelash at any time in between if you order one cup of coffee and then sit for two additional hours reading your paper or engaging in heated philosophical debate with your friends. Indeed, it’s quite likely the waiter will never return to see if you need something more anyway, since it’s expected that you’re there to sloth away a good chunk of time.

In short, Buenos Aires’s cafe culture makes Seattle’s vaunted caffeine scene look like a parvenu bastard second cousin. It’s fantastic, and I’ve been longing for that level of urbanity ever since. Which is why, when I was thinking of what to bake for Monday morning and staring at a gift-sized jar of dulce de leche left over from that trip and three blocks of cream cheese inherited from the aforementioned departing friend, I thought about brownies.

Brownies seem to have landed with a vengeance in Buenos Aires, since we ran into them in practically every cafe we visited. It was an unexpected amusement to scroll down a menu and see “brownie”, with no translation at all, sandwiched between traditional offerings like flan and pastafrola, a lattice-topped quince tart I will get around to making if I ever find fresh quinces again. In striving not to be the ugly American, I never ordered a food I could easily get back home, but we did get a few dainty brownie bits once as part of the cafes’ universal and impeccably civilized custom of offering a complimentary cookie, chocolate or other treat with your coffee (are you listening, Starbucks?). They were completely respectable brownie bits and went quite nicely with cafe dobles and leisurely conversation.

Although I never actually saw such a thing while we were there, it would be perfectly in keeping with Argentine sensibilities to add dulce de leche to brownies, since there’s pretty much nothing sweet that won’t at some point be embellished with the national condiment. My favorite heladeria already does this in reverse, adding brownie bits to dulce de leche ice cream. True to my ancestry, I’ve been known to warm a few spoonfuls from my normally jealously-guarded supply until liquid and dribble it Pollock-fashion over finished brownies with a sprinkling of toasted pecans or walnuts.

But that wasn’t going to be enough to finish off the jar this time, and I do have to use up all that cream cheese, so I decided to swirl the two together into an espresso-embellished brownie base. While rummaging through my strategic chocolate reserves (what, doesn’t everyone have one?), I discovered that we also still had Argentine semisweet chocolate left, the kind used to make the drink whimsically known as a submarino by dunking a whole segment into steamed milk and stirring once it’s started to melt. For the sake of authenticity, I decided to throw that in too.

I’m now almost out of espresso powder, have whittled down my strategic chocolate reserve, and that jar of dulce de leche is done. I might up the dulce de leche amount to a third of a cup next time for even more of a trademark hit, but otherwise I was quite pleased with their rococo appearance and coffee-and-caramel-kissed taste. It’s not the same as kicking back at Cafe Tortoni, but it’ll hold me for a little while.

Submarino!

By the way, thanks to my bicontinental mother, I still have an additional unopened 1-kilo can of dulce de leche, so be on notice that we’re in for many more applications in the coming weeks.

Buenos Aires Cafe Brownies
(Very loosely adapted from Cook’s Illustrated’s The Best Recipe)
Makes 1 13×9 panful, approximately 18 brownies

Chocolate base:
3 5/8 ounces (2/3 cup) unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate (70% cocoa solids or higher), chopped
8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, in quarters
7 ounces (1 cup) granulated sugar
1 teaspoon espresso powder
2 teaspoons Kahlua
3 large eggs

Dulce de leche cheesecake base:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup dulce de leche
1/2 teaspoon vanilla paste
1 egg yolk

Set oven rack to lower-middle position and preheat oven to 325 F. Line a 13 x 9 baking pan with two perpendicular sheets of nonstick aluminum foil or parchment paper, leaving overhang as handles for removing the cooled brownies later.

Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in a medium bowl.

In a large glass measuring cup, combine the chocolate and butter and microwave at 50% until chocolate has completely melted, stirring frequently. Stir in the sugar, espresso powder and Kahlua, and allow to cool slightly. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time, until completely smooth. Add the dry ingredients, stirring until just combined.

In a small bowl, whisk together the cream cheese and dulce de leche until uniform. Stir in yolk and vanilla.

Spread half the chocolate mixture in the bottom of the pan. Drop half of the cheesecake base on top in evenly-distributed large spoonfuls. Repeat with remaining half of mixtures. Using a chopstick or wooden spoon handle, gently swirl the batters together to create a marbled effect. Over-mixing will blur and muddy the swirls.

Bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into center emerges with a few moist crumbs attached. Cool completely on a wire rack and cut into squares just before serving.

Notes:

The basic recipe for the brownies was baked in an 8×8 pan. Since I knew these would be significantly sweeter and richer, I decided to stretch the batter into a bigger pan, and got thinner, chewier brownies closer to what His Lordship looks for. If you want thicker and fudgier, bake this in the smaller pan for around 40-50 minutes, although you’ll still probably have to cut them into smaller-than-average squares.

Pictured is my favorite brand of dulce de leche, determined during the aforementioned trip via purchase and side-by-side tasting of half the dulce de leche aisle at the nearby supermarket. La Salamandra is one of the most readily available in the U.S., albeit at highly inflated prices.

My brother remains faithful to San Ignacio, the brand we grew up with courtesy of our then-jetsetting grandmother. San Ignacio was the close runner-up in my taste test, edged out by the slightly more prominent fresh-milk top note of La Salamandra.

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Sunday Night Sweets Blogging: Opera Cupcakes

We’re woefully overdue for another Sunday night sweets entry. It isn’t that I haven’t been baking; it’s just that life has been interfering with blogging time again. The hazelnut chocolate chip cookies I made two weeks ago were a bit disappointing and not worth posting about yet, but I’ll try to find time to write up last week’s almond-caramel sandwich cookies sometime soon, since they came out rather well.

In the meantime, tonight’s mood was in the cake direction. The foibles of my crappy oven aside, I’ve been really happy since I started using Shirley Corriher’s recipe for Basic Moist Sweet Cake from Cookwise for cupcakes. The method is a bit quirky, since you blend the flour and the fat together first, then add the liquid ingredients, but the end product is wonderfully moist, tender, and velvety. I think it might actually work better as cupcakes, since the crumb is so delicate and melting that I can’t imagine it holding up particularly well to frosting or slicing as a full-sized cake. As it is, you really need to double-line the muffin cups, or use the stiff mini-panettone molds I used this time, to give the cakes enough support to stand up once you unmold them; otherwise, they just spread and deform in the liners.

Besides the fantastic texture, the other advantage of this recipe is that you can use any oil you like, but nut oils, if you have them, give you an incredibly flavorful end product. Nearly every time I’ve made this recipe, I’ve used macadamia oil, which gives the basic yellow cake a wonderfully exotic, round, full flavor. This time, since I’m out of the macadamia, I used hazelnut, which inspired me to go with the coffee-chocolate combination of the classic Opera Cake when it came time to frost. Having both a coffee buttercream and a ganache glaze is probably overkill for cupcakes, but I couldn’t decide on one or the other, and I really do love the combination of chocolate, coffee, and nuts.

I’m not entirely happy with the decoration here, because the coffee beans are too small and too dark to make any impact against the ganache. Next time I’d probably use the half-cup of leftover buttercream to pipe rosettes on top of the ganache and then top with the coffee bean, or perhaps a chocolate-covered espresso bean. I’m not going to knock myself out over aesthetics this late on a Sunday, though, and anyway, you really can’t argue with the taste.

Opera Cupcakes
Makes 20-24 cupcakes

Hazelnut Cakes
2 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
6 tablespoons plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk (1/2 cup total)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup hazelnut oil (or other nut oil, or mild vegetable oil)

Leave eggs, buttermilk and butter out at room temperature until butter has softened.

Place shelf in lower third of oven, and preheat to 350. Set 20 mini panettone molds on a baking sheet, or line two muffin trays with liners.

Sir the eggs, yolks, 6 tablespoons buttermilk and vanilla together in a liquid measuring cup.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, and mix on low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter, oil and remaining 2 tablespoons butermilk, and mix on low until the dry ingredients are moistened. Increase to medium and beat for 1 1/2 minutes, until light. Add the liquid ingredients, one third at a time, beating for 20 seconds between additions.

Fill the molds or muffin cups halfway and bake until golden and a tester comes out clean,
approximately 20-25 minutes. Remove from oven and let sit on baking sheet or in muffin trays for ten minutes before removing to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Coffee Buttercream
3 cups powdered sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder, dissolved in 1/4 cup hot water
1 to 2 tablespoons whipping cream

In a standing mixer, mix the sugar and butter on low speed until well blended, then increase speed to medium and beat for another 3 minutes, until light and fluffy.

Add vanilla, dissolved espresso and cream and continue to beat on medium speed for 1 minute more, adding more cream if needed for spreading consistency.

Once the cupcakes have completely cooled, spread 2-3 tablespoons of buttercream over the cakes, creating as smooth and level a surface as possible and leaving at least 1/4 inch of space between the buttercream and the top of the mold/liner for the ganache layer. Refrigerate the frosted cupcakes in an airtight container until the buttercream has firmed.

Ganache
150 grams heavy cream
150 grams dark chocolate, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Lyle’s Golden Syrup (or corn syrup)

Heat the cream in a liquid measuring cup in a microwave until near boiling, approximately 1-2 minutes. Add the chocolate and whisk thoroughly, until chocolate has dissolved and the mixture is smooth. Whisk in the syrup.

Pour 1-2 tablespoons of the ganache over the frosted cupcakes, tilting the cupcakes to swirl the ganache over the surface and ensure even coverage of the buttercream layer. (Do not touch the ganache or try to spread it with a spatula or other utensil, as it will mar the shiny surface of the end product.) If desired, add a coffee bean or chocolate covered espresso bean as garnish.

Return to the refrigerator in a covered container until the ganache has set.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Kitchen Crapshoot Edition

No matter how skilled you are (and I make no claims to being anything more than an enthusiastic and fairly competent amateur), cooking is always a crapshoot. You increase your odds by having the basic skills down, choosing your ingredients well, and using reliable recipes, but some element of chance always remains. Sometimes it’s happy serendipity and you get an outcome even better than you anticipated, and sometimes it all goes disappointingly wrong. Today, I got lucky.

For this week’s cookie blogging, I tried to re-create a biscotti recipe my mother used to make when I was a kid, but has long since lost. They were walnut biscotti with the sharp, earthy bite of a significant quantity of black pepper, which sounds very odd but, in fact, worked wonderfully well. I’ve madly Googled “walnut pepper biscotti” and endless variations thereon for months, but none of the recipes I’ve uncovered have gotten the “eureka” from Mom, so I decided to try winging it to see how close I can get.

Having had good results with the last batch of biscotti from a Todd English recipe, I decided to modify the recipe for Cardamom Almond Biscotti from The Figs Table. I figured cardamom and pepper were similar enough that they could be swapped 1:1, and almonds and walnuts are equally easy to exchange. Although I knew the original recipe did not have espresso powder in it, I decided to leave it in, just to see how the combination would work.

The raw dough was lovely to work with, very pliable and easy to shape, and because you don’t have to soften the butter, it’s great for impulse baking. It was also very tasty, buttery and warm from the coffee and pepper, with a slow cumulative burn rather than a nose-tingling initial bite. I sneaked a few bites of the still-warm dough after the first baking while I was slicing it for the second round, and it was even better.

The end product is fantastic. It’s almost nothing like the taste I was originally going for, because the original did put the black pepper front and center, but it’s absolutely great in its own right. Here, the coffee marries with the pepper, the vanilla, the orange, and the walnuts to make a full, deep, round combination that is much more than the sum of those parts. I am really pleased. I can even see these becoming something of a signature cookie, if I can come up with a sexier name than “Black Pepper Espresso Walnut Biscotti”. (Maybe something like Indonesian Biscotti, since black pepper and coffee are both grown there.)

Here’s the recipe:

Black Pepper Espresso Walnut Biscotti
(Makes 4 dozen)

1/2 cup cold unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 extra-large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon dried orange rind (available through Penzey’s), rehydrated (or 1 tablespoon fresh orange zest)
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

In the bowl of a mixer, beat the butter and sugars together until well blended. Add the eggs one at a time, incorporating thoroughly, then mix in the vanilla and orange zest.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, espresso powder, and black pepper until homogeneous. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture in two or three batches, mixing just until combined. Stir in the walnuts.

Divide the dough into two equal batches. Shape one half into a log 12 inches long by approximately 4 inches on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until evenly golden brown and slightly cracked on top. (While the first half is baking, refrigerate the remaining half.) Set aside to cool, and repeat the baking process with the remainder of the dough.

Lower the oven to 300 F. Using a serrated knife, slice the mostly-cooled logs on the diagonal into 1/2-inch thick slices. Place the biscotti on an ungreased, unlined cookie sheet, flat side down, and bake for 20 minutes, flipping the cookies halfway through. Allow to cool completely on the sheet, then store in an airtight container.

———

I had these biscotti for dessert tonight, along with the leftovers of an equally experimental mascarpone-based mousse I threw together on a whim yesterday. Since that showed definite promise but still needs a little tweaking, I won’t post the recipe yet, but I hope to perfect it very soon. Since coffee was also a major flavor element in the mousse, it went beautifully with the cookies, which provided a lovely crisp contrast to the cool richness and creaminess of the mousse. I think combining the two elements with a third (perhaps poached pears or something similar) might make for a really elegant special-occasion dessert.

Just to show that not all my experiments go that well, I’ll also share my most recent cooking faux pas. Two weeks ago, I bought a beautiful basket of fresh purple figs. As I always do when I buy figs or similarly pricey, relatively rare, short-season produce, I got ambitious. I decided to try for something like a spectacular dessert I had several years ago at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco (thankfully, on someone else’s dime), a napoleon made with fresh figs and a honey mousse. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to reproduce that recipe, but I thought I might make something evocative, if simpler, by baking the figs with port and making a frozen honey mousse I’d been eyeing for a long time in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The mousse was very simple: egg yolks, honey, and cream, with some flavorings and pistachios mixed in before freezing.

Since the recipe called for a strong-flavored honey and I only had very mild varieties at home, I went to the honey vender at the farmer’s market, and asked for a strong one for cooking. He gave me a smartweed honey that was almost molasses-dark, recommended for baking. When I got it home, I opened it and gave it a taste while preparing the rest of the ingredients. It was strong. Really strong. A little alarm went off in my head, that while this might work in baked goods because it could stand up to the heat, it might be too medicinal for use in that recipe. I didn’t listen to that instinct, though. I figured all the fat and the freezing would dull the flavor, and that I should just give it a chance.

Well, I was wrong. Even after mixing with the egg yolks and the whipped cream, even after freezing, it was way too pungent for even the most assertive fig. It had an almost menthol-like top note which, although it did fade after the initial taste, still killed the flavor of the fruit. We didn’t even finish the batch, and I had to toss out the remaining half. The moral of the story? Cooking is as much about listening to your instincts as it is about honing your skills. If it doesn’t smell or feel right, don’t trust the recipe to fix it for you.

Next weekend, schedule permitting, we’ll have another installment of Celebrity Chefs I Hate.

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