Sunday Sweets Blogging: Cashew-Macadamia Hearts

This is what happens when I get really ambitious on a Sunday.

Inspired by one of my favorite food blogs, which recently featured homemade brazil nut cups, I decided to finally get around to using the heart-shaped molds I’d bought ages ago with the intention of using them for chocolates and other molded treats. I thought about using a plain ganache filling, but since I’ve been big on all kinds of nuts and seeds lately, I decided to go with a nut butter filling instead. I had tried a cashew butter recipe from Alton Brown last year and liked it quite a lot, so I decided to start with that, supplementing the cashews with macadamias and the macadamia nut oil I’ve been putting into a lot of baked goods lately. (It’s really lovely stuff and works miracles on vanilla cupcakes.) The results are fragrant and tropical and a million times better than plain old peanut butter.

Making chocolates isn’t really that hard. It’s just a bit time-consuming, and the only tricky step is tempering the chocolate properly, so that it stays shiny and crisp when you bite it, instead of developing a waxy “bloom” or turning brittle. I researched several methods of tempering and decided to start with the “seeding” approach, melting most of it while reserving some for addition off the heat, to bring down the temperature and encourage stable crystals. Unfortunately, I didn’t do it well enough, and the chocolate was a bit distempered, so they did develop a whitish bloom, but I can’t complain too much, because these do taste wonderful, especially at room temperature, when the filling is creamy and smooth and melds perfectly with the yielding chocolate coating. I cheated a bit for presentation purposes by painting them with additional macadamia oil to make them glisten (a trick I picked up from Jacques Torres, another celebrity chef I decidedly don’t hate) and dusting the tops with cocoa.

I’ll work on my tempering techniques and see if I can’t do even better next time by monitoring the temperature instead of using the less precise seeding method, but for now, I’m quite pleased, and I didn’t hear any complaints at work this morning, either.

Cashew-Macadamia Hearts
Makes approx. 32 bonbons

1 cup cashew-macadamia butter (see below)
1/2 cup powdered sugar, sifted
1 lb bittersweet chocolate
Cocoa for dusting

Equipment: Clean, scrupulously dry candy molds
Double boiler
A cooling rack set on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper

In a food processor, blend the nut butter and powdered sugar until a firm paste forms. Taste and add additional salt if necessary to balance the sweetness. Set aside while tempering the chocolate.

Chop the chocolate very finely, setting aside 1/3 for later addition. Place the remaining 2/3 in the top half of a double boiler over simmering water and allow to melt, stirring gently. When the chocolate is just melted, remove from the heat and add the reserved third, stirring until the entire batch is melted together.

Fill the chocolate molds with chocolate, swirling and shaking to cover all surfaces, then set upside-down on the rack over the cookie sheet to let the excess run out. Set in the refrigerator for 10-15 minutes to set up. When the chocolate is firm, invert the molds and fill each chocolate-lined cavity with enough nut filling to reach about three-quarters to the top, pushing into the crevices to be sure that there are no air pockets. Seal the bonbons with the remaining chocolate, scraping the tops of the molds to remove extra chocolate and ensure clean unmolding. Return the molds, right-side up, to the refrigerator to set.

When the chocolates have firmed, carefully unmold them. If desired, brush with additional macadamia oil, and dust the tops with excellent-quality cocoa powder sifted through a fine mesh sieve.

Notes: Chocolate will “seize” or turn clumpy and grainy if it comes into contact with water, so be careful not to let steam from the double boiler condense into the melted chocolate, and be sure that the molds and all work surfaces and tools are very dry. Supposedly the best way to keep chocolate at a workable temperature and maintain the temper is to keep it on a low-temp heating pad while you’re waiting for the first set, but I didn’t have one, so I left it over the still-warm water in the double boiler, off the heat, which kept it warm enough to spread over the filled bonbons and also, oddly, resulted in slightly shinier bottoms on the candies.

Cashew-Macadamia Butter
Makes approx. 1 1/2 cups

8 oz raw cashews
2 oz macadamia nuts
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons macadamia oil (or other nut oil)
3 tablespoons grapeseed oil (or canola, or other very mild-flavored oil)

Preheat oven to 350. Toast the cashews in a single layer on a baking sheet until golden, approximately 12-15 minutes, being careful not to burn them. Let cool.

Heat the honey in a small container in the microwave until slightly runny, about 15 seconds. Combine with the oils in a liquid measuring cup.

Pulse the cashews, macadamia nuts and salt in a food processor until nearly pulverized, about 5 seconds. With the processor running, slowly add the oil and honey mixture through the feed tube and continue processing until a smooth paste forms. Taste and correct seasonings as necessary.

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And Now for Something Completely Different…

Between the holidays and my birthday last week, I’ve been eating so many sugary treats for the past two months that I finally burned out. Since I’m currently eyeing salads with the same longing I usually reserve for chocolate, I really couldn’t face cookie blogging last night, and decided to go with something more wholesome instead. I decided that what I really wanted was something with whole grains, dried fruit, and breakfast appeal, and settled on jazzing up my favorite bran muffin recipe with dried cherries.

The beauty of this recipe is that it has a wonderfully light and tender texture, unlike the usual leaden, splintery or greasy nature of most bran muffins. The recipe also makes a huge number of muffins that freeze beautifully, so I can have a ready supply of on-the-go healthy breakfasts, which is very handy during my periodic attempts to reform my breakfast-skipping instincts. The original recipe called for figs, but I substituted dates very early on and found that I really preferred their moistness and the way they combine with the honey to give the muffins an earthy sweetness. You can use any dried fruit you like, although I’m a much bigger fan of cherries than of raisins, and I liked the way their sharpness contrasted with the dates. Next time, I might even try cranberries.

These are healthy, but not masochistically healthy. A nice change of pace.

Cherry-Date Bran Muffins
Makes approximately 30

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 cups wheat bran
1/2 cup pitted, chopped dates
1/2 cup dried cherries
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 large eggs
2 cups buttermilk

Preheat oven to 400°F. Line 30 muffin cups with muffin papers.

Whisk flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl to blend. Combine bran, dates and cherries in another bowl, mix in 1 cup boiling water, and leave to stand while preparing the batter.

Beat the butter in a mixer until creamy. Gradually beat in the sugar, then the honey, then the eggs, one at a time. Beat in the buttermilk and flour in alternating additions, three of each. Fold in the bran mixture.

Divide the batter among the lined muffin cups, filling halfway. Bake muffins 20 minutes, or until firm and springy to the touch or a tester comes out clean. Turn muffins out onto racks and cool.

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Pie? Meh, but Cupcakes I Can Get Behind.

We never had pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving when I was growing up. While my mother adopted Thanksgiving with a vengeance when she first discovered it as an immigrant, her nearly-wholesale appropriation stopped short of the dessert course. She never cared for pumpkin pie, probably because she dislikes cloves and allspice, so we usually had some variation on apple pie (pie, strudel, even tarte tatin) instead. As an adult, though, I’ve thrown off my mother’s aversion to the spices usually found in pie, and I’ve also become really fond of pumpkin as a dessert medium, although pie is still not my favorite use for it, partly because really good pie dough without hydrogenated fat is my personal demon and constant nemesis, and partly because there are so many more interesting possibilities for pumpkin.

For the past few years, I’ve been alternating between the flan/creme brulee end and the cake ends of the spectrum. This year, I decided to follow the example of the very inventive Chockylit at Cupcake Bakeshop, because, in addition to being cute, leftover cupcakes would be much easier to take to work than a partially-consumed cake. I used the same recipe for the cakes, but I’m just not convinced by the combination of pumpkin and chocolate. I opted for a mascarpone and cream cheese frosting instead, based on a recipe I’d seen on Everyday Italian (yeah, she’s annoying, but at least she does have a legitimate grounding in terms of both training and Italian cuisine). The results were both yummy and attractive, although next time I might double the amount of frosting, since there was only enough to cover eighteen cupcakes, and not particularly generously, either.

I won’t re-post the cupcake recipe, since I didn’t modify it at all (although it made twenty-four rather than thirty in my muffin tins, probably because I always resist underfilling the cups), but I’ll post the frosting recipe, since I added vanilla and since the Food Network pulls recipes after a while.

Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting
Makes enough to lightly frost 18 cupcakes

3 oz cream cheese
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1/3 cup mascarpone cheese
3 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Let the cheeses and butter come to room temperature, then beat together the cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy. Beat in the mascarpone until combined, then the honey and vanilla extract.

Chill until firm.

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