Matcha Mother's Swiss Roll (Vanilla, Green Tea, and Chocolate Swiss Rolls)

I apologize for the terrible post title but I couldn't resist the urge to make a stupid pun.

Usually I start a post with a story or an explanation of how I decided to try making the recipes covered in the post.  But this time there's nothing special about it: I just googled recipes that use matcha (green tea).  I was in the mood for baking something that was matcha flavored, found a recipe for a green tea Swiss roll, and liked the look of it.  Nothing fancy.

Swiss rolls apparently aren't Swiss at all.  They come in a variety of flavors and the filling (usually whipped cream) can also have pieces of fresh fruit in it.  It turns out that I spent my childhood eating the "Hong Kong" style of Swiss rolls from the Chinese bakeries in San Francisco without realizing that the European versions are much sweeter.  I prefer the less sweet style, especially when it lets the taste of any fruit in the filling come through more (mango!!! yum).

The green tea Swiss roll recipe I found by googling comes from KitchenTigress's blog, and she is from Singapore.  I got lucky and happened to find a recipe that is in the Hong Kong style without knowing it.  I tried three different cake variations (vanilla, matcha, and chocolate), and two different filling variations (flavored whipped cream only or whipped cream with fruit).

While looking up Swiss roll facts for this blog post, I also found out that most people have trouble with the cake cracking and splitting when they roll it.  I did not have any of these problems when using KitchenTigress's recipe as the base for my experiments.  This is because Kitchen Tigress designed her recipe to produce a cake that is 1) moist and 2) stretchy and flexible.

The Pioneer Woman's post on Swiss rolls shows an excellent example of the cake cracking.  This is not a criticism of the Pioneer Woman, it's just the reality that most people face when making Swiss rolls.

The other major difference I found while googling is that people recommend rolling the cake while it's hot and letting it cool down, then unrolling it to fill it and then re-rolling it back up again.  I let the cake cool down completely before spreading on the filling and rolling and didn't have to rush through any steps.

This was the result of my first attempt at a Swiss roll using Kitchen Tigress's Vanilla Swiss roll recipe:

Vanilla Swiss roll with whipped cream filling and mandarin orange slices
The little black square is where a piece was when I dusted with powdered sugar but I ate the piece before I took this picture.
It was great.

The hardest part of the green tea recipe was remembering to double the ingredient quantities after converting from metric to imperial units.

California Cottage Food Law: Cardamom Cupcakes with Plum Swiss Meringue Frosting and Pomegranate Seeds

In one of the more "San Francisco" things that's ever happened to me, a couple of guys showed up to my last baking potluck and hustled us for their new baking internet start-up.  Yes, you read that correctly: a baking internet start-up.  Ah, the joys of living in SF.

Their basic business plan is that they have arranged all of the pesky non-baking details, like setting up a secure online payment system, contracting out with a delivery business, etc.  This leaves bakers with only thing to worry about: baking.

They've got several bakeries signed up and using their website but they specifically came to my potluck because they're trying to get home bakers who want to have their own from-home baking business to use their website.  They wanted to get some of us interested and to essentially be the from-home baking beta testers.

This is where the California Cottage Food Law comes into play.  As of January 1 2013, cottage food business became legal in the state of California.  A cottage food business is any food production business where the food product is manufactured in a non-commercial cooking space (i.e. a home kitchen).  Commercial food production facilities are monitored by the state for health and safety and food production business are licensed.  Before the Cottage Food Law was passed, all cottage food production was illegal.

So these guys are aiming for this new business area.  Leaving aside issues such as if it's worth it to run a cottage food business and if it's really possible to make money from a cottage food business, there's one major problem: frosting is not legal.

As odd as that sounds, there's a very logical reason for this and it's codified in the law.  "Baked goods, without cream, custard, or meat fillings" and "Flat icing" are legal, as is "Buttercream frosting, buttercream icing, buttercream fondant, and gum paste that do not contain eggs, cream, or cream cheese".  Now if you're wondering exactly how it is that you're supposed to make frosting that doesn't contain eggs, cream, or cream cheese, the answer is that it's very difficult.  I suppose you could make something vegan but I have yet to try a vegan version of buttercream or Swiss meringue frosting that doesn't taste like a gigantic sugary mess.  The law specifically excludes eggs, cream, and cream cheese because of problems with refrigeration.  Eggs especially can be vectors for bacteria and the state cannot inspect and license non-commercial food production facilities, so the compromise is to allow cottage food businesses to make and sell food types that aren't well known for spreading illnesses and food poisoning.

Basically, the start-up guys didn't do their homework.  If you want to (or already are) run your own cottage food business, do your homework!  Check your state laws and make sure that you're not accidentally breaking any laws.  I had no idea about the restrictions in the California law until I looked it up.  Ignorance is not an excuse for breaking the law.  If you have a cottage food business and make somebody ill by selling any illegal food types, you are going to be in serious trouble.

The theme of the potluck where I got hustled was "autumn spice".  Although Americans seem to be obsessed with pumpkin spice, I decided to use cardamom, which is a spice that I ate a lot of when I was kid and we lived in the Middle East.  It's a standard spice in the Levant but for some reason it hasn't really got any traction in the US.  I don't know why - it's fantastic.  I also made the Swiss meringue frosting again for practice and I think that I've finally got the piping figured out.  Check out how pretty this cupcake was:

Then I accidentally washed the piping tip down the drain when I washed up.  Oops.

Nectarine Peach Cupcakes with Mango Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting (aka Still Alive!)

It has been roughly 15 months since my last post.  If anybody is actually following this blog, I apologize for disappearing.  There are lots of reasons for not updating but they all boil down to the same idea: life happened.  My job got very busy, I moved, traveled to other countries, got a lung infection that knocked me out for 3 months, my father got meningitis, my sister had a baby, I got called for jury duty, my sister had a baby, and various other stuff.  Unfortunately the jury duty was not for anything even remotely resembling My Cousin Vinny.

When I am stressed out or low on time and/or energy, I end up baking the same set of trusted recipes over and over again.  Last month I decided that it was time to start trying new recipes again so I signed up for a cupcake potluck with the theme of "Summer Cupcakes".  This summer has been very bad in the Bay Area: for all intents and purposes, we are out of water.  There are large wildfires all over the state and the Pacific Northwest, to the point where sometimes the air looks like the smog back in LA in the 1970's.  We are supposed to get a massive El Nino this winter but I'm not putting any faith in the weather predictions.  I did not make "on fire without any water" cupcakes but I was tempted to.

My new kitchen is large but old and very run down, so there's no counter space and very little storage space.  The oven is so old and disgusting that I have to remove the battery in the smoke detector every time I turn it on since it produces enough smoke to set the stupid thing off.  I've cleaned the oven numerous times but nothing can remove the build up due to 40 years of use.  I get a real sense of accomplishment when I produce anything from this oven that looks good, tempered with some serious frustration about how gross and difficult to use it is.

Portmanteaus: Canmoneesecake and Doffins

Portmanteau recipes have become really trendy in baking circles ever since the cronut became so popular.  Ridiculously popular, really - the wikipedia article for cronuts says that people were selling them on the black market for $100.  A black market for upscale New York City bakery items.  My mind is officially boggled.

Now that I'm going to a monthly potluck (thanks, M and S!), I've got a regular schedule for experimenting.  This time I scrolled through my enormous collection of untried recipes and selected the first two that caught my eye: candied lemon cheesecake and sugar doughnut muffins (aka doffins).  I hadn't tried any portmanteau recipes before this so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon.  Who doesn't want a sugar doughnut muffin?

I've also been making lots of cheesecakes lately.  Although I don't really like cheesecake that much, I do enjoy making cheesecakes.  It's a win-win: I make it and somebody else eats most of it.  This recipe was intriguing because it included candied lemons, which I've been wanting to try making for a while.  It also has a crust that isn't made out of graham crackers.  The question of what to use instead of graham crackers if you're outside the US has been discussed by lots of people (1, 2, 3, 4) so I figured I'd give that a try as well.

With the exception of the candied lemons, both of these recipes were very easy to make (almost).  I put together the doffin batter while the cheesecake was baking and still had time to wash the dishes.

The cheesecake had a really nice, light texture.  I'm planning to use this recipe and swap out the lemon zest for other flavors (matcha green tea, cocoa, vanilla).

The only snag was that the ingredient list for the cheesecake didn't list the amounts of the ingredients very clearly.  The crust is made with biscotti, and the recipe said "12 biscotti".  How much is 12 biscotti?  I had mini-biscotti instead of full-sized biscotti and I started off using 24 biscotti and then kept adding until there was enough crust to cover the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan.  I have fixed the recipe so that it has volume, mass, or weight measurements.

Organization! Bitter Orange and Blueberry (Blackberry) Tart

Second post in a month!  Even though I wrote the last one in February but didn't hit the "publish" button until March, it still counts!  I am an organized and responsible adult!  Right?  *crickets*

First off, the internet needs a sarcasm font.  Second, I really am trying to be organized and get new recipes written up in a timely fashion.  As strange as it sounds, being sick all of last week has been helpful for this because I've been compiling a very long list of all of the things that haven't gotten done while I've been lying in bed, awake and not hungry and on drugs.

My doctor gave me ephedrine (edit: actually pseudoephedrine) to help with the sinus infection.  Holy crap is that stuff a strong upper!  I was up all day Tuesday and part of Wednesday, about 30 hours total.  I was so completely exhausted but I could not fall asleep.  I lay in bed and watched the sun rise on Wednesday morning and couldn't figure out what was going on.  I also didn't eat for a couple of days because I just wasn't hungry even though I could feel literal hunger pains in my stomach.  And I was still pretty congested.  So I ended up with a very detailed list of everything that I needed to do as soon as I was better.

Blogging isn't very high on my priority list but to me it is symbolic of organization, probably because it isn't necessary for my life to keep functioning and therefore if I have time to blog then it means that I have finished all of the truly important items on my life to-do list.  At least, this seems to be what my subconscious thinks.  In reality, there are an infinite number of important items on my life to-do list that are breeding with each other and spawning more important items when I'm not looking.  But at least I'm blogging.  Priorities!

I've made this recipe twice, once to try it out and which I completely forgot to take pictures of, and the second time because lots of people liked the first attempt and to take some photos.  The original recipe is from Nigella but isn't on her website.  Food.com has it, complete with automatic US/metric conversion.  Unfortunately the automatic converter is literal so it doesn't convert mass to weight (maybe I should do a post on the different measurement systems...).  This means that the recipes ends up with ingredients like "0.39 pounds plain flour".  The recipe below is from the American version of How To Be A Domestic Goddess and has more useful measurements.

Although the recipe title says "blueberry" and the recipe calls for blueberries, I used blackberries.  This doesn't have anything to do with what's in season.  The first time I made this tart, I saw the recipe and thought, "orange and blueberry sounds like a great combination!", wrote down blackberries on my shopping list, bought blackberries, made the tart, made the blackberry topping, and was putting it on the tart before I realized that I was using the wrong fruit.  I liked the result enough to make it a second time.

This tart is not as sweet as most fruit tarts, so it's perfect to make if you or a friend don't like desserts that are too sweet.  If you want more sweetness, whipped cream or ice cream is a nice topping with the blackberries.

Second Time's the Charm

Edit #2: oh my god it's March.  At this point, there just isn't any excuse for how long this has taken to write up.  The good news is that I have made several other recipes since the Super Bowl potluck.  Hopefully each of those won't take a whole month to get finished.

Edit #1: This used to be a wonderfully amusing write-up of what I made for K and B's Super Bowl potluck. I saved it multiple times, got the pictures exactly the way I wanted them, and even bothered to spellcheck the post.  And then, for some unknown reason, everything except the first couple of paragraphs disappeared.

So the entire post is gone, never to return.  Instead, I will leave you with the best part of it:

That is the team with possession of the ball for the first play of the game loosing control of said ball and then everybody running crazily after it.  It set the tone for the rest of the game.

K and B had a potluck at their new place to watch the Super Bowl.  B was interested in watching because he's from Alaska and the Seattle Seahawks are the closest football team to Alaska, so he grew up rooting for them.  The rest of us were just there to have a potluck and hang out.  Luckily, the Denver Broncos played so badly that we all sat around and laughed at them for 2 hours.  It's nice to have something to bond over.

The "second time" in the title is actually a reference to the fact that I used the potluck as an excuse to fix a couple of recipes that hadn't turned out well the first time but which had promise (and to try something new, of course).  In January, I had tried making a nutella cheesecake and Nigella's gooey chocolate stack.  The cheesecake never solidified but tasted great and the chocolate stack melted but tasted great.  My course was clear: get the great tasting desserts to have the right consistency.  I also made a batch of cookies just in case things didn't work out.

I'm Too Poor For Your Recipe

Every cookbook and blog tell you the same thing: use high quality, fresh ingredients for the best tasting results.  This makes sense and I completely agree.  But there is a line between high quality ingredients and break-the-bank ingredients.  Certain blogs (no, I won't name them) assume that you have both access to quality but expensive foods and the bank balance to possibly waste a large quantity of said expensive foods.

"Take a quick hop over to Nepal and hike to the Lumbini Buddhist monastery.  Trade the monks for yak butter specially prepared according to the ancient rituals.  P.S. You need two cups of butter for this recipe."

No, thank you.  I will just use the regular, straight from the farm to my local farmer's market butter that is still kind of expensive but worth the money to support local farmers.

For this month's potluck, I tried two new recipes.  One was completely reasonable and used ingredients that I can get at my local supermarket.  The other one was also completely reasonable if you bake or cook using mostly pre-made stuff.  I am snobby enough that I will make my own whipped cream instead of using "whipped product".  This recipe was probably pretty cheap when made using Duncan Hines cake mix, etc, but became pretty expensive when I made almost everything from scratch.*  The good news is that everybody said both recipes tasted great, which is the most important part.

* Okay, so my complaint about how expensive the ingredients were for this recipe is due to my insistence on using expensive ingredients and not on the recipe itself, but let's forget about that so I can complain some more.

The first recipe was raspberry bars, although the original changed recipe used blackberries and the original original recipe used blueberries.  There weren't any blackberries at the store so the main ingredient changed.  People said that the crust was great and that the bars tasted very strongly of raspberry.  I like blackberries better than raspberries so I'll probably remake this one when blackberries are in season, or I may try this using cherries.  I also like this recipe because it shows the type of evolution that recipes undergo when we use in-season ingredients.  You can see how the basic structure and dough part of the recipe stay the same, but we all used different fruits.

The second recipe was a chocolate-nutella mousse stack cake.  If you love Nutella like I do, this is the cake for you.  This recipe also had very little from-scratch baking in it so my version has a similar result to the original but a very different set of steps.  People said that the Nutella mousse was fantastic as frosting, that the taste and texture was amazing.  They also said that the cake was great but the Nutella mousse got more compliments.  I would have felt better about all of this if the cake hadn't broken in the middle.

Cakes weigh a lot, so when you stack them up they need to be strong enough to hold up the layers on top of them and to stay together when stacked on top of other cakes.  Many cakes are moist and lovely but not strong enough to either hold up layers or stay together on top.  This cake recipe produced exactly that type of cake: moist, soft, and easily broken.  Stacking layers with this cake will work if you don't slice each cake into two layers.

What Geometry Is Good For

At some point, everybody who's taken geometry in school has said, "When am I ever going to need geometry?"  The surprising answer: baking.  You really do need to know about degrees and angles and circles and triangles and rectangles (and various other geometric ideas) to bake and construct certain baked goods.  Listen up, class - today's lesson is on checkerboard cakes.

The idea of a checkerboard cake is that when you slice a piece, the inside of the cake isn't just one cake, but two different types arranged in alternating squares, like a chess- or checker-board.  The first time I saw a checkerboard cake, I actually thought that somebody had taken two cakes, sliced them up into little cubes, and then glued each cube into place with frosting.  I suppose you could make a checkerboard cake like this, but it's much easier to use geometry.

The key is to use circles to make the squares.  Hang on, what?  It's just like being in math class all over again.  To make a checkerboard pattern, you need to have the cake colors alternate.  You've got two round cakes and when you slice out a wedge, you want to see interlocking squares.  But the squares are really an optical illusion.  Instead, you cut out circles of cake and stack them so that the colors switch back and forth both horizontally and vertically.  (Or you can buy a pan that separates the rings for you.)

This sounds complicated but it's easy to see when you look at a picture.

A special pan for baking checkerboard cakes.  One color batter goes in the inner and outer rings, and the second color goes in the middle ring.  Swap colors in the next pan, and then stack the cakes vertically.  Cutting out the rings after the cakes are baked lets you skip using the special pans.

To make a two-layer checkerboard cake with six squares, you need two layers of cake where the inner and outer ring are the same color horizontally and a different color vertically.  You can achieve that part by simply stacking up two cakes like you normally would.  To make the middle squares be alternating colors, slice out a ring of cake from the middle, then switch the middle ring of one cake with the other one.  When you look at them horizontally, they make a pattern: Color 1, Color 2, Color 1.  The other layer will have the opposite pattern:  Color 2, Color 1, Color 2.  Then stack the two layers, and each ring will be sitting either on top or below of a ring of different color:

Color 2  Color 1  Color 2
Color 1  Color 2  Color 1

This is how you put together rings to make alternating squares when a wedge is cut.

See?  Geometry at work.

Mango Tart: Smashing At The End

Mangoes are my favorite fruit.  I love how they taste, their texture, that they can be eaten by themselves or used in both savory and sweet dishes - everything about them, which is why I make this mango mousse cake so often.  This time I decided to try something new and make a mango dessert that wasn't the mousse cake.  I had already decided to retry the green tea mille crepes cake from the Zen Can Cook website.  When I was on the website, I saw that he's got a recipe for a mango tart.  It was fate!

But of course I can't leave well enough alone, so I changed some things before I even tried the recipe for the first time.  You'd think that I would have learned after the mille crepes cake debacle, but no.  This time I decided that instead of using store-bought puff pastry, I'd make a tart shell and put the filling into that instead.  I used the tart shell from the dark chocolate and cherry tart and one and half bags of frozen mango chunks from Trader Joe's instead of four to five ripe mangoes.

Zen's original recipe produces a flat tart with a thin layer of mango puree topped with lots of fresh mango slices that are baked until they are cooked through.  This isn't a good time of year to get fresh mangoes on the East Coast, so I made a thick tart with a lot of mango puree topped with a small amount of fresh mango that was baked until the mango puree became more solid.  Sometimes it just isn't possible to get the right quantities of the ingredients you need to make a recipe.  There's no shame in improvising.  I figured if the whole thing didn't work, I'd just eat the mango filling with a spoon.

In the end, things worked out well enough that I have a couple of ideas for the next time I try the "thick variation" of this recipe.  Nobody at the potluck got to see the result because I was cut off when I driving on the freeway on my way to the potluck.  Fortunately I had put the mango tart in my cake carrier so when I braked suddenly, the mango tart smashed into the side of the carrier instead of into the back of the drivers seat.  I told the potluck that it was an Impressionist version of a mango tart.  We ate it with a spoon and it tasted wonderful, very mango-y.

If you don't like mango, it's not worth your time to make this since the filling is basically pure mango with a few extra ingredients.

Green Tea Mille Crepes: Second Time's The Charm

The first time I tried to make Zen Can Cook's green tea crepe cake, I got the crepe version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  This time I decided to follow the recipe exactly instead of using a different pastry cream recipe.  It also reminded me why I didn't use Zen's recipe last time: there's six egg yolks in it.  I will be eating a bunch of egg white omeletes this week.

The pastry cream needs to be firm and solid enough to hold up the stack of crepes.  Zen's recipe has both egg yolks and cornstarch for thickening so it's got the consistency of very solid jam.  I stacked up all of the crepes that made it (twenty), and the tower didn't even lean.

Twenty crepes is too many for this cake.  It was too tall to eat easily and we ended up splitting the slices into the top and bottom half.

The pastry cream has a lovely orange flavor but I didn't think it went that well with the crepes.  The green tea turned the crepes green but I couldn't taste it at all.  The texture was nice so the next time I make these crepes, I'll probably double or triple the amount of matcha powder in the batter.  Zen also has a version that is chocolate crepes with the same orange pastry cream.  I think that this combination makes more sense than green tea with orange.

This cake would work nicely as a single serving, personal dessert.  I may try making half sized crepes for small cakes instead of one large one.

Winter Disapearance, But That's Normal (Blackberry Cobbler Again and Chocolate Cherry Tart)

My original plan for this blog was to post once a week, most likely over the weekend but maybe during the week if work was slow or boring. The last time I posted an entry was January 23rd (Oldest Sister's birthday) but I also made a draft for another post on the 27th.  And then I disappeared.

Winter makes me tired, slow, unhappy, depressed, irritable, and sloth-like.  All I want to do is to curl up in bed with a heating pad on my freezing cold feet, read a good book or watch some good TV, and eat cookies (or raw cookie dough or cake or candy).  I force myself to get up and go to work so I won't get fired, and I try all of the fixes that people suggest for seasonal issues: vitamin D, light boxes, massage, more exercise, etc etc etc (but not colon cleanses).  So far nothing has worked, and like pretty much everything else in my life, this blog doesn't get touched.

And then last week the weather got better.  There is sunlight.  It's not snowing.  I can wear sandals outdoors, I can ride my bike to run errands, I don't have to wear a winter coat with snow boots and earmuffs.  All of a sudden I want to go out with friends or do some exercise.

So obviously I need to move to a city that doesn't really have winter.  I hated living in Los Angeles but I never got the winter blues in the eight years I was there.  Although it's going to take a while to get the social part of my life back together, the current result is that I'm baking for three potlucks this week.  This blog is about to get a whole bunch of posts in a short amount of time, especially since the draft from January is already halfway done.

For yesterday's potluck, I made a blackberry cobbler and a chocolate cherry tart.  The cobbler is a recipe that I've made before and it's very reliable, while the tart was an experiment with a new recipe.  I chose these two recipes for several reasons.  One, if I want to try a new recipe and I'm going to a potluck, I make a reliable recipe as well in case the experiment fails.  You don't want to show up to a potluck with nothing but excuses about how the dough didn't come together right or the filling never solidified.  Two, one of my friends really doesn't like chocolate and I figured he would enjoy having a chocolate-free dessert option.  Although I didn't plan it this way, both recipes have something in common: blind baking/parbaking.

Blind baking and parbaking are different applications of the same idea.  When you want to bake a recipe where the different parts need to bake for different amounts of time, you bake each bit separately at first and then combine them for a final bake.  Although this sounds complicated, it is usually easier and more time-manageable than it seems because you can mix together the second part of the recipe while the first one is being blind or parbaked.

Cobblers are a fruit filling with some type of dough topping, usually biscuits or pie dough.  According to the almighty wikipedia, cobblers are an American invention to use less butter than some of the traditional English desserts.  Basically, if you don't put a layer of dough on the bottom of the pan but only on the top, you use half as much dough, which mean half as much butter, flour, etc.  We have many different types of cobblers over here but I like the good old-fashioned blueberry or blackberry cobblers.

Green Tea Mille Crepes: An Experiment Based On Somebody Else's Experiment

Update (4/22/2013): I tried this recipe for a second time and got better results.

I'm not the only baker who gets a type of recipe stuck in their brain and then has to make multiple versions of it.  I am also susceptible to food porn: pictures of somebody else's food creation that is so beautiful, you must try the recipe yourself.  Take a look at this:

Matcha mille crepes (from Zen Can Cook).

It's a green tea crepe cake with orange pastry cream filling.  This is the third mille crepe version that Zen blogged about.  He got the same "must make different flavors!" bug that I get.  Of course I had to make this cake.

Every European culture has their own version of crepes.  In my father's family, we eat blintzes, which are basically crepes filled with a sweet cheese mixture and then fried.  We also eat the classic French version of crepes, especially since there are a bunch of crepe restaurants in Berkeley (Crepes A Go Go, Crepevine, etc.).  These are more on the American side of what a crepe should be: larger and with more fillings than you'd get in France.  I'm an American so I don't complain.

So I'd been eating crepes for years but I'd never tried to make them.  I knew from the start that there would be a serious problem: I can't flip anything in a pan.  Pancakes and omelettes become smashed messes when I try to flip them.  I also don't have a crepe pan, which is a thin frying pan with a completely flat bottom and almost no outer rim (see this for an example).  I didn't know if the pan was necessary or not.  This entire thing was going to be an adventure, and if it didn't work I would hopefully have some delicious, smushed crepes to eat at the end.

Holiday Parties Galore: Mojito Doughnuts

Now that it's January and I'm looking back at the holiday season, I'm still convinced that work holiday parties are horrible.  It's not that I don't have friends at work, it's that either I've got work that needs to get done and I don't have time to waste or I usually hang out with my friends at work while we're at work and I don't need to do that with hundreds of other people as well.  I'm a total Scrooge and there will not be a Tiny Tim coming by to change that anytime soon.

By the time I got to the last holiday party in the Week Of Seven Holiday Parties, I was clearly in need of something alcoholic.  So why not make something sweet and boozy?  I've forgotten exactly what combination of words I put into google to find this recipe, but I'm sure that it included "yummy", "alcoholic", "sweet", and "doughnut".  Mojito doughnuts!  What a perfect and brilliant idea.

Of course, there were several setbacks, including my lack of a doughnut pan and the fact that one of my old roommates had a serious drug and alcohol problem and had secretly stolen all of my cooking booze (except the arak - even alcoholics won't drink the arak).  So I bought rum and with its help constructed a doughnut pan out of tin foil and a muffin tin.

Between the rum and the rest of the week, I was at the point where I didn't care if the recipe worked or not.  That's why it turned out to be one of the best recipes I'd made in 2012: recipes only work perfectly when you don't care anymore.  Martha Stewart should do a show about this phenomenon.

What's a slightly drunk girl with no doughnut pan going to do when she tries to bake doughnuts?  Construct one!  I just expected that it wasn't going to work and I would have oddly shaped, solid doughnuts, but it actually worked like a charm.  Who knew?  Definitely not me.

Holiday Parties Galore: Fantastic Holiday Party Cake Recipe

Having two jobs means that I've basically got double of all of those job-related things that crop up in life - specifically, I had three job-related holiday parties to go to.  If they had been spread out through the month of December, it would have been fine.  But not only were they in the same week, they were also in the same week as four other holiday parties that I had already said I'd go to.  To be blunt, the second week of December kicked my ass.

I wasn't planning on going to both holiday parties for Job 1, but I miscalculated: when you bake cakes that people like, they want you to come back for other potluck parties.  I got ambushed by the secretary to the Deputy Director a couple of days before one of the parties, and while I was making excuses about why I wasn't going, the Deputy Director popped up and said that he'd loved my cake last year and would I please bring it again this year.

This would normally be complimentary, but I'm pretty sure that the Deputy Director of a federal agency the size of ours doesn't know me from Adam and certainly didn't remember what cake I'd brought to a potluck party with hundreds of people that happened a year earlier.  But his secretary remembered and he's a good boss who tries his best to keep her happy, so I got commanded to show up with the cake.

They got a bit of a surprise when I mentioned that it was a lime-zucchini cake.  Zucchinis are a secret baking weapon: full of water to make cakes moist but they have a weak taste that can be overridden by any citrus fruit.  Lime-zucchini cakes just taste like lime, and nobody can tell that there's zucchinis in it.

Zucchini cakes are just like carrot cakes, where a mild tasting vegetable that holds a lot of water is used to produce a very moist cake.  If the idea of a zucchini cake freaks you out, just remember that lots of people love carrot cakes and don't think that there's anything wrong with using carrots in a cake.

What To Make For The Holidays? Cranberry-apple Crisp!

It's that time of the year: holiday parties for two months, where you want to bring something nice but after the first couple of parties you just can't be bothered.  You're running around, trying to go to your friends' parties to see them and have a good time with them while arranging your own holiday life, getting in fights with your parents, failing to find presents that your sisters will actually like, forgetting some of your friends when setting up your own party invitations, trying to get all of your work done while half of your coworkers are gone.  It's no wonder that there's a popular urban legend that the suicide rate goes up because of winter holidays.

The best recipe for this time of year should be delicious, easy to make, quick to make, and require only ingredients that you've already got in your kitchen.  Not surprisingly, such a recipe does not exist.  The closest you can get are delicious recipes that are easy to make and which use common ingredients, ones that you can easily get at the grocery store.  The good news is that this recipe meets all of those requirements, and gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.

This recipe works because it releases a lot of the sugar (sucrose) held in the apples and cranberries.  The longer the apples sit with the cranberries, the more the tastes mingle, so the two-day old leftovers from this recipes will often taste better than the freshly made version.

You can also change things up quite easily in this recipe.  I didn't have dried cranberries about half of the times that I made this crisp, so I just used more fresh cranberries instead.  It came out fine.  You can also add in other flavors easily - orange zest, lemon zest, nutmeg, etc.  The one part of the recipe you don't want to change is the topping (the part that becomes crisp when you bake it).

I got this recipe from America's Test Kitchen: All-time Best Holiday Recipes, which was an impulse buy when I was stuck in a ludicrously long line in a Whole Foods.  I don't know why the website says price: $9.95, on sale: $9.95.  Maybe they are great at baking and terrible at arithmetic.  All I can tell you is that this magazine is worth the money.

This crisp is a great party dish because it is easy to make and transport (just one baking dish), it has ingredients that are considered to be winter holiday fruits (apples + cranberries), and it's different from what most people bring (chocolate, gingerbread, or pumpkin pie).  It's easy to serve and people are always impressed if you make fresh whipped cream to go along with it.

Potluck Experiments: Plum Galette

Chez Panisse is a very famous restaurant in my hometown of Berkeley, notable for the fact that it basically started the California cuisine movement: use fresh, local foods to make fusion cuisine - very Californian.  I've never been there since a) I can't afford it and b) my mother and the owner got in a fight back in 90's and my mother holds a grudge.  Berkeley isn't a cosmopolis - it's really just a small town that happens to have a large university in the middle of it - and the personal interactions are what you'd expect to see in a small town in the middle of nowhere.  Imagine a Thornton Wilder play with more grumbling about the lack of state educational funding.  (I'm not kidding about this: Thornton Wilder went to Berkeley High.)

In any case, I have that Berkeleyan smug disdain for Chez Panisse that everybody there develops eventually.  "Oh, yes, Chez Panisse.  Did you know that the original Peet's is just around the corner?  And it's so much easier to just grab a slice of pizza at the Cheeseboard.  Chez Panisse is just okay now.  Oooh, you know what I heard?  Now they're using beets in everything.  Can you imagine?  Beets!  Chez Panisse is so overpriced."  We're allowed to complain about it but nobody else is.

The internet does not have the same attitude towards Chez Panisse.  For example, this website is run by a guy who loves Chez Panisse.  In fact, he posted this recipe because of a picture he saw in the flicr photostream for the Chez Panisse 40th Anniversary Party.

This photo, to be precise.  Original.

Now I completely get what he's talking about, because when I saw one of his photos on his website I decided that I had to try making a plum galette as well.

His photo.  Who wouldn't want to try making that?

I had to fiddle with his recipe a bit to make it work but it turned out all right in the end.  While I can't tell you is if this is the type of thing that they serve at Chez Panisse, I can say that the people at the potluck liked it.  I was expecting the crust to be softer but it's actually flaky.

The Tortoise, Not The Hare

Cookbooks and cooking websites/blogs (mine included) generally present complete recipes - the proportions of the ingredients carefully worked out and tested, the cooking time and temperature given without qualms.  But most recipes don't start out like this even if you get them from other people.  You just don't know what you're going to get the first time you make a recipe.  No matter how sure the original recipe author may have been about the recipe's perfection, it's not guaranteed that it will work in your kitchen.

There are various different reasons for this.  The one that seems to surprise people the most is that an oven's thermostat isn't precise.  The actual internal oven temperature can vary by up to 50° F from what's on the dial.  An oven heats the air inside it by some kind of heating apparatus (open flames or a heated coil), which will continue heating until it's too hot.  Then the heating apparatus turns off until it's too cold, when it turns on again.  The end result of this process is that your oven isn't sitting consistently at 325° F, it's heating up to 355 and then cooling down to 310 and then heating up to 340 and then cooling down to 295 etc etc etc.

So you should really buy a hanging thermometer for your oven and see how far off your thermostat is from the real temperature.

But that doesn't solve the real problem: you have no idea how well a recipe is going to turn out until you make it.  Less than 100 years ago, cookbooks were still pretty new fangled and recipes had instructions like "add some milk to several eggs and beat with flour until the consistency is right".  Not very helpful.  If you've ever wondered why The Joy of Cooking or Julia Child's cookbooks were such a big deal, now you know: they had explicit amounts for ingredients paired with detailed instructions.

Before I ever give a recipe to anybody else, I've made it at least five times (generally a lot more than that).  All of the previous posts on this blog were of recipes that I know like the back of my hand.  For a change, today's post is going to be about what I'm thinking when I make a recipe for the first time, and how I decide what changes need to be made for the next time I use a recipe - or if I even want to bother trying the recipe again.

Think of this as a tale of two recipes: one success and one miserable failure.

Bread Pudding: Why Write About Something That I Hate?

The title of this post is clear: I hate, loathe, abhor bread pudding.  But I can't deny that it's useful.

The Bloomingdale Farmers Market is only three block away from my house, and has approximately 10-15 vendors.  There is one bakery stall where you can get amazingly good bread.  They are a wholesale bakery (they make the bread for lots of high-end DC restaurants).  I don't know where the bakers are from originally, but they may be from France.  I'm not good with French accents so they may also be from a previously French-colonised country.  All I can tell you is that they talk to you in French first, and I've heard them having conversations in French with other customers.  They were very polite when I said my one pathetic French sentence to them: Je ne parle pas Francais.  Sometimes I am listening when Twin talks to me.  Sometimes.

So I buy a rustic baguette every Sunday around noon and gorge myself on it, making havarti and tomato sandwiches.  And every Tuesday I look at the leftover half-baguette and feel guilty about throwing it out, but how much baguette can one person eat?  Patches loves toast and would eat the entire rest of the loaf and wind up with bunny diabetes.  So this week I decided not to be one of those Americans who throw away 40% of their food and instead make something with the stale bread.

Mango Mousse Cake: How To Fool People Into Thinking You've Done A Lot Of Work

Some recipes produce food that tastes amazing but doesn't look like something you'd ever want to put in your mouth.

This is something called "chicken bog" and while it's supposed to taste good, you won't catch me trying it.

Some recipes produce food that looks amazing but doesn't taste very good or is difficult to eat because of the presentation.  This is my personal pet peeve: I don't care how lovely it looks on the plate if I can't eat it.

Somebody made Stonehenge out of lettuce and toasted bread.  To eat this, you need to take the bread off, knock the lettuce over, slice it up, put it and the tuna tartar on the bread, and possibly slice that as well.

The magic recipe results in food that looks and tastes amazing.  The absolutely best recipes on the planet are magic recipes that are also easy to make.  When you've found one of those, never loose it.  It's the baking equivalent of a flying unicorn that draws rainbows across the sky.

Mousse cakes are almost always "magic recipes".  There may be a small amount of baking involved, but the mousse itself is made by mixing whipped cream with a flavored, stabilized base which is put in the refrigerator to chill and solidify.  That's it.

The complications in a mousse cake only come from how fancy you want to make it.  A mousse with three or four different flavors?  A mousse cake with five layers?  A mousse cake with differently colored cake layers?  All these are options that may make the cake better but certainly aren't required.

The key to making an amazing mousse cake is to use well-flavored ingredients.  If you're going to make a chocolate mousse cake, don't use low quality chocolate.  Hershey chocolate bars are wonderful for s'mores but terrible for cakes.

My personal favorite mousse cake is mango mousse cake because I love mangoes that much.  Unfortunately it can be difficult to get quality mangoes on the east coast, especially if it's not mango season.  Trader Joe's sells bags of frozen mango chunks during mango season.  If you've got enough freezer space, I recommend storing 2-4 bags of mango chunks so you can have them at hand year-round.  I don't have enough freezer space to do this, but I would if I could.

Pumpkin Souffle

Souffles have a reputation for being incredibly difficult: they are finicky, they fall, they are fragile and collapse, etc.  This is not true.  Souffles are actually very sturdy, and they are supposed to slowly collapse as they cool down.  If a souffle deflates over the space of 10-20 minutes, then you've done something right.

Julia Child (a lady who knew what she was talking about) described souffles as a a flavoured base with beaten eggs whites.  As the souffle cooks, the air bubbles in the egg whites expand and the souffle rises.  That's why souffles collapse as they cool down.  As Julia pointed out, souffles basically consist of two ingredients: a base and beaten egg whites.  All you need to do is combine them:

"Soufflés are not difficult when you have mastered the beating of egg whites and the folding of them into the soufflé base."

Here's a great webpage about souffles with lots of useful tips at the bottom for the first-time souffle maker.

At Halloween last year, Landlord made a cute jack-o-latern.  What do you do with all of the leftover pumpkin?  I didn't want to make a pumpkin pie because it was close to Thanksgiving and I figured I'd be drowning in pumpkin pies in less than a month.  I don't remember why I decided to make a pumpkin souffle.  I had never made a souffle before but I figured if it didn't work then I wouldn't have wasted any ingredients.  I should mention that at this point I still believed that souffles were impossible to make and I didn't realise that they use so many eggs.  I had also heard the urban legend about the Julia Child show where she made a souffle and it collapsed live on television when she pulled it out of the oven.  I figured that if Julia Child couldn't get a souffle to work, then it wouldn't be a real failure if my attempt was a disaster.

The pumpkin souffle was amazing, so flavourful and light and the texture was incredible and and and...

I was a souffle convert.