Chocolate Cream Dacquoise

Hey ya'll, it's me again, and I have a Chocolate Cream Dacquoise to present to you: [hazelnut meringue, chocolate cream, whipped cream]x3 + [hazelnut meringue, whipped cream, caramelized hazelnuts].
 This dessert is a bit more complicated than my usual adventures, but it was christmas, which in my family means "time to eat lots of food", so I figured it would be a good time to try something fancy. Of course, as I was making it, I was convinced the meringues had burnt and that the pudding had curdled (it had, twice), but it turns out it is very difficult to make hazelnuts, cream, and chocolate taste bad.

Because this dessert is a pretty big undertaking, I'm too lazy to type up the recipe, so instead I'll entertain you with my research about dessert naming.

Dacquoise: a female inhabitant of the city of Dax, or a dessert made of layers of hazelnut or almond meringue filled with buttercream.

The red flag is Dax.

According to en.wikipedia.org, a marjolaine is a dacquoise with chocolate buttercream. However, fr.wikipedia.org makes no mention of marjolaine. In fact, searching for marjolaine in Google.fr only brings up marjoram, pictures of women named Marjolaine, and websites in English gushing about the supposedly French dessert of marjolaine. However, when I searched for "marjolaine dacquoise" in google.fr and insist on only pages in French, I do get a couple hits for French blogs making marjolaine.

Conclusions: Marjolaine is much more widely used to refer to a chocolate Dacquoise in English than in French. The small amount of usage in French is possibly due to feedback from English (French is currently borrowing a lot of words from English).


General gist of recipe (from Trish Deseine's I want Chocolate):

2 cups of hazelnuts

stirred into 12 beaten egg whites and 3/2 cups of sugar to make the meringue. This mixture is formed into 4 disks and baked for an hour at 275F.

For the chocolate cream, I beat 6 egg yolks, 1/4 cup sugar, and 2 tbsp flour until pale and frothy. I heated up 3/2 cup cream and 3/2 cup milk until almost boiling, and poured it into the egg yolks.

The yolk-cream was put back in the pan and brought to a boil (this is where the curdling happened, whoops!). Once the cream thickened, I added 4oz dark chocolate and stirred well. I cooled the cream in the refrigerator.

Now the layering! Meringue, chocolate cream,

whipped cream, grated dark chocolate. 

I made some caramel, mixed in some roasted hazelnuts, and crumbled it all on top.

The chocolate cream is kind of oozing everywhere. 

We're supposed to eat turkey or something

We celebrated this year's Thanksgiving with our wonderful friends the M family. Yesterday's dinner menu included:

• Roast Turkey (Traditions must be observed)
• Catherine M's Chestnut Stuffing 
• Green beens with lemon
• My dad's Pommes Anna
• My brother's Ginger Cranberry Sauce
• Cornbread
• Hazelnut and Fuyu Persimmon Salad
• Pumpkin Pie
• Sara M's Maple Pots de Crème

I read Bon Appetit Magazine, and in their Thanksgiving issue this year they found issue with using stuffing as stuffing because it prevents the bird from cooking or some other nonsense. They even decided to call their stuffing recipes "dressing" to discourage putting them inside turkeys. This name change doesn't even make any sense because, at least in my experience, dressing is a flavorful sauce. I do not believe that bread mixed with various vegetables/meats fall in that category.
In any case, if your stuffing is hot when you put it in the turkey, it isn't going to prevent the turkey from cooking, and the turkey juices will make the stuffing that much better.

Enough ranting. For the potatoes, my dad found a recipe in that same Bon Appetit magazine for "Mini Herbed Pommes Anna" , which are basically cakes of potato slices layered with butter and herbs. This recipe turned out delicious, and it can be easily made into advance, so I recommend it to anyone who needs a showstopper side.

My brother is the family cranberry expert, and he found a recipe for ginger-lemon cranberry sauce. The sauce came out strong and savory, not as sweet as more classic recipes. The ginger complemented the the rich gravy quite well. 

I made the Hazelnut/Persimmon salad and the pumpkin pie. For the salad, I first toasted some hazelnuts in the oven at 400F for 10-15 minutes (stirring them often). According to Catherine M's instructions, we peeled the hazelnuts by rubbing them in a dish towel.

We then sliced up some fuyu persimmons (the ones with rounded bottoms: they're not astringent) into a cider vinegar-olive oil-mustard-black pepper vinaigrette and added some mixed greens and arugula. The sweetness of the persimmon was nicely complemented by the tartness of the vinegar and the bitterness of the arugula.

For the pumpkin pie, I used Cook's Illustrated recipe, which can be found here http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2008/11/cooks-illustrated-pumpkin-pie-recipe.html . I really like this recipe because it combines canned pumpkin with fresh sweet potato to give a complex flavor. Compared to the pumpkin pie from the dining hall I had eaten last week, this pie tasted full and complete.

Crêpes!

Crêpe with onions, mushrooms, ham, and cheese

On Tuesday we celebrated my brother's birthday again (his actual birthday has not yet happened) with a crêpe party! In my family, "crêpe party" means that we pull out the gridle that has six holes for small crêpes so that each person can customize his or her crêpes and the meal goes on.

For our crêpe batter we use half wheat (not whole wheat) flour and half buckwheat flour. Traditionally, savory crêpes (called galettes) are made with 100% buckwheat flour, but the lack of gluten makes the batter hard to work with, and my family's hybrid crêpe batter lets us use the same batter for savory and sweet crêpes!

To make crêpe batter for 4 people (+ leftovers for breakfast the next morning):

Ingredients:

• 100g all-purpose flour
• 100g buckwheat flour
• 3 eggs
• 2 tsp salt
• about 360g milk
• water

Method:

1. Mix the flours with the salt in a large bowl. (For some reason my family has a designated crêpe bowl)                                                           
2. Add the eggs and mix with a spoon            
3. Add the milk slowly, stirring between each addition to avoid making lumps (if you do get lumps, give the dough a whirr with an electric mixer)
4. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
5. Add water to the dough until it is liquid enough to run off the spoon quickly (if the dough is too thick to spread when you start cooking crêpes, you can always add more water)

To cook crêpes:

1. Heat your pan with some oil. 
2. Add a small ladle of batter to the pan and either use the bottom of the ladle to spread out the batter or rotate the pan so that the batter is very thin but not broken.
3. Cook one side until the bottom is browned, then flip.
4. Add desired topping if toppings need to melt.
5. Cook until bottom is also browned.
6. Adjust the temperature for the next crêpes if they are cooking too fast or too slowly.
7. Serve.

Remember: the first crêpe you make in the pan is always a failed crêpe. Don't sweat it.

For our savory crêpe toppings we had caramelized onions, sautéed mushrooms, ham, cheese, and eggs. For dessert toppings we had nutella, honey, sugar, butter, bananas, and canned pears.

 

The classic "crêpe complète"  is ham, cheese, and a fried egg. I add onions and mushrooms because onions and mushrooms make everything even more delicious.

 

And of course, as crêpes (galettes) are from Bretagne, they must be eaten with apple cider. My dad found some legit unfiltered and unpasteurized cider at Piazza's that supposedly went very well with the crêpes. (As I am under 21 I obviously did not have any ;)

 And the great thing about making crêpes for dinner is that you get to eat the leftovers with nutella the next morning!

Tobe's Candy-Cane Cookies

In my last post I mentioned my suitemate Tobe's delicious candy cane cookies, and she has kindly agreed to let me post her recipe on this blog. As I wrote earlier, my roommate Sophia and I made 2 batches of these cookies because we could not resist the warm combination of the soft almond cookies and the crunchy-sweet peppermint topping.

Tobe's Candy-Cane Cookies

Ingredients:
    Dough:

• 1 C soft shortening 
• 1 C powdered sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 C flour
• 1 tsp salt 

    Topping:

• 1/2 candycanes, crushed
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar

Procedure:

1. Pre-heat oven to 375F.
2. Mix the first 5 ingredients together by hand. (I used a whisk)
3. Add the flour and salt. (I used a spoon at first and then switched to using my fingers)
4. Divide the dough into as many parts as you want colors and knead in food coloring until the desired color is achieved. 
5. To make candy cane shape: Roll 1 tsp of each color in to a strip about 4" long.  Place strips together side by side and twist together. Curve tops down for candy cane effect.
6. To make thumbprint shape (for people who fail at making candy canes like me): take 2 tsp of dough, roll it into a sphere, and press down in the middle with your thumb. (This shape is good for holding a lot of topping)
7. Place on ungreased cookie sheets and bake at 375F for 9 minutes.
8. Combine the crushed candy-canes and the sugar in a bowl.
9. Remove cookies from baking sheet while warm, place on paper towels and sprinkle with topping.

Holiday Baking!

Finals are over! And it turns that finals week was the week where I had the most free time. What did I do with this frightening abundance of free time? I baked cookies! I think I baked 8 times in 8 days. Not only cookies though.
Saturday afternoon, my friend Nicole wanted to make shortbread cookies for her professors, so I volunteered to help out. We used this joy of baking recipe and shaped some of the cookies as stars and hearts and other cookies shaped as hippos and elephants. The fizzix professors have a slight obsession with rhinos, so we figured hippos would be close enough. Unfortunately the hippos ran away before I could photograph them.

 

I tried filling shortbread cookie dough with nuts and brown sugar! Pecans, almonds, and cashews all worked well.

That same day, my dorm was having a potluck, so my roommate, Sophia, and I made Sophia's favorite apple crumble recipe. The apples were simply sprinkled with sugar and lemon juice. The topping was a combination of butter, oatmeal, brown sugar, and flour. Usually she uses pecans, but almonds were cheaper.

 

We brought the crumble to the potluck, but it turned out that only 2 people had brought savory foods, so we had a lot of desserts: crumble, apple pie, sesame balls, cookies...

The next day I helped Sophia make the biscotti she makes every year for Christmas. These are delicious almond-anis-raisin biscotti (I liked them even though I usually don't really like anis or raisins.)

 

 The last batch of cookies we made was Tobe's (our suitemate) Candy Cane cookies. Sophia and I agree that these are the best cookies we have ever had. The dough is flavored with almond extract and the cookies are sprinkled with crushed candy canes and sugar. Tobe's instructions said to color some of the dough red and twirl the different colors together to make candy canes, but neither of s was able to do it. Instead, we made trees and mushrooms and flowers, but we discovered that the simple thumbprint cookie was the best at holding large quantities of the candy cane sugar.

Thanksgiving Dinner

I am back at school from a very nice Thanksgiving break. Food at home is so much better than food in college. For thanksgiving dinner my family had a turkey (prepared by my dad)

 

but it looks tastier cooked.

 

We rubbed the turkey with herb butter and stuffed it with chestnut stuffing that my mom and I made.

We based the stuffing off of this recipe from Epicurious, but we also sautéed the turkey's liver and heart and added it to the stuffing along with some chicken broth. And, like every year, we decided to cook the turkey with stuffing in it because in my family's opinion, it makes the stuffing taste so much better.

To compliment this, I made Brussels sprouts with bacon and my brother made cranberry sauce.

 

To prepare, the Brussels spourts, I first steamed the halved sprouts in a pressure cooker for 7 minutes and fried some cubes of thick bacon. Then I added the sprouts to the bacon and let them caramelize for a bit.

My brother's cranberry sauce was actually Cook's Illustrated's Cranberry Chutney with Appple and Crystallized Ginger. It had all of those ingredients as well as cider vinegar and brown sugar.

Since we don't have much family in the US, we celebrate thanksgiving with another French family. Our guests brought more delicious foods including corn bread, green beans sautéed in garlic, delicious apple tart.

And so we had a belly-happifying Thanksgiving meal!