A Day at the Beach: Fresh Strawberry Tart with Lemon Cream

Our friends Jim and Colleen organized a terrific beach trip to the Outer Banks over Memorial Day weekend. As is the routine with our annual cabin trip to Shenandoah each fall, everyone on the trip split up the responsibilities for making meals, and Tom and I were assigned to handle dinner on Saturday night.

Tom handled proteins and vegetables, and I took on the rest. I made an appetizer course of Gruyère gougères and a vegetarian main course of beet ravioli with poppy seed butter (I highly recommend both of these recipes, they both turned out great and were very well received). For dessert, I knew that a summery fruit tart would be perfect for our dinner at the beach. Tom and I bought some delicious small strawberries at a fruit stand on the way to the beach house, and so I was excited to try out the recipe for the Fresh Strawberry Tart with Lemon Cream from The Craft of Baking.

This tart has a cream cheese crust (butter, cream cheese, sugar, flour, and salt) that is mixed, chilled, rolled out, and blind baked. Once the crust is cool, you fill it with a lemon cream that is made by folding whipped cream into lemon curd (lemon zest, lemon juice, sugar, eggs, egg yolks, salt, and butter). The tart is topped with strawberries and chilled before serving.

I had some trouble with the crust shrinking, even though I blind baked it with pie weights. I would happily make this tart again, but if I ever do, I will fill the tart crust with straight lemon curd and save myself the effort of mixing in whipped cream to make lemon cream. I ended up with a lot of leftover lemon cream, which was just wasteful. Also, I didn't like the airy texture of the lemon cream; it did not set firm and made a mess when I cut the tart, even after the tart had spent a few hours in the refrigerator. Finally, I thought the lemon flavor was too dilute with the cream mixed in. Nonetheless, the crust was tender and tasty and the sweet strawberries were a wonderful contrast to the refreshing lemon flavor.

While my execution of this tart wasn't quite perfect, it was still a nice finish to a meal kicking off the unofficial start of summer!

Recipe: "Fresh Strawberry Tart with Lemon Cream," from The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox.

Striped Delight: Zebra Cake

Earlier this week, I received an email from King Arthur Flour advertising a sale. At the bottom of the email, there was a photo and blurb promoting a recipe for Zebra Cake, a fantastical-looking creation with wavy black and white stripes. I checked out the KA Flour Baking Banter Blog and was surprised to see how easy it was to achieve the striped effect. I couldn't wait to try it for myself.

I won't spend any time describing how to make the cake, since the photos and explanation on the Baking Banter Blog pretty much cover everything. My stripes are a little wider than the ones in the King Arthur photos, but I did get a wonderful zebra stripe effect.

I made a double batch of batter and baked two 9-inch round cakes. I had considered putting the double batch of batter into a single 9-inch by 13-inch rectangular pan, but I wasn't sure how the stripe pattern would work out in a rectangle and I didn't want to risk it. I'm really glad I didn't. I cut one of my round cakes radially (cuts radiating from the center outward, as one would normally cut a round cake into wedges), and all of the slices looked like the photo above, with a beautiful wavy stripe pattern. I experimented with the other cake and and cut it orthogonally (into squares). Instead of parallel zebra stripes, I got what looked a lot like wood grain, as you can see in the picture below.

So, if you make this cake in a rectangular pan and cut square slices, you'll get wood grain. While it's sort of interesting looking, it looks messy and random. I think the reason the zebra cake looks so neat is the fact that the parallel stripes look organized and deliberate. The wood grain looks more like something you might have achieved by accident with a regular marble cake.

As far as the flavor of this cake, it's pretty meh. Although it was very moist, it didn't taste like much of anything. I would strongly suggest that if you try making this recipe, you should definitely add some frosting to give the cake a flavor boost (I would have frosted the cake if I had thought frosting would survive the commute to work on a 90+ degree day; I generally avoid bringing anything with frosting to work during hot weather). With some frosting, I'm already thinking that this would make a really fun two-layer birthday cake for kids. And heck, now if anyone ever requests a wood grain cake, I know how to make that, too!

Recipe: Zebra Cake from King Arthur Flour.

Jumping the Gun on Summer: Apricot-Marzipan Tart

My friend Dorothy invited me and Tom to have dinner at her parents' house on Saturday night, and she accepted my offer to bring a dessert. I've been impatiently waiting for summer (and more importantly, summer fruits!) to arrive, and I had a hankering to make a fruit tart. I flipped through my newest cookbook, Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes, by David Lebovitz, and I decided to try a recipe for an Apricot-Marzipan Tart. As Lebovitz explains in the introductory text, the recipe title is a misnomer, because the tart actually calls for almond paste (more almonds than sugar) and not marzipan (more sugar than almonds). This tart has an almond crust (flour, almonds, sugar, salt, chilled butter and an egg yolk) that is pressed into a tart pan, chilled, and blind baked. You fill the baked crust with sliced apricots tossed with sugar and cornstarch, sprinkle the fruit with a crumble topping (flour, brown sugar, almond paste, almonds, and butter), and bake the tart until the top is golden and the fruit is bubbling.

I had all of the ingredients on hand to make this tart except the fruit. I didn't have time to stop by Whole Foods until Saturday afternoon, and of course, the only apricots I could find at the store were completely unripe. When I got them home and tried one, it was horrible. Sharply sour and completely inedible. Fortunately, you can often get away with using unripe fruit in baked goods. I added some extra sugar in with the fruit and kept my fingers crossed.

I went to the trouble of arranging my apricot slices in beautiful overlapping concentric circles in the tart crust. It was a complete waste of effort because the recipe produces so much crumble that it completely covered up all of the fruit. The crumble browned beautifully in the oven, but the edges of the crust got a little too dark. In the future, I would probably shield the edges of the crust with some aluminum foil to prevent over-browning.

I was afraid that the fruit might have made the bottom crust a little soggy, but I was delighted after I served it and discovered that the tart had retained a very crispy texture -- both in the crust and the crumble topping. As it turned out, I really liked the fact that the tart was not too sweet (so the under-ripe fruit didn't seem to hurt at all), and the almond flavor was lovely and really delicious. The tart was a very tasty and interesting combination of flavors and textures and I can't wait to make it again. Lebovitz also suggests making the tart with plums instead of apricots, and I think I will definitely have to try that variation. I cannot wait for summer fruits to get here!

Recipe: "Apricot-Marzipan Tart" from Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes, by David Lebovitz.

A Perfect Fit: Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies with Milk Chocolate Filling

I have made many different varieties of sandwich cookies in my time, and one of the little irritations I often encounter is trying to match up cookie pairs of identical shape and size to sandwich together. Well, I finally found a recipe that eliminates this problem -- the peanut butter sandwich cookies with milk chocolate filling from The Craft of Baking. The batter for these cookies (made with flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, dark brown sugar, powdered sugar, creamy peanut butter, vegetable oil, vanilla, and an egg) is a soft dough that bakes up into perfectly round, flat, uniform cookies when parceled out with a cookie scoop (I used a #60 scoop and ended up with cookies 2 and 1/4 inches in diameter). These cute wafers had the slightly bumpy surface texture that is distinctive of peanut butter cookies.

With all of the cookies being identical, putting together the sandwiches (the filling is a mixture of milk chocolate, smooth peanut butter, powdered sugar, salt, and boiling cream) was a snap -- I could pick any two cookies at random and they would fit together to form a perfect sandwich. The cookies on their own have a great peanut flavor and are crisp (in fact, a little dry -- although I think this probably helps them avoid becoming soggy next to the filling). The creamy filling tastes mostly of peanuts; the mild milk chocolate is basically drowned out by the peanut butter. I might try bittersweet chocolate next time to get a bit of a stronger chocolate flavor. However, even though they aren't very chocolate-y, these sandwiches were really delicious -- much better than anything you might find in the cookie aisle at the supermarket. I would consider these cookies a success on taste and texture alone, but the fact that they turned out so attractive is a huge bonus (and, it definitely puts them ahead of the Nutter Butter recipe from Bouchon Bakery, which I have tried in the past with rather homely results).

Recipe: "Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies with Milk Chocolate Filling" from The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox.

A Delectable Confection: Nut and Cherry Nougat

Tom and I happen to share a love of nougat. I'm a fan of essentially every variety -- almond or pistachio, hard or soft, plain or chocolate covered, French or Italian -- I just cannot resist its chewy nutty goodness. Until now, however, I've been unsuccessful at making it on my own. A couple of years ago, I tried making nougat a few times, and I was never able to achieve anything with the proper texture. But the nut and cherry nougat recipe in The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own made me want to give it another try.

The recipe is described as being fairly labor intensive, which is only partly true. The recipe requires you to toast almonds and pistachios and keep them warm in the oven (along with some honey in a separate container), whip egg whites, and heat two separate pots of sugar and corn syrup on the stove to two different temperatures. None of this steps is particularly difficult or laborious, and the recipe actually comes together in a short amount of time. However, I think it's more accurate to describe the recipe as fairly concentration intensive, since it requires you to do all of the above tasks at the same time. The recipe also leaves little room for error, since it provides you with multiple opportunities to burn sugar.

Essentially, you whip eggs whites with sugar, and then keep the mixer running while you add in: 1) sugar and corn syrup that has been heated to 250 degrees; 2) more sugar and corn syrup that has been heated to 293 degrees; 3) warm honey and salt; and 4) dried cherries and warm toasted nuts. You pour the whipped mixture onto a pan liberally sprinkled with a layer of powdered sugar mixed with cornstarch, sprinkle some more powdered sugar-cornstarch mixture on top, roll it out, wait for it to cool, and then cut it with an oiled knife. I cut mine into 1.5" squares.

These nougats were quite firm (in the past, I've made nougats that were so soft they wouldn't hold their shape) and easy to cut and handle. I rolled the nougat a bit thinner than I probably should have (I think they would have looked prettier if they were a taller), but I was able to get 50 squares out of the batch. They were delicious, with a perfect chewy texture. My only complaint was that the almond flavor was overshadowed by the pistachios -- next time I might tinker with the pistachio to almond ratio. More than anything, I'm just gratified I was finally able to turn out a successful batch of nougat at home!

Recipe: "Nut and Cherry Nougat" from The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox.

Not For the Faint of Heart: Pistachio-Black Pepper Crème Caramel

I usually try to avoid eating out during Restaurant Week. Although there are hypothetically some good deals to be had, I often find the limited menu choices and ubiquity of supplemental charges to be really annoying. Thus, I was a little skeptical back in January when some of my co-workers arranged a Restaurant Week lunch at the Washington Court Hotel. Despite having worked across the street for over six years, I had never set foot in the hotel before. I also had never even heard of the hotel restaurant, Bistro 525.

To my delight, our lunch was good, and I was absolutely blown away by an unusual dessert, a spicy pistachio-black pepper crème caramel. I asked our waiter if there was any way I could get the recipe, and later that afternoon, I received an email from Washington Court Hotel executive chef Mario Raymond spilling the secret to his wonderful creation.

I have to admit, I tried making the recipe in late January shortly after I got it. I made two critical errors that resulted in complete disaster. Not only did I burn the caramel, but I also accidentally splashed water into the custards when they were in the oven. Having failed so spectacularly, I set the recipe aside for a while and I didn't get another chance to try it again until last weekend.

This time, I learned from my prior mistakes. I made a double batch of the pepper caramel so that the larger volume of liquid wouldn't be so quick to burn (but this caramel hardens incredibly fast, so you do have to work like lightening). I also used taller ramekins, put them in the oven in a dry pan, and used a tea kettle to fill the pan with water after it was already on a rack in the oven -- thereby eliminating any splashing that might occur while navigating a heavy pan full of water and custards into the oven. My custards were still completely liquid after baking for 30 minutes. I turned on the oven's convection function and left them in there another 30 minutes -- a little longer than I had intended, but I was busy entertaining guests and sort of forgot about them. They were a little overcooked, but they still ended up with a perfectly smooth, melt-in-your-mouth texture.

To unmold the custards, I cut around the edges of each custard with a knife and dipped the bottom of each ramekin in a shallow pan of boiling water for a few seconds. They released easily and looked quite nice.

The custard was super vanilla-y. The recipe calls for 4 entire vanilla beans (both the seeds and the pods), and the the vanilla pretty much eclipsed the pistachio flavor (even though I had let the pistachios sit in the custard overnight before I strained it -- but I did forget to garnish the custards with pistachios like they do in the restaurant). The pepper caramel is super spicy -- definitely not for the faint of heart! The peppercorns that Tom and I regularly use in our kitchen are Penzey's India Special Extra Bold -- a large and particularly pungent tellicherry variety. Also, the pepper grinder I used was set on coarse -- as you can see in the picture above, there are some really large pepper pieces in there. One of our dinner guests actually gave up on eating his custard towards the end, because the heat was too much for him. But if you are into spicy desserts, this might be the one for you! I loved the wonderful contrasts of the creamy sweet custard and the crazy aggressive caramel. Tom declared that this dessert would be the perfect compliment to some Scotch.

We even got a bonus dessert out of this recipe. I only baked five custards, and I had over a pint of chilled custard mixture left over. I put it in the ice cream maker -- tossing in a few chopped pistachios at the end -- and made some truly amazing pistachio ice cream.

Thank so you much Mario, for sharing this recipe with me and letting me post it on the blog!

Pistachio Black Pepper Crème Caramel
from Mario Raymond, Washington Court Hotel executive chef

Custard
4 cups milk
1 1/4 cup plus 3 Tablespoons sugar
1 cup chopped pistachios
4 vanilla beans
5 eggs
3 egg yolks

Bring milk, sugar, pistachios and vanilla beans (pods and scraped out seeds) to a simmer. Let the milk sit for 5 minutes. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs and egg yolks. Slowly add hot milk mixture into the eggs while whisking. It is best to allow the custard to sit overnight with the vanilla beans and pistachios to allow for maximum extraction of flavor; give it at least an hour if you do not have time to do this the day before. Strain.

Caramel
1/2 cup plus 1 Tablespoon sugar
3 Tablespoons corn syrup
3 Tablespoons water
2 Tablespoons ground tellicherry pepper

Combine the sugar, corn syrup and water in a sauce pan. Cook on medium high heat, covered, for about 5 minutes. Uncover and continue to cook until golden. Swirl the pot occasionally, but do not stir. Remove from heat and add the pepper, stirring to combine. The caramel will foam up, but don't worry -- keep swirling until the foam dissipates. Work quickly from here or the caramel will harden. Pout about 2 oz. of caramel in each of 8 8-oz. ramekins while tilting to cover the bottoms evenly. Let the caramel set.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. When the caramel is hard, fill the ramekins with custard to about 1/2 inch from the top. Bake, covered with foil in a bain-marie (hot water bath, with the water coming at least half way to the top of the ramekins) for 30 minutes. The custards will be just set in the center. You may need to adjust the cooking time as we do these in commercial convection ovens; just check every 5-8 minutes by gently shaking the pan. The custards will just barely wiggle in the center when they are perfectly done. Be careful not to splash the water into the custards.

To serve:
Put ramekins in a pan of very hot water for about 5 minutes. Invert onto a plate. Garnish with chopped pistachios, 2 whole pistachios on top, and 2 raspberries.

Happy Siete de Mayo: Tres Leches Cake

Our friends Jim and Colleen were kind enough to invite us over for dinner last night, with the evening having a tongue in cheek belated Cinco de Mayo theme (or, as Jim put it, a Siete de Mayo theme). I struggled to come up with an idea for an appropriately themed dessert to bring, but then I remembered that last month during our trip to Vegas, my brother had ordered a slice of tres leches cake for dessert at Border Grill in Mandalay Bay. While the origin of tres leches cake seems to be in dispute and the dish might not actually come from Mexico, I figured that for the Siete of Mayo, it was certainly close enough.

Tres leches (or "three milks") cake is a sponge cake soaked in a mixture of condensed milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream, and then topped with whipped cream. I have never made the cake before and so I scoured the internet for a recipe. I narrowed it down to three options: a recipe from Emeril Lagasse, a recipe from the Pioneer Woman blog, and a recipe from the Los Angeles Times. In the end, I went with the Pioneer Woman recipe, if for no other reason than it seemed to be the least unhealthy. Her sponge cake recipe included 1/3 cup of milk but no butter, and the soaking mixture was one can of evaporated milk, one can of condensed milk, and 1/4 cup of heavy cream. In contrast, the L.A. Times recipe included a stick of butter in the cake and had a soaking mixture of a pint of milk, a can of evaporated milk and a can of condensed milk. The Emeril Lagasse recipe practically gave me a heart attack just reading it. While the cake seemed fine (no butter and a half a cup of milk), the soaking mixture includes a pint of heavy cream, one can of evaporated milk, and two cans of condensed milk (okay, you reserve some of the soaking liquid and serve it on the side with the cake, but still!).

Baking the cake itself is straightforward. I cut the edges off the cake once it was cool (I often have to do this with sponge cake, as it usually shrinks upon cooling and the edges end up uneven) and tasted the trimmings -- somewhat dry and fairly tasteless. There is no point in eating the cake alone. I mixed up the soaking mixture and managed to get all of it into the cake (the Pioneer Woman said she usually discards the last cup of the mixture, since it ends of being too much for the cake -- but I didn't have this problem). I was shocked how much liquid this cake could absorb; it was like the ShamWow of desserts.

I refrigerated the cake overnight and made the sweetened whipped cream right before serving. I put dollops of whipped cream on top of each slice instead of trying to spread it over the entire top of the cake like a frosting. Unless you looked really closely, the cake just looked like cake, and you would probably have had no idea that it was soaking wet. Each slice was saturated with liquid that would ooze out a little each time you applied pressure with a fork to cut off a bite. The cake was very sweet and quite delicious. It was also very cold after being in the refrigerator for a day. Amazingly, even though the cake is completely saturated with liquid, it is not soggy. The cake is really just a conveyance for the sweet soaking mixture -- and the result is nothing short of wondrous.

Recipe: "Tres Leches Cake" from the Pioneer Woman Blog, September 11, 2009.

Bloody Poofy Woolly Biscuits: Lamington Cupcakes

When Tom recently gave me The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox, I was intrigued by the photo on the cover, which seemed to show some sort of cupcake being dipped in chocolate and covered in coconut. In fact, the pictured sweet is a Lamington Cupcake, a variation on a classic Australian treat.

The traditional Lamington is a square piece of sponge cake coated in chocolate icing and rolled in dried coconut, sometimes with a layer of cream or strawberry jam in the middle. According to Wikipedia and this article from the New Zealand Herald, the cake is named for Charles Cochrane-Baillie, the second Baron of Lamington and the Governor of Queensland from 1896-1901. Reportedly, he once referred to the cakes as "those bloody poofy woolly biscuits." Undoubtedly, Lamington is lucky to be remembered mostly for a tasty cake instead of for having committed the horrifying faux pas of shooting a sleeping koala bear while on a trip sponsored by conservationists.

The recipe from the Craft cookbook has a vanilla sponge cake inside that is made from cake flour, baking powder, salt, softened butter, sugar, vanilla extract, vanilla bean, whole milk, and egg whites. I was a little skeptical about the large amount of vanilla in the recipe -- the recipe is supposed to yield a dozen standard-sized cupcakes, and it calls for a tablespoon of vanilla, plus one-quarter of a vanilla bean. You not only scrape out the seeds of the vanilla bean and add them to the batter, but then you throw the rest of the bean in there as well -- fishing it out only near the end before incorporating the beaten egg whites.

After you bake up the little cakes in a greased muffin tin (with no cupcake liners), you cool them completely, coat them in a chocolate glaze (cocoa powder, powdered sugar, salt, vanilla, and water) and then roll them in toasted dried shredded coconut. The finished cakes are completely adorable. The glaze sets firm so that they are easy to handle.

The cake inside is very white (maybe because there are no egg yolks in the batter), with a very spongy and dense texture. The cupcakes are definitely vanilla flavored, but not excessively so. I think my cakes might have been a little undercooked at the bottom, but they were just lovely with the chocolate and coconut. The crunchy texture of the dried coconut was especially delightful. I have never been to Australia, but if I do ever get the chance to go, I will be sure to try a Lamington... In the meantime, I will happily make my knockoff versions here!

Recipe: "Lamington Cupcakes" from The Craft of Baking: Cakes, Cookies & Other Sweets with Ideas for Inventing Your Own by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox.