I'm still looking for recipes to use up my milk chocolate supply. I have been making steady progress on the five kilograms of Cacao Barry 38% Lactée Supérieure that I bought back in February; even though I have less than 1.5 kilograms left, every little bit helps. So I decided to try a recipe for Pistachio and Milk Chocolate Squares from BBC Good Food.
This recipe is made to be baked in an 8-inch square pan but I multiplied it by 1.5 and baked it in a 9-inch by 13-inch pan. It also calls for golden caster sugar. I never use caster sugar because it's so expensive. However, a colleague gave me some Barbados sugar that is dry, light golden in color, and slightly more coarse than regular granulated sugar. To approximate golden caster sugar, I put an equal weight of Barbados sugar in the food processor and ground it superfine. It wasn't any extra effort because the recipe requires you to grind some of the sugar with pistachios and milk chocolate, so I was going to have to get out the food processor anyway.
This cake uses the all-in-one mixing method. You just dump everything -- the sugar, ground pistachios, ground milk chocolate, softened butter, eggs, flour, baking powder (which I had to add since I used all-purpose flour instead of self-raising), milk, and salt -- into a bowl and mix it together. This is a high-ratio cake with equal weights of sugar and flour so I wasn't worried about overbeating it; I made sure the batter was thoroughly mixed and aerated before I poured it into a parchment-lined pan to bake.
After the cake was completely cool I used my Agbay to level the top and split it into two layers. The frosting is just a mixture of melted milk chocolate and sour cream. I filled and frosted the cake and topped it with chopped pistachios. Because of the sour cream in the frosting I stored the cake in the fridge.
The neat appearance of this cake was immensely satisfying -- tidy squares with a very thin and perfectly straight layer of frosting between the cake layers. (Agbay cake levelers are expensive but they produce impressive results with very little effort.) And even though there was ground milk chocolate in the cake batter, you couldn't see it -- the cake was a light shade of pistachio green that provided a nice color contrast with the frosting. I loved this cake. The texture was dense and a bit oily (I assume from the ground nuts), but the flavor was spectacular. I used to hate milk chocolate but that was before I starting using quality European chocolate that actually tastes good. The refined combination of pistachio and milk chocolate was sublime. And I can't believe how delicious the creamy frosting was, even though it was just chocolate and sour cream.
Eating this cake evoked a very specific memory for me; it took me back to grade school when a fancy French bakery opened up in Lincoln. It sold squares of chocolate cake -- about the same size as these pistachio-milk chocolate squares -- that were milk chocolate and hazelnut, with chopped nuts covering the frosted sides. That cake was unlike any other dessert I had eaten before and I still dream of eating cake like that now. That bakery didn't last long; if memory serves, each small slice of cake cost something like $3, which was crazy in Nebraska in the early 1980s.
Although this cake is quite different from the one in that special childhood memory, I think the smooth milk chocolate flavor in the pistachio-milk chocolate squares is what took me back in time -- along with the perfect balance of two distinct but completely complementary flavors. This cake was a delight.
Recipe: "Pistachio and Milk Chocolate Squares" from BBC Good Food.
This recipe is made to be baked in an 8-inch square pan but I multiplied it by 1.5 and baked it in a 9-inch by 13-inch pan. It also calls for golden caster sugar. I never use caster sugar because it's so expensive. However, a colleague gave me some Barbados sugar that is dry, light golden in color, and slightly more coarse than regular granulated sugar. To approximate golden caster sugar, I put an equal weight of Barbados sugar in the food processor and ground it superfine. It wasn't any extra effort because the recipe requires you to grind some of the sugar with pistachios and milk chocolate, so I was going to have to get out the food processor anyway.
This cake uses the all-in-one mixing method. You just dump everything -- the sugar, ground pistachios, ground milk chocolate, softened butter, eggs, flour, baking powder (which I had to add since I used all-purpose flour instead of self-raising), milk, and salt -- into a bowl and mix it together. This is a high-ratio cake with equal weights of sugar and flour so I wasn't worried about overbeating it; I made sure the batter was thoroughly mixed and aerated before I poured it into a parchment-lined pan to bake.
The neat appearance of this cake was immensely satisfying -- tidy squares with a very thin and perfectly straight layer of frosting between the cake layers. (Agbay cake levelers are expensive but they produce impressive results with very little effort.) And even though there was ground milk chocolate in the cake batter, you couldn't see it -- the cake was a light shade of pistachio green that provided a nice color contrast with the frosting. I loved this cake. The texture was dense and a bit oily (I assume from the ground nuts), but the flavor was spectacular. I used to hate milk chocolate but that was before I starting using quality European chocolate that actually tastes good. The refined combination of pistachio and milk chocolate was sublime. And I can't believe how delicious the creamy frosting was, even though it was just chocolate and sour cream.
Eating this cake evoked a very specific memory for me; it took me back to grade school when a fancy French bakery opened up in Lincoln. It sold squares of chocolate cake -- about the same size as these pistachio-milk chocolate squares -- that were milk chocolate and hazelnut, with chopped nuts covering the frosted sides. That cake was unlike any other dessert I had eaten before and I still dream of eating cake like that now. That bakery didn't last long; if memory serves, each small slice of cake cost something like $3, which was crazy in Nebraska in the early 1980s.
Although this cake is quite different from the one in that special childhood memory, I think the smooth milk chocolate flavor in the pistachio-milk chocolate squares is what took me back in time -- along with the perfect balance of two distinct but completely complementary flavors. This cake was a delight.
Recipe: "Pistachio and Milk Chocolate Squares" from BBC Good Food.
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