"Healthy" Desserts

No, I haven't gone completely mad. I still love butter and cream, and you won't see recipes for tofu cheesecakes or fat-free brownies any time soon. It just happened that I made some desserts this weekend that might seem healthy at first glance: banana coconut chocolate chip cookies and plain frozen yogurt.  

I read about these "healthy" cookies on Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks blog and was immediately seized with a morbid curiosity to make some for myself. This is possibly the strangest cookie recipe I've ever seen.

Here are the things this cookie does NOT contain:

- butter

- sugar

- eggs

- flour

Is this possible? Yes. Does it taste good? You bet.

Baking Orgy at Kathy's

I haven't had time to post in a while due to grad school application/decision craziness. Thankfully that's all settled now, and it'll be "Paris Sweets in Boston" come September (note to self, don't include geographical information in the blog title next time).

Last week, I was suddently struck with the desire to make bread. Beautiful, warm, domestic-goddess-style bread, and lots of it. Some people have dreams about wanting lots of babies. I wanted bread. I knew I couldn't possibly handle all this bread-making by myself, so I turned to my friend Kathy.

Kathy's my partner-in-crime when it comes to baking. She's technically my coworker (along with 90,000 other people), but we really bonded over food (I made her wedding cakes last summer). Once in a while, we'd get together and unleash our culinary prowess in furious, multi-hour baking sprees. And Kathy's sugar-loving husband Colin usually ends up with lots of mixing bowls and spatulas to "clean".

Really, we're scary efficient when it comes to churning out baked goods. This time, we whipped up sage garlic bread, blackberry coconut bread, cinnamon bread, and mango tres leches cake in less than three hours.

(At least we had one savory item this time. Last time we made cranberry tart, French apple cake, and Paula Deen's insanely decadent pumpkin pie. My heart still hurts when I think about that one.)

Salmon Head in Agar - Jet City Gastrophysics' Modernist Dinner

I recently had the privilege of being a guinea pig for a group of wildly creative and talented gentlemen who go under the name Jet City Gastrophysics. 

Their mission? To learn modernist cooking techniques. It isn't easy when one doesn't have a research kitchen and bottomless funding, but sous-vide machines can be built for under $100, and ebay is a great source for lab-grade equipment. (One person's blood sample centrifuge is another's pea butter maker). 

They had been preparing for a "Thesis dinner" in April to showcase their newfound knowledge to some very special guests, and a small group of friends and family were invited to attend the trial dinner (it was limited to friends and family, so we'd be too polite to sue in case of food poisoning). 

You can read the official writeup on the Seattle Weekly blog, but I've got more, let's say, disturbing, pictures.

The dinner started with a plate of gorgeous home-cured duck breast prosciutto, topped with a drizzle of olive oil and edible flowers. Mr. Eric Rivera has some serious knife skills. 

It was an Asian-themed dinner, so chopsticks were the primary utensils. It should be noted that authenticity was not the point of the dinner; the flavors are Asian-inspired, but the food is uniquely Jet City Gastrophysics. 

Lemon Blueberry Bundt Cake

Two weeks ago, I had a lovely Friday lunch in a cute neighborhood cafe with a friend. The food was comforting (mmm wild boar shepherd's pie), but the real attraction was the baked goods piled behind the glass counter. The whole display was, well, rather American. There were buckets of cookies bigger than my head and five different types of bundt cakes. Despite my usual preference for feather light sponge cakes and delicate custards, I have a soft spot for moist, buttery cakes, especially when they are richly perfumed with citrus and spices.

The slice of lemon bundt cake I bought was...disappointing. I could taste the lemon, but it was missing the lemon fragrance. As commonplace as they are, lemons and oranges have surprisingly elegant aromas (Close your eyes the next time you smell a lemon). Forget passionfruit and lychee, citrus fruits need to take back their status as exotic fruits!

I went home and consulted my trusty America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. It might not be fancy or European, but when it comes to American baked goods, ATK rocks. I used their recipe for lemon bundt cake and added some blueberries to the batter. The cake at the cafe had a soaking syrup, so I made up one with some vodka added for extra flavor (I'm sure lemon has alcohol soluble flavonoids...). I didn't have enough lemon juice left for a glaze, so I made up an almond glaze, which complements the lemon very nicely.

The cake was moist and fragrant, with a tight crumb. It was fantastic paired with a cup of Earl Grey tea.

Birthday Cake Part II: Ispahan Charlotte

I know sometimes I seem schizophrenic, but really, I just like variety. In college, I went from singing Brahms in choir to playing guitar in a rock band, sometimes in the same day, even. (In hindsight, I totally should have rocked out in my choir outfit. Nothing says "stick it to the man" like a high-waisted, floor-length skirt.) The second birthday cake was a complete opposite from the tiramisu cake. Whereas the tiramisu cake had bold, popular flavors, the charlotte was delicate and floral and complex, with a name that only pastry buffs would recognize.

So what is Ispahan?

Ispahan is one of the signature flavors of celebrity pastry chef Pierre Hermé. It consists of raspberry, lychee, and rosewater. I've actually never had any of the Ispahan desserts, but the name is so evocative of Arabian Nights (it'd make a great cocktail too, I need to remember that next time I go out). I was going to make a pear charlotte, but then I remembered that I had all the ingredients for Ispahan on hand. I do love my pantry.

Birthday Cake Part I: Tiramisu Cake

I'm used to making birthday cakes for other people, so when it came to my own birthday, it seemed natural that I'd be making it too (a friend told me he was too intimidated to make me a cake, hah.) I ended up making two joint birthday cakes. One was a joint birthday cake with my sister, and the other one with a friend at work.

(Incidentally, does it seem like you know a lot of people whose birthdays are close to yours, or it just me?)

The first birthday cake was a tiramisu cake because my sister adores tiramisu. The recipe comes from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. The recipe is fairly straight forward: soak two disks of gorgeous yellow cake in coffee syrup, sandwich with mascarpone cream and chopped chocolate, and top with espresso-flavored whipped cream.

Making the cake was interesting, especially as I had to bring half of my baking equipment across the border to Canada. It's a good thing I didn't fly, because I don't think security would be too happy with my Le Cordon Bleu knife set...

Weekend Pastry Adventure

People usually ask me what my favorite bakery in Seattle is, to which I usually firmly but gently assert that I've been spoiled by the great pastry shops in Paris* and refuse to visit any in Seattle. But when my friend Edilyn (of Le Cordon Bleu fame) came to visit, we went to a few local bakeries "for research". The results were rather surprising.

Can I find good pastry in Seattle? Why yes!

*Actually, I had my moment of ideological despair in Paris where, surrounded by half-eaten pastries from Pierre Hermé, I realized that I can no longer be enchanted by any pastry. I was saved by some ripe peaches and a deceptively humble teacake from Pain de Sucré, but that's another post.

I've been meaning to check out Hiroki bakery for a while now. I'm a big fan of Japanese/French fusion bakeries, their products are usually less offensively sweet and there are often interesting flavor combinations. Let's just say that I was really glad I went with another pastry aficionado, of course it was normal to order five things between the two of us so we can try everything!

Kinako Ice Cream with Soy Sauce Caramel

A friend had the brilliant idea of hosting a homemade ice cream party last week, which gave me the chance to try something unusual. My original idea was to make a peanut stracciatella gelato, but while I was leafing through The Perfect Scoop, I landed on a recipe for kinako ice cream.

Kinako is Japanese toasted soy bean powder. I first learned about the term while reading Clotilde's blog entry on warabi mochi, although in hindsight, I've eaten it in pastries while growing up in China (there's a famous Beijing specialty that's basically red bean-filled mochi dipped in kinako). Maybe my palate is biased - after all, I was raised on soy products - but I'm a big fan of kinako's nutty, toasty, unmistakably-soybean taste.

I had a fun time coming up with something to pair with the kinako ice cream. A certain photographer from Scotland suggested caramel, so I made a batch of David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel ... and enhanced it with soy sauce. I learned that trick from Alton Brown, and it just makes so much sense to pair soy with soy.

Anyway, I absolutely loved the ice cream. It's one of those flavors that I'll definitely make if I ever opened my own ice cream shop (for the record, it'll also have strawberry rhubarb and lemon speculoo flavors).

I think that next time, I'll follow the latest NYC trend and flavor my caramel with miso instead...

Chocolate Strawberry Birthday Cake

I was on birthday cake duty last Friday, when three friends hosted a spectacular joint birthday party. There were no allergies, but chocolate had to be involved. I briefly toyed with the idea of making three cakes, each one with a different spin on chocolate cake (chocolate sponge with fresh fruit and whipped cream for a modern look, chocolate cake with malt buttercream for the five-year-old in everyone, and a hefty chocolate and stout pound cake for the "too cool for birthday cake" crowd). Alas, all the recent moving and tango classes left me with very little free time, so I settled for one cake - a towering concoction with four layers of tender chocolate buttermilk cake and strawberry-filled chantilly cream in between.

Speaking of moving, the cake matches my new furniture quite well, don't you think?

I got the cake recipe from an old article in America's Test Kitchen for the old fashioned chocolate cake. I improvised a little by adding two teaspoons of espresso powder - it just adds that depth to chocolate desserts without tasting like coffee (for all the coffee connoisseurs out there, yes I know espresso powder doesn't taste like "real coffee", but I like the taste anyway!) I was really pleased with the way the cakes turned out; I was afraid they would be too tender to be sliced and handled, but these were very sturdy after a quick chill in the fridge.

August 2010 Daring Bakers' Challenge: Ice Cream Petit Fours

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop".

Having missed out on the July challenge (I was doing enough baking in Paris), I'm very glad I chose to do this one. Why? Because the browned butter pound cake is the most delicious cake I've ever made. I don't know why I don't use browned butter more - it caramel, nutty smell is amazingly seductive. Honestly, it's one of my favorite smells. And it's so easy to make too! Just melt some butter until the milk solids are caramelize and turn brown. 
Here's what browned butter looks like after you let it set (which you'll need to do for the pound cake recipe):

The pound cake recipe is very simple. You cream the butter with sugar and eggs, then whisk in flour and baking powder. The browned butter is the star here. (Don't worry, the recipe is at the bottom. This isn't one of those medieval recipes where you just "styre everything togither").