Hubby's birthday!

In honor of Paul's birthday, I baked him America's Test Kitchen's Triple Chocolate Mousse Cake (via Annie's Eats).

Yum. 

It was so good I forgot to take a picture of a slice showing all the layers (you can almost see them in the second picture.)

Delicious.

Brudder's Birthday!

In honor of my baby brother's birthday, I cooked his favorite dinner:

Baked potatoes, Steak, and Asparagus:

And when I say cooked, I mean my dad grilled.

But I did make an amazing birthday cake! 

Annie's Eats Cookies and Cream Cake

Since Brudder is an incorrigible chocoholic who eats gallons of Cookies and Cream ice cream every summer, I decided to combine his loves, to delicious result.

Despite trying to frost with warm frosting and almost pulling the cake apart in the process, a quick trip to the fridge to solidify and some careful doctoring resulted in this:

Which my brother seemed to enjoy:

Cut yourself a slice!

Simple, Classic French "Gateau au Yaort" (Yogurt Cake)

It seems everyone has a family recipe for "Gateau au Yaourt" (pronounced gah-toe oh yah-oor).  You might ask what is so special about a yogurt cake?  It is a recipe, whose measurements are proportional by volume, so it is easy to remember and even simpler to make. 

Ingredients
1 single-portion container of plain yogurt
2 eggs
vegetable oil
sugar
flour
1 sachet baking powder (11g, or appx. .5 oz or 1T)
pinch of salt
vanilla extract
grease or spray for pan

Supplies
Baking dish
mixing bowl
spoon
 
Flavoring options: rum, diced apple, sliced banana, pineapple, cinnamon, cocoa, nutella, nuts, extracts, etc...

Directions


Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (160C).

Crack two eggs into the bowl, gently beat.
Empty yogurt container into bowl, stir into eggs.
Fill yogurt container halfway with oil, stir into eggs.
Splash in some vanilla extract.

Rinse and dry yogurt container.

Measure 2 yogurt containers of sugar and stir into liquids.
Measure 3 yogurt containers of flour and stir into batter.
Add sachet of baking powder and pinch of salt, stir into batter.

Add your desired "extras".

Pour smooth batter into greased baking dish.  Bake for 1 hour.
Enjoy!

Gotta catch 'em all!

Every year on March 20, world-renowned pastry chefs celebrate the jour du macaron.  A macaron is a delightful cakey cookie related more closely to the meringue, and though linguistically similar, not-to-be-confused with Passover staple, the macaroon.

On this day, all over the world, at select shops, macarons are given away for free!
This year, my husband and I made the tour of four of the six Pierre Herme Paris shops, discovering too-late that there was a special gift involved in going to all 6 (a free box of 35 macarons!).  Nevertheless, our careful strategy (and the purchase of 1 macaron) allowed us to taste all 25 flavors being offered that day.

Here is a photo of (almost) all of them.  Three were eaten en-route home.

The flavors are:
Arabesque (apricot and pistachio)
Cafe (coffee)
Chocolat au lau & the Earl Grey (milk chocolate and Earl Grey tea)
Chocolat & foie gras
Chuao (chocolat and black currant)
Citron (lemon)
Coing & Rose (quince and rose)
Eden (peach, apricot and saffron)
Fragola (strawberry and balsamic vinegar)
Huile d'olive & vanille (olive oil and vanilla)
Imagine (Matcha green tea, crunchy black sesame)
Infiniment Vanille (Tahitian vanilla, Madagascan vanilla, Mexican vanilla)
Infiniment caramel (salted-butter caramel)
Ispahan (rose, litchi, raspberry)
Jasmin (jasmin flower and jasmin tea)
Magnifique (strawberry and wasabi)
Marron & the vert Matcha (chestnut and Matcha green tea)
Medelice (lemon, hazelnut praline)
Mosaic (pistachio and wild cherry)
Mutine (milk chocolat and coconut)
Mogador (milk chocolate and passionfruit)
Pistache (pistachio)
Rose (rose and rose petals)
Truffe blanche & noisette (white truffle, grilled Piemont hazelnut sprinkles)

They lasted all week and they were delicious.

Disappearing Tarte aux pommes, French crust redux

Using the tart crust recipe from my previous post, I made a very simple apple tart.  I call it the disappearing apple tart because not only are there never leftovers, but it disappears before I can get a piece!!!  I call that a baking success.

Ingredients
French tart crust
2 apples, I use 1 granny smith and 1 fuji (or any sweeter apple), peeled and sliced thinly
appx 1/4 apple sauce
cinnamon
sugar

Spread the apple sauce in the baked pie crust so there is a nice layer to nest the apples in.  Shake on some cinnamon (alternately, you can do cinnamon-sugar mixture on the top, but I prefer to hide it since I prefer to hide the darker color of the cinnamon.)  Spread the apples.  I like to do a pretty pattern (I circle the edge, then do an inner circle,) alternating slices of the two types.  Sprinkle with sugar.  Bake at 350F until the apples are tender but not burning.
Voila!

 

Date Night Dinner!

Tonight my husband and I are having a special evening out:  a show at the Fox and steak for dinner!

For the soup:
1 acorn squash
1 c chicken stock, optional
2T margarine, optional

Preheat oven to 375F.  Wash the skin of the acorn squash.  Pat dry.  Stab repeatedly with knife--this is very good for stress!!!  It also keeps it from exploding in the oven under the pressure of the steam from its flesh cooking.  Put on baking tray, to catch any leaking juices, and roast for 45 minutes or until tender.

Let cool.  It should be soft enough to pierce easily with a fork.

Cut in half.  Scrape out the seeds and innards, discard. 

Cut in four pieces and peel off the skin, discard.  Puree the flesh and add choice of liquid and spices to make a tasty soup to the desired consistency!

I added turmeric, a little coriander, a little ginger powder, and fresh ground black pepper. 

The puree can be frozen, and snuck into other veggie-less meals to pump up their healthiness.  Stealth veggies!!  You can also add brown sugar, orange juice, and milk or cream to make a sweeter soup, or blend in apple puree or parsnip puree to make a veggie side, sweet or savory respectively.

Steak

Ingredients
3 beef eye of round steaks
1/4 c sweet vermouth
1/4 c white vinegar (white wine or cider would have been better)
1/4 c olive oil
1 onion, diced
Salt and pepper

Salt and pepper both sides of the steak.

Marinade the meet in the vermouth, vinegar, oil and onion.

I never finished this post, because while the soup was delicious, simple and filling, the steaks were too greasy and underseasoned.  I should not have used olive oil, I should have used a more acidic marinade, and I should have kept the onions separate from the meat as they cooked at a different time and temperature.  Lesson learned.

Pumpkin Mascarpone Tart

This recipe uses the "French Tart Dough" crust from David Lebovitz's website.

Ingredients
6T butter (I use dairy-free margarine)
1T veggie oil (I use canola)
3T water
1T sugar
1/8 t salt
1 heaping cup flour

Preheat oven to 410F degrees.
In an ovenproof bowl (I used one of my pyrex mixing bowls) put the butter, veggie oil, water, sugar and salt.

Heat in the oven until it is bubbly and browning around the edges, about 15 minutes.  Careful when you're checking it, it spatters a bit.

Take it out of the oven and dump the flour in --don't forget the bowl is VERY hot and this WILL spatter!

I let it sit for a minute.

Stir it with a fork until it makes a ball.

Let it cool down until you can handle it.

Line a tart pan with wax or parchment paper.

Put it in a tart pan. 

Save a marble-sized piece of dough for patching up cracks after it bakes (I put it in a shot-glass for safe-keeping.)  Press the dough into the pan and up the edges, try to keep it even.  Stab it all over with a fork, taking care not to make tears by scraping the fork.  Be sure to stab into the corners where the dough might be a bit thick.

 Bake until lightly browned. Patch any cracks with the reserved dough.

Now to make the filling!

Ingredients
1 c pumpkin
1/2 container mascarpone
cardamum
cinnamon
ginger
nutmeg
cloves
allspice
brown sugar
powdered sugar

Mix the pumpkin with the cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, allspice and brown sugar, all to taste.  I used about a 1/2 t cinnamon, 1/4 each ginger and nutmeg, a few shakes of cloves and allspice.  This is basically pumpkin pie spice and brown sugar, if you prefer to use that.  Spread on crust.

 

I should have put it in the oven now to heat through, but i didn't.  Instead I mixed the cardamom, powdered sugar and mascarpone to taste.  I then spread that on really messily, accidentally getting it mixed in with the pumpkin.


Then I baked it at 350F, melting the cheese into the pumpkin.  It made a nice toasted marshmallow type melted topping , but not the cream-cheese texture I was hoping for.
If you are using a pie pan with removable bottom, be very careful when you take the bottom out of the pie pan (and when you take it out of the oven!) I have burnt myself twice when they came awkwardly, and I have also broken the crust a bit, as it is perfectly flaky and crumbly.

It was still delicious.

Hubby's Birthday Dinner

For my husband's birthday dinner, I made his ideal, meat-and-potatoes dinner followed by chocolate cake.
Caveat: I have never made a steak before. If we had steak when I was growing up, my dad grilled it. I was a little apprehensive about ruining a perfectly good (and more expensive than our normal budget) piece of meat! I asked the butcher for directions, and followed them religiously to delicious results!

Menu:
Ribeye steak
Green beans
Mashed potatoes
Chocolate cake

I bought fresh green beans at a local Farmer's market (see previous post) and I blanched them in chicken stock (reserved it), then dressed them with olive oil, lemon juice and cracked pepper.
I boiled potatoes, and mashed them with the reserved chicken stock and some margarine.
For the rib-eye steak: I seared it in a frying pan until browned on both sides, then placed it on a cookie sheet covered in foil, gently tented foil over it leaving room to breathe, and baked it in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes. I then let it rest, still covered, for 10 minutes before serving.

The final product:


For the cake, I followed the Barefoot Contessa at Home recipe for Beatty's Chocolate Cake and chocolate frosting.

For the cake, I did not have two same-sized round cake pans so I improvised with two different sized ones. For the frosting, I missed the direction about not using chocolate chips due to stabilizers, so after being in the fridge the frosting turned lumpy as the chips tried to maintain their pre-melted shapes. I also left out the egg yolk and instant coffee.

The very homemade-but-still-tasty looking final product: