Wednesday 10 August 2011

Please vote for me in Årets Bak- och Dessertmästare

I'm currently participating in a baking contest for amateur bakers here in Sweden and
I've made it through to the semi finals, in which I need people to vote for my contribution in order to make it to the final. Thus, please go to

http://bakochdessert.se/semifinal

and vote for nr 1 (Anders Lindgren) by clicking the GILLA button under my name.

Then just click the TILLBAKA button to close the form that appears and you are done. No registration necessary.

Please also spread this to other people in your social networks - I need all the votes I can get. :)
(This is the last week of voting, and we are six people battling it out for the five spots in the final, so everybody is hustling for votes - please help me!)

Thanks a lot for your help!

/Anders

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Årets Bak- och Dessertmästare (Swedish baking contest) - PLEASE VOTE FOR ME!!!

I'm currently participating in a baking contest for amateur bakers here in Sweden and
I've made it through to the semi finals, in which I need people to vote for my contribution in order to make it to the final. Thus, please go to

http://bakochdessert.se/semifinal

and click the "GILLA" button underneath semifinalist 1 (it should also say Anders Lindgren there).
You can ignore the popup that follows, that's only for people in Sweden - as long as you've clicked the GILLA button, you have voted for me.

Please also spread this to other people in your social networks - I need all the votes I can get. :)

Thanks a lot for your help!

/Anders

(yes, I know the photo of my cake there is really crappy, but it tastes good)

Wednesday 5 January 2011

New Year's Eve 2010/2011

Happy New Year to all my blog readers. This past NYE, I celebrated with a group of good friends. Dinner was done "potluck tapas style" and different guests had been assigned different items to bring in order to not have someone spend all of NYE in the kitchen. As is common on occasions like this, I had been assigned to dessert duty, and decided to go with an old favorite. The Stockholm Chocolate Festival cake that I made before was such a huge success, was really delicious, and wasn't all to hard to make (for some definition of hard...), so making that again was a choice that couldn't go wrong.

That was a very good decision as it turned out just as good this time around. I used my edible gold spray paint and some glitter of various colors to make it glamorous for the occasion. Pictures below:



The pastry chef and his cake.





Decorated so that we know what year we are entering.




It's NYE after all, so we need some sparklers.

Thursday 2 December 2010

Wilton Course 2

In the Wilton Course 2, we continued piping based on what we had learnt in the first course, but now, we mostly piped with Royal Icing. With Royal Icing, you have to be really careful to cover it up carefully with clingfilm or it will dry really quickly, and whenever you are not using your piping bags, you need to keep the tips covered with a damp towel or they will also dry out. On the other hand, RI is not as temperature sensitive as buttercream, so it won't go soft as quickly from holding the piping bag. RI also has the benefit that once it has been piped and dried, it can be kept for a long time, so decorations can be made way ahead of time.

We continued piping different borders and other basic things. One interesting technique that we were taught was the basket weave pattern. It look quite nice (see pictures below), but it is a bit labor-intensive. Not very difficult though. We also continued to make lots of different flowers, which were a bit more advanced than the ones in course 1, mostly making use of the flower nail. We made chrysantemums, daffodils, pansies, violets, and also a new type of rose, the Victorian rose.

Some of the flowers we piped


Basketweave pattern on a cake


That cake with some flowers and borders on as well.

Wilton Course 1

While I've been quite good (if I may say so myself...) at making cakes that are delicious, I have not given much focus to decorating the cakes. I've done some very basic piping (I only had a couple of different tips) and decorated the wedding cake I made with some sugar paste flowers. Now it was however time to change this and be able to make cakes that not only taste good, but that look nice as well. Therefore I signed up for a series of three cake decorating courses based on the Wilton(TM) series of courses. Each course was over a weekend (two days from 9-16.30 approximately) and was given by Camilla Sala at the company Kakburken ("The Cookie Jar") outside of Stockholm. Their web site can be found at http://www.kakburken.se/ and I can recommend the courses to anyone that wants to be able to make nice looking decorations for their cakes. Some of the results from the first course have already been displayed here in the previous post (the roses on the chocolate festival cake).
The following three posts will be one for each of the courses.

Wilton Course 1
This was the basic Wilton course in cake decoration and focused on piping techniques using buttercream. It also went through basics like covering your cake with buttercream, etc. Since I would never consider covering a real cake that I made with buttercream, that was less interesting to me, but the decorating aspects of the course were very good. We were taught many piping basics and did various simple flowers and stars, shell borders, lines, pattern transfers, and other useful things. The most interesting thing was obviously piping the roses. Extremely tricky at first, but once you got the hang of it (which didn't really happen until after the course for me), it is actually rather simple and a very quick way to get a nice looking rose for your cake.

Monday 11 October 2010

Stockholm Chocolate Festival Cake

The Stockholm Chocolate Festival is happening this coming weekend. On their web page I found the recipe for the "festival dessert". The recipe is intended to be made into individual servings and is dimensioned for a much larger scale than I want to make.
I scaled the recipe down a bit and adapted it to make one 9" cake.



Chocolate cake base:
  • 150 grams soft butter
  • 130 grams sugar
  • 150 grams melted chocolate, 70%
  • 2 eggs
  • 40 grams flour

1. Mix well (in the order that the ingredients are listed) to a smooth batter.
2. Pour into a greased spring-form pan (9").
3. Bake for 10 minutes in a 200C oven. Let it cool off.

Raspberry truffle:
  • 120 grams raspberry puree
  • 60 grams unsalted butter
  • 150 grams sugar
  • 45 grams double cream
  • 135 grams milk chocolate
  • 135 grams dark chocolate (70%)

1. Chop both chocolates and place in a bowl.
2. Bring the other ingredients to a boil. Pour this mixture over the chocolate.
3. Mix to a smooth mixture.
4. When the mixture is 30C, pour over the chocolate cake base and place everything in the freezer.

Milk chocolate mousse:
  • 100 grams double cream
  • 210 grams milk chocolate
Bring the cream to a boil and pour over the chocolate. Stir until the chocolate melts and the mixture is smooth.
  • 70 grams sugar
  • 21 grams water
  • 1 egg + 1 egg yolk
  • 310 grams lightly whipped cream
  • 1 sheet of gelatin, soaked in water
Let the sugar and water boil to a syrup until it reaches a temperature of 121C. Pour this over the egg and egg yolk while constantly whisking. Keep whipping the egg mixture coldly.

Fold the chocolate mixture, the egg mixture, the gelatin, and the lightly whipped cream together.
Pour the mousse into the spring form pan and make the surface of the cake smooth. Put it back into the freezer.

Take out of freezer a few hours before serving to give it time to defrost properly.

Decoration
Decorate the cake as you see fit. I took a cake decorating course (Wilton Course 1) this past weekend, so I wanted to make use of my new skills, so I made some buttercream and piped the roses and leafs. (I made lots of roses... I should have taken a picture of my plate full of roses. While it was tricky at first, it is actually rather easy to pipe roses once you get the hang of it.)

Monday 1 February 2010

Saffron ice cream with a topping of Santa

As Christmas last year approached, the Xmas parties started following each other in rapid succession. For my church home group Christmas party, I was (as I expected) asked to provide the dessert. I wanted to make something good, but still something that wasn't too work intensive, and preferrably something with a Christmas feel to it. I might need to explain here to the non-Swedes out there that in Sweden, saffron is very strongly associated with Christmas as it's main use in the Swedish kitchen is for the "lussekatter" Lucia buns that are traditionally eaten on December 13 (but also throughout the rest of December). Given these parameters, I remembered a sort of saffron ice cream on a base of an almond meringue cake that Tomas Johansson, an old friend and colleague, had served us at work several years ago. Thus, I contacted him and he graciously obliged and provided me with the recipe.

I finished the cake without any problems, but still had a little bit of time and a bit too much creativity, so I wanted to do some decoration for the cake. Another Swedish Christmas tradition is to make marcipan pigs and Santas, so I decided I would make a marcipan Santa.
Of course I didn't have any marcipan, but I did have left-over almond paste from making the cake, and marcipan is basically the same as almond paste, just with higher suger percentage, so if you knead almond paste with icing sugar, you get a pretty good approximation of marcipan.
I divided the marcipan into smaller pieces and used food coloring to color one piece red. A smaller piece that was going to end up being the head of the Santa was kneaded together with a very small piece of red marcipan to get something that is close to skin color.
Now I could start modelling the Santa figure. A piece of skin colored marcipan was rolled into a ball and then slightly squished to give it a head shape. Using a knife and a match, I did some sculpting of this head to create facial features. The result ended up being better than I had expected (I tend to make things that taste good, but the artistic side of making cakes is usually not my biggest strength). The big red piece of marcipan was sculpted into the body - both the torso, arms, and legs were made from the same piece of marcipan.
I had made the decision that I wanted my little guy to be able to stand up, but the marcipan body (which was almost 10 cm tall) was not rigid enough, so I had to add some extra support by impaling the poor thing with a match (note: this means that you should be very careful if someone would get the idea to eat the creation). A toothpick would have been better, but I didn't have any toothpicks. Similarly, I also stuck matches up through the legs to give them stability (and left a piece sticking out to make it easier to attach the feet.
Next were the feet and the belt. One of the problems here was that I only had red food coloring and I had already used that to make the red suit and the "skin colored" head. The boots and belt should be rather dark. Fortunately I had some chocolate flakes (100% cocoa content) that are meant to be used for making drinking chocolate, but I'll take whatever I can get. I kneaded some of this into another piece of marcipan to create a brown marcipan and then formed small boots to attach to his legs and a long thin stretch to wrap around him as a belt. The combination of the chocolate flakes and the marcipan wasn't great as it caused the marcipan to become to fragile and easily wanting to fall apart. Next time I might try to just use some cocoa powder instead.
Gloves were made out of uncolored marcipan, and the same for the beard (which I dusted with icing sugar to make it a bit whiter). The head was stuck onto the body (once again using a match for support, and a hat was formed from more red marcipan together with some uncolored marcipan for the whiter details on it.
Almost done. There was still a problem though. He didn't have any eyes, just holes where they were supposed to be. This was obviously a problem as I (as mentioned before) only had red food coloring (and we don't want Santa to have red eyes). I figured I would use the chocolate for the eyes, when I came up with another idea.
I had a bag of "Vicks Blue" in a cupboard. Vicks Blue is a Swedish lozenge for sore throats and as the name suggests, it has a very bright blue color. So, take one Vicks Blue, take out your trusted mortar and pestle and crush it. You now have tiny pieces of blue "crystals", perfect for making eyes to your little marcipan Santa.

Below follows first the recipe for the saffron ice cream cake, and then photos of the cake, and finally photos of me decoration.

Saffron ice cream cake
(recipe courtesy of Tomas Johansson)
Crust:
300 g almond paste (commonly available in Swedish stores - if you can't find it, you can make your own by grinding almonds together with sugar (150g almonds/150g sugar) in a food processor)
3 egg whites
1-1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder

Ice cream:
3 egg yolks
100 ml sugar
150 ml milk (3% fat content)
1 pack of saffron, 0.5 g
200 ml heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 200º C. Line the bottom of a 23cm (9inch) spring form pan with baking paper and grease it. Shred the almond paste thinly. Whip the egg whites until firm peaks form. Carefully fold the almond paste into the egg whites. Sift the cocoa powder into the egg white mixture and fold. Pour the mixture into the spring form pan and bake in the lower part of the over approximately 20 minutes. Let the cake cool in the pan.

Mix egg yolks, sugar, milk, and saffron in a sauce pan. Bring to a boil and simmer on low heat while constantly stirring until it reaches a creamy consistency. Let the mixture cool. Whip the cream and fold it into the saffron mixture.

Let the cake/crust remain in the spring form pan and pour the ice cream mixture over it. Freeze the cake for at least 4 hours. Remove from freezer approximately 30 minutes before serving.