Four Nut Brownies by Delia

Last night I made a first attempt at one of the recipes from the Delia Smith recipe book that I received for my birthday. I decided to start off with a brownie recipe. I don't really have a good brownie recipe, and this was something that is fairly easy to make and is likely to be good. The brownies turned out really well. A slight crust on top and very moist and chewy inside, just like brownies should be. Picture and recipe below.


Recipe:

100g mixed nuts (macadamia/brazil/pecan/hazelnuts)
50g dark chocolate
110g butter
2 large eggs, beaten
225g granulated sugar
50g flour
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 180C.
Chop the nuts roughly and place on a baking sheet and toast them for 8 minutes in the oven.
Chop the chocolate and put it together with the butter in a heat-proof bowl over a saucepan with simmering water. Let the chocolate and butter melt and stir until well mixed.
Take off the heat and add all the other ingredients and mix well.

Pour the batter into a 15*25.5cm greased baking tin and bake for 30 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before cutting into squares.

A final birthday cake

As this past Wednesday was my actual birthday, I did have to make some kind of cake for it.
I wasn't really in the mood to do something extremely complicated, so once again, I went back to my new go-to-cake. This was the fifth cake I made for this birthday. At least, this time I have a picture of a slice of the chocolate cake with ricotta cheesecake swirls in it:

The latest addition to my library

Here is my latest addition to my baking library.
A friend gave me "The Delia Collection - Chocolate" by Delia Smith as a birthday present. A very good gift indeed. I've only had time to browse through it quickly yet, but there certainly seem to be many recipes that I need to try out (and I will make sure to report the results here).

Another year, another birthday

In a couple of days it is time for another mid-life crisis as I turn 30. I have however already had some birthday celebrations as I spent Easter and last week back home in Sweden, so I took the opportunity to have an early birthday party for my friends back home (granted, before this I had already had two previous smaller birthday celebrations - one for friends who couldn't make it for this one to which I made the Cloud forest chocolate cake (no pictures) and one for family for which I made my old trusted favourite described in a previous post here).

Given that I had already done a fair amount of baking I wasn't really in the mood for anything overly complicated for this party. The photos below show the two cakes that I had. The one to the left is a traditional Swedish "gräddtårta" and consists of three layers of genoise with a mixture of mashed bananas and strawberrys between the layers, and coated with whipped cream. Very simple and very good. The decoration was made by my sister and is a portrait of me back in the days when I used to have a beard. :)
The other cake is a bittersweet chocolate charlotte. I've been looking at this recipe for a while, wanting to try it, so I figured this was a good occasion to give it a go. Once again, I received some help from my sister in stacking the ladyfingers in the bottom and around the sides of the pan. We didn't have enough ladyfingers to cover the top of the cake as well, so I just put some white chocolate shaving on it. I probably won't make this cake again. Everybody liked it and thought it was very good, but I was not thrilled. I didn't really like the texture of it, and given the amount of effort it after all required, I could probably do something better. The pictures also shows some cookies that my mother had made previously that I retrieved from the freezer.




Oh, I just remembered, that while not on the pictures, I also made a last minute batch of these chocolate and almond meringues from foodbeam that are very good.

Coeur Velours

Ever since I saw the post about the Coeur Velours (Velvet Heart) over at Foodbeam, I have been looking for an occasion to make it. Given that it's a Pierre Hermé creation it is from the offset guaranteed to be a great recipe. Add into the equation that this is basically an entrement version of a Plaisir Sucré, and you can hope for nothing less than total bliss.

Yesterday was my friend's birthday, and one can hardly find a better excuse than that to try out a recipe like this. It's a win-win situation - I get to try out a recipe that I've wanted to try for a long time (and, not to forget, get to eat some of the cake), and she gets a nice birthday cake like she deserves.

The cake has the following layers:
A disk of hazelnut daquoise
A layer of praline feuilleté spread on this
Three thin sheets of milk chocolate, with a milk chocolate ganache between each of the sheets
A fairly thick layer of milk chocolate chantilly
Another hazelnut daquoise
The entire cake is then covered with a milk chocolate coating and sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts for decoration.

Comments:
While the resulting cake is quite impressive, just like the Plaisir Sucré, the recipe is straight-forward to work with and has the benefit that most of the different components can be made separately ahead of time and kept frozen until it is time to assemble them. This certainly makes it easier to find time to make a fairly ambitious project like this or the PS. Each component is reasonably simple to make (but it certainly doesn't hurt to have some baking experience - this probably shouldn't be the first cake that you attempt to make, with one notable exception (which is the same thing that was a hassle when making the PS) - the chocolate sheets. While the recipe allocated a total of 15 minutes for the tempering of the chocolate and the creation of the chocolate sheets, I fortunately have enought insight into my abilities in this area to expect this part of the process to take slightly longer. After about two hours (and a fair bit of chocolate pieces on the floor), I was done. First of all, tempering chocolate is a bit of a hassle in itself, as it is a very delicate process where the temperature ranges for the chocolate are very precise and it is easy to overshoot the target temperature when reheating it (if you are not aware of what tempering of chocolate is, it is basically a process in which the chocolate is first melted and brought up to a certain temperature, then it is cooled down to a lower temperature, and then reheated again to a temperature in-between to two others... this is done to make the crystals that make up the chocolate re-arrange themselves in the proper way to make the chocolate have the right "snappy" consistency). Once the chocolate is tempered, one has to work quite quickly to spread it on sheets to create the thin layer of chocolate that will make up the three circular sheets that go into the cake. Finally, there is the process of removing the chocolate from the plastic without breaking the chocolate sheets (this is even more difficult here than for the PS, as each sheet is much larger for this cake).
My cercle à pâtisserie was also larger than the 19cm prescribed in the recipe. I scaled up the amount of praline I made, but not the chantilly and ganache, which I probably should have. I think that the amount of chantilly was still enough, but it would have been good to have some more ganache to get a larger distance between the chocolate sheets (especially when you are cutting the cake, the trio of chocolate sheets will be a bit compressed in some places).

Just as expected, the cake was very good. One of the best things with making cakes and dessert is to watch peoples' faces as they take the first bite of what you have made. When you have made something good, that expression says so much more than words (though the words of the birthday girl and the others who tried this cake were also very positive), and that is what I strive to achieve with all the things I bake.

While the cake basically is mostly milk chocolate presented in different ways, it is very interesting with several different textures that combines together wonderfully. It has the smoothness of the chantilly and ganache, the chewiness of the daquoise, the crunch of the praline, and the snap of the chocolate sheets.

Finally, here are the pictures of the cake. (Yes, I know... I need to start putting more effort into the pictures and have nicer backgrounds.)

The cake under construction:

The assembled cake in the sunlight:


Waiting to be eaten:
A slice:

The remains:

The pictures of a wedding cake

So, here they finally are. What you have been waiting for all this time. The pictures!














Photo: Andreas Wallgren and Christina Öhrling

The story of a wedding cake (part 3)

I was now ready to take on the biggest baking project that I had ever done so far. I had a recipe that I was fairly confident in. I had scoured every kitchen I could think of to find as many spring form pans as possible and packed my other important equipment (thermometer, scales, mixer). It was now time to bake.

The wedding was going to be on a Saturday, so on the Thursday before that, I got on the bus and went down to Övik, where the wedding should be. I met up with the bride and groom and we went shopping. Actually turned out to be able to get everything I needed at a quite reasonable cost. Not bad at all. I had planned to go out to the place where the wedding should be at once (in a smaller village outside the city) as I was promised the use of the kitchen out there to make the cake on site. My plan was to at least create the lemon cream for all the cakes (I had decided to make a total of 8 cakes in different sizes) and freeze it (you create a disk of frozen lemon cream that you later assemble onto the cake), and hopefully get started on some of the things that needed to be baked. Took a while to be able to get out there, and I was informed that we needed to leave in a while to pick up another person. Stressful, and while we were quite late to picking up the person, I managed to at least get the lemon cream done (this was the most crucial thing to get done this day as it needed time to freeze).

Fortunately, the kitchen was very large and good, so I had plenty of space to work on, and two ovens so I could have two things in there simultaneously.

Early the next morning I went back out there again and got started with the daquoise and the ladyfinger disks. This took quite a long time and it was late by the time all of them had come out of the oven. As more and more of these became finished, I started whipping up the white chocolate cream and taking out lemon cream disks from the freezer to assemble cakes.
Before going to bed this day, I had assembled all the cakes and put them in the refridgerators to allow the cream to set (this is of course always a bit nerve-wrecking, as you don't want to get there the day of the wedding to see that the cream DIDN'T set and your entire cakes are just flowing out over the table).

Even earlier the morning of the wedding I took all my stuff and came back out there to start decorating the cakes. I was happy to see that they were not collapsing and looked pretty good. I now had 8 cakes to decorate, and not a lot of time to do it. So I had to start whipping some cream. The decoration moment was one that I had somewhat dreaded, since while I'm quite confident in my baking skills, I'm less of a visual artist. I had among other things been considering making sugarpaste flowers and even bought myself a kit for that, but soon realized that it would not be a good idea. So I just went for simple, but stylish. Piped cream "stars" with silver dots on top of them, and pink hearts made with a cookie cutter from a thin piece of the sugar paste I had bought. Looks pretty good, and very "weddingy" if I may say so myself.

After the vows, plenty of good food, speaches, and other things that happen at Swedish weddings, it was finally time for THE CAKE. I went out to the kitchen and helped them mount it on the cake stand, and it was served.
Everybody (most importantly, the bride and groom) were very happy with the cake. I received multiple comments from people on how good it was, so I was also happy. (Though, as the self-critic I am, I did think I had a bit too much of the lemon cream in it....)

I had now successfully made a wedding cake. I've learnt a number of things:
* 8 cakes were way too many.
* If you've had a metal spoon in a very hot oven, the metal spoon will also be very hot. Do not try to pick it up using just your hand. It will hurt.
* Planning is everything.

The story of a wedding cake (part 2)

I was now on the hunt for the perfect recipe (or combination of recipes) to use to make the wedding cake. As expected, I read every recipe in my Pierre Hermé recipe books and also scoured food blogs and forums for ideas. This was tricky... Two cakes caught my attention a bit extra were the Riviera and the Rhubarb and White Chocolate Charlotte (PH recipes of course). The Riviera had the benefit of being the only of the cakes that I found that had that alluring flavour requested by the bride - lemon... The Charlotte is a cake that I had made once before and liked it. It did of course not have any lemon in it, and it did contain white chocolate, which wasn't one of the favourite flavours of the bride... As I needed to experiment, I assembled a group of brave volunteers to sample my different creations (they did seem quite happy to be my selected guinea pigs), and at two different occasions I made the two cakes above.

The Riviera was the first cake I made. The cake was pretty good (had a nice chocolate mousse in it), butI have to say that I didn't find the combination of the lemon with the chocolate that great (but then again, I usually do not fancy chocolate that is combined with oranges, lemon, etc...), and this cake also had another problem - it's colour. Since it's a chocolate cake, it is obviously brownish, and typically wedding cakes would be white, or at least bright colour (though I've seen at least two chocolate wedding cakes, and they have been the best wedding cakes I've tried that I haven't baked myself). After a conversation with the groom, he also confirmed that they wished for a white cake. Of course, it is possible to cover a chocolate cake with white marzipan or whipped cream, or some kind of icing. I did however not want to use marzipan (way too common in Sweden) and if you use some form of white icing on a dark cake, it can be hard to cover it completely without the darker colour shining through.

A couple of weeks later it was time for my second experiment - the rhubarb and white chocolate charlotte. This is a very light and "airy" cake (dangerously so, become it doesn't feel heavy at all when eating it, but inspecting the list of ingredients, it isn't really a healthy cake...) and I like it. This one also received the approval of my panel of guinea pigs (they liked the previous one as well, but preferred this one). This cake also has the benefit of looking more "wedding-like" since it is very white. Of course, this cake was lacking lemon, and contained white chocolate. I didn't consider the white chocolate issue to be too serious as the flavour of it is not very dominating in this cake. Personally I think that white chocolate can easily become too sweet, but I didn't have such problems with this cake. Promising that it wouldn't become too dominating, I received the blessings of the bride to include some white chocolate in the cake. The rhubarb in this cake adds a tangy touch that goes well with the sweetness of the white chocolate. I was now starting to think of the similar properties between lemon and rhubarb (both are quite tangy) and thinking of replacing the rhubarb compote in this cake with the lemon cream from the Concorde. My flatmate also suggested replacing one of the ladyfinger disks in the cake with something else, like a daquoise.

I made all those substitutions and came up with a cake consisting of the following (from bottom to top):
A layer of hazelnut daquoise
A layer of lemon cream
A layer of white chocolate whipped cream
A layer of ladyfinger disk
A layer of white chocolate whipped cream

When this is all set, the cake is lightly coated with whipped cream.

I now finally had an idea of what I wanted to make, and looking at the recipes it seemed to be a feasible task that should still result in a good cake. Of course, I had never made this particular version of the cake before, so I couldn't know if it would work or not... Fortunately, the week before the wedding, we had a family "reunion" kind of thing where lots of people met up, so I had the opportunity to make a final test run there. The cake turned out fine, and when there even started to be rumours about my cake (as I was standing next to the cake table, one person (who didn't know who I was) asked me if I knew which one was the cake that everybody was saying was so good), I felt quite confident that I would do OK next week.

Stay tuned for the riveting next episode in the story of the wedding cake... The actual baking of the cake...

The story of a wedding cake (part 1)

This past summer, it seemed like all of my friends were getting married, and I was invited to four weddings (but fortunately no funeral).

For one of these weddings, I was quite early on approached by the groom, who asked if I would be interested in making the wedding cake. I have to say that it was certainly with mixed emotions I received this request (I wasn't extremely surprised though, as he had dropped hints earlier). A wedding cake was something I had been wanting to do for a long time, and would without doubt be larger than any previous baking project I had done, so it was very exciting. On the other hand, it was also quite nerve-wrecking, as this is something that just cannot be allowed to fail - I didn't want to be the one who ruined their wedding day by messing up the cake. The fact that I now live in London, and the wedding obviously would be in Sweden didn't make it easier. Anyhow, after more discussions with the bride and groom (to try to figure out what kind of cake they wanted, for how many people, etc) I agreed to do it (though I don't think I ever REALLY considered saying no... I wanted to do it too much).

So, now the big question was "What kind of cake should I make?". In Sweden, we don't really have the tradition of "multi-tiered fruitcake with royal icing" creations for wedding cakes as is common in other parts of the world (at least UK and US), so that was not something that I wanted to do (while we don't do multi-tiered cakes where the tiers are stacked on top of each other (though I've seen that too), we still have multiple "levels", but it's more common for this to be achieved through having multiple cakes on a form of scaffolding).
The bride and groom had give me a lot of freedom with the design of the cake, which has both pros and cons. I do prefer having a lot of creative freedom to do things that I believe will be good and not told "do exactly this", but at the same time, you need to get SOME input to make sure that you don't make the main flavour one that the bride hates or something like that.
So, even though it was hard to get the input I wanted from them, I finally got some flavour suggestions.... But was it the suggestion I wanted? No.... She wanted to have something that had a LEMON flavour... And preferrably no white chocolate. Great... There are many flavours that I might have chosen myself, but lemon certainly was not one of those, so now I was a tad confused on what I should do. Oh, well. Time to start looking for lemony recipes (and a few others as well, just in case I would have to decide that there would be no lemons in the cake). The white chocolate issue was less of a problem to me (I thought) as I'm not that big of a fan of white chocolate anyway, but white chocolate can be good in wedding cakes as you are likely to want them to be white.

As I wanted a good recipe that I could expect a good and reliable result from (and I wanted something that would not just taste "good", but that would make people remember the wedding cake for a loong time...), my obvious source to look towards was Pierre Hermé as I really like his recipes (but also searched eGullet and other forums... both for recipes as well as practical advice on what to think about and how to know how much cake to make).

To be continued in part 2, where I try to hunt down the perfect recipe. (And whatever you do - don't miss part 4 or something like that, where the pictures will be.)

A birthday party...

To get this blog started (and since I haven't had time to bake anything), I thought I would do some cheating and post some pictures of a few of my past baking projects (look at for my two most ambitious projects in coming posts).

For my birthday a few years ago, I decided that I would have some friends over, and that I would make a few things for them to eat. This was shortly after I had received my Pierre Hermé books ("Desserts by PH" (DbPH) and "Chocolate Desserts by PH" (CDbPH)), so not surprisingly, the baking was inspired by him (though the Korova cookie recipe is not from the books).

The things I made were the following:
Melodie - DbPH
Nutella Tart - CDbPH
Chocolate Dome - DbPH
Pistachio Macaroons
Passionfruit Tartlets (I think, from looking at the pictures... need to check the books though for the Macaroons and Tartlets to be sure...)
Korova Cookies - (recipe can be found here (not called Korova cookies there, but it is the same, and they were called Korova at this occasion))

The best thing was, without doubt, the Chocolate Dome. It is just two thin layers of a chocolate genoise with a wonderful almond chocolate mousse between them and on top. All in a nice dome shape and covered by a chocolate glaze. All very chocolatey, but not too rich, and it just melts in your mouth. Wonderful.

The Melodie was interesting, with the 20 hour apples and the creme bavaroise making a nice combination. I did however find the cinnamon disks to be hard, so it was tricky to properly cut and eat the cake (this could have been due to my baking...). I have at later instances used the 20 hour apples and creme bavaroise combo in other creations, so that part of the recipe I can recommend. (On a side note, I should mention that I have read on other blogs that people have had good results with their "20 hour apples" even when using a higher temperature and shorter time, but how much fun is that...?)

The Nutella Tart was good and rich, but compared to many other PH recipes, it was not that spectacular (when you eat too much PH stuff - especially on the same day - you become a bit picky...).

The macaroons were once again good, but not as good as the chocolate macaroons I had previously made. Since learning about the wonder of those small creations known as macaroons, I have tried a number of different flavour combinations, and still I will have to say that my favourite one is just chocolate.

The tartletts were a bit too fruity for me, but appreciated by others.

The Korova cookies were the best of the cookies, and I have made these again quite recently. These are amazingly good cookies, and if you make them, they won't last long. They are extremely chocolatey and good.

So, without further ado, here is what you have been waiting for; the pictures:

Back row: Melodie, Nutella Tart, Chocolate Dome
Front row: Macaroons, Passion fruit tartletts, Korova cookies

The cookies.

Someone enjoying his piece of the Chocolate Dome and Nutella Tart.

Chocolate Dome

Nutella Tart

Melodie

New Years Eve dessert

Last night we had a nice new years eve party with a lot of good friends from the past and present. As expected, I was assigned (well... I guess I kind of assigned it to myself) to dessert duty. Needed to do something good for 14 people, and since I didn't have a lot of time, it should preferrably be something not too complicated.

I decided to go for a "Gateu au chocolat with ricotta cheesecake swirls", something I had made before this past fall, which had received lots of praise from the people eating it. This is a creation that I made from combining two different recipes. I got the idea from a post by Fanny at foodbeam (a great baking blog, I can highly recommend it) where she creates a brownie with swirls of the ricotta cheesecake. I found this interesting, but wanted something a bit different for the chocolate part, so instead of making the brownies, I made a chocolate cake that I found in a forum post at Bröllopstorget, a Swedish wedding planning web site (can't really remember why I found it, might have been while planning the wedding cake I made last summer). For simplicity (and since one recipe is in Swedish) I will still include the total recipe here (and this also include some minor modifications (I like to think of them as improvements) to the chocolate cake recipe.

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You will need:
For the chocolate cake:
200g dark chocolate (use good chocolate), finely chopped
200g butter
175g sugar
4 tbsp plain flour
4 eggs, separated
75ml double cream (the original recipe called for milk here, so that can also be used, but I've found the result better with cream)

For the ricotta cheese cake:
125g ricotta
80g cream cheese
30g sugar
seeds from one vanilla bean
1 egg, at room temperature
25ml double cream
1tbsp plain flour

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Preheat the oven to 180C.

First make the chocolate batter:
1. Bring the cream to a boil and melt the chocolate in the cream.
2. Add the butter and mix well until the butter is melted and incorporated in the mixture smoothly.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk 125g of the sugar with the egg yolks.
4. Pour the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture a little at a time.
5. Add the flour and mix well.
6. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until opaque. Add the remaining 50g of sugar and whip until the egg whites hold firm peaks.
7. Gently fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture.

Make the ricotta cheesecake batter by mixing all the ingredients together until smooth.

Pour the chocolate batter into a greased cake pan. Pipe the cheesecake into the uncooked chocolate cake batter or spoon it on top of the chocolate cake and make swirls in it by dragging the back of a wooden spoon through it a few times (take care not to overdo it - you don't want the batters to mix into one batter, but you want the chocolate cake and cheese cake to be distinct entities).

Bake on a wire rack in the oven for 30-34 minutes (this is the time stated on the original chocolate cake recipe, but I've found 35-40 minutes to be more appropriate, but to be safe, start with 30 minutes and go from there, frequently checking the cake).

Let the cake cool before serving.

Call your friends and ask them to come over for some cake, and watch their faces as they take the first bite. This cake has a very nice "melt in your mouth" property that make it quite delicious.

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Enjoy!)

(Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of this cake, but it's merits are in the taste department rather than the looks department anyway)

A new year, a new blog

Another year has gone by and a new one has begun. What better time to start my new blog? It was created a while back, but I haven't made any posts before now.

As the blog information states, I am in no way a professional baker or pastry chef (as a matter of fact, I am a computer scientist), but I thoroughly enjoy baking and making desserts in my spare time. In this blog I plan to write about the various thing I make in the kitchen, my baking and desssert projects, and successes and failures and experiences learned from them.