Fresh ginger cake

David Lebovitz seems to have been making this cake for decades – it’s online at Epicurious from 1999, and also in his Ready for Dessert (p42) – and for good reason.

This had a better reception than my made-up ginger brownies and Maida’s gingerful biscotti put together. It was rich and light, and pleasantly hot and bitey, and each crumb glowed golden. That may sound as if I’ve taken leave of my senses and am seeing miracles, but it’s true. I put it down to the workings-together of the oil and treacle and ginger. I’m sure it was also this combination that gave the cake its gloriously sticky shiny surface.

115g piece fresh ginger
250ml mild molasses (?? I used half-and-half Lyle’s golden syrup and black treacle)
200g sugar
250ml vegetable oil (I used peanut)
350g plain flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
250ml water
2 teaspoons bicarb soda
2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a not-shallow 20-cm square (or 22cm round springform) cake tin with baking paper.

Scrape the skin off the ginger with a teaspoon (that way you don’t waste any, as you do with a peeler or knife) and chop a bit. I blitzed my ginger in the small food-processor attachment that came with my stick blender and that I love and use daily, or you can be tough and do this by hand until very fine.

In a large bowl (the KitchenAid for me, but see issue with sifting over flour below), mix the molasses or substitute, sugar and oil – perhaps because I wilfully insist on using raw sugar, I ended up with an incredibly gluggy mixture where the sugar kept sinking to the bottom. Separately whisk together the flour, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper.

Bring the water to boil in a small saucepan (or I boiled the kettle), then stir in the bicarb soda. Beat the hot water into the golden syrup mixture, then add the chopped ginger.

Gradually sift the flour mixture over the golden syrup mixture, beating gently and in fits and starts to combine (since I haven’t been able to get around the problem of how to sift flour over while the thing’s running – perhaps a case for going the manually-mixing route for this one). Add the eggs and beat until thoroughly blended.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for about an hour, until a bamboo skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave to cool completely.

David suggests serving it with a fruit compote, or a lemon curd whipped with cream, which would have been my choice if I’d had cream. I felt that it needed something.

Just one other good thing about this cake is that, as it’s so moist, it keeps well for up to 5 days at room temperature. This baby could go through the post for a Xmas present. And it can be frozen for up to a month.

Marjolaine

I’ve been meaning to make marjolaine for ages, ever since I first noticed it in David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert. Marjolaine is famously elaborate and fiddly, but with the dearth of baking lately I was due for a challenge.  And I got one.

I lacked the size of baking tray called for in David’s recipe, or the oven to fit such a tray, so turned to the internet to find a workaround and found there widely varied methods, most of all in whether the compulsory three flavours of filling were based on crème fraîche or a pastry cream.

I found an article waxing lyrical about a Patricia Wells recipe from the ’80s, which had a lot in common with David’s but used a meringue quantity for two trays almost as small as mine, so I combined the best of both worlds – going as far as a half-crème fraîche, half-pastry cream approach (a mistake – the pastry cream layers remained creamy, while the crème fraîche layer solidified, too stark a contrast). And Patricia called for rum, but I stuck with David’s brandy.

The various elements can be prepared ahead of time – indeed must be. A weekend wasn’t quite enough – I had to shortchange the maturation of the crème fraîche by quite a lot, which may be why it had a grainy texture that didn’t quite disappear when the 420g of chocolate was incorporated into it.

Adapted from David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert and Patricia Wells’ ‘Marjolaine Multilayered Chocolate Cake’

Meringue
75g hazelnuts

75g almonds
10 egg whites at room temperature
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour

Preheat oven to 150 degrees. Spread nuts on baking tray and roast 5–10 minutes, until fragrant. Cool, rub hazelnuts in a tea-towel to flake off skins, then blitz to medium-fine powder in food processor.

Heavily butter two 10x14" baking trays and line with baking paper. (As I only had one tray, and an oven that treats its lower shelf very differently to its upper, I divided all the ingredients in half and made the meringues in two batches.)

Beat egg whites, adding sugar gradually, just until stiff. Fold in cornflour and ground nuts. Divide mixture in half, spreading evenly on baking trays. Bake for 20 minutes in a 150C oven, or until just beginning to brown. Mine were in for 40 minutes, and still hopelessly undercooked at that. Remove from oven, turn onto rack, paper side up. Cover with damp tea-towel for several minutes, then carefully remove paper while still warm. 

Cut meringue in half lengthwise.

Accept that they’re not going to dry out or stop weeping caramel beads on cooling, perhaps due to the conditions of 100% humidity at the time, and replace them in the oven at 150C for another half hour to crisp up.

Crème fraîche
1 cup sour cream
1 cup pure cream

Pour sour cream into bowl and stir in cream until smoothly blended. Cover and allow to sit at room temperature for 8 to 12 hours. Stir again and refrigerate overnight before using.

Chocolate cream
2 cups crème fraîche, bought, or prepared earlier as above
420g bittersweet chocolate

Bring crème fraîche to a boil. Remove from heat and add chocolate, bit by bit, stirring until well incorporated. Set aside until cool and thickened. For assembly, it’ll need to be thick but spreadable. This can be made as much as 3 days in advance and refrigerated – warm slightly over a sink of hot tap water for a minute and bash with the fork to return it to a useable consistency.

Pastry cream
8 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour (I used cornflour)
2 1/2 cups milk
280g unsalted butter, at room temperature

Beat egg yolks with sugar until thick and light. Incorporate flour. Bring milk just to boil in a large saucepan (not one only big enough for the milk or you’ll run into difficulties when it comes to add the egg mixture to it – it was late at night for me, and I found this out the hard way). Whisk half the hot milk into the egg mixture, then pour this egg and milk mixture back into remaining hot milk. Whisk over medium heat until thickening and bubbling. Let boil lightly for 2 minutes, whisking constantly until thickened and your arm is almost falling off.

While the mixture cools, beat chopped butter until creamy and spreadable. When the egg mixture is completely cool, add it to the butter and beat thoroughly until incorporated. This pastry cream can also be made days in advance and refrigerated, if you’re organised and have plenty of time on your hands midweek.

Praline powder
1 cup whole, unblanched almonds
1 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 150 degrees. Spread almonds on baking sheet and roast 5 to 10 minutes, until fragrant and lightly browned. Cool.

In a heavy-bottomed pan, combine nuts and sugar and heat gently, stirring constantly, until sugar starts to melt. Stir constantly, until mixture turns dark brown and syrupy and the almonds make a popping sound. The whole process should take about 5 minutes.

Pour mixture onto a silicon sheet and cool. 

Break into pieces and blend to a fine powder in a food processor. This praline can be made as far in advance as you like. It’s by no means a terrible idea to do a double quantity to keep on hand for sprinkling over ice-cream.

When ready to assemble the marjolaine (which should be at least 1 day before serving), divide the pastry cream into two equal parts.

Brandy cream
Blend one half of the pastry cream with 1 tablespoon vanilla extract and 3 tablespoons brandy, and chill.

Praline cream
Blend the remaining half of the pastry cream with the praline powder (it seemed a lot to me, so I kept some back to cover the sides with), and chill.

Final assembly
With the chocolate cream and pastry cream on hand and chilled but spreadable, place 1 layer of meringue on whatever you can find to fit it, surrounded by some strips of baking paper to protect the plate from drips (drips! – ha!). Spread half of the chocolate cream on cake – I did a bit less, cleverly intending to use the extra for coating the sides as well as top later on. Keep it nice and even, paying especial attention to the corners so it doesn’t become rounded as the levels progress upwards. (I was so full of fine, worthy intentions at this point, so heartbreakingly innocent and naïve.) Refrigerate for 15 minutes to firm it up.

Cover chocolate cream with second meringue layer, lining it up carefully with the first. Spread with all of the brandy cream. Refrigerate 15 minutes. This is where things began to come unstuck for me.

Scrape the excess brandy layer back up where it belongs as best you can, then top that layer with the third meringue layer, and spread all the praline cream over it, reasoning that it was merely the brandy content that caused a teensy bit of instability and that all would come up Millhouse (I think this is correct use of one of the The Quiltmaker’s more obscure sayings) in the chilling.

Not so. I’ve neglected to take a spirit level to the fridge shelf, but clearly it has the slightest lean that caused the entire praline layer and its supporting meringue to slide off and one side come to rest on the fridge shelf at a steep angle. Gravity dictated that the praline gently pooled in the margin of the serving plate and thence made its gooey, sticky way over the whole shelf. I suppose I should be grateful it’s a solid shelf, not one constructed along the lines of a cake rack.

At this point the chef (yes, it needs to be third person; plus, the reader may keep his or her quibbles about tense and mode shifts herein to him or herself. Thank you) goes into survival mode and throws any desperate remedy into the situation that can be found, thinking all the while of the ten eggs and half kilo each of chocolate and cream and the birthday to be celebrated the following day. Head and shoulders in the fridge, and in need of a spare set of hands strictly of one’s own and no one else’s, the chef manoeuvres the softening, reluctant meringue back roughly where it should be, and then hauls the whole mess out of the fridge, leaving an unspeakable chaos of sticky jars to be dealt with later.

 

A lot of the praline can be piled back up – no thought of evenness now – but meanwhile the brandy cream is oozing out the other side! and must be scraped back up with an icing spatula! To the accompaniment of a thousand screeching violins a la Psycho, the third meringue layer is dumped on the top with more haste than accuracy, and bamboo skewers rammed through the whole disaster to secure the layers. It was all like a particularly fraught episode of Grand Designs.

Finally, working around the skewers with the icing spatula rather than sweeping it from one end to the other, the top of the meringue is spread with remaining chocolate cream. The sides are bound in the turned-up remnants of the baking-paper plate shields and then bandaged mummylike in GladWrap to keep in what remains of their filling.  And into the freezer with it all for the rest of the day.

At this point, the chef collapses on the couch with a giant bag of chips and a beer, eventually recovering enough to thickly apply the rest of the chocolate all over it, which thankfully sets like so much cement. And because it was less sleek than intended, the leftover praline was patted on the sides.

 And bandaged again, and chilled again, until no more than five minutes before its cutting-open.

Breath was bated, but the pastry cream didn't pour out and all over the table. It was no last word in French elegance, though.

Here's what it should've been.

Here's what it was.

Lemon quaresimali

I had no idea what these would turn out like, given the rare lack of accompanying picture in this shiny book – I was drawn to the name, so Italian and operatic-like, and I had lemons to the rafters; the double-baking technique wasn’t something I’d done before, so there was the curiosity factor. As it turned out, they’re just big, lemony, nutty cantucci biscotti.

And not for those with sensitive teeth until they’ve had a good dunking in a beverage of choice – not for nothing are they Lenten biscuits of penance.

Adapted from David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert, p219

245g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 large eggs, plus 1 egg for brushing
265g sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Fine zest of 2 lemons
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
250g whole almonds, toasted – I used half hazelnuts

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a tray with baking paper.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, vanilla, lemon zest and juice. Stir the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until well blended, then mix in the whole almonds.

With wet hands, shape the dough into two logs about 30cm long and 6cm in diameter and place on a tray lined with baking paper. Stir the remaining egg in a small bowl and brush each log generously with it, then give them a second coat. Don’t feel compelled to use up all the egg – it’ll be much too much and will run everywhere, take it from me. Better to toss the remainder into a handy omelette or give it to the cat.

Bake the logs for 25–30 minutes until golden-brown and firm; they’ll expand and flatten while baking. (I baked two side-by side on the one square tray, and feared they’d run into each other, but they missed that by a whisker – still, if you have a fancy Italian oven that accommodates two trays on the upper rack, probably best to separate them.) When done, remove the tray from the oven and reduce the heat to 150C.

Allow the much-expanded golden shiny logs to cool for 10 minutes before slicing them crosswise 2cm apart with a sharp serrated knife. Arrange the slices cut-side-down on the tray and return to the oven for 20 minutes, after which they’ll cool to a hard lemony crunchiness, excellent for coffee-dunking.

Spicy black bean brownies

 David Lebovitz wrote recently about a Mexican restaurant in Paris called Candelaria, which among other things, makes a Brownie Epicé Haricot Noirs. This idea of making a brownie out of black beans was intriguing, and when the Dumpling Fiend (who is also a nachos fiend) invited me to her Get Up in That Nacho party, it seemed the perfect occasion to wheel this out.

David mentioned a recipe on the 101 Cookbooks blog as forming the basis of this Candelaria one, and I gleaned that the added epicés were star anise and chili.

60g unsweetened chocolate
230g unsalted butter
2 cups soft-cooked black beans, drained
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon ground star anise

1.2 teaspoon chilli flakes
¼ cup instant coffee granules
¼ teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1½ cups light agave nectar (I used up all the Trader Joe’s Raw Agave Nectar I’d brought home from the US a few months ago, and made up the rest with brown malt syrup.)

Preheat the oven to 180°F. Line an 11x18-inch slice pan (a large one) with baking paper.

Begin melting the butter in the microwave for a minute before adding the chocolate – a trick I read somewhere recently that ensures the chocolate won’t catch. Stir to melt the chocolate completely.

Place the beans, half the walnuts, the vanilla extract, and a couple of spoonfuls of the melted chocolate mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Blitz for about 2 minutes, or until the batter is thick and the beans smooth – I added a bit more chocolate to loosen things up a bit.

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining 1/2 cup walnuts, remaining melted chocolate mixture, coffee substitute, and salt.

Beat the eggs until light and creamy, about 1 minute. Add the agave nectar, etc. and beat well.

Stir the bean/chocolate mixture into the coffee/chocolate mixture. Add the egg mixture, reserving about 1/2 cup. Mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Beat the remaining 1/2 cup egg mixture until light and fluffy, and drizzle it over the brownie batter. Lightly drag a chopstick through the egg mixture, creating a marbled effect.

Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the brownies are set – took about an hour for me. Let cool in the pan, and then refrigerate before cutting into squares – they’re too soft at room temperature to cut neatly, and they’d be messy and gooey when served unless well-refrigerated, so I kept them in the fridge. 

I also liberally sprinkled even more chilli flakes over, for heat and some sorely needed prettiness – these are no handsomer than any other brownie. People were kind about their lack of looks in the party post-midnight gloom, though, and they were found incredibly rich and fudgy, and I won a medal for my efforts. That was a great moment.

 In lieu of the concluding brownie pic I failed to capture, I'll go one better and give you the be-medalled Nachos Fiend bashing the crap out of her piñata with a broom.

Carnitas

Dedicated to Misslice

It goes like this.

Try to identify which unlabelled jar holds ancho chillis, out of the numerous varieties from Casa Iberica and Victoria Street that have accumulated in the cupboard.

Find the right chilli with the help of Google Images.

Place in grinder, grind, sniff curiously at its strangely figgy aroma, sneeze and weep copious tears for a long time.

Preheat oven to 180C and spend a scant ten minutes preparing hunks of pork shoulder (oh yeah, salt it the day before) for a four-hour braise according to David Lebovitz’s excellent recipe.

 Straight up, or the next day, prepare or otherwise gather together refried beans, guacamole, salsa, sour cream and tortillas. Eat with carnitas.

That’s all.

Beginnings

Beginnings of a week rich in lemon-based things, if at all possible. 

 Beginnings of kimchi courtesy of David Lebovitz, which I hope will ferment enough in my wintry kitchen to use in Orangette's kimchi fried rice before much longer. I know appallingly little about Korean food, and this took my fancy over the weekend. 

After soaking chopped-up wombok in salted water overnight it was very easily thrown together, and it was only afterwards when I began to read through the 65 comments on David's post that I noticed how many foodie-oriented people were saying they’d never have the balls to attempt fermented cabbage. I make no claim to possessing an undue number/amount of balls, so I found this a bit unnerving after my slapdash preparation – what’s expected to happen? A home-brew-type explosion, or a poisoning à la the first episode of The Borgias where it’s curtains for Derek Jacobi? 

Two days later, I see no bubbling in that giant swing-top jar, and it still just pongs of garlic and chillies, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.

 Beginnings of a new era for The Guitar Teacher and his love affair with XO sauce. After yet another Victoria Street source petered out, he was forced to face facts and get self-sustainable and make his own. I can only try the stuff at a ratio of a thousand-to-one in congee, but it seemed XOey enough for me. Though not very red.

Whole lemon bars

*

 I haven’t come across a lot of this style of lemon slice – or lemon bar, as David Lebovitz and the rest of the US would have it. It’s not the usual tuckshop bakeless condensed milk/crushed-biscuit lemon sloice with a layer of lemon icing and desiccated coconut, but is more like a lemon curd layer oven-baked over a prebaked shortbread crust.

This uses the whole lemon, so organic ones are called for; Meyers tend to be mentioned a lot when it comes to baking sweet lemony things, but I’ve never come across them that I know of. I turned to the huge husky lemons I was given from someone’s tree, rather than schlepping to an organic shop with baskets and hand-chalked blackboards (organic produce: a good thing; the cultish well-heeled smugness often – that’s often, as in not always – surrounding its supply and consumption: sometimes sick-making). These citrus footballs had a thick layer of pith, so I peeled off the good skin with a veggie peeler and then cut away the potentially sour pith and ditched that.

I also threw in a lime cut in quarters in lieu of the juice of another lemon, although would the food processor chop up the skin? Would it bugger, to paraphrase Bubble of Ab Fab. It had to be fished out and chopped manually in a pool of lemony, sugary egg as I puzzled over how the blade would know the difference between that and lemon rind.

And it would have been better to remain out – anyone who copped a mouthful of lime rind as an introduction to the slice got the old involuntary mouth-pucker, however tart they claimed to like their lemon slice. Despite this, all were polished off by the end of the working day – only the Tall Designer was a total wuss and couldn’t finish his piece. I think the delicately crunchy buttery shortcrust base went a long way to soothe most.

*Admire with me the shot kindly taken by the Quiltmaker with her nifty Hipstamatic app just before the last piece vanished. I love its ghostly grid and its nostalgic orange cast, although by the harsh light of day the slice was rather more pallid.

Chouquettes

When I was in Paris last year, I kept walking into patisseries and laboriously requesting in my painful French the things I was familiar with and felt should rightfully be ordered when in a real Parisian patisserie – croissants, macarons. Then the person behind the counter would inevitably respond in excellent English. Anyway. Familiar tale.

So. I kept seeing these golden blob-like objects covered in large white granules and eventually, out of curiosity, asked for one along with a baguette. The woman said, ‘Just one?’ and looked knowing. I took just the one and stuffed it in my greedy tourist mouth just outside the shop – and had to immediately retrace my steps as though on puppet-strings and buy six more.

They were light as air, buttery, nothingness and substance, and the crunch of every grain of pearl sugar was a surprise. I didn’t know their name. 

I took this picture of the unidentified objects and posted it on Twitter and publicly refused to come back to Melbourne until a source was made available, but no one in Melbourne took heed, and we had return flights and arrangements with catsitters and workplaces, so I was forced to back down and return ignominiously to a land without chouquettes.

Well, I couldn’t sleep one night this week and my lack of chouquettes weighed on my mind. Dear reader, I got up and made some damn chouquettes like a dog no longer sitting on a tack. (I’d been working up to it – I’d recently spent many hours trying to find pearl sugar (aka crystal sugar, rock sugar, nib sugar, parlsucker) online and going on a wild goose chase to Ikea before submitting to David Jones’s Food Hall where I shelled out twelve bucks for a small bag.) I took the internet shortcut and third in Google was the trusty David Lebovitz. I followed everything but the choc chips – my Paris chouquettes never had choc chips.

I had everything required, which made it seem meant to be. That never happens. Novelty sugar aside, it’s butter, flour, egg, all in a saucepan melted and mixed together, a bit like a roux. I love those recipes that undergo an instant transformation when flour is introduced to melted butter and morphs into a neat ball, leaving the saucepan spotless. Then piped into blobs, eggwashed and studded with pearl sugar. Nothing to it.

They’re great right out of the oven, great an hour later, great for late-morning tea. Their vaguely crisp, egg-whiffy charm doesn’t last indefinitely, though. I took mine straight into the work kitchen, from whence they thinned out until there were only a few left – I gathered them up at the end of the day to take home for The Guitar Teacher – he appreciates what scraps are left – and they’d become soft and somehow clammy.  He still appreciated them.

Dulce de leche brownies

I love these brownies of David Lebovitz’s. Compared to macarons, they’re a walk in the park, and sometimes that’s what’s needed when one really sucks at French and needs to set aside precious Sunday time to study so as not to appear such a loser in class the next evening, and when one has suddenly taken it into one’s head to start a blog, the set-up of which has somehow eaten up most of the day. But I digress. I do that a lot. The whole thing – making brownies, that is; back on track now –  takes about ten minutes from start to oven, assuming one’s prepared several tins of dulce de leche earlier, as one ought to have done. I hold forth about such preparation in another post.

Contrary to how most posts to come will roll, this was not my first dulce de leche brownie encounter. That was last week, when I made a couple of batches – one to take to my work, where they were assured of a warm reception, and the other dispatched with The Guitar Teacher to be left in his staffroom. TGT resisted, claiming it ‘wasn’t part of the culture’, but I pooh-poohed such silliness and he admitted they were all gone by day’s end, so I win.

First hitch came when I found that there was almost nothing left of the Droste I bought mere days ago. I figured half of a quarter-cup was close enough, and bumped up the flour and real chocolate quotient slightly. No harm seemed done.

(It’s only right to disclose I have started blogging this rainy Sunday due to the opportunity for inclusion of boldly cropped close-ups. Just want to try out the macro setting on my Pentax Kx, to be honest. Nothing else to see here. If I really get into the swing of this, French linen may be artfully crumpled in the near background. And yes, I’m aware that this pic may not be key to the procedure, thank you very much, but I bashed my right temple very hard on the corner of the cupboard while angling to take it, so here it is.)

Anyway. The ingredients are flung into a saucepan and melted and stirred together. No need to have the foresight to let cubes of butter come to room temperature of their own accord while trying to keep the cats from eating them.

The ingredients form a gloopy, glossy mess of impeccable rightness. Half is spread in a tin, globs of dulce du leche distributed on top, and the process repeated. I found it best not to mix too much beyond drawing a knife lightly up and down the pan a few times to streakify the caramel a bit – the integrity of the globs is worth a thousand tiny strands of golden almost indistinguishable from the surrounding brownie. I didn’t bother with the optional walnuts, feeling this to be a less-is-more thing. Walnuts’d only get in the way; they’d try to claim some of the stage rightfully occupied by the sticky chunks of caramelised condensed milk goo.

As usual with my quirky oven, the maximum recommended baking time still produced a central wobbliness more uncooked than sexy. Even though I’d bumped up the oven by ten degrees, and a thermometer supported the temperature. I may never discover why this is. 

Yeah, I cut the end off well before it cooled. What of it? The caramel did crack, and the brownie crumb may have been crushed, or squashed, or whatever is supposed to happen to it in such an event, but goddammit, it was high coffee time.