Taste Memories

I think this might be the one

I've been yearning to make this cake (and this similar version) for approximately forever (or at least since I saw the recipes). And yet and yet and yet: something always gets in the way. But last weekend, there were three good reasons to finally make this (count 'em). And we're creatures of reason. So the fact that the cake ended up on our counter and in our tummies was, as we philosophers say, causally overdetermined.

Reason the first is that it has not been the easiest of weeks around these parts. What better way to usher in good cheer, then, than with chocolate cake? But this is not just any old chocolate cake, oh no. In fact, I cannot say enough good things about this cake. Nevertheless, let me try: it's dense, moist, intense, and decadent (there I go, flouting my daily adjective quota again). It's the kind of cake that makes you slyly lick your finger after you've finished your slice and run it around the saucer to catch any errant crumbs. You won't want to miss a morsel.

Reason the second is that last Saturday marked the second anniversary of our first date. To say that the cake (and making it together) was the highlight of our festivities is to say a great deal, since they also included dinner at Sorellina (and my very own serving of those aforementioned Kobe beef meatballs) and (joy of joys) tickets to a Keith Jarrett concert. (He's my favorite jazz pianist, and among my favorite classical pianists as well. The man's a genius. And to witness his notoriously weird gyrations as he plays – he acts like he's the conductor of his hands, which almost seem to have a will of their own – just added to the thrill. We were glued to the edge of our front row seats all night). But, yes, despite all of that, this cake took the, well, cake.

Reason the third was my friend K's drawing my attention to this possibility. I never would have guessed that such a fudgy cake could stack (and in truth, I've yet to try), but there is evidence that it just might work. Thus, by making this cake, I knew we might be one step further along the long road to making our very own wedding cake.

And so it seems to be. I mean, the cake is so easy to make it almost seems like a cheat (in sharp contrast to this seven-hour-time-sucking monstrosity), and it's the most delicious cake I can remember eating in recent times. D felt much the same. So we're now seriously countenancing the possibility of using this as our wedding cake, sandwiched lavishly with alternating layers of raspberry and mint cream. Stay tuned for a full trial…

I don't want to jump the gun here. This cake and us, well, we're still in the dating phase. But I'm tempted to say things I shouldn't. As in: this might be the one.

The Cake I Think We Want to Marry, closely adapted from Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini

Ingredients:

300g good semisweet chocolate

300g good unsalted butter

1 ½ cups sugar

6 eggs

1 tbsp vanilla

2 tbsp flour

 

Method:

Preheat the oven to 375˚F. Prepare an 8" baking pan by oiling it lightly, and lining it with parchment paper.

Melt the butter and chocolate together in the microwave (or in a double boiler if you want to play it safe. We, on the other hand, like to live dangerously. And lazily).

Stir in the sugar, and then add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly with a wooden spoon after each addition.

Next, stir in the vanilla and the flour.

Pour the mixture into the baking pan, and give it about 35-40 minutes in the oven, or until it is lightly set and no longer liquid in the center (note: we baked it a little longer than Clotilde called for, to assess its stacking potential. It was still unbelievably moist). Now turn off the oven and leave it for 10 minutes more.

Cool the cake on a wire baking tray, before turning out.

P.S. After sampling the results and giving it his stamp of approval, K's boyfriend (who apparently makes this all the time, how lucky is she?) made the brilliant suggestion of adding a soupçon of fleur de sel to the batter. Next time, we shall do just that.

Fennel Bender

You could be forgiven, dear reader, for taking me to be a secret agent from the National Fennel Grower's Association (there must be such an association, right?) For, in this blog's short life, I have already featured two (make it three) salads featuring fennel as a key ingredient. But I can't help myself, so dearly do I love fennel. It's such an elegant and surprising vegetable, with a taste somewhere between celery and licorice. It's a delicious oddity. Do try it, if you haven't already.

This salad is more than just a vehicle for fennel, however; it is also a lovely way to use up Smitten Kitchen's divine slow roasted tomatoes, which I plan to make all winter long (they're toothsome even when the tomatoes you start from aren't anything to write home about). The resulting marriage of textures is a thing to behold - chewy oven-dried cherry tomatoes, crisp fennel, slippery edamame, and yielding mozzarella. The basil and lemon zest (in the dressing) render the whole affair superbly fragrant to boot. It occurs to me that this is a fantastic recipe for those of us missing summer (or at least summer cuisine), since it conjures up the taste of the season without relying too heavily upon its now dwindling produce.

Edamame, Slow-roasted Tomatoes, Mozzarella, and Fennel Salad

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups edamame, cooked and cooled (other beans would also work well here, I suspect)

½ cup slow roasted cherry tomatoes (I roasted each punnet of cherry tomatoes with 1 tbsp olive oil and ½ tbsp kosher salt for 3 hours at 225˚F)

1 blob of fresh mozzarella (about 4oz), torn

½ cup fennel, finely chopped

A handful of small basil leaves

 

For the dressing:

1 tsp good extra virgin olive oil

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

A small pinch of good salt

A large pinch of red pepper flakes

 

Method:

Combine the salad ingredients, whisk the dressing ingredients, and toss together.

Serves 2 as a light lunch.

P.S. I know I'm onto a good thing when Amelia and Freddy take it in turns to sniff it out.

Amelia avec salad.

Freddy avec salad.

Smoked

I am a sucker for all things smoked. Over just the past few months, I've devoured smoked salmon (cold-smoked and hot-smoked), smoked trout, smoked scallops, smoked oysters, smoked chicken, smoked duck, smoked turkey, and smoked chiles (chipotles). My goodness! It's a wonder my gullet isn't ashen by now. But my favorite of all these delicious comestibles is smoked mackerel. Its dank, buttery flesh deserves widspread recognition, but I've never seen it on a menu anywhere. A strange state of affairs, methinks: deplorable, even. Thus, I offer you this homely but delicious smoked mackerel salad. Wrapped up in sprightly young butter lettuce leaves, it makes a perfect light lunch or snack.

Smoked Mackerel Salad

Ingredients:

6oz smoked mackerel, de-skinned and flaked
2 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp chardonnay vinegar
1 tbsp capers
1 rib celery, finely chopped
1 scallion, finely chopped
1 tbsp dill, snipped

Butter lettuce leaves, for serving

Method:

Mix all the salad ingredients together, and then deposit small clumps of the resulting mixture on the lettuce leaves.

Serves 2 as a light lunch.

P.S. This salad also makes a tasty sandwich filling, preferably on dark rye.

Order envy

Order envy is a terrible thing. You know when you're out at a restaurant, and your dining companion orders something so delicious-looking that it's all you can do not to plant your unbidden fork in it territorially? It happened to me recently at Sorellina, when Daniel ordered the Kobe beef meatballs. One small taste of the dish simultaneously conveyed to me the very essence of beefiness, yet made me feel like I was tasting something entirely new. I immediately wanted to sob into my (excellent) appetizer of crab with corn crema. My regret at not having ordered those meatballs still haunts me.

The incident reminded me of another such, years back, in Australia. I should preface this anecdote by saying that my family is very much a family of habit. Every year growing up, we would go to the same destination (Apollo Bay) to stay in the same cabin (Beacon Point Lodges) for the same period of time (one week) and eat at the same restaurant (Chris's restaurant). As a stroppy teenager, I found this summer routine terribly dull, and longed for a family who went on adventuous, glamorous vacations, preferably without me. But I now look back on our times in Apollo Bay with great fondness. The glorious sympathetic curve of the bay where we swam is one of the few mental images I hold in my head (I retain words, not pictures, you see). When we weren't at the beach, we would play mini-golf and pool and scrabble, all of them games which transform both my Father and I from mild-mannered intellectuals into ruthless, vicious competitors (although we both vehemently deny as much). And I have always adored Chris's restaurant: they serve the fresh, ingredient-driven, unfussy yet refined food that is definitive of my culinary aesthetic.

The time when my sister Lucy ordered a feta and leek tart (with a buttery tomato coulis) at Chris's restaurant was my first experience of order envy. I remember surveying the tangle of sweet leeks perked up with tangy, salty feta and bound in a delicate, eggy custard, and immediately yearning to switch lives. I've been replicating the dish in various forms ever since, but I think this savoury cheesecake interpretation could be the best yet. I'm not sure how it fares in comparison to the original, but we're going to Chris's restaurant for Christmas this year when we visit my family in Australia. I can't wait. Here's hoping Chris's menu changes as little as my family's routine, and that I have a chance to finally order that feta and leek tart for myself.

Feta and Leek Cheesecake

Ingredients:

The white and just barely green parts of 4 well-rinsed leeks, finely sliced
1 tsp butter
1 tsp kosher salt (divided use)
6oz feta cheese, crumbled
10 eggs
2 cups ricotta (I used part-skim)
1 cup milk (I used fat-free)
A large handful of flat-leaf parsley
Paprika

Method:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Put the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the leeks and half the salt, and sauté for about 10 minutes, until well-softened.

Place a 9-inch non-stick springform cake pan over a baking tray (to catch leaks, no pun intended). Spread the leeks over the bottom of the pan, and then top with the feta.

Whizz the remaining ingredients except the paprika in a blender until well-combined. Pour the custard mixture over the leeks and feta.

Sprinkle the surface of the cheesecake with paprika, and then bake for about an hour and 15 minutes, until it is softly set. Cool to room temperature, and then unmould. Chill before serving. (You could also serve this warm if you like, but then make sure the cheesecake is a little more firmly set before pulling it from the oven.)

P.S. Don't discard the green parts and stalks of the leeks! I made a delicious vegetable broth using these and the remaining parsley, together with a head of soggy celery, 5 dingy carrots, the carrot tops, 2 peeled onions, 1 unpeeled, smashed head of garlic, and 3 bay leaves. I simply chopped these ingredients into pieces small enough to fit into a stockpot, and then covered them with cold water and added a tablespoon of kosher salt. Two hours at a simmer left me with vegetable broth that was good enough to sip on its own.

Public Service Announcement

Oh dear. Dear oh dear. Dear dear dear. I could go on.

What a disappointing week in cooking it has been! The silence around these parts for the last week is due to the string of (barely) so-so meals that I've been cobbling together. I have lost my cooking mojo, it seems. Picture me hunched in a corner of my kitchen, flagellating myself with a cast iron skillet. I've been so bad.

Last Friday night, for example, I set about making a waldorf slaw to accompany hangar steak. Now doesn't that sound promising? But then I forgot the grated granny smith apples and the walnuts, and the result was bland and soggy and completely forgettable. Also, I soaked my raisins for hours, but they didn't plump up enough, causing me to pout.

No harm, no foul, I thought: until Saturday night, whereupon I failed to get my roast carrot and orange soup right for the second time running (the first time I made it, it was too orangey; this time, it was too insipid). The idea is too delicious to let go of; but the right formula continues to elude me. Next time, I'm roasting the carrots with harissa, and then adding the orange juice when I blend the soup (be warned: do not roast carrots with orange juice and no oil unless you want to spend your Sunday afternoon scrubbing a baking pan. All right, so I may have delegated the task to Daniel. Nonetheless, I feel a change of strategy is in order, if only for the sake of marital harmony).

Finally, I made some sesame-peanut-ginger-cucumber soba noodles on Sunday afternoon. Again, doesn't that sound fabulous? But somehow it managed not to be. The noodles were chewy and chalky, and the sauce was unsubtle and kinda dry (notwithstanding the generous splash of sesame oil in it, I might add). I might try again with better quality soy sauce; then again, perhaps not. Why did I think I would even like sesame-peanut noodles? I am no longer sure. Oh, and I tried putting some pan-seared tempeh in it, which was about as appetizing as wet woodchips. 

Ah well. After such a string of failures, there was nothing for it on Monday but to make the most comforting dish on earth - vegemite toast with a poached egg. I include the above photo as an illustration of how to do vegemite. Please note the generous buttering of the toast in comparison to the tiny uneven smear of the glorious thick yeasty stuff that is Australian ambrosia. For you Americans who think you don't like vegemite, you've been laying it on too thick. Try it again in the illustrated manner, and I dare you not to swoon. 

War: what is it good for?

I declared a war on cereal last month. This month I’m whistling a slightly different tune. Does that make me a hypocrite, or – still worse – a whistling hypocrite? Say what you will, but I prefer to think of myself as flexible, adaptable, pliable even. (I hear Daniel hooting with laughter in the background. Admittedly, I get into a snit when our three remote controls are not positioned just so on the coffee table, but whatever. I shall continue to (a) contradict myself, (b) eat multitudes of granola, and (c) misappropriate Walt Whitman. Still more, I shall do so blithely.)

To return to the (now rather distant) point, I made granola last weekend. It all started when a friend of mine who just moved from Australia to the States asked me why American muesli is so damn sweet (and why the coffee is so bad, but that’s another story). Actually, I’ve found these to be the two complaints most frequently made by Australian expats about this fine land. Anyway, after pointing my friend in the direction of Orangette's three tempting recipes for homemade granola, I began to salivate. I decided, notwithstanding my better judgment, to give granola a go. However, I had to tweak the recipes quite a bit to come up with something that suited my exacting specifications.

 

For one thing, I have an (admittedly rather hippy-dippy) aversion to sugar, so I wanted to see how powdered fructose and agave syrup (which are low-glycemic and all-natural, la la la) would fare in place of sugar and honey (brilliantly, as it turns out). (Let's resist making the inevitable joke about 'being granola,' shall we? Good show.) For another thing, I wanted more nuts than oats in the granola, so as to ensure that the finished product had plenty of protein. Finally, I am strongly against the indiscriminate use of cinnamon (another real problem in American cuisine, I find). So I decided to flavor the granola with ginger and orange, which I declare a delicious combination.

This granola is fragrant, subtle, and almost unreasonably good. The war may not be over yet, but if there was ever grounds for a détente, this is it.

Ginger-Orange Granola (inspired by Orangette's three aforementioned recipes)

 

Ingredients:

Dry ingredients:

3 cups old-fashioned oats

5 cups unsalted nuts (I used an equal amount of whole raw almonds, flaked blanched almonds, whole pecans, and walnut pieces)

1 cup seeds (I used flax)

½ cup fructose (you could also use ¾ cup sugar)

1 tbsp ground ginger

¼ cup ginger nibs (finely chopped crystallized ginger would also work, I’m sure)

a large pinch of salt

zest of 1 orange

Wet ingredients:

1 tbsp orange flower water (optional; you could also replace this with a few drops of orange extract or vanilla extract, if desired)

¾ cup unsweetened apple sauce

½ cup agave nectar (you could also use the same amount of honey)

2 tbsp flavorless oil (I used safflower)

Post-baking additions:

1 ½ cups chopped dried fruit (I used cherries, cranberries, prunes, apples, and apricots)

1 ½ cups unsweetened flaked coconut

Method:

Preheat the oven to 300˚F.

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl, and then combine the wet ingredients in a small one. Now add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, and mix thoroughly (I used my hands for this, which I’ve read helps in creating nubbly little granola clumps).

Spread the granola mixture over two large baking sheets or pans. Now bake for about 30 minutes, checking and stirring every 10 minutes or so (Nuts burn very quickly, so keep a careful eye on it, especially if you suspect your oven runs hot). You want the granola to be crunchy but not too dark.

Cool the granola thoroughly, and then add the dried fruit and coconut.

This makes a huge amount, about 12 cups. But my research indicates that you can keep homemade granola in an airtight container in the fridge for about a week, and in the freezer for a few months.

 

I like to serve the granola with a dollop of fage yoghurt (preferably whole milk, although the fat-free version works fine too), a tiny extra drizzle of agave syrup, and a side of fresh fruit.