Tried and True!

I love my cookbooks but, more often than not, it is to *teh innernets* that I turn to for inspiration and ideas. The cooking sites and blogs I read are all listed in my sidebar, and I have to admit are visited daily. (Or at least they were up until this week, where I finally started work again after a year on maternity leave.).

Anyway my ’system’ for marking and remembering internet recipes leaves a lot to be desired: I try to bookmark them into a ‘recipe’ folder never look back. Not such a great technique however, since I end up spending hours trying to remember something I saw. Not so with this recipe, from a highly recommendable blog, which I have been meaning to try for a year now. Everytime I saw lemons, I had to think of this recipe and I have finally made it. And I can tell you: tried and true, it’s absolutely awesome. Because you use an entire lemon, you get a little bit of the bitterness of the peel and the zest which makes it taste somewhat like a gin and tonic with sugar. And no booze.

By the way, my biggest fan and harshest critic (all rolled into one) did yet again, not believe me that a whole lemon was a good idea for a tarte au citron. That’s probably because legend has it her husband makes the most perfect, delicous tarte au citron meringuée. But I have never had the privilege to taste it (HINT!). Anyway, if you hear me sistah, go make it!

Oh, and I am also using this post to make a little special smartypants insert about tarte dough (which my husband INSISTS on calling pie dough–a tarte is NOT a pie my friends!). As a disclaimer, though, I will tell you that my mother (what’s with me and my family in this post, huh?) makes the absolute most perfect tartes and subsequently, tarte doughs. Hers are buttery, flaky and most of all thin. I have somehow never managed to achieve my mother’s tartes’ degree of thinness, but I actually also like tarte dough so much, that i absolutely don’t mind if there is a lot of it! Ok, enough digressing, let’s move this along!

Whole Lemon Tarte

Basic Tarte Dough

2 cups of flour (about 240 g)
1/2 tsp salt
100 g sugar
145 g cold cold butter
3 tbsp icecold water

prep time: 5min, cooling time: 30 min, parbaking time 25 min*

metal mixing bowl and knife or food processor ( I beleive it’s called a ‘cuisineart’ in the english speaking world)

Make sure all your ingredients are very cold. Cut the butter in cubes and using a knife, cut it into the flour, salt and sugar, or mix it together in your foodprocessor until it looks like coarse crumbs. Add the cold water bit by bit until the dough starts to come together. Roll it together in a ball, wrap it in clingfoil and put it in the fridge to rest for 30 min.

Butter and flour the tin(s), to be extrasure, line the bottom with baking paper. Roll out the dough to the desired size, fold it and unfold it into your tarte or cake tin.

Now you have two possibilities: 1) prebake the dough and fill it with chocolate, or strawberries and cream or I don’t know what, and 2) dust some almond meal or couscous in the bottom, fill it with uncooked fruits (apples, apricots you name it) and bake it as a whole.
We are going to go with number 1), and I wil give you a better and detailed description for number 2) whenever I think of it.

To make the whole lemon tarte, prick little holes in the pie dough with a fork, line it with baking paper and fill it with beans or rice or actual baking weights if you are truly fancy. Bake at 180° for about 20 min. The crust should be semi-baked and still somewhat soft, but shouldn’t break if you attempt to remove it from the tin (if it did, and your crust is ruined, I am truly sorry…). Remove the baking weigts and baking paper and put it back in the oven for another 5 min. Let it cool. Take it out of the tin and put it onto a baking rack or sheet

Lemon Filling

adapted from Paris Sweets by Dorie Greenspan, via smitten kitchen
prep time: 10min, baking time: 45 min, cooling time: 20 min

1 medium sized lemon (about 130 g)
300 g sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 tsp corn or potato starch
115 g of butter, melted and cooled

23 cm round cake or tarte tin

Preheat the oven to 160°C. In your foodprocessor combine the sugar and the lemon and whizz it until it becomes a homogenous and delicious smelling puree. Resist the urge to eat it all on the spot.
With a whisk, add in the whole egg and the yolk. Sift over the cornstarch and slowly add the melted butter, making sure all the ingredients are thoroughly combined.

Pour the lemon mixture into the parbaked tarte crust and slide it into the oven. Bake for about 20 min. Increase the heat to 180° and keep baking for another 15-20 min, or until the filling is bubbly and golden. take it out of the oven and let it cool for a while before serving.

* This recipe makes enough for a thickish crust in a 27 cm tarte tin, or two medium crusts in a 23 cm tin, or a covered ‘pie’, or one 23 cm tarte tin and 10 muffin sized mini tartelettes. phew, thorough, eh?

A Trifle for Easter

Easter sunday in Berlin was looking a lot like Christmas what with the snow and the cold, and my hailing of spring a few weeks ago was feeling more ridiculous by the minute. To make matters worse, nearly all of our guests cancelled due to illnesses of all sorts, and we were left with an enormous lamb shoulder and only 3 1/2 people to eat it.

Everything turned out well in the end, however. The shoulder was nearly entirely eaten, as were the easter eggs and the trifle of sorts that had been planned for dessert. I still had some poundcake left (ok, I didn’t just happen to have some left, I actually had to pry it away from my husband’s hands who wasn’t too pleased about it!) and I had an idea to make a white chocolate whipped cream and raspberry fool to go with it.

The chocolate whipped cream I made up as I went, helped by this recipe. The dessert wasn’t really a trifle, more a sor tof layered dessert thingie — which sounds absolutely tempting, admit it — and so I layered away and am calling it a trifle for the purpose of google searches (Oh, I must share those some day, BTW. Hilarious what people google before they end up here!).

‘Trifle’

prep time: 15min

mixing bowl, saucepan

100 g white chocolate
1 cup of whipping cream
1 Tbsp mascarpone
a good handful of raspberries fresh or frozen or more to your liking
pound cake, sliced.

Set the raspberries to defrost slightly if they are frozen. Melt the chocolate with 2 Tbsp of cream in a double boiler until dissolved. Set to cool. Whip the cream together with the mascarpone until soft peaks form. Pour one half of the cream into the cooled melted chocolate to temper it. With the mixer beating, pour the chocolate cream into the bowl with the mixed cream in a steady stream and beat until whipped to your liking. Chill, covered in the fridge until serving.

Arrange the pound cake slices, cream and raspberries in layers on a plate or in a pretty glass. Serve.

Spring!

my day so far:
- hoping that the little boys would stop teething and thus be able to go to daycare.
- my hopes being shattered as I changed the n-th diaperblowout.
- getting a cancelation of my lunchdate by a friend who I have’t seen properly in months
- changing another diaper
- deciding to make something out of the rhubarb I had bought on saturday
- forgetting the rhubarb on the stove because of, you guessed it:
- changing another diaper
- making a load of laundry
- changing another diaper…
You get the picture.

But i digress, back to the rhubarb: after having forgotten it on the stove and nearly reduced it all to what closely ressembled the content of the above mentioned, I managed to salvage some of it and set about making a crumble - similar to when one frosts a cake because it just looks somewhat… unpleasant. I had high hopes for this crumble, considering the day I’d had so far, thankfully, it didn’t let me down!

Here is my first taste of spring:

Rhubarb Crumble

prep time: 15min, serve hot or cold

For the Rhubarb

5/6 stalks of rhubarb
brown sugar, to taste

saucepan

Peel the rhubarb, cut it into bits and put it in a saucepan. Cover with a lid and cook until it starts to soften up. Add sugar to taste. Eat as is, or:

For the Crumble Topping

1 cup of uncooked rolled oats
1/4 cup of flour
1/2 cup of brown sugar
75 g of butter (room temperature)

mixing bowl, 20×20cm gratin dish

Preheat the oven to 180°. In a mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients for the topping until ‘crumbles’ start to form. You can do this by cutting into the mixture with a knife, or with your hands.

Pour the precooked ruhubarb into the gratin dish, cover with the crumble topping and bake for 40 min, or until the top begins to look golden.

Serve hot or cold, with ice cream, cream, yoghurt or just straight up.

You can substitute any fruit for the rhubarb, and you mostly need to precook only the tougher ones such as quinces etc.

If Your Are Still Reading…

So. The best thing - in my opinion - about this lovely cake from my last post, was the frosting. One taste of it, and all I could think of, was making marshmallows. Real, honest-to-god selfmade chamallow as they are called in France. And being the only girl in our family of five, it was instantly decided that these mallows, they HAD to be pink.
Luckily for me, others before me had ventured into marshmallow teritory, so all I had to do was check my favorite sources for all things american as well as decide on wether I was going to make marshmallows with, or without egg whites.

In the end, I chose to make them with egg white. Somehow they seemed slightly less indulgent with egg, as if the egg whites made them nearly as virtuous as the famed egg-white omelets favoured by so many south-californians! On a culinary level, making something purely out of sugar, corn syrup which is essentially just more sugar and gelatine somehow wasn’t gastronomically acceptable! So, between this and that recipe, I muddled my way through, and chose to add raspberry purée as a pinkifying agent.

pretty, no?

The recipe is fairly straightforward. Despite all warnings, I whipped up the mass with my handmixer (if anybody wants to donate a kitchenaid to a just cause, I promise tasty rewards!) and it turned out just fine. Now, get to your mixers, the marshmallows turned out to be really really tasty, and fun to make. They would also make a great project to do with kids on a rainy afternoon, although the fact that the mass has to dry overnight might make for a disappointed toddler - don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Pink Raspberry Marshmallows

prep time: 15min, cooling time: 12 h

16 sheets of gelatine
3 egg whites
2 1/2 Tbsp glucose or corn syrup
1 1/4 cup of sugar
100 ml of water
4 Tbsp of raspeberry purée, sieved
corn or potato starch

saucepan, 20 cm square cake tin, cutting board

Place the gelatine in a bowl of cold water to soften it up. Line the cake tin with oiled parchment paper - I oiled both sides of the paper to make sure it would really stick to the tin. Crack the egg whites into a big mixing bowl, the mass will triple in volume. In a saucepan combine the water, syrup and sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 8 minutes, or until the mixture is dissolved.

While the syrup is cooking, whip the egg whites to soft peaks. Drain the gelatine sheets and squeeze out as much water as possible. Add them to the hot sugar syrup, and pour the whole thing gently over your whites while still whipping the eggs. This is the point at which you might realize that yes, you only have two hands, and that a helper might be of use. Once the whole syrup is combined into the egg whites, add the raspberry purée and keep mixing until the (pink!) mass reaches room temperature

Pour the mass into the prepped cake tin, and wonder for a brief moment if you just inadvertently made latex. Let it cool over night.

The next day (before even having breakfast if you are anything like me!), sieve a little starch onto a cutting board, and some more onto a plate. Invert the marshmallow onto the cutting board and dust it with some more starch. With a sharp knife or a pizza cutter.

I recommend letting the cut up marshmallows dry up some more before you package them, as they tend to hold a lot of moisture and will stick together despite the corn starch if you package them too soon. Or you just eat them straight up!

In Honor of the Upcoming World Nutella Day… Chocolate Pizza and Basic Pizza Dough

Did you know, that there is a World Nutella Day? I read about it on Ms. Adventures in Italy, and I had to applaud the initiative. An entire day to celebrate Nutella is only right and proper!

As a child, we were never allowed to have nutella, which resulted in me developing a lifelong addiction to it - so much so, that one of the first things of my own that I bought when I moved into my own apartment, was a giant jar of nutella. Because I polished it off much too quickly, I have since tried to restrict myself to desperate times only. Hence, the appeal of a World Nutella Day.

I’ve had this recipe in my must-try folder for about a year and it seemed to be just the thing for this celebration: chocolate pizza.

Pizza, Nutella, and more chocolate to top it off sounded like my idea of a good time — but while it did not disappoint, it is not quite the dessert it was said to be. In my opinion, it is much better suited for goûter (the snack that most french children take after school, around 4 pm) or maybe even for a decadent breakfast.

It’s very quick and easy to make, I used my go-to basic pizza dough recipe, nutella and subsituted ribboned orange zest for the hazelnuts which gave it a more refreshing taste.

Basic Pizza Dough

Prep Time: 30 min baking time: 15 min

2/3 cup of lukewarm water
1/ Tbsp active dry yeast (amounts to one envelope)
1 Tsp of sugar
2 cups of flour
1/2 Tsp of salt
3 Tbsp of olive oil

baking sheet

In a mixing bowl, mix the water, yeast and sugar together and set aside in a warm place until bubbles form at the surface (5 min)
Add the flour, salt and olive oil to the yeast-preparation and beat with the wirehooks of your handmixer until an elastic dough forms (5 min). You can of course mix the dough by hand, but it will take about 5x longer.
When the dough has come together, roll it into a ball in the mixing bowl, cover with a teatowel and let it rise in a warm place until doubled in size (20 min).
Preheat the oven to 200° and line your baking sheet with parchment paper.
You will have enough dough for either 4 small pizzas, 2 medium sized ones, or one big one. If you are making pizza, proceed to top the rolled out dough with the topping of your choice and bake for about 20 min.

Chocolate Pizza

Prep Time: 2 min baking time: 22 min

1 Tbsp of melted butter
about 1/4 cup of Nutella or to taste
2 Tbsp white chocolate chunks
1/2 cup of dark chocolate chunks
1 Tbsp of orange zest

baking sheet

When your dough is done and rolled out into the desired size, prick it with a fork and brush the top with the melted butter. Bake it in the oven until golden and baked through - for about 15 min
When the pizza is done, take it out of the oven and spread it with your choice amount of nutella. Sprinkle the chocolate chunks and the orange zest on top. Bake it in the oven for another 2 min, or until all the chocolate has melted. Serve warm.

Chocolate Cake on a not so good day

Phew, has it ever been a while since I posted! My lack of posting is not to be attributed to lack of enthusiasm, far from it: We have been staying with my parents for the last month, and most of the cooking has not been done by me. This means that I couldn’t really post anything salty either even though I had been meaning to do it.
Instead, I would like to share with you the highlight of my not so good day: the gateau au chocolat de Marie.

It is very similar to this cake and I believe also this one. In short, it’s a super rich chocolatey, fudgey, buttery chocolate cake. But but but, before you start whining about caloric values and other health risks involved with the consumption of this cake, let me add that this one also boasts extra vitamin c thanks to the addition of orange zest and orange juice. If that’s not healthy, I don’t know what is! Another selling point for this cake is the fact, that it comes together in 30 min, less time than it takes you to get ready for a dinner party! But beware, thatthe chocolatey goodness is at it’s best after a substantial cooling time, or even on the next day.

The recipe for this chocolate cake comes to me courtesy of my aunt Marie, who gave it to my mother. It was the go-to chocolate cake for years, since it’s easy enough that a kid can do it with hardly any help needed. In fact, when I was in high school I used this cake as a trade in for favors: I never had a drivers license, let alone a car so I traded one chocolate cake for one semester of hitching rides to school with some friends!

My aunt herself, had the recipe from my grandmother, a true parisienne if there ever was one. As a young girl, she was trained at the prestigious Ecole du Cordon Bleu as part of her bourgeois upbringing,where she learned to bake this cake at the Cordon Bleu school, and passed it on to her daughter, and her daughter only. She is rather secretive about her recipe, and was none to pleased when she found out that we (my mother, my sister and I) had been using her recipe as well - from her point of view, recipes are not to be shared. OOOPS, my bad!

My sister suggested that I make this cake in order to cheer me up from my not so good day (involving 2 teething twins and a troublesome toddler amongst other things) and as is to be expected with all things chocolate, it totally worked!

Gateau au chocolat de Marie

Family Recipe
Prep Time: 8 min baking time: 22 min

200 g butter
200 g dark chocolate
150 g granulated sugar
4 eggs
zest and juice of 1/2 an orange
1 Tbsp flour

25 cm round or square cake tin

Preheat the oven to 190° and line your buttered cake pan with parchment paper. Melt the chocolate together with the zest and juice of 1/2 an orange. Add the butter and sugar and let it melt with the chocolate
With an electric mixer, mix in the eggs one by one (BTW, does anybody else find it super annoying to add eggs one by one when using a handmixer and NOT a kitchenaid? just saying!) and finally fold in the flour.
Pour the mixture evenly into your cake pan and bake for 22 min, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out slightly moist. The sides of the cake will rise more than the middle. Cool in the pan for 5 min before inverting it onto a plate (safer than a cooling rack, which might break the cake at this point) and letting it cool of completely.
The cake is really good on it’s own or with a coffee. But americans will certainly tell you that it’d be even better with a tall glass of cool milk!

Last Christmas - a log disaster

try making the traditional french bûche de noel while surrounded by 16 people, 7 of which under the age of 7. Add to that a cavalier baker, thinking it will all be done with the flick of a wrist and you get a recipe for disaster. Luckily, in this instance the many cooks saved the proverbial broth and turned what was meant to be a chocolate log filled with raspberry mascarpone cream and slathered in ganache, into a brique de noel, much prettier and equally as delicious as was hoped for.