use real butter

Recipe: mocha hazelnut torte

After making a chiffon cake with swiss meringue buttercream, I usually wind up with at least a dozen egg yolks. I saw that David Lebovitz posted about using up egg whites which is the opposite of my problem. While perusing my old Chocolatier issues, I found a recipe from 1994 that uses at least ten egg yolks (more, if you go all out on the plating). Sweet! Except it’s a three truffle recipe. It doesn’t mean the recipe is necessarily difficult in terms of skill level, rather – it means there are several steps. That’s fine, I thought.

I had made the espresso pastry cream a day ahead because I knew doing all of the steps in one day would put me in a foul mood. Fine – that worked out alright. The recipe didn’t say to strain the pastry cream through a sieve. I am here to tell you to definitely do so. I like my pastry cream to be smoooooooth. The next morning I baked the chocolate genoise which turns out to be a little more brittle than I expect from genoise, but I was cool with it. While the genoise was cooling on a rack, I started on the hazelnut meringue. The first step was to skin some hazelnuts. God, I hate skinning hazelnuts. It’s fairly straightforward, just roast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet for about 10 minutes and then wrap them up in a kitchen towel to cool. When they heat up, they expand and bust their skins. When they cool, they shrink and will theoretically release from the skins with ease. Theoretically. My advice is to roast 25% more hazelnuts than called for because some of those suckers will refuse to release.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: rocky road brownies

No – not the way Cartman refers to… I’m talking about literally making brownies.

Never really satisfied with that earlier experiment of fudgy versus chewy brownies, I was flipping through some old issues of Chocolatier the other day and found brownie recipes worthy of a kitchen test. In my youth (back in 1994) I subscribed to Chocolatier because I liked baking with chocolate. I found I was mostly in over my head with that magazine. I tried again in 2000 and the same thing happened. Mind you, their other publication is Pastry Art and Design, if that’s any hint. I’m glad I hung on to those issues though, because now that I have perused the recipes, the three truffle (most difficult) ratings look to be on par with the more advanced stuff I did in pastry class. I mean to say – they are now within my ability level, and that feels pretty good!

My allergy symptoms are pretty much under control now that 1) the steroids are in full effect and 2) I have learned to keep my grimy fingers out of my itchy eyes. It took me a while to get that second one through my thick head, but after the second day of being incapacitated because my eye was pink, oozing crap, and swollen shut, I began to accept that yes, you really do need to just deal with the itch or make it worse. Usually, I find some sort of distraction helps in that regard.

Jeremy and I have been painting the exterior of our house. It’s wood siding and so it isn’t painted a color per se, but rather we desperately needed to seal it before winter. Everything needs to get done before winter. I feel like a pika running around preparing for winter. We were joking the other day about our two seasons: winter and almost winter. Actually, I like that because I think I can generally stand a month of summer. Too bad autumn is all of 2 weeks here, but the thrill of getting an early snowfall is on par with my love for fall. Back to the house, we are still getting afternoon rainstorms and that – along with morning winds (assuming that is all from solar heating and mixing of air masses which usually starts up a few hours after sunrise) – makes the ladder work a little dicey when Jeremy is trying to paint the exterior of the third floor. Most of it is manageable except one part over our mudroom which will require me to belay Jeremy. But we need to care for the house properly considering the big bucket of weather that gets blasted at the south and west faces.