use real butter

Recipe: triple fudge kahlua torte

Jeremy’s birthday was over a week ago, but he was away at two meetings and I was visiting my nephew for his eighth birthday. Since Jeremy and my birthdays are nine days apart, we decided we would celebrate later, when we weren’t so short on time and money. We both tend to be fairly unsentimental about these things, so that worked out fine.

But… I did promise I would at least make him a special dessert. I asked what he would like and as usual, Jeremy couldn’t make up his mind. He’s so easy going that it is downright frustrating at times. I found a recipe in an old issue of Chocolatier which I modified somewhat, but it contains several of Jeremy’s favorite components such as chocolate cake, booze, espresso, and chocolate.

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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.

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Recipe: lime cake

I had originally planned to make petits fours with a full sheet of the chiffon cake yesterday, but after the first half made me so bloody crazy, I bailed on the idea of more petits fours. Instead, I looked at the leftover cake, the leftover buttercream, leftover lime syrup, pulled a jar of opened lemon curd from the refrigerator (thanks Sam!) and threw together a lime-lemon cake of sorts. I’m playing out the different permutations of cake, buttercream, syrup, and jam/curds and writing up the successful combinations in my quadrille notebook. It’s nice to be able to experiment instead of trying something new whenever we entertain – that’s just a little more stress than I need in a day.

I assembled the cake last night and thought about garnishing. I’ve candied lemon slices before and they are beautiful and delicious. Not so with lime slices. The lovely green becomes a most unappealing brownish green when candied. I shouldn’t care, but… the OCD color-loving parrot in me can’t do with brown-green. Sleep on it, right? I did and I thought a flash dip in hard crack stage sugar might work. Instead, I got a green-brown lime slice that fell out of it’s candy shell and dripped lime juice everywhere. Amidst my mess of wax paper, cooling racks, crystalizing sugar, and slaughtered limes, I just settled on raw slices and some spun sugar (about all that could be salvaged from the sugar).

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