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.

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Recipe: almond toffee

We didn’t get around to making toffee during my pastry skills class. I just remembered Chef Shan shouting, “and if you add cream to this, you end up with toffee!” Toward the end of the ten weeks, I asked him for a toffee recipe and he said he couldn’t give the secret recipe away. Okay, I understand – confectioner’s secret. Chef Will was the same way with his toffee recipe. I watched his perfectly square blocks of gorgeous toffee while he demonstrated tempering to the professional pastry students.

I looked online, looked in books, looked online some more and settled on a recipe in Candymaking (Kendrick and Atkinson) to begin my foray into toffee today.

Recipe: chocolate-dipped strawberry cake

Figs are not only delicious on their own or with prosciutto, but they are also fantastic with balsamic vinegar! Case in point, I put some in our salad tonight:

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