French Macarons with Mint Chocolate Ganache Filling
I have not been to Las Gaviotas in Rosarito, Mexico since December of last year for New Year’s Eve. Coming back in beautiful spring weather was such a treat. Bearik’s family has a beautiful beachfront house in Las Gaviotas, a community of beach houses down in Baja. Anytime we feel like getting away for a weekend, we drive down with our boogie boards, golf clubs and of course a voracious appetite for delectable Mexican food.
Now here are a few snaps of my nephews, niece, and cousins for Easter. Thought I’d share with you their absolute cuteness.
Despite my awful and intense allergy attack Easter day, it was a beautiful time celebrated with family. I made French Macarons with Mint Chocolate Ganache Filling for the occasion. With its sea-foam green color, these beauties looked just as festive as the Easter eggs on our picnic table.
Most bakers have their own macaron secrets but I only really abide by the following when I make macarons:
1. I use aged egg whites (egg whites separated from the yolks at least overnight – if you can age for 2 days sitting in your counter top, that’s preferred)
2. I have only used the French meringue method. It works for me so I don’t really have any reason to try the Italian meringue method.
3. I follow Helene of Tartelette blog’s macaron mixing method. No more than 50 strokes… fast at first, then fold. Visit her site and learn from the pro. She has a great resource for macaron newbies – Demystifying Macarons.
Ham and Gruyère Thumbprints
A short post today friends. I have a few pretty exciting things currently unfolding in my life and I couldn’t be more happier. First, my folks are transitioning into a beautiful new home we are all really thrilled for them. Second, my 6th wedding anniversary is fast approaching and Bearik and I have already been debating discussing which restaurant to go to. Third, I have a handful of friends who recently got engaged and that means we have plenty of weddings to attend (YAY, I love weddings). Fourth, I found a new advertising gig closer to home with great growth opportunities and wonderful people.
Then talk about today’s Easter fun with the family… great food, great conversations, games plus egg-hunting with little ones, and uplifting time at church. I am utterly blessed.
I’ll let you get back to the rest of your Easter celebration so I’ll close by sharing this insanely easy Ham and Gruyère Thumbprints recipe from Martha Stewart. This recipe is available online and was also published in Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics and a previous issue of Martha Stewart Living Holiday magazine.
The recipe uses a pâte à choux base. Pâte à choux is the dough used for making cream puffs, éclairs, and gougères . These thumbprints are actually very similar to making gougères – a savory dough with cheese and herbs – wherein you incorporate minced black forest ham and shredded Gruyère cheese into the dough.
These are great cocktail party appetizers or as an after-school snack for kiddies. Who doesn’t like ham and cheese, right? Read more…
Chocolate Hazelnut Tart
Chocolate Hazelnut Tart inspired by The Help. That was my contribution to my sister-in-law’s annual Academy Awards viewing party and potluck.
This post is about 3 weeks late and irrelevant now. Blame it on a last minute Vegas trip and a wild work schedule as of late.
Heather, my sister-in-law, throws an Oscars party every year where each guests bring a completed ballot together with a $5 bill for a little fun and tease and a dish inspired by the best picture nominated movies for our bellies.
As daring as I was before Oscars weekend to make something inspired by The Tree Of Life, I found myself stuck and uninspired because let’s face it, it was my least favorite movie of the year. Fast-forward to February 25th, Saturday, day before the party. I woke up with memorable scenes of Minny’s infamous Chocolate Pie from the movie. And that was it, forget The Tree of Life, we are doing some sort of Chocolate Pie minus the “duty” of course – if you saw the movie, you know what I am referring to.
Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, has a great Chocolate Hazelnut Tart recipe in their self-named baking book. I thought this would be a good version/twist of Minny’s pie. I made the pie with a very slight change… skipped the brandy and just reduced the amount of orange zest. Because ½ teaspoon of zest as the recipe called for just slightly overpowered the chocolate. About ¼ teaspoon is enough to give it another depth of flavor without distracting you from the chocolate goodness. But feel free to use more if you prefer that stronger orange flavor like Tartine’s original. Read more…
Blueberry-Pear Pistachio Tart
I get excited about the Super Bowl and I get a little mushy for Valentine’s Day, but the February tent-pole event/holiday that I am absolutely most stoked about is the Oscars. Having seen all the best picture nominated movies this year, I am predicting that The Artist will win best picture this year, with The Descendants as a close rival.
Last year, I had a clear favorite movie which was The King’s Speech. This year, I can’t exactly pinpoint which one is my favorite… the movie that I enjoyed the most just as a regular moviegoer, not as a hyper-critical film enthusiast. I do have a top three list though, and in no particular order: The Artist, Midnight in Paris, and The Descendants. Loved all these films tremendously but just can’t point my finger to the absolute numero uno. However, last year around this time, I had already established my three favorite films, and this is in order: The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, Black Swan. Toy Story 3 was my fourth in case you were curious.
My sister-in-law is hosting her annual Academy Awards viewing party and attendees have to make/bring a dish inspired by the best picture nominated movies. Perhaps some Black and White Cookies for The Artist? Make Chocolate Éclairs for Midnight in Paris? How about Cream Scones with jam for War Horse? Baseball-shaped cookies for Moneyball or homemade Cracker Jack? Oh the dilemma. I’ll share on the next post what I end up making. Prize awaits for the most creative, most inspired dish. Very eager to take that prize home… whatever it may be.
I thought of reinventing this Blueberry-Pear Pistachio Tart I made not too long ago for the much-awaited Oscars viewing party. The twist was to transform the tart to a pie in honor of The Help’s nomination. I brewed the idea in my head for several days and decided that I want to challenge myself and come up with a dish inspired by The Tree Of Life. Gulp. This trippy movie directed by Terence Mallick is chock-full of imagery, a little non-linear, and honestly a little too long. It tells the story of a boy’s relationship with his father through his childhood memories while intertwining rich images of how the world started and how it became what it is now. Any ideas on what I should make to commemorate the brilliance of this film in the form of edible food? Baking a tree-shaped cake or bread is a total cop-out – although playing with the title seems to be the only viable option I can manage to come up with right now. I’ll share on the next post what my imaginative mind can whip up. Don’t get your hopes up, I might end up with a pie.
Focusing our attention back on this gorgeous tart. This uses pre-made puff pastry dough (please don’t judge) smeared with homemade pistachio paste and topped with sliced pears, blueberries, and chopped pistachios. Making puff pastry from scratch is a big task. Last time I made homemade puff pastry was culinary school days (about four years ago) and since then, I haven’t rekindled my relationship with the sometimes daunting puff pastry. It really is all about technique. It isn’t daunting once you have the technique down. I remember my chef instructor lauding my flaky puff pastry layers when we made Brie En Croute and Napoleons. That was a great feeling. But if you are pressed for time and can’t make puff pastry from scratch, like myself most days, you can opt to use a pre-made but high quality brand like Dufour and still have satisfying results. Read more…
Dorie’s World Peace Cookies
Web freedom won… at least for now. The force of the entire online community was so impressive the past few days that SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) votes have been shelved indefinitely. No imminent Wikipedia shutdowns and no closing down of sites without due process in the near future until the bills are both revisited again possibly later this year. So thank you, if you participated in one way or another, in the mass online protest earlier this week. We can enjoy all the web content out there with great freedom.
Be in the know. Here’s a really good Gizmodo article about what SOPA means to you and me.
In the spirit of this temporary web victory, and big hopes to having a ‘perfectly-imperfect’ online privileges for all, I leave you with Dorie Greenspan’s much-loved World Peace Cookies. The recipe for these cookies have been published multiple times online and in-book (magazines and baking books alike). I wouldn’t be surprised if you had made these superb chocolate cookies a thousand times over in your lifetime.
These cookies shine because of the “generous” amount of fleur de sel in the dough. I don’t mean generous like A LOT but it has a good amount of salt compared to other cookie recipes. In her book, Baking From My Home To Yours, it asks for 1/2 teaspoon of fleur de sel. But she also gave a substitute of 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt if you don’t have fleur de sel sitting in your pantry… I know they can be a little pricey. I used gray sea salt when I made my batch and it was divine.
I also made these cookies during the holidays and my family went nuts for them. We drank hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows to wash down the cookies for our post-Christmas dinner treats. Just perfection.
World Peace Cookies by Dorie Greenspan recipe as published by American Public Media (The Splendid Table) and by Bon Appetit. Or get the printed version here.
*Dorie warns that the cookie rounds may start to crack as you slice your cookie log… just patch the bits back to the cookie and everything will be fine. Trust Dorie.
Cranberry Upside-Down Cake
Fresh cranberries are usually available from October to December. If you’re lucky, availability might even bleed into January. I’m a hoarder when it comes to kitchen supplies and ingredients – cans of pumpkin purée, 250-count parchment sheets, and two-pound bags of Callebaut semi-sweet chocolate discs from Surfas to name a few. So this season, I started stocking up on fresh cranberries before they are all gone… I just throw them in the freezer if I won’t be using them right away.
A delectable dish to make using fresh cranberries is an upside-down cake. I’m sure some of you have upside-down cake recipes that track all the way back to your grandparents, or your sassy aunt makes a version whenever there’s a family barbeque. Dust off that recipe card because you might want to experiment swapping out the classic pineapple rings with ruby-red cranberries.
This Cranberry Upside-Down Cake is from Cook’s Illustrated (one of my favorite recipe sources to try and test). The cake uses a separated egg method. The yolks are added with the rest of the ingredients while the whites are beaten separately until soft peaks are formed. The whites are then folded into the batter resulting to a firm cake (to hold all that cranberry topping) but with a light crumb.
There are a lot of batter recipes out there for upside-down cakes. One that I really like is the addition of cornmeal in the dry ingredients. It gives the batter a slight nutty texture which works well with stone fruits. This one, however, uses blanched slivered almonds that’s been ground to a fine powder.
When baked, the cake looks like it’s adorned with sparkling gems. And it glistens with the addition of this cranberry reduction, almost like a caramel sauce. This sweet reduction helps add balance to the tart cranberries. Not too sweet, not too sour. There’s still a mild pucker – but guaranteed with a smile.
If you are not yet a member of Cook’s Illustrated, you must. It’s a gift you can give yourself for 2012. Tons of kitchen tips, tested recipes, and equipment ratings. Since I didn’t make any adjustments to the cake, I will not post the recipe on this blog but you can access it here with their 14-day free trial.
Happy MLK weekend and let’s see if Tim Tebow makes it past Tom Brady. #NFL
Banana Cupcakes with Vanilla Frosting
Four days spent in Baja for New Year’s celebrations is becoming a boisterous but endearing family tradition. This is the 2nd year we spent New Year’s Eve at my husband’s family’s beach house in Las Gaviotas, a cobbled-street private beach community in Rosarito, Mexico. Weather was insanely cold. Not what we had hoped for but it was kind of ethereal with the dense fog and chilly atmosphere (although driving in the thickest fog you can imagine was nerve-wracking).
Spending New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day with the entire immediate Diaz clan was endearingly boisterous (I think I mentioned that), being surrounded by four little ones not lacking in energy and spirit and tears. I absolutely love spending time with my three nephews and my niece. You can get them to play any game you can think of with vigor and laughter. However, no matter how fun it starts, it usually ends pretty ugly. One fights the other and crying ensues… then screeching and then throwing of random things. Ahhh, the joys of being a kid… a carefree spirit and a free pass to do irrational outcry in a snap of a finger. Something us adults wish we could still do.
But no matter how many times they wail over the most ridiculous things, my nephews and my niece are way too adorable to easily get exasperated about.
The one dessert that caused a bit of a stir with the kiddies not too long ago was these Banana Cupcakes with Vanilla Frosting I made for my father-in-law’s birthday. As soon as they saw Nilla wafers on top, each one wanted a piece even before the birthday celebrant had a chance to see them (or eat one).
Karen DeMasco’s The Craft of Baking had a recipe for Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Buttercream. It looked really yummy but I thought the peanut butter frosting would be too rich (I also made a Chocolate Espresso Cake for the birthday party). Having been in the mood for banana pudding at that time (I just had Magnolia Bakery’s Banana Pudding the week before and it blew my mind because it was soooooo good), I decided to swap out the peanut butter with vanilla frosting to recreate the banana pudding flavors I was still craving seven days later. Ergo, the Nilla wafer topper on each cupcake. Ta da!
Everyone enjoyed these cupcakes very much – kids and adults alike. The banana flavor was prominent and the cakes were ultra moist. The vanilla-flavored frosting worked incredibly well against the banana cupcakes… it did not compete with the banana flavor, in fact, it enhanced it a thousand percent.
What’s good about this dessert is that you can make it year-round. It’s true that I am a sucker for seasonal baking but sometimes you need go-to recipes you can make in a flash with accessible ingredients and crowd-pleasing results. This is one of them.
