Happy Birthday to Me

Getting older isn't much fun anymore. But cake is still awesome. I usually make the "Chocolate Fudge Cake" from The Cake Bible (Rose Levy Barenbaum). It's wonderful deep chocolate, with a bitter edge from brown sugar. This year I wanted chocolate cinnamon. I felt the cinnamon could get lost in such a deeply-flavored cake. So I went with the "All-American Chocolate Cake" from the same book. And by "I" mean my husband. He hates cake, and he hates baking. But he feels a moral obligation to make my birthday cake. Which is very sweet. And he did a fabulous job this year. The cake was moist and rich and fantastic. I split the layers, and I made an extra batch of the frosting recipe that I posted last week. Good thing. The cake was very soft, making it difficult to spread the frosting thinly. I used every bit of frosting, and I could have used more to cover some blotchy spots. But it worked.

The top stencil was done with a mixture of cocoa and cinnamon. I didn't level the cake, so the top was curved. I realized too late that the solution is to move slowly around the stencil, pressing an area against the cake before sprinkling the cocoa mixture. So some areas came out blotchy. Next time I'll know better. Of course next time I'll probably take the time to level the cake properly.

Delicious! Husband complained that the cinnamon-chocolate cake plus orange-brown sugar frosting was too many flavors. I think he's right, but I still enjoyed every bite.

Piloncillo Buttercream

I love frosting. I like cake, but I think the best cake is one that supports a lot of frosting. A few years ago, a Thanksgiving dinner guest brought a cake. It was a 3-layer cake, with a gingerbread layer, spice cake layer, and some other sort of layer. You see, I don't really remember the cake, because what made this dessert incredible was the frosting. A brown sugar buttercream with a wonderful grittiness from tiny brown-sugar crystals that crunched between my teeth before melting away. Every time I make a cake I think about trying to replicate that frosting. But I never  do. I don't care for the incredible sweetness of American-style buttercreams. It's not a health thing. I just don't like sweetness to be to the dominate flavor in my desserts. So I always end up making an Italian-meringue buttercream.

In particular, I like the Italian-meringue buttercream recipes in Rose Levy-Beranbaum's cookbooks. She calls it her "Mousseline Buttercream." But it is just Italian meringue with more egg whites and less sugar than most other recipes call for. It solves the "too-sweet" problem of American buttercreams. However, it comes with its own drawbacks. With much more butter relative to the sugar, it can feel greasy. Especially in the winter, when my house is around 65 degrees and the buttercream turns solid. So for a long time, I served cakes with whipped cream for winter-time desserts. But this doesn't work well for layer cakes. I dreamed of a cake topping that had the soft fluffiness of whipped cream but the stability of buttercream. Cream cheese icing had the texture I wanted, but it's too tangy work well with all flavors. What about mascarpone?

If your idea is a good one, someone else has put it on the internet. So I was happy to see that there were several mascarpone-buttercream recipes online. There were even a few that used Italian meringue. They were all pretty much identical: standard Italian-meringue buttercream recipes, but with half the butter replaced by mascarpone. I tried one, and it was pretty good. Iit felt just-on-the-edge of stable. I had success flavoring it with freeze-dried strawberries. But adding anything less solid (like jam) might jeopardize the emulsion. I wanted a basic recipe that easily accommodated a variety of flavorings. I am still experimenting, searching for the perfect formula. For now though, my base formula is 2/3 butter, 1/3 mascarpone.

That was a very long introduction to this post's recipe. Sorry. My birthday is next week. As I do every year, I've spent weeks agonizing over the choice of cake. I decided it was finally time to try brown sugar buttercream. But not too sweet. I have some cones of piloncillo in the cupboard. I buy them because they look so cool.  Then I can't figure out how to use them. They are incredibly hard. I've read you should grate them. But my box grater can't hack it. My food processor is useless. The only thing that works is dissolving it in water. Which I need to do anyway for Italian Lmeringue! So finally, a recipe, with pictures. Credit is due to Epicurious. I based my recipe on this one, http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Brown-Sugar-Buttercream-104580

Piloncillo Buttercream
1 8 oz cone of piloncillo
1/2 cup of water
zest of 1/2 an orange, in large pieces
1 cinnamon stick
3 egg whites
3/8 tsp cream of tartar
8 oz unsalted butter
4 oz mascarpone

Late stage additions:
2 Tbls molasses
1/8 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp distilled orange essence (from www.lacuisineus.com)
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Put piloncillo, water, orange zest, and cinnamon stick in a small pot. Cook on medium-low until sugar dissolves (this gives your cinnamon and orange a chance to infuse.)

Once the sugar dissolves, turn heat up to medium. Let come to a boil. After mixture has boiled for several minutes, remove zest and cinnamon. Set them in strainer over a measuring cup, and add the strained syrup back into your pan. While syrup is cooking, beat egg whites and cream of tartar to the soft-peak stage. Cook the syrup until it reaches 238-240 Fahrenheit.

Immediately pour syrup into a heat-safe measuring cup. Do not scrape the pan. Pour 1/3 of the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites and beat for 30 seconds. Stop the mixer, add another 1/3 of the syrup, and beat another 30 seconds. Add the rest of the syrup, scraping the measuring cup. Now beat the meringue for a very, very long time. At first the egg whites will break down, and you will be looking at a brown frothy soup. But eventually it will come together in to a beautiful silky brown meringue. I need to find/invent a recipe with brown-sugar meringue.

Once the meringue has come together, keep beating it on low until it is completely cool. Then with mixer on medium, start adding your butter and mascarpone, one tablespoon or so at a time. Watch your beautiful meringue disintegrate into a weird lumpy soup, and despair.

Despair, but keep beating. And beating, and beating. It will look terrible for a really long time. Pour yourself a drink. Play a few rounds of solitaire. Eventually it will start coming together.

And then

 Check the texture by turning off the mixer and stirring the frosting with a spatula, using a folding motion. At the early stages, it will look more or less like a finished buttercream, but it doesn't move correctly. When you stir it, it doesn't move like a batter or buttercream, moving only where your spatula cuts through it. Instead the whole mass jiggles a bit, the same way partly-beaten egg whites move in a jiggly mass. Just keep beating. the more air you beat in, the better the texture gets. If your mixer is overheating, or you just need to get the cake frosted, you can improve the texture by adding a bit more butter. The mascarpone, with its higher liquid content, is the reason that this frosting takes so long to reach the right texture. Adding more fat will improve the emulsion. If you've got the time and patience though, just keep beating. Eventually you get a beautiful silky, creamy frosting.

This wasn't the buttercream I was dreaming of. The molasses flavor was very faint. The orange and cinnamon notes where subtle and perfect in the few drops of syrup I tasted. They were completely missing from the finished buttercream. In retrospect that's not surprising. Orange zest and cinnamon are both oil-soluble flavors, and I was attacking them with water. Since I can't add fat at this stage, infusing is not the right way to get these flavors.

I took a break for dinner and then went back to work. I stirred in 1/8 tsp of  kosher salt, 2 Tblsps of molasses, 1/4 tsp Ceylon cinnamon, and about 1/4 tsp of orange essence. That made a big difference. The molasses flavor is perfect, as is the subtle hint of orange. I can't taste the cinnamon. However, the buttercream is going to sit in the fridge for a few days. The cinnamon might intensify, so I'll adjust for flavor when I make the cake. Before I use the buttercream I will need to bring it to room temperature, then rebeat. I'll be sure to have some room-temperature butter on hand, in case the emulsion needs help.

Oh, the texture after the second beating was fantastic. You really can't overbeat this frosting. Your mixer might disagree. So if you have time, beat it to death, let your mixer rest for an hour, and then give it another 5-10 minute beating.

I haven't quite decided what cake to use. Chocolate-chili would be ideal, but it would make my daughters cry. Probably chocolate-cinnamon. I will post the final recipe and pictures next week. In the meantime, I have a bunch of extra mascarpone I must find a use for.

Chili (Gravy) Hash

Sunday is our "fancy breakfast" day. Most weeks that means eggs and potatoes. And this week, it meant chili gravy too. I had leftover gravy and leftover roast beef, so the obvious meal was hash.

Every Sunday morning, as I chop raw potatoes, I vow that next week I will cook boiled potatoes for Saturday's dinner. Then I will have leftover cooked potatoes for easy hash. And then the next Sunday I wake up to a kitchen with no pre-cooked potatoes, and I make the same vow. Because making hashbrowns from raw potatoes takes a long time. 30 minutes minimum cooking time, usually more like 45. And the potatoes stick to the pan, no matter how much oil you use. After numerous experiments in stove-top hashbrowns, we've decided to cheat. If we're starting with raw potatoes, we cook them in the oven. It's not any faster, but it's a lot easier and a lot more reliable. And at 6 am on a Sunday morning, that matters.

So I started breakfast by prepping potatoes. I toss chopped potatoes with olive oil and salt. Then I lightly mash a few garlic cloves and throw those in. Usually I'll put in some sprigs of thyme or rosemary. Since I was going to smother these potatoes in gravy, I skipped the herbs this morning. The potatoes went in to a 400F oven.

Then I started the onions. I saved the pan full of drippings from Friday's chuck roast. I threw sliced onions into that pan and started cooking. This picture was taken at the start of cooking--the color comes from the beef drippings. Sauteing onions is the easiest way to deglaze a pan.

While that was cooking I boiled water for coffee, shredded some leftover meat, and made more gravy. (I had leftover gravy, but not enough.) I used the same recipe I linked to in the last post. For this batch I used the fat from Friday's roast to make the roux. That gave a nice flavor boost. When the potatoes were done, I started assembling. First I combined the onions, beef, and potatoes.

I let that cook awhile on low to let the flavors meld. Meanwhile I fried the eggs and chopped some scallions. And finally I could assemble the dish.

And we ate. Happily.

Chili Gravy

I've thought about starting a food blog for years. Every year the urge gets strongest at Thanksgiving. I spend a month planning a menu that makes me happy, but provides for all the vegetarians/vegans/teetotalers/onion haters etc at the table. But I never got around to starting the blog until now. And chili gravy is what finally drove me to get started.

My husband found the recipe. He wanted me to make cheese enchiladas, and he started surfing Tex-Mex food sites. He is from California, I am from Oregon, and we both grew up on tomato-based enchilada sauces. But the Tex-Mex way involves chili gravy, and it is so much better. It's a standard flour gravy, similar to what you make for Thanksgiving turkey. You just add cumin, chili powder, and a few other Mexican seasonings, and suddenly you have a miracle. A cross between an American gravy and a Mexican mole. Except that it's a lot less work than a real mole, but more versatile.

I don't understand why this sauce has stayed limited to Tex-Mex cuisine. We ate it on boiled potatoes and roast beef last night. It was amazing. Then cheese enchiladas. I'm planning the weekly Sunday breakfast around it now. I'm thinking beef hash with fried eggs, and chili gravy over the whole thing. I want to try chili-gravy poutine. I will pour chili gravy on mashed potatoes. I expect that the first year of this blog will have a lot of chili gravy posts.

For this week's batch of gravy, I made the recipe here, http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2007/01/essence-of-tex-mex.html. I used Swanson's beef broth (the reduced sodium one). It was pretty great. I did boost the beef flavor with some powdered porcini mushrooms and pan juices from a chuck roast. I'm looking forward to trying versions with homemade stock. Or with roasted ancho chilis. Or ....