Of course, there was cake

This past weekend, we celebrated Octavian's birthday. We put down our books. We strolled out in the sunshine. We sipped on dulce de leche milkshakes. We cleaned decades' worth of dust off the LPs that belonged to Octavian's late grandfather. We let the needle drop and sat back as Ella's voice filled the room. It was a wonderful moment. These records had sat untouched for years in Octavian's grandparents' home in Romania. Many of them were British pressings of 1960s pop and jazz smuggled into the country during the Ceaușescu regime. It felt good to be able to give them a new life in our home.

And, of course, there was cake. The folks at Momofuku Milk Bar call this one a chocolate-chip layer cake, but that, I think, hardly captures it. What makes this cake worthy of a chorus of oohs and aahs are the bright ribbons of passion-fruit curd running through it, bold, tart, and unmistakably tropical. The curd plays brilliantly with the other elements--coffee frosting, chocolate crumb, chocolate-chip cake--and lingers just a little in the mouth, exotic and floral. It is wonderfully good stuff.

Without a doubt, in fact, it's the best stuff I've made out of the Milk Bar cookbook. I am crazy about this curd. I wish I'd made more last week--enough to smear on toast, to swirl into yogurt, to sandwich between bittersweet-chocolate-wafer cookies, to eat by the spoonful. It is that good.

Admittedly, this curd does demand a little more of you than the typical curd. You'll need a blender and some gelatin. But it's worth it. The addition of gelatin gives this curd serious body. Most curds rely only on eggs for thickening, and while that's fine for toast, curd made that way won't hold up in a cake or sandwiched between cookies. This curd, by comparison, is versatile. Let your imagination run wild. Whatever you come up with, this curd will not be out of place.

And if you're wondering, Octavian and I really liked the cake as a whole. Passion fruit, coffee, and chocolate are amazing together (and make for a far more balanced cake than the chocolate-malt, if you ask me). But in our heart of hearts, we're still apple-pie layer cake people.

Passion-fruit Curd

Adapted from the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

Note: About the passion fruit puree. There are a number of online vendors that sell very high-quality frozen fruit purees, but with overnight shipping and the quantity of puree recommended to ensure that it all stays cold, it can add up. I recommend that you check the freezer aisle of Latin markets in your area first. Chicagoans, I found more than enough El Sembrador passion fruit puree for this recipe for about $3 at Tony's Finer Foods in Logan Square. I was pleased with the quality.

100 g / 1/2 cup passion fruit puree

65 g / 1/3 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 gelatin sheet or 1/2 teaspoon powdered gelatin

170 g / 12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) butter, very cold

2 g / 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

Put the passion fruit puree and sugar in a blender and blend until the sugar granules have dissolved. Make sure to scrape under the blender's blades--granules tend to deposit there. Add the eggs and blend on low until you have a bright-orange-yellow mixture. Transfer the contents of the blender to a medium saucepan. Clean the blender canister.

Bloom the gelatin. Soak the sheet in a small bowl of cold water. The gelatin is bloomed when it has become soft, after about 2 minutes. If the gelatin still has hard bits to it, it needs to bloom for longer. If it is so soft it is falling apart, it is overbloomed; discard the gelatin and start over. Gently squeeze the bloomed gelatin to remove any excess water before using.

Heat the passion fruit mixture over low heat, whisking regularly. As it heats up, it will begin to thicken; keep a close eye on it (this can take awhile--at least 15 minutes, in my experience). Once it boils, remove it from the stove and transfer it to the blender. Add the bloomed gelatin, butter, and salt and blend until the mixture is thick, shiny, and super-smooth.

Transfer the mixture to a heatproof container and put it in the fridge until the curd has cooled completely, at least 30 minutes. The curd can be refrigerated for up to 1 week. Do not freeze.

Makes about 1 cup.

Technical Notes for Milk Bar's Chocolate-chip Layer Cake

The directions for this cake were, for the most part, straightforward. Below are a few points of obsessive detail that you might find helpful when making the cake.

• Passion-fruit curd: when you're dissolving the sugar into the puree in the blender, give the underside of the blades a scrape with a spatula before proceeding on. Sugar tends to deposit there, and you want that sugar in your curd.
• Cake mixing: be warned--the chocolate-chip cake has far more liquid than the other Milk Bar cakes, so you really need to mind Tosi's mixing instructions with this one. I mixed my cake batter for the six minutes required, and still my cake almost baked out of its quarter-sheet. It was also less dense than it should have been and was more difficult to work with as a result. The lesson: mix, mix, mix!
• Chocolate chips: I'm not really sure why Tosi wants you to scatter the chips over the batter just before baking. Why not just fold them in by hand before spreading the batter over the quarter-sheet? Nearly all my chips stayed at the surface of the cake. I think the final cake would have had more visual appeal if you could see the chips in the profile of each of the cake rounds.
• Serving: This cake was by far the easiest to cut slices out of. With previous Milk Bar cakes, I've had the slices collapse on me while trying to transfer them to a plate. Keep this cake cold enough, and it will slice beautifully. That said, I recommend, if you can manage, waiting for the cake slices to come up to temperature a little before digging in, at least 10 minutes. Cold, hard mini chocolate chips just don't have that much appeal.
• Height: This layer cake was noticeably more stout than other Milk Bar layer cakes I've made. I chalk that up to the cake's components--they don't give the cake as much height as some others.

P.S. If you're looking to make the whole cake, you can find the recipe posted here.

It has its charms

Yes, dear reader, you are looking at another chocolate cake, and yes, I still maintain that I am, for the most part, indifferent to chocolate. But what can I say? Chocolate-loving friends deserve birthday cakes too, and how can anyone resist a cake stacked three layers high and filled with gooey, charred marshmallows?

The cake, as you might have guessed by the looks of it, was another one of those layer cakes, wacky and wonderful, dreamed up by the lovely folks at Momofuku Milk Bar. I say was. You're a little too late to meet this particular chocolate-malt layer cake. It was three layers of buttery chocolate cake dripping malt fudge sauce. It was topped with malted milk crumb and torched marshmallows. It was utterly over-the-top. But, as Saturday night slipped into Sunday morning, it was also utterly demolished. All that we left the birthday boy with at the end of the night were a few marshmallows and a mound of chocolate rubble.

And though chocolate usually doesn't do it for me, even I have to admit that this cake had its charms. Digging into a slice was just that--an excavation. One forkful might be all buttery, chocolate crumbs and gooey fudge, but with the next, you'd crunch down on some cookie-like milk crumb or find a few toasty marshmallows. Buried treasure. Oh the marshmallows! It was a fun cake to eat.

But even more so, (I think, anyway) it was a fun cake, a marvellously fun cake, to put together. I got to play with liquid glucose and Ovaltine. I got to beat butter, eggs, and sugar into a dreamy cloud-mass. I got to set a half-sheet spread with marshmallows ablaze. Nothing too complicated, just good, messy kitchen fun.

And if you're thinking about taking the plunge and putting together your very own Milk Bar layer cake, either this cake or the apple-pie layer cake might be the place to start. Neither requires anything particularly difficult of you (you really just need to read carefully and do what Tosi tells you), and apart from the liquid glucose in this cake, which you can replace with light corn syrup in a pinch, their ingredients are ones that you should be able to source at your local grocery store. Oh, and they're both spectacularly good, (though I, of course, am rather more fond of the apple-pie than the chocolate-malt).
A couple of years ago, Bon Appétit did a feature on Christina Tosi and published a version of the recipe for this cake. You can find it here. It's a little more home-cook friendly but maybe not quite as awe-inspiring from the looks of it. It'll give you a sense of what making this cake involves, though.

Technical Notes for Milk Bar's Chocolate-malt Layer Cake

The directions for this cake were, for the most part, straightforward. Below are a few points of obsessive detail that you might find helpful when making the cake.

• Fudge sauce: you only need three tablespoons of fudge sauce for the cake batter, but unless you have a jeweller's scale, it might be hard to scale down the recipe to that amount. I used the leftovers on some malt ice cream. If you're making this ahead of time, be sure to give it some time, at least half an hour, to warm up a little on the counter. Alternatively, you can give it a short zap in the microwave to loosen it up. Otherwise, the fudge sauce will just cling to the paddle of your stand mixer and won't incorporate properly.
• Sifting the cocoa powder: I know, I know, Christina Tosi thinks that sifting is generally a waste of time. But cocoa powder can be ridiculously difficult to incorporate unless you've already broken up the clumps it tends to form itself into. Maybe, if you're lucky enough to have Valrhona cocoa powder lying around (I didn't), this isn't as much of a problem. I didn't sift my cocoa powder, and it didn't incorporate into the cake batter properly. I ended up having to use an immersion blender on the batter. The cake didn't seem to suffer much from all that overmixing--there were just a few more air bubbles in it than there might have otherwise been.
• Malt fudge sauce: much like the plain old fudge sauce, this malt one stiffens up pretty quickly as it cools. I made mine right before assembling the cake and left it in a bowl over some simmering water until I was ready to use it. It was a little difficult to eye five equal portions from the bowl, so I poured it into a 2-cup glass measuring cup for assembly purposes.
• The unveiling: the malt fudge stuck to the acetate, so peeling back the plastic on this cake was a little more difficult than with others, but I don't think there's much that you can do about this. The cake still looked fine for the most part.
• Storage: As Tosi says, the fudge sauce will stick to plastic. If, like me, you don't have a cake carrier or a giant bowl to cover your cake while it thaws in the fridge, you can, like me, tape together a few sheets of acetate and build a plastic ring around the cake or the plate that it's sitting on. Pull some plastic wrap over that, and you've got a temporary cover for your cake. 

Uncommonly luxurious

I want to be upfront about one thing--making this cake right here, it can get a little messy. Flour can fly. Chocolate can splatter. Yolks can run. Beets can splash. Don your apron. Have a stack of kitchen towels at the ready. Trust me, you'll need them.

But let's back up a bit. Beets? In a cake? Yes, and they make for an uncommonly luxurious one, one that is velvety, dark, and yielding--every bit the chocolate cake of my dreams. And I'm saying this as a girl who almost never goes out of her way to bake with chocolate, who lets half a bar of Scharffen Berger languish in the pantry for nearly a year. It's not that I don't like chocolate. Often enough, it's just that I'm more captivated by other things (lemons, tomato jam, salted caramel). But this chocolate cake--I've fallen for it. After my friends left the other night, I snuck a second slice. I couldn't resist.

And the beets? Their presence is a little hard to describe. It's faint after baking, just a quiet harmony against that dark, resonant chocolate. They make a good pair (next, I'm thinking: dark-chocolate and beet ganache).

Unsurprisingly, maybe, this cake is Nigel Slater's. If you're not familiar with him, you should know that he's a man who cultivates and cooks his vegetables with real affection. He appreciates each on its own terms. He works to make them all sing. The chocolate cake is from his recent book, Tender. I received it about a month ago, and it has kept me spellbound. It is lovingly written, the sort of cookbook that you can curl up with at the end of the day and just read. It is page after page of gorgeous vegetables, inviting recipes. I've been cooking a lot of wintery one-pot dinners from it lately, but the recipe for this cake was the first that caught my eye. A beet-laden cake topped with crème fraîche and poppy seeds? Say no more.

Tender has made me want to take more care with my vegetables, to coax new things out of them, to lavish them with whatever they deserve. And what better way to start than with butter and dark chocolate? (Okay, that could get dangerous...)

An extremely moist chocolate-beet cake with crème fraîche and poppy seeds
Adapted from Nigel Slater's Tender

Note: Crème fraîche and poppy seeds. Slater says that these are not just a nod to beets' Eastern European heart but an important part of the cake. I agree. They play beautifully against the chocolate's deep notes. Take the trouble of getting both. Reserve them until you're just about to serve the cake. Otherwise, you'll end up with sodden cake and crème fraîche shot through with hot-pink streaks. Pan size. Slater uses an 8-inch spring-form and bakes the cake for forty minutes. I think most of us in North America have 9-inchers for the standard cheesecakes we've learned to bake from our mothers, so I've adjusted the baking times accordingly below. Make ahead. The cake keeps well for a couple of days on the counter wrapped in plastic. Somehow, it's even more moist on the second day.

8 oz / 250 g beets (about 4 small or 2 medium ones)
7 oz / 200 g good-quality bittersweet chocolate (70 percent cocoa solids)
4 tablespoons hot espresso
1 3/4 sticks / 200 g unsalted butter
1 cup + 2 tablespoons / 135 g all-purpose flour
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons good-quality cocoa powder
5 eggs, separated and at room temperature
1 scant cup / 190 g sugar
crème fraîche and poppy seeds, to serve

Lightly butter a nine-inch springform cake pan and line with a round of parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Cook the beets, whole and unpeeled, in boiling unsalted water. Depending on their size, they will be tender when pierced with the tip of a knife within thirty to forty minutes. Young ones may take slightly less. Drain them, let them cool under running water, then rub their skins off with your fingers, slice of their stem and root, and then process in a blender or food processor to a coarse purée.

Melt the chocolate, broken into small pieces, in a large bowl set over a pot of simmering water. Don't stir.

When the chocolate looks almost melted, pour the hot espresso over it and stir once. Cut the butter into small pieces and add to the melted chocolate. Push the butter down under the surface of the chocolate with a spoon (as best you can) and let soften.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and cocoa. Stir the yolks together.

Now, working quickly but gently, remove the bowl of chocolate from the heat and stir until the butter has melted into the chocolate. Let sit for a few minutes, then stir in the egg yolks. Do this quickly, mixing firmly and evenly so the eggs blend into the mixture. Fold in the beets. Whisk the egg whites until still, then fold in the sugar. Firmly but gently, fold the beaten egg whites and sugar into the chocolate mixture. A large metal spoon (or a large flexible spatula) is what you want here; work in a deep, figure-eight movement but take care not to overmix. Lastly, fold in the flour and cocoa.

Transfer quickly to the prepared cake pan and put in the oven, decreasing the heat immediately to 325 degrees F. Bake for thirty to thirty-five minutes. The rim of the cake will feel spongy, the inner part should still wobble a little when the pan is gently shaken.

Set the cake aside to cool (it will sink a tad in the centre), loosening it around the edges with a thin icing spatula after half an hour or so. It is not a good idea to remove the cake from its pan until it is completely cold. Serve in thick slices, with crème fraîche and poppy seeds.

Makes for 12 modest slices.

Two bites

Last night, I had some friends over for a long-due party. Over the summer, if you remember, my boyfriend and I were busy renovating the place we'd just bought. Most of the work was contracted out, but we did our share of priming, painting, patching, and problem-solving--and we couldn't have done that much without the help of our very, very generous friends. They lent us their hands, their tools, and their cars when we needed them. We couldn't be more grateful. So four months after having moved in, we thought it was time that we had them all over for some food and drink.

I took this as an excuse to dive back into Momfuku Milk Bar. Since the party would be a strictly finger-food affair, I thought that this would be the perfect time to make a few carrot cake truffles. The idea is this. Take a heap of carrot-cake scraps (or in my case, bake a carrot cake and set aside the remaining cake for munching), mix them with a few generous spoonfuls of liquid cheesecake (essentially cheesecake underbaked such that it is delightfully spoonable and spreadable), form the cake into rounds, roll the rounds into melted white chocolate, and, finally, give the rounds a nice coating of crunchy, buttery milk crumb (think cookie crumbs but made milkier with a little milk powder and more white chocolate). Think of a carrot cake truffle as a good slice of carrot cake compacted into two heavenly bites.

And your cake truffles don't have to be made out of carrot cake. I think that this method would work with pretty much any sort of leftover (but still good and fresh) cake you might have lying around. Just remember the basics: cake, a few spoonfuls of something to moisten it, plus chocolate and something crunchy to coat. A little messy, admittedly, but not too complicated.

Now, you may have noticed that I'm a little Milk-Bar-obsessed. Ever since the cookbook came out last October, I've been gushing almost non-stop about Milk Bar and Christina Tosi. And this won't be the end of it. There is so much more of the book that I want to bake out of. So, consider this a little side project of mine. I'll still keep up with my regular posts, but every now and then, I might share some photographs from a Milk Bar undertaking like this one.

I'll be back soon to write about another one of the finger foods from last night.

We couldn't resist

This cake, Christina Tosi's apple-pie layer cake, was going to be the dessert at our Thanksgiving table on Thursday. I had it all planned out. There was a schedule, and I stuck to it. I made one of its five components every day starting last Wednesday. I assembled everything on Sunday afternoon. It was beautiful. It couldn't have gone better. I put it in the freezer to set. It could sit there tucked away until Thursday. I would just have to thaw it out early in the day. But on Monday afternoon, we couldn't resist. My boyfriend's parents were going to arrive from New York just in time for dinner. Wasn't that occasion enough to enjoy some cake? We could just whip up a quick apple tarte tatin for Thursday, we reasoned. So we held our breaths, popped the cake out of its metal ring, and peeled off the clear acetate that had been holding it all together.

It really was a thing of beauty. Three six-inch discs of barely brown butter cake stacked high with liquid cheesecake, buttery pie crumb, and apple-pie filling, all of it crowned with pie-crumb frosting and more pie crumb. Glorious. Certainly the most impressive-looking cake ever put together in my kitchen. See why we couldn't wait any longer?

Right after dinner, we dug in, and it was amazing. It was familiar tasting but not. It was like apple pie but not. It was everything you'd ever want in a cake--rich, moist, wildly flavourful, and delightfully unexpected. It was just about perfect. Every bit of it, down to the tiniest nub of pie crumb, was so good. If only it would last us until Thanksgiving dinner.

And it was just as fun to make as it was to eat. Though none of it was particularly challenging, it was eye-opening. Who knew, for example, that a little cream cheese, cornstarch, milk sugar, and egg barely baked would turn into something unmistakably cheesecake-like but totally spreadable? I know that I gushed about Christina Tosi and the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook just a few short weeks ago, but I'll do it again. This woman is a genius. Her desserts conjure up childhood in strange and wonderful ways. And all of it is put together with such care--every last little crumb. While making the components for the layer cake last week, I was in constant danger of eating up whatever I'd just made.

I don't think I can share the whole cake with you. I have to leave some of the Milk Bar cookbook for you to read and play with on your own. But I will give you the liquid cheesecake. I could definitely have just eaten the whole batch of it on my own the day I made it, spoonful after guilty spoonful.

Make the liquid cheesecake. Have it with carrot cake. Spread it on slices of vanilla pound cake. Share it with your friends (or not). Taste Tosi's genius and go out into the world for more.

Liquid Cheesecake
Adapted, barely, from the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

225 g / 8 oz cream cheese
150 g / 3/4 cup sugar
6 g / 1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 g / 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
25 g / 2 tablespoons milk
1 egg

Heat oven to 300 F.
Put the cream cheese in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and mix on low speed for 2 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Add the sugar and mix for 1-2 minutes, until the sugar has been completely incorporated. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
Whisk together the cornstarch and salt in a medium bowl. Whisk in the milk in a slow, steady stream, then whisk in the egg until the slurry is homogenous.
With the mixer on medium-low, stream in the egg slurry. Paddle for 3-4 minutes until the mixture is smooth and loose. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
Line the bottom and sides of a 6x6 inch baking pan with aluminium foil and/or parchment paper. Pour the cheesecake batter into the pan, put the pan in the oven, and bake for 15 minutes. Gently shake the pan. The cheesecake should be firmer and more set toward the outer boundaries of the baking pan but still be jiggly and loose in the dead center. If the cheesecake is jiggly all over, give it five minutes more. And 5 minutes more if it needs it. If the cheesecake rises more than a 1/4 inch or begins to brown, take it out of the oven immediately.
Cool the cheesecake completely, to finish the baking process and allow the cheesecake to set. The final product will resemble a cheesecake, but it will be pipeable and pliable enough to easily spread or smear, while still having body and volume. Once cool, the cheesecake can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Cake was a must

Two nights ago, we had over our first dinner guests since the move to the new place. It felt good to finally have a proper dinner party, drinks, dessert, and all. Our guests were a couple I've mentioned before--the two who stayed with us in March for the philosophy department's prospectives' week and who came back to the new place day after day late this summer to help with painting. They've become good friends--loving food as much as we do probably didn't hurt. Between that first week in March when they showed up on our doorstep and now, we've shared a lot of food together--everything from cold lentils shovelled down between coats of paint to the best bacon ever (where else but at the Publican). They're always up for pretty much anything, especially if there's something delicious involved. We get one another out of our sleepy neighbourhood and into the city. They're good friends to have. So it was only appropriate that they were our first dinner guests.

Dinner was a warm, stewy collard cobbler, which you can read all about over here--perfect for the end of a wet and blustery day like the one we had, straight-up comfort food. Dessert was pretty much the opposite. You'll have to forgive me. I don't get nearly as many excuses (or have as much time) as I'd like to play with dessert, okay? And besides, this happened to be a belated-birthday dinner too. Cake was a must, the fancier, the better.

I went with something from a cookbook I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, Mission Street Food. Now, most cookbooks are not good reads, not even the good cookbooks. I don't mean this as a complaint--they are cookbooks, after all. But MSF is a great read. There's a pretty wild story behind the food (think: Bar Tartine cook and his grad-student girlfriend serving gourmet eats out of a borrowed taco truck and then, when that doesn't work out, out of a borrowed Chinese restaurant one night a week while the restaurant is still doing take-out), and the writing is hilarious. But, maybe, what I like best about it is how no-nonsense and matter-of-fact it is. Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz are not out to warm your heart. They tell it like it is, and often, it just happens to be funny. Even the instructive bits of the book make for good reading. Take this bit about sauces: "Armed with a powerful blender, you can make a lot of the components that separate fine-dining from Schmapplebee's or SchmeeGIFriday's. [...] If you start on a setting that's too high, your contents will splash and you'll have to wipe down the edges of the pitcher with a spatula, so be cool, but not too cool, because you're on the clock and there's no point in blending on Medium-Low for eight seconds while you build up the courage to shift to Max. After all, it's called the Vita-Prep 3, not Prince Wuss-o-Matic the Third." See, instructive and entertaining.

One more thing: MSF is not an everyday sort of cookbook--though Myint and Leibowitz were not exactly working in ideal conditions, the MSF team cooked serious restaurant food. They were practically minded (they even list an approximate cost for every recipe in the book) and couldn't quite do everything the "right" way, but they still managed to do some wild stuff. Peking duck, anyone? Mozzarella mousse? Triple-fried potatoes? A little out of my league for the moment, which was why I stuck with dessert.

Oh right, dessert--I made MSF's brown-butter financiers and served them with a rosemary-infused chocolate ganache and hazelnut-brittle pebbles. Sound complicated? Let me let you in on a little secret: it isn't really. There are three parts to it, none of which are particularly technically challenging. Block your time properly, have a little patience, and soon you'll find yourself left with just the plating to do. Make it pretty.

First component, the financier--if you've never had one before, a financier is a delicate but intensely nutty French cake. With all of the egg whites in it, it's kind of like sponge cake. You start by browning a good amount of butter over the stove. Meanwhile, you toast some almond flour. Two kinds of nutty goodness! Then it's just a matter of those egg whites, some cake flour, and some powdered sugar. Bake all of that in a 9 x 13 inch pan for a half hour, and you're set. Grab your favourite biscuit cutters and stamp out pretty shapes to your heart's delight. (If you eat the scraps while you're working, I won't tell.) By the way, Mission Street Food estimates that the financiers will run you about $8 for all the ingredients.

Second component, the hazelnut-brittle pebbles--making brittle is a pretty quick and painless process. You just need a bit of nerve (boiling sugar always scares me a little) and a candy thermometer. Have your ingredients measured and ready at hand to add to the mix--toasted hazelnuts (skins off, as best you can manage) and baking soda (for texture)--and don't walk away from the stove. The sugar can get hot fast. If you manage not to drop your wooden spoon on the floor and splatter bits of hot candy all over the place, you'll have done better than I did. Pour the brittle over a half-sheet, wait for it to cool, and break it into cute, bite-sized pieces. You'll have a lot of extra to snack on. Treat yourself.

Final component, the rosemary ganache--this one is really easy. When you're just about ready to impress your guests, drop a modest sprig of rosemary into a saucepan with some heavy cream, bring it to a boil, pour it over your best finely chopped chocolate, and stir. The ganache should be luxuriantly smooth and shiny. Don't forget to pick out the rosemary. Grab an angled spatula and smooth the ganache over your financiers.

Financiers? Check. Hazelnut brittle? Check. Rosemary-infused ganache? Check. Now, arrange all of it prettily on some clean plates and finish them off with some vanilla ice cream. And, if you want, you can get really fancy and make quenelles out of the ice cream. All you need are two spoons and some practice (there's a good instructive video here--one thing that it doesn't mention is that dipping your spoon in hot water really helps. If you're really good, like this guy, you don't even need two spoons.). And there you have it, delicious, fancy-pants dessert. Lick the ganache off your fingers and pat yourself on the back.

Brown-Butter Financiers

Adapted from Mission Street Food: Recipes and Ideas from an Improbable Restaurant

Note: About the almond flour. I blanched and ground my own raw almonds for the batter, and the cake turned out fine. I suspect, however, that it would have had an even more delicate crumb with proper almond flour. Grinding almonds into flour at home is always a bit tricky--you don't want to end up with almond butter. But if you can't be bothered with buying almond flour, blanch your raw almonds in boiling water for 1-2 minutes and drain. The skins will slide right off after that. Just give the almonds a squeeze. Let them air dry or pop them in the oven for a few minutes, then grind them as fine as you can manage in a food processor. Make ahead. As MSF says, the cake batter will keep just fine in the fridge for a couple of days. Leftover cake will be good for a day or so, tightly wrapped at room temperature.

2 sticks / 8 oz unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups / 5 oz almond flour (alternatively, try hazelnut or chestnut flour)
3/4 cup / 3.15 oz cake flour
2 1/4 cups / 9.75 oz powdered sugar
8 egg whites

Heat the butter in a saucepan over medium heat until it turns brown and nutty, stirring frequently. Set aside.
Place the almond flour on a parchment-lined tray and bake at 350 degrees F until golden, about 12 minutes.
Grease a 9 inch by 13 inch pan with butter and line with parchment.
Sift the cake flour and combine with the toasted almond flour.
Mix in a stand mixer with the whisk attachment for 30 seconds.
Add the egg whites and mix for a few minutes, until thoroughly incorporated.
Add the butter (including browned bits) and mix thoroughly. Then add the powdered sugar.
Once the sugar is incorporated, pour the batter into the lined baking pan.
Bake for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees F. The cake is done when it has developed a golden and pleasingly crusty exterior. A toothpick inserted in the middle should come out clean. Let cool.

Hazelnut Brittle
Adapted from Tina Ujlaki at Food & Wine

Note: If you're starting with raw hazelnuts, toast them at 340 degrees F for 15 minutes on a half-sheet. Then, collect them into a large sieve and, using a clean dish towel, roll them against the surface of the sieve to remove their skins. This never works perfectly, so don't obsess about it.

1 cup / 6.85 oz sugar
1/4 / 2 oz cup water
4 tablespoons / 2 oz unsalted butter
2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons / 2 oz light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cups / 6 oz toasted hazelnuts, skins removed, roughly chopped
Fleur de sel or crushed Maldon sea salt

Generously butter a half-sheet.
In a large saucepan, combine the sugar, water, butter and corn syrup and bring to a boil. Cook over moderately high heat, stirring occasionally, until the caramel is light brown and registers 300° on a candy thermometer, about 10 minutes.
Remove from the heat and carefully stir in the baking soda. The mixture will bubble. Stir in the nuts, then immediately scrape the brittle onto the buttered half-sheet. Using the back of a silicone spatula, spread the brittle into a thin, even layer. Sprinkle with salt.
Let cool completely, about 30 minutes. Break the brittle into large shards. Stored in an airtight container at room temperature, the brittle will keep for a month.

Rosemary Dark-Chocolate Ganache

Note: Make the ganache at the very last minute before you need it. If for whatever reason you do find yourself with leftover ganache, you can keep it covered in the fridge and reheat it the next day. Gently melt in a heat-proof bowl over simmering water. If the ganache starts breaking, you've applied too much heat--but don't worry, just whisk it vigorously, and it should come back together.

3 oz good bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
2.75 oz heavy cream
1 modest sprig of rosemary

Place the chocolate in a medium heat-proof bowl.
Bring the rosemary and cream to a boil in a small saucepan over medium heat. Pour the cream over the chocolate and stir until the ganache is smooth and glossy. Remove the rosemary sprig.

Final Notes on Assembly, Etc. Cake. Cut the cake however you'd like. I thought concentric discs would be fun, so I took out my biscuit cutters. Think of it as sculpture. Stack your financiers. Lean them against one another. You've got a lot of cake, so go crazy. MSF says that you can get 12 servings out of the cake, but I think it really depends on how you want to present it. I'd say that you can probably get six 8-inch discs out of it, plus an assortment of smaller ones. Save the scraps for snacking on. They're tasty. Brittle. Make the brittle ahead of time and feel good about yourself. It will keep for up to a month. For plating, break it into small, bite-size pieces and scatter those. Ganache. Spread a thin layer of ganache on some of the financiers before serving, just enough to cover them. You don't want to overwhelm everything with chocolate.

Finish with a few rosemary needles as garnish. Serve with vanilla ice cream. Make quenelles, if you like.

Variations: MSF notes that the financiers play well with most things, especially fruit. They, for example, suggest blueberries, pine-nut brittle, mint leaves, and mint ice cream. I think vanilla poached pears would do it for me at this time of the year. This cake is versatile.

A Farewell to Oranges

People around here tell me that this city doesn't really do spring. In these in-between months, they say, it can't really make up its mind about just what season it is. The weather flip-flops between extremes--we'll get warm, sun-drenched days that remind us of what summer is like, only to have winter howl in again and dust us all with snow. In June, I'm told, summer finally sets in, but until then, it's anyone's guess what the coming days will bring. So, given the irresoluteness of seasons here, I hope that you'll forgive me one last wintry cake. I'm longing for rhubarb and strawberries with the rest of you, but for now, consider joining me in giving the waning season's oranges one last hurrah.

Now, I know that some of you might think that citrus olive-oil cakes have already had their day and that we all ought to move on to better, or at least different, things, but I think that there's something special about the combination of orange and olive oil. They make a good pair--both fruity, both bitter, but each in its own way--and especially in this particular cake. You start it off with nearly the whole orange--two of them, actually, zest, pith, membranes, and all. That's what drew me to the recipe. Even after a bit of boiling, I thought, the orange would lend this cake just a hint of bitterness--and it does. Together, with the olive oil and a dusting of coarse sea salt, it makes for a wonderfully aromatic, complex, and silky cake.

But my favourite part about it, I have to admit, is how well it keeps. Sometimes, my boyfriend and I don't feel like sharing with others. I'll bake a cake one afternoon, and we'll just keep it to ourselves--have a slice after dinner, maybe sneak one for breakfast, another with an afternoon espresso...over the next few days or for however long it lasts. This cake is perfect for our little habit. It doesn't dry out and even gets a bit better as the sea salt melds with everything else. As good a way as any for the last oranges of the season to go.

Orange-scented Olive-oil Cake
Adapted (barely) from the May 2010 issue of Saveur

2 oranges, preferably organic
6.85 oz  / 1 cup + 9.2 oz / 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
unsalted butter, for greasing
10.6 oz / 2 1/2 cups flour, plus more for the pan
0.3 oz / 2 teaspoons baking powder
0.25 oz / 1 teaspoon baking soda
0.05 oz / 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 eggs
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 oz / 2 tablespoons fresh orange juice (about half an orange's worth)
0.5 oz / 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar
coarse sea salt, for garnish

1. Trim about 1/2" from the tops and bottoms of the oranges; quarter oranges lengthwise. Bring 6 cups of water to a boil in a 4-qt. saucepan, add oranges. Bring water back to a boil; drain. Repeat boiling process twice more with fresh water. Put oranges, 1 cup sugar, and 4 cups water into the same saucepan over medium-high heat. Cook, stirring often, until sugar dissolves and orange rind can be easily pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes. Remove pan from heat and let cool to room temperature.
2. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 10" round cake pan (or a 9" spring-form pan, like I did) with butter and dust with flour; line pan bottom with parchment paper cut to fit. Set pan aside. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl and set aside. Remove orange quarters from syrup, remove and discard any seeds, and put oranges into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until oranges form a chunky puree, 10-12 pulses. Add remaining sugar, reserved flour mixture, vanilla, and eggs and process until incorporated, about 2 minutes. Add olive oil; process until combined. Pour batter into prepared pan, bake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 40-45 minutes (or between 60 and 70 minutes, if using a 9" spring-form pan). Let cool for 30 minutes.
3. In a small bowl, whisk orange juice and confectioners' sugar to make a thin glaze. Remove cake from pan and transfer to a cooling rack for glazing. Using a pastry brush, brush orange glaze over top and sides of cake; let cool completely. Garnish cake with salt.

Serves 10-12.

A Belated Birthday

Last week, one of my friends neglected to tell anyone that it was his birthday until it had all but passed and so spent it at home alone. We remedied this later in the week by taking him out to Karyn's on Green, where he could eat his vegan heart out. And though I will never be so virtuous a person as to be able to give up such things as sauteing my mushrooms in butter or topping my greens with a poached egg, I ate with relish that night. The "chicken legs," especially, were a work of genius. Most vegetarian meat substitutes lack something texturally--they're...spongy at best. But these legs were something to really sink one's teeth into and, even two days later as leftovers, were great--they even had the sort of satisfying fattiness to them that you'd expect from a good chicken leg. All of us left the restaurant overstuffed and content.

And if that were not enough, having just fantasized about baking towering birthday cakes draped in snowy frosting earlier that week--and because, of course, I hold my friends dear--I baked a (belated) birthday cake the next day to coincide with our weekly listening party. And so we spent Saturday evening digging into (not quite vegan) maple birthday cake with the strange and lovely croonings of Joanna Newsom's Ys flooding the room.

This cake, kind of like Joanna Newsom, is not for the faint of heart. It's not the buttercream-frosted vanilla cake from your childhood birthday parties, anyway. It has such grown-up things in it as maple syrup (a cup's worth!) and whole-wheat pastry flour, which make the cake's sweetness warm, dark, and deep. And to offset the maple intensity is a crown of meyer-lemon frosting, adding just enough brightness to make it all come together. This is exactly the sort of cake you want on a cold, dark January night, whether or not it's your birthday. (Apologies for the absence of shots of the cake's insides--we polished it off too quickly.)

(Vegan) Maple Birthday Cake with Meyer-Lemon Frosting
Cake base adapted (barely) from Peter Berley's Modern Vegetarian Kitchen

Note: This cake can be made vegan, just follow the substitutions below. For some reason or another, this cake tends to fall a little in the centre--I will have to do so more testing in the kitchen to get this worked out. However, this is an easy fix: just level off the top of the cake with a serrated knife (it doesn't have to be perfect) and cover it all up with the frosting. One last thing--the recipe for frosting below doesn't quite make enough to fully cover the cake (as you can see), so you'll have to scale up, probably by 1.5, if you don't want a bit of cake peeking out from underneath. Personally, I think it looks just fine this way.

For the cake:
1 1/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2/3 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup pure maple syrup
2/3 cup water or 2 eggs + 3 tablespoons water
1/3 cup pure olive oil or melted butter
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a nine-inch springform pan and dust with all-purpose flour.
In a mixing bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, eggs (if using), water, olive oil/butter, vinegar, and vanilla. Add the wet mixture to the dry and stir until just combined, taking care not to overmix.
Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Set the cake pan on a rack to cool.

For the frosting:
1 stick of butter or 8 tablespoons of a vegan substitute like Earth Balance (4 oz), cut into one-inch pieces if using butter
1 1/2 cups of confectioners' sugar (4.5 oz)
1/2 teaspoon Meyer lemon juice
zest of one Meyer lemon

Cream butter and sugar together until smooth. Add zest and juice to combine.

Assembly:

Heap frosting on top of the cooled cake and spread into an even layer with an off-set spatula. Add candles, light them, and get ready to bellow out 'Happy Birthday'.

Sweetness never suits me

At the ripe old age of twenty-three, I find myself increasingly unable to enjoy particularly sugary things--and with seventeen and a half ounces of sugar having gone into the batch, these brownies were definitely far too much for me after the first few nibbles. Though they are certainly not your run-of-the-mill, grade-school-bake-sale brownies with their gooey pockets of bittersweet chocolatey goodness, satisfying chew, and shiny, crackly tops, for all that, they are just too sweet. Achingly sweet. (And, though the vegetable oil called for is what makes them so wonderfully chewy, no amount of Scharffen Berger disguises that slick, oily taste that only vegetable oil imparts.)

For what it's worth, Cook's Illustrated, I salute your efforts, but I'll leave these brownies to those youngsters and their bake sales from now on.

A Cake in Progress

This cake was promising--tender, barely sweet, apple-studded, and with just the right amount of rustic, wholesome, whole-grained goodness--but for a reason or two that I just can't put my finger on, I just wasn't quite happy with it. It might be that it wasn't quite rich enough or that it could have been more moist, and it's most likely that this was my fault and not Kim Boyce's. I'll have to try this again with full-fat yogurt, like the recipe calls for, and not whatever happens to be in the fridge (in this case, 2% m.f.), and hopefully I'll be more comfortable with this new-(very)-old oven by then. And maybe a dash of nutmeg in addition to the cinnamon and ground ginger wouldn't hurt either. I'm convinced that with a few tweaks this cake could be perfect with a cup of tea on one of these lovely fall afternoons of late.