Those first few minutes were glorious

Common sense recommends that you not fry doughnuts in your kitchen when it's 82 degrees F out or when you're planning to attend a rather technical philosophy talk in a few hours or when the only ventilation in your kitchen is an open window. It also recommends that you not down four or five such doughnuts (as modestly sized as they might be) within seconds of one another. But some considerations tend to drown out that sober, well-meaning voice in your head--for example: grapefruit-jelly doughnuts! Just the idea of them--it's like bells ringing in your head. It chimes and crashes 'til you wake up one day thinking, "Common sense--what's that?" and then find yourself juicing grapefruits in the kitchen.

So it was under the spell of these doughnuts that a few friends and I gathered in my sweltering, cramped kitchen this past week, dropping bits of brioche dough into hot, shimmering oil to have them sizzle, puff, and blister golden. It got pretty sticky and greasy in there, but that didn't matter to us. Warm doughnuts filled with grapefruit jelly--the idea kept us going.

And when we were through, those first few minutes were glorious. We stood there together in the thick air of the kitchen, just eating. We reached for one doughnut, then another, then another. Whatever sense we had had left us. We blissfully gorged ourselves. It was not, perhaps, our finest moment. Five or six doughnuts in, we started to feel the grease on our fingertips, the sugar going to our heads, and had to stop ourselves. But I maintain that those first few minutes were glorious. The aftermath--not so much. Octavian and I, anyway, were headache-stricken and drowsy for the remainder of the day. Doughnut coma is a phrase that comes to mind.

But I don't mean to discourage you from making your own doughnuts at home. It's a good way to spend an afternoon with friends (you should just round up more than I managed to to help you with the eating), and these doughnuts are really good. Make a party of it. Your friends will thank you.

That said, making these doughnuts in particular does require a bit of planning ahead and a few extra hands (remember those friends?). It's easiest, I think, to spread the work over two days. On the first day, you should put together the brioche dough. This is my favourite part. You start by mixing together a basic yeasted dough. Then you add butter, a lot of butter, to the dough, bit by bit, until it's satiny and yielding. This process takes a while, and you may find it tedious, but I am all for the waltz of dough and butter whirling around the bowl of my stand mixer. I find it mesmerizing.

Brioche dough is not typically what you'd use for jelly doughnuts. By weight, the butter-to-flour ratio in brioche ranges from 1:2 to 4:5, which makes the dough far richer than what you find in most doughnuts. But this, I think, makes these doughnuts all the better--airy, delicate, meltingly tender. (I wouldn't have thought to do this myself. I came across the idea in Tartine Bread.) And the grapefruit jelly does help tame some of that richness.

You should make the jelly on the first day too, if not beforehand. It's a cinch and can be made well in advance (I made mine several weeks ago, when it was still legitimately grapefruit season)--just transfer it to a clean jar and store it in the freezer until you need it.

On the second day, gather your friends and put them to work (what else are friends for?). You should at least have one other person on hand. You'll have a much easier time with the deep-frying that way--maintaining the oil temperature, keeping track of the time, and turning the doughnuts in the oil are a lot for one person to do, given how quickly the doughnuts fry. And if you have more friends willing to help, all the better. Make yourselves a little assembly line. You'll definitely need a second set of hands when filling the doughnuts. (Try holding a pastry bag full of jelly and piercing a doughnut with the filling tip--no good can come of it.)

So, these doughnuts do call for a good deal of effort, and many of them will disappear into your friends' mouths seconds after you've put your pastry bag down. But I can think few better things to do with friends when you've got an afternoon.

Grapefruit Jelly Doughnuts

Adapted from the December 2011 Bon Appétit and Tartine Bread
Note: About the grapefruit jelly. The first time I cooked the jelly, it didn't set. I failed to note the importance of using a large saucepan. If this happens to you, just return the mixture to a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Let it boil for 3-4 minutes and pour it back into the shallow dish. You do not need to let the jelly reach 220 F while on the stove--it will set too hard if it reaches this temperature. If the jelly has set too hard, return it to a saucepan and cook over medium heat. Add up to 1/2 cup more of fresh grapefruit juice and whisk to incorporate. Bring it to a vigorous boil and then pour it back into the shallow dish to cool and set. And if you find yourself with extra jelly, it's wonderful on toast. About the brioche dough. I used Tartine Bread's brioche recipe for my doughnuts, which involves using sourdough starter and poolish for leavening. I'm pretty confident, however, that just about any brioche dough with a similar butter-to-flour ratio, 1:2, will produce good results. I like this Dorie Greenspan recipe. You might also consider using this brioche dough (but without all of the savouries, of course). Or, if you have Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice, you could also use his recipe for "middle-class" brioche. Whichever recipe you settle on, it will most certainly make more dough than you'll want for doughnuts. Scale the recipe and portion out the dough so that you have just as much as you need or bake a loaf of brioche with the extra like I did. Follow your chosen recipe's directions up to and including bulk fermentation (the first rise) and then chill the dough (for up to a day) until you're ready to follow the procedure below. About the safflower oil. Depending on the size of the pot in which you're deep-frying, you may need up to 1 quart of oil. Once you've finished the frying, you can let the oil cool and then filter it through a fine-mesh sieve or a coffee filter to get at least one more use out of it. Store it in the fridge until then.

GRAPEFRUIT JELLY

2 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups fresh grapefruit juice (from about two and a half grapefruits)

1/4 cup liquid pectin

1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

DOUGHNUTS

700 g brioche dough, chilled (see note above)

Safflower oil for deep-frying

Powdered sugar for dusting

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT

Long-handled slotted spoon

Deep-fry/candy thermometer

Stand mixer

1 1/2-inch biscuit cutter

Pastry bag fitted with a Bismarck tip (no. 230)

Make the grapefruit jelly. Combine the sugar, grapefruit juice, and pectin in a large saucepan (the mixture tends to foam as it heats up--a larger saucepan will allow it to properly boil and release enough of its water content to set into a jelly). Scrape in the seeds from the vanilla bean and add the pod. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Increase the heat to high and whisk until mixture boils vigorously, about 6 minutes. Pour mixture into a shallow, heat-proof dish. Remove the vanilla bean pod. Let cool completely at room temperature. Cover and chill until set, at least 2 hours. The jelly should have a consistency similar to preserves--thick enough to cling to the end of a spoon. The jelly can be made up to a week in advance (or earlier if stored in the freezer in a clean jar).

Shape the doughnuts about 2 hours before serving. Lightly flour the dough and the work surface. There are two options for shaping the dough. (i) divide the dough into 3 equal portions and roll each portion into a cylinder about a 1/2 inch in diameter. If the dough feels as if it will not stretch further, let it rest for 10 minutes and continue rolling. Transfer the dough to a cutting board and set in a draft-free place or cover with a kitchen towel. Let rise until the dough looks soft and inflated, 1 to 2 hours. Cut the dough into on the diagonal into pieces about 2 inches long or as you prefer and then place near the stove. (ii) Roll the dough out to a thickness of 1/2 inch. Cut circles out the dough with a biscuit cutter. Transfer the circles to two lightly floured half-sheets and set in a draft-free place or cover with a kitchen towel. Let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours. Place near the stove.

Pour oil into a heavy, high-sided pan to a depth of 2 to 3 inches. Heat the oil over medium-high heat until it registers 375 degrees F on a deep-frying thermometer.

When deep-frying it's best to set up your prep area like an assembly line so you can work safely and efficiently. Set a rack near the stove and under it place a layer or two of papers towels.

Carefully slip four pieces of dough into the hot oil and fry until golden brown, about 1 minute. Using the slotted spoon, turn the dough and fry until brown on the second side, about 1 minute.

Carefully remove the doughnuts from the oil and transfer to the wire rack. Fry the remaining pieces of dough, checking the temperature of the oil intermittently. If necessary, allow a couple of minutes for the oil to return to 375 degrees F in between batches.

Transfer the grapefruit jelly to a pastry bag fitted with a Bismarck tip. Filling the doughnuts is a two-person job--you need one set of hands to hold the pastry bag upright and to pipe out the jelly and another set of hands to insert the Bismarck tip into the doughnuts. A squeeze bottle fitted with a 1/4-tip would also work. Fill each doughnut with about a 1 teaspoon of jelly. 

Dust the doughnuts with powdered sugar and serve immediately.

Makes 40-50 two-bite doughnuts.

For the Big Day

I wasn't planning on making macarons this past weekend. But then a good friend of mine called on Friday morning and asked apologetically if I could make a little dessert for his wedding reception. The wedding, I knew, was taking place on Sunday, just two days from then. Over the phone, I could here the chaotic clanging of pots and sheet pans. Clearly, the happy couple already had their hands full. I assured him that I'd have something put together for then and wished him luck.

Macarons seemed fitting for the occasion. When the couple had first gotten together, Octavian and I had had them over for dinner, and we finished the meal with a few Hermé macarons in the sweltering summer heat. And marriage--well, that seemed another beginning of sorts, so I set about separating some eggs and blanching some almonds.

Given that I only had a day or so, there was no time to suss out offerings at the farmers' market. I had to make do with what I already had at hand. Being April, that meant winter apples, butter, sugar, and cream--all that you really need to make Pierre Hermé's macarons frivolité.
And these macarons might just be my favourite yet. There are two parts to their filling: apples diced into tiny gems and then cooked gently in the oven and a deep, dark salted-butter caramel chilled and then whipped up cloud-like with butter. Together in the macarons, the effect is something like apple tarte tatin made fleeting, ethereal--there and then gone before you know it.

The wedding, if you're curious, went beautifully. I got a little teary-eyed seeing the two of them at the altar. They were perfect. And afterwards, there were grapefruit mimosas, small savoury bites, marzipan, zserbó szelet, macarons, and tons of cake. The macarons were a hit with the guests. They were being snapped up in kitchen even before the desserts had been laid out. The bride admitted later that she'd secretly hoped that I would bring macarons. I was glad to have done my little part for the big day.

Macarons Frivolité 
Adapted from Pierre Hermé's Macaron
NOTE: For more general macaron advice, see this post. Equipment. You'll need at least two heavy-duty half-sheets to bake the shells. You can bake them in two batches, about 36 shells per sheet--Italian meringue is stable enough to stand for an hour or longer. You do, however, need to double up on half-sheets when you bake the shells--otherwise, the shells will crack during or after baking. The second half-sheet insulates the macarons from the oven's heat. (If you double the recipe as I did, the going is easier with three half-sheets on hand.) You'll also need a pastry bag and a no. 11 tip for piping the shells and filling, a candy thermometer for the meringue and caramel, and a mixer for the meringue and the buttercream. Aged egg whites. Egg whites that have been left in the fridge for 5-7 days, covered with plastic wrap with a few holes poked, will be easier to whip up for the Italian meringue. This allows some of their moisture to evaporate and their proteins to relax. Baking times. Hermé has you bake the shells for 12 minutes, but the time will vary depending on your oven. I've found that at 14 minutes, the feet on my macarons are better formed, and the shells no longer stick to the parchment on removal. Apples. You need at least 144 apple cubes, give or take, if you're making 36 macarons and putting 4 apple cubes in each. From Hermé's directions, I wasn't really clear on what to look for to determine whether the apples were ready. I baked mine for about an hour and 25 minutes, basically until the heat had taken away their raw edge. At this point, they're sort of pale and a little spongy. Not very pretty, but not to worry, no one will really see them. Colour. Before baking, my macaron shells were more or less the colour of mustard. Baking improved their colour. Even so, I might just skip out on the yellow food colouring all together next time. Trablit. Trablit is a French coffee extract. I don't know how it compares to more common coffee extracts from personal experience, but I'm sure that Hermé and other bakers favour Trablit because it's really just super-concentrated espresso with a little added sugar. (As a result, you don't need to worry about very much extra liquid interfering with the other ingredients.) In the macarons, the coffee flavour isn't very pronounced--though it's certainly there if you try the shells on their own. I can't really say quite what it added to the macarons overall. But I found a reasonably priced bottle of Trablit here at L'Epicerie. Buttercream. I wouldn't recommend making the buttercream on a very hot day. The butter might melt out of it. If you're worried about it, pop it in the freezer for 5 or 10 minutes before proceeding. But don't let it harden--otherwise, your piping won't be very pretty. The consistency of the buttercream should be airy and mousse-like. You may find yourself with leftover filling. Let your imagination run wild.
(These aren't the prettiest macarons I've ever made. I think my problem is a combination of letting the Italian meringue get too stiff and not mixing the meringue with the almond mixture thoroughly enough. The macaron batter holds its shape too well, which leaves the shells with little tails from piping. I'm a little out of practice.)

OVEN-DRIED APPLES
2-3 granny smith apples (or any other tart, baking apple)
15 g lemon juice
10 g granulated sugar

MACARON SHELLS
150 g powdered almonds
150 grams powdered sugar
55 g aged egg whites
7.5 g yolk-yellow food colouring
7.5 g Trablit coffee extract
+
150 g granulated sugar
37 g water
55 g aged egg whites

TO FINISH
Coarse-grain sugar

CARAMEL BUTTERCREAM
150 g granulated sugar
167 g heavy cream
33 g butter
2 big pinches of good-quality sea salt
145 g unsalted butter, softened

The night before, prepare the oven-dried apples. Peel and core the apples. Cut into 8 mm cubes and toss in the lemon juice as you go. Coat with the sugar.
Preheat the oven to 90 degrees C / 194 degrees F. Spread the apple pieces over a parchment-lined half-sheet in an even layer. Slide them into the oven and let them dehydrate for about an hour, depending on the variety of apple. The cubes should look somewhat dry when they're ready. Leave them at room temperature until the next day.
The next day, prepare the macaron shells. Sift the powdered sugar with the almonds. Mix the food colouring with one of the 55 g portions of egg whites. Add the egg mixture to the sugar and almonds without mixing.
Bring the sugar and water to a boil. When the syrup reaches 99 degrees C / 210 degrees F, begin whipping the second 55 g portion of egg whites. When the syrup reaches 118 degrees C / 244 degrees F, slowly pour the syrup into the whites, letting the syrup run down the sides of the bowl so that it doesn't splatter. The whites should have barely formed soft peaks at this point. Continue whipping the whites on high speed for one more minute. Reduce the speed of the mixer to medium and continue whipping the whites for about 2 minutes. The whites are ready when they've cooled to 50 degrees C / 122 degrees F. Add the whites to the powdered almond mixture and fold together quickly, in as few strokes as possible. The batter is of the right consistency when it falls off the end of the spatula in a thick ribbon. Put the macaron batter in a pastry bag fitted with a no. 11 tip.
Pipe shells around 3.5 cm in diameter, spaced at least 2 cm apart on a parchment-lined half-sheet (doubled with another half-sheet for insulation). Let the shells stand for 30 minutes. Partway through, sprinkle each shell with a pinch of coarse-grain sugar.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C / 356 degrees F. Slide the macaron shells into the oven. Bake for 12-14 minutes, opening the oven door quickly twice towards the end of this time. Let the shells cool for at least 30 minutes before lifting them from the parchment.
Prepare the caramel buttercream. Bring the heavy cream to a boil. Pour about 50 g of sugar into the bottom of a medium saucepan. Let it melt over medium heat. Then add 50 g more sugar and do the same. Repeat with the final 50 g of sugar. Let the sugar caramelize until it is dark amber.
Remove from heat. Minding the hot caramel, add the 33 g of butter. It will spatter and foam. Stir with a spatula and then pour in the cream in a few rounds, stirring until incorporated. Return the caramel to the flame and heat it until it reaches 108 degrees C / 226 degrees F. Pour it into a wide dish. Cover the caramel with plastic wrap, touching the wrap to the surface of the caramel. Leave in the refrigerator until cold.
Place the softened butter in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and whip the butter for 8 minutes until airy. Add the cooled caramel in a few rounds and whip with the butter until uniform. Work quickly at this point. Put the buttercream into a pastry bag fitted with a no. 11 tip. Pipe a generous amount of buttercream onto half of the macaron shells. Gently press 4 or 5 apple cubes into the buttercream. Top with the remaining shells. Leave the macarons in the refrigerator 24 hours. Let stand at least 20 minutes at room temperature before serving.
Makes about 36 macarons.

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. 

You'll be in luck

I think I'll always be a city girl. But sometimes, I do dream of living somewhere with room enough for a backyard full of swishing collards and an old lemon tree heavy with more fruit than I'd know what to do with. Maybe I'd even have a few chickens.

Right now, though, I'm happy enough to pretend. And last weekend, that wasn't too difficult to pull off. Just down the street, the last of the season's Meyer lemons were going for sixty-five cents a pound, so, naturally, I carted as many home as I could manage. And then I had more lemons than I knew what to do with.

I considered making my favourite lemon curd--my standby when Meyer lemons are in season--but I was afraid that with so many lemons that much curd would spoil before Octavian and I could possibly eat it all, as much as we love the stuff. So I decided to take things in an entirely different direction and preserve the lemons.

Preserved lemons are lemons that have been packed in a jar with salt and their own juices and left out to soften for a few days or weeks (depending on the specifics of the process). After that, with all that salt and acid, the lemons will keep in their jar refrigerated for about a year. So when you're longing for sunny, mouth-puckering citrus in high summer, you'll be in luck.

I was introduced to preserved lemons for the first time at Prune in New York City. They came diced--bright, tart little gems--studding a creamy, ricotta-slathered tartine. It was one of those simple but incredible lunches--nothing fancy, just beautiful ingredients thoughtfully put to use. I've been thinking about preserved lemons and summer-vegetable tartines ever since.

You should think of these lemons as a savoury seasoning that will lend salty, lemony-bright notes to your dishes. So far in my kitchen, they've made their way into a lunch of marinated sardines and buttered bread. And I'm thinking that they'll do wonders in parchment-roasted asparagus or stirred into quinoa or rubbed into a chicken awaiting the oven...and maybe even in a cocktail or two. An abundance of lemons, all through the summer! For now, at least, I'm good without a lemon tree.

Moroccan-Style Preserved Lemons
Adapted from Paula Wolfert via Epicurious

Note: the number of lemons you need will really depend on their size. The Meyers I had were rather smallish, so I needed 22 in all to fill up my jar and cover the lemons with juice.

6-8 organic Meyer lemons + 5-15 additional Meyer lemons for their juice
150 g / 2/3 cup fine sea salt or kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil

Blanch the lemons in boiling water for 5 minutes, then drain. This step hastens the softening of the lemons. When cool enough to handle, cut each lemon into 8 wedges, discarding seeds. Toss the lemons with salt in a bowl, then pack the lemons, along with their salt, tightly into a clean 1-quart jar.

Squeeze enough juice from the additional lemons to cover the salted lemons. The lemons may float a little, but this is okay--you should just turn the jar upside down and let it rest that way occasionally while the lemons are curing. Seal the jar and let the lemons stand at room temperature, shaking gently or turning once a day, for 5 days.

Add the oil to the jar and refrigerate. The lemons will keep chilled for up to a year. To use, remove flesh and discard. No need to rinse the lemons.

I made a beeline

I don't often get nostalgic about my undergraduate days. I'll admit it--I was an awkward, geeky kid coming out of high school. I was nowhere near ready for the droves of rowdy frat-boy types, the 11 am beer pong, the near constant party going on somewhere down the hall. This, of course, wasn't all there was to college, but when I lived in a dorm it seemed like it, and I was miserable. It took me a long while to find my place.

But one of the things I do remember fondly about those days (once I found a real place to live) is the splendid bakery downtown, Pan Chancho. Octavian and I would often wander in on Sunday afternoons to admire the rows of burnished sourdough boules and enjoy a cup of soup. I was doing most of our baking at home at the time, but there were a few things we always found hard to resist taking with us, like a couple of the savoury brioches. They were our favourite--lofty, buttery, herb-flecked--and just perfect with a sharp, lemony salad on a warm day. When it came time to move, I knew I'd miss them. 

And clearly, I still haven't stopped thinking about those brioches. When Octavian and I were visiting this past December and popped into Pan Chancho, I made a beeline for the cookbooks. The bakery had published a collection of its recipes a few years ago, including one for the savoury brioches. I was determined to have those brioches, wherever I happened to be.

Getting the recipe to work for me took some tinkering. The translation from professional bakery to home kitchen has got to be a little tricky. So, while the first attempt was a little disappointing, the second--when I did what made the most sense to me--turned out brioches just as we remembered them--gleaming, golden, buttery, and tender.

If there's anything challenging about making brioches à tête like these (tête is just French for head), it's in the shaping. You want to make each round of dough as smooth and uniformly round as possible, and you want to place each tête dead-centre on top of its round. (You also don't want to handle the dough for too long and have the butter melt out on you.) Imperfections will be obvious once the brioches hit oven and start rising. Misaligned and unevenly shaped têtes will bake off-centre. (You can see from my photos that I haven't quite mastered the technique!) It just takes a little practice, and even if your brioches are a bit wonky looking, I don't see anyone complaining once they've taken a bite or two.

I planned to have the brioches with a modest soup over a few lunches, but I never quite got around to making any soup before all of the brioches disappeared. (We gave some away...I didn't eat all of them!) But I can say that these brioches are not out of place at breakfast and definitely make for an outstanding afternoon snack. I can even see them taking the place of dinner rolls if anyone wants to have me over for something that needs a little mopping up.

Savoury Brioche
Adapted, somewhat liberally, from The Pan Chancho Cookbook

Note: Mixing. It might be possible to mix the dough by hand, but I wouldn't recommend it. It will be difficult to pull the dough together, I think, and using your hands to knead the dough will warm the butter too much. Shaping. It takes a bit of practice to get the technique down for shaping the brioches. Alternatively, you can use the method that Dorie Greenspan uses here for bubble-top brioches, which is more forgiving.

375-500 g / 3-4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 sticks / 225 g unsalted butter, soft but still cool
5 large eggs
1 tablespoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon fresh Italian parsley, finely chopped
1 teaspoon fresh sage, finely chopped
2 teaspoons fresh chives, finely chopped
2 teaspoons rosemary, finely chopped
1 scallion, thinly sliced
60 g sharp cheddar, grated (about a 1/2 cup)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 large egg + 1 teaspoon water

Sift 375 g / 3 cups flour, the salt, and the sugar together. In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter. Paddle in three of the eggs and scrape down the bowl. Incorporate the flour mixture at low speed, 1 cup at a time, and scrape down the bowl. Paddle in the remaining eggs at medium speed, one at a time. Add in the yeast and beat for 1-2 minutes. The dough should have pulled away from the sides the bowl at this point. If it's too wet and hasn't, mix in as much of the remaining flour as necessary on low. 

Re-fit the stand mixer with the dough hook and knead the dough at medium-low speed for about 5 minutes. Knead in the herbs, cheese, and pepper at low speed. The dough should be smooth and elastic enough to pass the windowpane test. Press it into an even rectangle and wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 6 hours or overnight to firm up the butter.

Butter 16 of the cups in two muffin tins or 16 small brioche moulds if you have them. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface. Divide into 16 equal pieces, about 65-70 g each. Cut a bit of dough off each piece, about 1/5 of the total, for the tête. You don't want the tête too small, or it will dry out while baking. 

Working quickly, shape all 32 pieces into rounds--cup your hands around each and press the edges of your palms into the edges of the dough and pull them in and towards the work surface, rotating the dough and repeating this motion until you have a smooth, even round; pinch the round from the bottom to tighten it. Place the large rounds into the greased muffin cups seam-side down. Press a well 3/4 of an inch deep into the centre of each round. Gently press a tête into each well. Cover with a damp tea towel and let rise for about 90 minutes or until doubled in size. The brioches should pretty much fill the muffin cups, their têtes clearing the tin. 

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Beat the remaining egg with the water for egg wash and brush the brioche. Bake for 18-20 minutes. The brioche should be golden and their têtes a deep mahogany. Unmould immediately and cool on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes. The brioche are best eaten the day they're baked but will keep for another day in a zip-top bag.

Makes 16 brioches.

With abandon

Writing term papers is not a pretty affair--at least in my case. The dishes pile up. I don't bother with my hair. I grimace a lot. So, I'll have to be brief today.

A few weeks ago, I finally kneaded together a batch of Milk Bar "mother" dough and baked up a few bagel bombs to share with the other sleepy-eyed folks in my early-morning political philosophy seminar. The bagel bomb is Christina Tosi's nod to the New York bagel, sesame seeds, dried onions, garlic powder, and all. Bite into one and you'll get the "bomb" bit--think bacon-scallion cream-cheese explosion. I think they went over pretty well with the class. I might have seen a person or two reaching for a second, maybe even a third bomb...but I won't mention any names.

Munching on bagel bombs definitely helped the morning along, but, really, I still think that I got the best of it while making them earlier that week. That bacon-scallion cream cheese? Totally amazing and dead easy to make too. I'll admit to having had a taste or two and maybe to licking the stand-mixer paddle clean. Hey--I get to when I'm doing the baking, right?

But in all seriousness, I have to say that after its spell in the oven, the cream cheese tucked into each bomb isn't nearly as good. The scallions lose their pluck. The cream cheese gets a little curdled. Next time around, I think I might just try my hand at some proper bagels and paddle together this cream cheese to mound on top. If you ate sour-cream-and-onion chips with abandon as a kid like I did, this is your cream cheese.

Bacon-scallion Cream Cheese
Adapted from the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

50 g / 1 3/4 oz bacon, the smokier the better
200 g / 7 oz cream cheese
2 g scallion greens, thinly sliced (about 2-3 scallions' worth)
5 g / 1 teaspoon sugar
2 g / 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

Cook the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until it's auburn brown and crunchy. Remove it from the pan and chop it into small pieces; reserve it and, separately, the rendered bacon fat.
Put the cream cheese in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream it on medium speed. Pour in the reserved bacon fat and paddle to combine. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the chopped bacon, scallions, sugar, and salt and paddle briefly to incorporate.

One last thing: to help out those of you who already have the relevant cookbook and who might want to tackle a project I've posted about, I'm going to be adding a few technical notes to the end of my project posts from now on. I hope some of you out there will find them helpful!

Technical Notes for Milk Bar's Bagel Bombs

• Oven temperature: the recipe directs you to bake these at 325 degrees F, but even when I baked the bombs at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, I wasn't getting any colour on them. I tweeted Tosi about it (it's a thing she does every Friday), and she suggested that I give them a minute or two on low under the broiler. It did the trick.
• Yeast: the "Ingredients" section at the beginning of the Milk Bar cookbook says to use active-dry yeast, but I'm pretty confident that you should be using instant yeast for the mother dough. First of all, the active-dry stuff won't break down unless you dissolve it in liquid. Second, the quantity of yeast and the time allotted for proofing are more appropriate for instant.
• Dough: the mother dough is probably a little wetter than the average bread dough--just keep your hands floured.

Macaroni, matrimony, and cheese

It came out in conversation a few months ago that my friend Ben doesn't like macaroni and cheese. Doesn't like macaroni and cheese! I didn't think that that was humanly possible--at least for someone who'd grown up in this country. Worse yet, he admitted, his fiancée loves mac and cheese. How was this going to work out once they tied the knot this summer? Would Ben have to sneak his share of mac and cheese to the dog? Would the dog even welcome a pile of mac and cheese in his bowl? It didn't matter--there would be no room for a dog and two people in a Hyde Park apartment. Ben was a little apprehensive.
So, naturally, I invited him over for dinner. Ben's a good guy--the picture of a southern gentleman, really--well-dressed, soft-spoken, warm and, of course, appreciative of the good things in life, like fine bourbon and bluegrass. I wanted to do what little I could for his and his fiancée's matrimonial happiness. So, it was time to subject him to a good plateful of mac and cheese, hot, golden, and bubbly--something that would be irresistible, even to a hardened sceptic like him.

Okay, so it turned out that Ben was not all that hardened a sceptic. His past experiences with mac and cheese had been of the orange-powdered, cardboard-boxed variety. And that's probably enough to leave most at least somewhat sceptical. All that Ben really needed was a little push, and I was happy to be the one to do it, to acquaint him with the good stuff.
The mac and cheese we made that night was a southern variation on the standard bubbly, baked sort. Instead of starting with a roux and making a cheese sauce for the macaroni, you douse it in a rather immodest mixture of cream and eggs, scattering cubes of cheddar throughout, and then finish it off with another good heap of cheddar. It bakes up golden and creamy, almost custard-like beneath that cheesy lid.
That said, I can see how an absolute die-hard mac and cheese lover might not be entirely satisfied with this particular plate--it doesn't ooze cheese. But I still think it's fantastic, especially with a mess of braised collards on the side. And most importantly, it won Ben over. I look forward to the wedding!

Southern-Style Macaroni and Cheese
Adapted from Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking via the May 2010 Saveur
Note: I used 2 cups of heavy cream and 1 cup of milk in place of heavy cream and half-and-half with no issues. I'm pretty confident that using less heavy cream wouldn't have been a problem either. And if indeed you're a die-hard mac and cheese lover, a few more ounces of cubed cheddar probably wouldn't hurt.

12 oz elbow macaroni
Butter, for greasing
13 oz extra-sharp cheddar, 7 oz (about 1 1/2 cups) cut into half-inch cubes + 6 oz (about 2 cups) grated
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1⁄4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1⁄4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1⁄8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2⁄3 cup sour cream
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1⁄2 cups half-and-half
1 1⁄2 cups heavy cream
1⁄3 cup grated onion
1 teaspoon Worcestershire

Heat oven to 350° F. Bring a 4-quart saucepan of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until cooked halfway through, about 3 minutes. Drain pasta and transfer to a buttered 9" x 13" baking dish. Stir in the cubed cheddar cheese and set aside.
Combine the salt, flour, mustard, black pepper, nutmeg, and cayenne in a large mixing bowl. Add the sour cream and the eggs and whisk until smooth. Whisk in the half-and-half, heavy cream, onions, and Worcestershire. Pour the egg mixture over the reserved pasta mixture and stir to combine. Sprinkle the grated cheese evenly over the surface. Bake until the pasta mixture is set around the edges but still a bit loose in the center, 60-70 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before serving.
Serves 8-10.