Soft Orange Cake

Based on my experience with the soft chocolate cake, I expected this to be a citrusy chiffon cake. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The ingredients in this cake were pretty typical, with maybe a bit more eggs and butter than a typical cake. It didn’t even call for cake flour – just plain old all-purpose. It was, however, soaked with orange syrup and orange glaze after baking, which will certainly soften anything up. The end result is a dense cake with a surprisingly light feel.

As for the flavor? Bright and vivid. There’s a ton of fresh orange juice and orange zest in the batter itself. You’d think that would be enough, but the sryup you pour on after baking is made from orange juice and sugar, so the flavor is bumped up another few notches. The final touch – a glaze made from orange jelly – adds a final layer of flavor to the whole thing.

Orange isn’t really a flavor that you find in cakes all that often – it seems that lemon and lime are much more common. This cake is a nice change from that.

Soft Chocolate Caramels

After what felt like a series of so-so treats, which either just weren’t that good or turned out not quite how I was hoping for, it was really nice to have a solid win. The best part? These were incredibly easy to make, taking less than half an hour from start to finish (not including the cooling time, of course).

The process was simple enough – caramelize some sugar and corn syrup, add some cream and butter to make the final product soft and chewy, reheat it to finish off the caramel, then stir in chopped dark chocolate for flavor and let it cool before chopping it up. Easy peasy. And delicious.

The flavor is more chocolate with only the texture of caramel, and they’re not kidding when they say it’s soft. It almost feels wrong to describe it as chewy, since it melts in your mouth without sticking to your teeth. So amazing. I took most of these into a work potluck and they disappeared pretty quickly despite the fact that we all had to run back to work just as we were getting to dessert. The handful that were left didn’t even have a chance to make it back home. Instead, they made it into my belly.

The recipe also has variations for milk chocolate and vanilla white chocolate. They involve cooking the caramel to lower temperatures the second time around, probably to lessen the intensity of both the caramel flavor and color so that it doesn’t fight with the milder chocolate. You can bet I’ll be trying both of those – I’m not a huge fan of white chocolate on its own, but I’m very curious to see how it works in these.

Rose-Flavored Baked Custards

It’s official: we do not like rose-flavored items in this house. The texture of these custards was perfect: rich, creamy, and smooth. Unfortunately, eating them made me feel like I was drinking my grandmother’s perfume, and that was after eliminating the rose essential oil completely and reducing the amount of rose water and rose syrup in half. My husband, who tried the custard totally independent of me when I wasn’t even home, had the exact same opinion. Luckily, this was the last of the rose-flavored items. From here we move on and never look back.

The other strange issue I had – which I also had when I baked the crème brûlée – was that these custards took far, far longer to bake than expected. The recipe listed a baking time of 1 hour, but they were still incredibly liquidy at that point in time. They didn’t really begin to set until 2 hours in. It’s possible that I could be overcooking them, but the end result seems to be right instead of overbaked and dried out, so I don’t know. The strange thing is that both of these recipes had the custards baked for a longer time and at a lower temperature than other (American) recipes I’ve seen, so maybe that has something to do with it.

At any rate: I’m now done with all of the baked custards and rose-flavored items in this particular cookbook, which provides more than just a little relief.

Savarins

Savarins are essentially a rum-soaked baba – a cross between a brioche bread and a cake. The dough is made very similarly to a brioche dough, in that it’s mostly eggs, flour and butter, but it has much more liquid in it. This allows you to pipe the dough into little doughnut-like molds for baking. After they baked and cooled, they went for a dunk in a simply syrup flavored with orange juice, lemon juice, vanilla and rum. The result was a lightly citrus-vanilla scented rum cake.

However, it didn’t stop there. The instructions specifically said to soak the 8 cakes with another half cup of rum before serving, so that’s what I did. The result? A very strongly flavored rum bread. Not bad, but I think I would leave out the second splashing of rum if I were to make them again.

My only problem with these was the final texture: they were dense and dry. When I took them out of the oven, they looked and felt like they’d be light and moist, but that wasn’t even close to being the case. I’m pretty sure that’s how they were supposed to come out, though, since when I had a pineapple baba at a fancy French restaurant a couple of weeks ago I had the exact same thoughts about it – not bad, but kind of dry and dense.

Perhaps babas jut aren’t my thing. They were, however, well received by my husband’s co-workers, although that could have been because they all got a nice little mid-morning buzz from them.

Soft Chocolate Cake

This cake is essentially a chiffon cake, getting its loft from whipped egg whites. Aside from the eggs, though, this cake is largely made up of butter and chocolate. And sugar. With just enough flour to hold it together. The result is a light, spongy, densely flavored, impossibly soft cake. The only problem? This cake is so light that you could easily eat the entire thing in a single sitting. Some self-control (or a large number of witnesses) is definitely required.

Ladurée Sundae

As it turns out, a “Ladurée sundae” is basically a chestnut sundae. It simply consists of chestnut ice cream topped with whipped cream and candied chestnuts. If you have those three things lying around the house? Then it’s a piece of cake to put them together.

For this sundae (and the ice cream in it), I chose to attempt to make my own candied chestnuts rather than spring for a giant can of them that I would never use up. This decision was motivated largely by the fact that we had chestnuts sitting around the house, so it seemed silly to buy candied ones when I could probably just candy them myself. After all, candying usually just involves cooking up some caramel and then tossing in the nut of choice. Completely doable.

Candying chestnuts is a bit more time-consuming, as it takes several days. During that time, the chestnuts hang out in the syrup, getting cooked for a minute or two each day, until they’ve absorbed as much syrup as they can and are not just coated in sugary vanilla syrup, but are completely infused with it.

I used this recipe and while my results weren’t quite as great as the candied chestnuts I purchased last time I needed them, they were adequate. I think the issue I had stemmed from the fact that I overcooked the syrup on the first day, and so the chestnuts were sitting in hard candy for a couple of days, rather than soaking in syrup. On day 3, I added more water to the whole thing to bring it back to a syrup and it started to look more like I thought it should. If I were to do it again (which I would, as candying a small batch of chestnuts is far more economical than buying a 2-pound can which I will never, ever use up), I would add significantly more water to the beginning of the process and cook it much lower, reducing it down to a good syrup on day 1 and making sure it stayed that way throughout the whole process.

After all that, how was the sundae? Well, much like the ice cream, it’s pretty good if you’re into chestnuts. As for me? I could skip it. Although as long as I’ve got candided chesnuts and chestnut ice cream in the house (which could be kind of a while, given that my husband is the one who likes chestnuts and eats far fewer desserts than I do), I’ll be happy to whip one up for anyone that drops by.

Rose Cream Puffs

I made these for our annual Super Bowl party last weekend and am pleased to report that they were a slam dunk all around. (Apologies for the mismatched sports there.) I got the temperamental choux paste for the shells exactly right on the first try. I reduced the rose flavorings in the pastry cream by half (and eliminated the rose essential oil from it entirely) and wound up with something that was rose-flavored without being overwhelming. I also left the rose flavoring out of the fondant/white chocolate mixture that topped the pastries to keep the rose down to a manageable amount in each bite.

I had a small issue when I mixed the liquid fondant into the melted white chocolate (instead of the other way around) and the whole thing crystallized and seized up immediately when it cooled off. Oops. Luckily, it was easily fixed by adding a bit of water to the mixture and essentially redissolving the fondant, then letting it cool and reduce down to the consistency I was looking for. Kind of a long work around, but now I know to mix the melted chocolate into the fondant next time instead of the other way around.

While the amount of rose in these was reasonable and well-received by our guests, I still wasn’t a big fan of them. I’m beginning to think that’s just because I don’t like rose-flavored goodies, despite the fact that the French seem to love them. Luckily, there’s only one more rose recipe remaining in the book.

Roasted Pineapple Tart

So, now that you have a whole bunch of delicious roasted pineapple, what do you do with it? Yes, you could just eat it and, in all honesty, that’s totally the tactic I would have taken had I not seen this. However, if something is good by itself, it’s almost always better if you put it in a pastry crust and cook it in the oven. Which is exactly what we did here.

The center of the tart holds about half of the roasted pineapple which is topped with a coconut cream. The cream is made by mixing butter, sugar, coconut flour and egg with whipped cream. After the issues I had with other recipes involving coconut flour, I finally got smart and only used half of the specified amount which worked out perfectly. The whole thing went in the oven, resulting in a tart containing pineapple and a light coconut-flavored cake-like layer. Once that cools, you top it with the rest of the pineapple and, if you’re going for extra credit, some of the cooking liquid from the pineapple.

Sound good? It was. Plus the orange and vanilla flavors in the roasting liquid gave it a different flavor than most pineapple tarts I’ve come across. A nice twist on a different sort of sweet.

Roasted Pineapple

Pineapple is one of those fruits that you don’t immediately think of cooking, but once you’ve tried it? You wonder why it took you so long. I’ve had grilled pineapple a number of times, admittedly usually in conjunction with some sort of teriyaki-glazed meat. When you put pineapple on the grill, the (many, many) sugars caramelize and become delicious.

This takes that one step further. Instead of just roasting the pineapple, you cover it in a vanilla and orange-infused caramel. As the pineapple roasts for a couple of hours, you regularly baste the fruit with the liquid caramel which slowly thickens as it cooks and reduces. At the end, you have slightly orange-vanilla scented pieces of pineapple that are sweet and amazing with just a bit of tang. Two big, big thumbs up.

Rice Pudding

I apologize, as there isn’t much that I can do within my own home to make rice pudding photogenic. However, don’t hold that against it. It’s not an especially fancy dish, being composed of exactly what you would think: rice cooked in sweetened milk. Yes, it’s arborio rice (commonly used to make risotto) and yes, it was briefly parboiled in water before being cooked in the sweetned milk, but other than that? Incredibly straightforward.

The one twist is that egg yolks were added to the mix towards the end of cooking, much like you would add egg yolks to heated milk in making a custard. They give the pudding some much needed color, as well as a thicker texture and a bit of flavor. In all honesty, though, I think I preferred the flavor of the pudding before the yolks were added.

Lastly, a handful of golden raisins, softened in hot water, were mixed in just before cooling and serving. It’s not the fanciest dish in this book, but sometimes a simple dish done well is all you need.