FFWD: Paris Mushroom Soup

I heart mushrooms. That's right. As cheesy as that sounds, I really do love mushrooms. Love it so much that I have cremini almost every week. Basically I try to incorporate it into anything I make. This week, for example, I made Chicken for Les Parreseux again (for the 3rd time). I roasted some mushrooms (coated with thyme, salt & pepper, and olive oil) to go along with the yummy chicken.

When I make some sort of stew (boeuf bourgignon, tangine, coq au vin) I always added a bunch of mushroom to the pot. Hm.. come to think of it, I have not made Coq Au Vin for a while.

Sorry, I digress. That's what happens when I'm hungry :). 

Let's talk about this dish, shall we?

It's so easy to make. Sautee onions and garlic, add mushrooms, broth (I used vegetable broth), and white wine. Simmer until tender, then puree.

I don't know about you guys, but I did not think pureed mushroom looks appetizing at all! The color is a bit depressing. And even after adding that big chunk of parsley for the photo, I still don't think it looks good.

But boy, this dish is tasty! Especially if you love mushroom as much as I do. And even if you don't, you should try it anyway. Why not? It's good for you. And at the very least, it will warm you up when it's freezing outside.

TCB: Bittersweet Cocoa Almond Genoise

For a New Year's party at a friend's house, I offered to make a cake. Which cake, I have no idea. It took me forever to choose. Do I choose one of the 40 cakes I have left from Rose's Heavenly Cakes? That would be good, one more cake down, 39 to go. Or do I try something from The Cake Bible?

The crowd I'm serving to seem to like Genoise-type cakes, and chocolate is always a favorite. I have made both Moist Chocolate Genoise and Genoise Au Chocolat. Genoise Au Chocolat is the running favorite (lighter, fluffy, and less sweet).

I flipped through RHC, looking at the ones I have not made. Then I did the same with TCB. My hand stopped at a page... the cake is called Bittersweet Cocoa Almond Genoise.

Score! I thought. This would work perfectly with a decorating idea that I had in mind, borrowing from this blog.

I read the genoise recipe. Intrigued. Then I did a search for this cake over at Rose's forum. It yielded results. Reading on, I'm liking the cake. And so here it is.

I made the full recipe of the cake, baked in 2 7 inch pans. It is not what Rose recommended, but I wanted to achieve a good height for the chocolate decor.

I used a low fat cocoa (Ghirardelli). I took Julie's suggestion and used 75% of the cocoa and 25% of Schaffenberger unsweetened chocolate. The combo worked like a charm and the cake turned out wonderful.

For the filling, at first I was going for stabilized whipped cream all over. On baking day I changed my mind and went for light whipped ganache. I didn't do a good job when melting the chocolate with the cream, the mixture was too hot and I can see the chocolate separating. Not a big issue, I took it off the heat and started adding cream slowly until the mixture come together.

Too lazy at this point to add more chocolate, I went with it and the result is a very very light ganache, more like a chocolate flavored whipped cream. It was wonderful. Fit perfectly with the cake as it was pretty rich.

Making this cake, I figured out that I much prefer piping than torting and frosting a cake. Slicing each cake in half is no biggie except the sides of the cake started falling a part and they look more like a distorted circle. I gathered all the crumbs, combined with some light ganache, and started spackling.

The chocolate decoration is pretty easy to do. I followed Emma's instruction down to a T. The only deviation I did was that I apply the chocolate directly onto a cake, instead of forming it around the tin can, as Emma did.

The chocolate was not even tempered, and it held up throughout the 60 photos I took and through the evening.

I'm very pleased with the end result, it didn't look like the mess that I torted.

And most importantly? My friends LOVED the cake. They all think it looks awesome and it tasted awesome.

HCB: Chocolate Bull's-Eye Cakes and She Loves Me Cake

Another weekend of two-fer for me...

Chocolate Bull's-Eye Cakes

Marie has said, this cake is very easy to make, even though the instruction is 4 pages long. And she was right. And as I discovered, while putting this cake together, I could recite how to make this cake from memory. I don't remember the amount of any of the components, LOL, so I still need to look at the recipes, but I know the method by heart.

First you make beurre noisette, which smells so heavenly (or orgasmic, as Raymond would tell you). Then keep it warm while you heat up the eggs over simmering water. Beat the eggs until quadrupled, then sacrifice a quarter of it to the beurre noisette. Next, fold in the flour cornstarch mixture into the eggs in 2 addition. Finally, fold in the beurre noisette mixture.

While the cake was baking in the ramekins, I made the sugar syrup. Nothing to it, just boiled some sugar and water. I don't have Navan or vanilla liquor so I used Grand Marnier instead.

After the cake is syruped, apply some apricot glaze all around the cake. Opening the fridge, I realized all I have is raspberry fruit spread, so that's what I used instead. I just mix it with some water, didn't add any alcohol as I suspected the cake is boozy enough already with 3 Tablespoon of Grand Marnier.

Next, make the chocolate cream filling. This is very easy also. Melt some chocolate in heavy cream, pour into egg yolk sugar mixture, then heat up the whole thing until almost boil and thick. And as I am typing this post, I realized I had forgotten to add vanilla to this cream. Oh well. It's too late by now *grin*.

Then make chocolate glaze by melting some chocolate with cream over simmering water. Or you can do like me and be lazy and melt some chocolate instead of making the glaze.

And finally, adorn with a chocolate butterfly. Melt some chocolate and fill a parchment cone and pipe. This part is not hard. The hardest part is piping the chocolate to look like butterfly. I find I had to do several tries before getting the shape that I like.

Tasting impressions:
Oh man oh man. This is so good. The sponge cake is so moist and boozy it's so good. The cream filling is so yummy and fit so well with it.

She Loves Me Cake

This cake, according to Rose, feeds 16 people. So I made 2/5th of the recipe. Why the complicated math? Well, there are 5 eggs, so I thought I should make fractions of 5. I know, I know, I'm nuts. But that's how my brain works yesterday. Blame it on the sleep deprivation. I stayed up for new year's and got up early.

2/5th of the recipe, I discovered, made 8 cupcakes (40 grams each). There are only 7 in this picture. The 8th cupcake didn't make it to the picture table, it ended up in the photographer's tummy.

This cake is so easy to make as well. Even easier than the Bull's-Eye. The hardest part is weighing the batter into each cupcake wrapper. I do not like this weighing business. I'd much rather pipe decorations. But I wanted to have even size cupcakes, so weigh I did.

First, mix the egg yolks with vanilla and 1/4th of the milk. Then combine all the dry ingredients in the mixer, add the butter and the rest of the milk and mix until combined. Then add the egg yolk mixture in 2 additions.

While the cupcakes were baking, I made the lemon curd. Also 2/5th of the recipe.

I made some royal icing and pipe the individual cupcakes. My icing was pretty thick, or so I thought, but it ended up a little runny by the time the photos were taken. And as you can read from the writing, I just had a birthday a couple of days ago.

Tasting impressions:
YUM! This cake is really good. We love the tangy-ness of the curd. It fit well with the moist cake.