Big Bowl of Comfy

Dearest Gumdrop-

I know exactly what you mean about those moments when life is a too small sweater. Lately, I’ve been beset with a mad longing to run away and plant my toes in the warm earth and eat sun-rippened mangoes plucked straight from a tree (or shaken loose by a monkey as frequently happened when I was in Tanzania. But that’s another story).

I immediately set off for the exotic locales featured in my cookbooks, but
the curve ball of using a new ingredient made the right fit difficult. Too many culinary adventures came back to haunt me: the pop of cumin and nigella seeds during an Indian adventure one year, the harmonious balance of salty and sweet during a Thai idyll another. After several days of the most wonderful armchair journeys, I was beginning to despair.

And then you came to my rescue. Cruising through the New York Times to read about the evolution of the whoopie pie, I came across two curries I’d try. One, a South Indian Eggplant Curry , the other a Thai Curry Mee (or coconut chicken soup). The funny thing with each was that it was really the simplest ingredients I’d never used: eggplant and Thai curry powder.

With that decided, I began my favourite part of cooking: plotting the grocery trip. While I’m always smitten with black text on a crisp white sheet, nothing tells the miraculous transformative journey of food more than a simple grocery list. I’m sure everyone has his or her own order, but I like to organize my list according to my perambulation through the store, usually starting with produce and ending with dairy. Of course, these recipes called for special trips to Little India and the far eastern edge of the city. Even better.

With the list in order and baggage packed on Thursday (the IE and I were headed to the cottage for the weekend), I set off to get through Friday. It didn’t cooperate at all and we wound up leaving the city much later than intended. It meant I had to sacrifice one of my curry shops so we could arrive at the cottage before our guests.

I suppose now is the right time to reveal that I’ve never cooked eggplant before for one simple reason: I hate its spongy texture. I’d only thought to make the eggplant curry because the new hubby likes it. It was one of those bountiful newlywed gestures that you regret as soon as you've made it. So needless to say, we scrapped our journey to Little India (but not before I vowed to get there soon for the intimidating and beguiling asafetida, the one ingredient I have truly never tried) and headed out to the most wonderful place, Sheung Thai Supermarket.

We walked straight into the kind of multicultural place that makes me love Toronto so much. While ostensibly Thai, Caribbean, Chinese and South Asian people and ingredients filled the aisles. Having loaded my cart with curry leaves and water chestnuts, red coconut cake and sambal, I regretfully left this culinary wonderland that was home to half the world and was also half the price of my local market!

At the end of a crisp spring day spent traipsing through the woods and sipping cocktails while we read, we huddled around the wood fire and enjoyed a fresh, delicious curry soup that was both easy to prepare and easy to eat. This was the kind of simple curry bursting with vibrant flavour. It also had a lovely spring-like hue since I threw in a few more vegetables that messed with its authenticity, but definitely satisfied our daily servings of vegetables. It's food that reaches deep down into your soul and gives it a big bear hug. Or as the IE put it, "this is really good." My only note (as someone who could drink a good curry sauce and skip the rice completely) is don’t save the left-over noodles and soup in the same bowl. Those selfish, thirsty noodles absorb all the creamy broth, making tomorrow's lunch curried noodles not curry soup.

As a sidebar, the whoopie pies were out of this world. They’re homely looking things, the plain jane cousin of adorable cupcake, so I’d be tempted to give them a bit of a make-over next time around – maybe pipe the frosting so it has a prettier edge or add a chocolate drizzle, but who wouldn't fall in love with the burgers of the cake world?

All in all, the weekend was the culinary equivalent of a big comfy sweater. Just what I needed.

Xo
Pickle

PS: apologies for the state of the pictures, but I forgot the camera and had to use my blackberry

The Third Challenge - Or Life Claustrophobia

I swear I'm not going to just use this blog to come up with semi-pithy and ultimately unnecessary terms for things in life - but do you ever feel sometimes like your life is a sweater that's a bit too small? That kind of chokey feeling, when you want to rip the terrible itchy thing off and run around wildly with your winter-white arms flapping freely in the breeze? I've been stuck in this grey and cold city for months on end. And it's too tight. Life Claustrophobia strikes again. Soooooo -

This week I challenge us to make an exotic main dish curry - but each of us must use an ingredient we haven't tried before. Maybe kaffir lime leaves, maybe Jalfrezi curry paste, maybe star anise, sambal olek, palm sugar....

I figure it's a cheaper solution than a plane ticket.

The Maltese Shrink

Oh Pickle, you are such a good therapist. Nothing will help a person slough off the grime and grit and grey of sad old March quite like swirling clouds of frosting onto a huge pile of cake. ...Which said person will then eat. It's better than Xanax and therefore my chocolate purchases oughta be covered by those health insurance jerks who deny my dental cleaning. With my claim, I will send in this happy portrait of March-busting bliss. It's the 'Chocolate Malted Layer Cake' from Melissa Murphy's 'Sweet Melissa Baking Book'. I have never been to the eponymous bakery in Brooklyn, but I liked her homey nouveau Americana recipes enough to buy the book.

This particular slice-of-Brooklyn recipe reminded me of my girlhood obsession with old-fashioned American drinks, especially egg creams and chocolate malteds. (The egg cream I stole from 'Harriet The Spy', and I think I got the malteds from 'Nancy Drew' or maybe even ancient copies of 'Trixie Belden'.) I've never been able to find proper malt powder in Canada, so several malt-y recipes have languished on my Want-To-Make list. Until I recently read in an online forum that Horlicks was a not-bad substitute for malt powder, so I snapped up a can. Shoved it into the overflowing tea cupboard until an opportunity for baking presented itself, cursing heartily every time I reached for orange pekoe and Horlicks fell on my head.

This cake was well worth the goose eggs. As with the cupcakes I made for Pretzel's birthday, the star here was an unusual frosting recipe, a hybrid of ganache and buttercream.

I chopped a full pound of chocolate, then scalded a full cup of cream. Then I stirred a full cup of Horlicks into the cream before pouring it over the chocolate. You're supposed to add 1/4 cup of corn syrup before you let it cool but I forgot. Once it's cooled you then beat in a full stick of butter, tablespoon by tablespoon. (Yes, those are a lot of 'fulls'. I was impressed at the ballsiness of this recipe that way!) At this point I remembered the corn syrup and beat it in with apparently no ill effects. I did notice at this point that I hadn't done the greatest job of stirring the huge quantity of malt powder into the small quantity of cream and it had seized up in a few places, making little malty lumps. But with the vast quantity of chocolate, cream and butter - and guests coming in two hours - there was no time for do-overs. (Almost predictably, Mr. Salty pronounced the accidental and unreplicatable 'crunchy bits' as his favourite part.)

The buttercream gets piled onto and in between two layers of a deep cocoa-y cake - who cares about the recipe, you are soooooo right that cake is just a frosting presentation device.

Do you do that thing where you protect your cake platter with strips of waxed paper or whatever until you're done icing, and then you pull them out like a cheap magician, thereby leaving a clean platter? I did that, but this particular cake was soooooo moist that it crumbled when I pulled one of the strips out and I ripped a big ugly chunk out. If I were an engineer, it woulda been like ripping out half of somebody's basement with one careless dropcloth removal. But as it's only cake, I just hurriedly spackled that back in with frosting and faced that part toward the wall.

It got garnished with a pile of chopped Maltesers and a few whole ones around the edge. This served three purposes. It drew the eye away from my terrible structural deficit, looked pretty, and got all the children about to eat this cake excited. (Why is it that you can bake the most impressive thing and kids will shrug - but if you garnish it garishly with coloured sugar or candy, they will suddenly be impressed? I'm going to start putting candy on broccoli gratin and seeing how they like them apples.) Anyway, it got all the kids running around the house yelling 'CHOCOLATE BALLS CHOCOLATE BALLS, I WANT CHOCOLATE BALLS'. Which was, as I'm sure you can imagine, rather amusing.

I think I'm going to have to start make layer cakes more often, at least until summer is really and truly here. Don't tell the insurance company, they'll probably up my dental premiums.

I Coulda Had a V8

Dear Gumdrop-


You have perfectly described a plague sweeping the entertaining nation with your self-diagnosed (and aptly, charmingly, named) Shyness Culinaria. When did it become a point of derision to want to go all out for your friends and family? When did pouring your love and affection into dainty pinwheel sandwiches become a bad thing? I laude your Teddy Bears’ Picnic initiative and have no doubt that Pretzel adored every minute.

Personally, I suffer from a rare culinary affliction that leaves me dizzy and delirious when trying a new recipe. The more complicated, the more feverish my delirium. But when I next make said recipe, I suffer from such a debilitating malaise, it infects the dish. Cakes that rose spectacularly first time around fall flat and hard; gratins that oozed and melted so perfectly you were transported to a tiny bistro in Paris leave you stranded in a greyhound bus station in Scarborough instead.

With this in mind, I decided to forego trying to repeat my past success with Bill’s Big Carrot Cake in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, which brought down the house at a recent birthday party. It was one of those cakes that soothe your soul to make. I’d even grated the 100-mile carrots by hand (the fact that it was only because I couldn’t find the blade for the cuisinart in the jumble that is my kitchen utensil drawer is entirely irrelevant).

So instead, I decided to make the ultimate lemon layer according to an old Cooks Illustrated circa March 2007. The recipe said it had lightened up the traditional butter cake to complement the tangy lemon curd and was crowned with billowy mounds of a modified 7 Minute Frosting with just a touch of lemon. It sounded like the perfect Spring dessert, frankly.

I started with the lemon curd since that needed to be cool enough to spread. Reading over the directions, I realized I didn’t have any gelatin (my grandmother and her weekly homemade lemon meringue pie would shriek in horror at such a thought!) and decided to use the dependable lemon curd from Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contess in Paris instead. Lemon curd’s perfect balance of tart and sweet is so satisfying, I’m always devastated that it never tastes right in anything other than a lemon tart or mile-high meringue pie. It’s like having mint sauce with any thing other than lamb: it’s just wrong.

Next came the cake, which did have a lovely light texture, although I undercooked it a bit despite leaving it in for the full time given in the recipe. Since cake is just a vehicle for frosting, I didn’t worry and set out to make the 7 Minute Frosting, which I’d never made before.

So it was a little disappointing to realize it was really just a meringue you didn’t bake. It used to seem like such a magical kind of icing, calling to mind adolescent games of 7 Minutes in Heaven. Except that really only happened in the Judy Blume books I read after-school and never really to me, so I guess my disappointment shouldn’t be too hard to overcome.

Despite the few little bumps along the preparation road, the cake assembled well even if I did wind up tossing a layer that was a little raw still (it became the cook’s treat). The frosting was the sort of pure glossy white that’s unachievable with vanilla butter cream and in its complete form, it looked like a charming country cake that should come with a side of rambling old lady with a hanky shoved up her cardigan sleeve.

In the end, while IE claimed this was his new favourite cake, I wished I’d made a lumbering hunk of coconut layer cake instead. So I whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies to console myself (they were perfect: bursting with velvety chocolate, crispy around the edge and slightly under-baked in the middle. Absolute heaven).

Xo
Pickle

It Was My Kid's Birthday So I Couldn't Bake A Cake

Welcome back, Pickle!

I love Korean food!!! Go Kimchi - hey, Kimchi's a Korean Pickle, no?! :) I have a memory of wandering through the frigid February streets of Seoul myself and finding a lovely little bakery. It had steamed up windows, adorable anime style characters, row upon row of delicious looking pastries. Just what the doctor ordered! I bought the most beautiful pastry I could find, if memory serves it was kind of posy shaped with a little cross of white icing on top so it looked a little four-leaf-clovery... All excited in anticipation of a warm sugar rush I bit in and found...

- A mixture of peas, corn and carrots. Like exactly that frozen mixed vegetable stuff your parents make you eat when you're five. Yummmmmmm. (Although I do love a red bean-filled dessert, which I know is a sometimes an equally controversial opinion.) I do concur - what you have pictured there, while intriguing (am especially into the green tea latte in some kind of handled vase) - that is definitely NOT a cupcake.

THIS is a cupcake. And this is what I was doing while you were flitting glamourously over the globe - celebrating little Pretzel's second birthday. We had a teddy bear's picnic this weekend, with rows of pinwheel party sandwiches to tease toddler tastebuds. In some kind of be-aproned Mommy Fugue state, I went all out on sandwiches, gingham blankets, balloons, little tea sets for the bears and the aforementioned sandwiches. It came time to make the cake and, aware of your challenge, I got all ready to bake a four-layer peanut butter and jam cake (to match the theme, dontcha know...) And... I had an acute attack of Shyness Culinaria. Has this ever happened to you? You have people coming and you want to impress with the food BUT you know if you go toooooooooooo far they're going to kinda mock you a little. Or a lot. And I was already feeling self-conscious about being a little too 50s mom with the whole theme thing. So I just made a one layer bear chocolate cake (this tasty Martha basic), with cupcakes for a snout and ears. I don't even have a picture as I was too shy to take one. I will ask my SIL who may oblige with a bear pic, if you're interested.

The good discovery made while doing all of this is an AMAZING VANILLA BUTTERCREAM from one of the Magnolia bakery cookbooks. I have been searching for a recipe like this forever - it is NOT icing sugar based, because I find icing sugar frostings hit my teeth with too much of a sweet wallop (not that I would ever turn any frosting/icing down, let's just be 100% clear about that.) And it is NOT a meringue buttercream, because I find those can be soooo labour intensive for just a small batch o' cupcakes for kids who don't care. However, as I intended to eat a number of cupcakes, it needed to be an authentic buttercream. This wonderful, unusual recipe is thickened with a milk and flour concoction and is made with granulated sugar. It was utterly delicious and paired a perfect whipped consistency with a gentle, sweet vanilla taste. Wow.

I also bought some wonderful silicone cupcake liners (I got mine, made by Wilton's, from McCall's School of Cake Decorating. If you haven't been to this baker's paradise, leave work and go now!) Have you tried these? Perfect. You don't have to worry about kids eating cupcake paper, these just slip right off. They don't leave you scraping cupcake off paper with your front teeth, which is a touch undignified (and could possibly be seen as greedy.) Plus they go in the dishwasher. Which is good, because I'm lazy as well as late.

I will get on making a wonderful layer cake as soon as the teddy bear dust settles. I love layer cakes, they make me feel all Southern. Which is something my frozen cold bones could use these days!

Love,
Gumdrop