Patron Saint of Bakers

Salut Gumdrop,

Having just stuffed myself with an enormous, melty chocolate chip walnut cookie from Le Gourmand, I finally feel able to recount my experience with chocolate pastry.

I know a poor worker blames her tools, but I’m going to lay the blame for this catastrophe firmly at the feet of Nick Malgieri and his book The Modern Baker. More specifically, I’ll blame the gorgeous look of the book. Like a complete sucker, I feel for its fresh and modern style, but when I started to make Chocolate Pecan Tart with Chocolate Nut Dough, I just knew I was in for a bad run. Have you ever had a moment like that? You’re only on the first step and it already feels wrong? I must have read the recipe five times just to find out what temperature to set the oven.

The dough was easy enough to prepare, but utterly uninspiring during the experience. Likewise, the filing wasn’t complicated in and of itself, but I did ask for a bit of trouble by making this a large tart instead of tartlets (having received a ruffled tart pan for the wedding, I wanted to use it. A fine lesson in what you want isn’t what you need). This meant that my chocolate caramel ganache didn’t set properly. Regardless of that little disaster, the chocolate overwhelmed the caramel flavour, so I wondered what purpose the caramel really served?

With all the bad mojo during the baking, I had a sense that all might not be right with this tart. I decided that I needed to try this beastie before I served it to the in-laws for Mother’s Day. It wasn’t good. It looked so awful when cut; I couldn’t even bring myself to photograph it. Some things only a mother can love, but that’s not the case with mothers-in-law, is it? For a split second, I thought I could pretend the IE made it instead of me, but as my father would say, that was just too far-fetched a story. In the end, I whipped up an emergency Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding instead. Once again, Dorie saved the day. She should be the patron saint of bakers.

The true casualty of this experience is that I was totally unwilling to work with nuts and ganache again and scrapped my plans to make the Hazelton Sandwich Cookie for the Cookie Carnival. Instead, I whipped up a Red Velvet Cake during the weekend up at the cottage.

Red Velvet Cake has had a bit of a popularity surge recently, but it’s a nostalgic cake for me. Every girl has one of those childhood movies we inexplicably adorable and for me, it’s Steel Magnolias. I think because it reminded me of my mom and her gaggle of girlfriends, who each reminded me of those magnolias. For a while, I had a version of my future that involved marrying a Louisiana lawyer and arguing over a Red Velvet Armadillo Groom’s Cake (not that whole diabetes/no children thing).

The movie was the first time I’d ever heard about the cake and my imagination ran wild wondering what it would actually taste like since neither the colour red nor velvet itself had much of a discernible flavour as far as I could tell. So one year when my family was in Myrtle Beach for our annual vacation and my mom and I came across a Red Velvet Cake at the Harris Tweeter or Piggly Wiggly (have you noticed that all Southern grocery stores seemed to be named after cartoon characters?), we had to try it. Now, I can’t recall if it had a cream cheese frosting (I suspect it didn’t), but that cake was just not right. It was the most peculiar, flavourless thing and everyone except my grandfather refused eat it after the first bite.

Maybe some things just need a little time to grow on you, but this version from Epicurious was delicious and charming in its simplicity (it was the cottage, so I didn’t bother with a crumb coat, making it the homely thing here). When the hubby says, "it’s so good, I want to lick my teeth," I think it’s something that’s going to stay in the repertoire for a good long while. All those Steel Magnolias would be proud.

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