Delicious Chocolate, Not of My Making! Plus a New Cookbook! In Japanese.

 

Yesterday my friend Tussy and I picked up some chocolates at the beautiful Compartés down the street from me in Santa Monica! I chose the first three:

Marzipan

Macallan Scotch

Lychee

And Tussy picked out an assortment for herself and her fella:

Brûlée Caramel

Sea Salt and Caramel

Smoked Salt

Passion Fruit

Dried Cherry and Dark Chocolate

Extra Dark Chocolate with Orange Peel

Candied Pear

Candied Ginger

Super delicious chocolate that is properly tempered giving it that clean snap when you bite into it. And the fillings are of course to die for:

Marzipan, made in-house!

Super creamy Lychee truffle

... and my favorite, the dark, bitter scotch ganache.

And here is my new cookbook! I got it last week for my birthday and suddenly feel the need to share with the world...

It's in Japanese and it's ONLY WAFFLES. Amazing.


Bake Hard,
Azara

Surprises Are Nice

Buttermilk Cobbler with a Variety of Fresh Cali Fruits

This is a cobbler made by myself and my cousin/best friend Jennifer for a 4th of July barbecue. Because we are greedy, we put in probably twice as much fruit as was called for in the recipe. And then decided we needed to compensate by doubling the biscuit recipe and giving the cobbler a bottom crust as well. It was like cobbler pie... amazing!

Probably a tad more than we needed for the barbecue, but who can complain about cobbler for breakfast?

Buttermilk Cobbler with Mixed Fruit (adapted from this Food Network recipe)

Preheat the oven to 425°. Butter a baking dish, the largest you have if you want to make the volume in the recipe that follows. It can easily be halved or otherwise adjusted at will.

For the fruit*:
1 small container raspberries
1 small container strawberries
2 superripe peaches
2 ripe mangoes
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon flour (optional; helps the pieces of fruit maintain some integrity, but we skipped it)
*note: the amount and kind of fruit that can be included in this recipe is very flexible; if it looks like there isn't enough in the pan, just sprinkle some more on top! Next time I would add blueberries too... but we'd eaten them all by the time we put the cobbler together =(

For the cobbler:
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
6 tablespoons brown sugar
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 1/3 cups buttermilk
2 tablespoons brown sugar, for topping
Whipped cream as needed

Dice all fruit to desired size. It doesn't really matter how you do it, so it's really about your preference.
Sprinkle the sugar and flour, if using, over the fruit and mix well with your hands to avoid mushing things around. Set aside.
Combine dry ingredients for cobbler in a bowl. Work the butter into the dry ingredients with your fingers if you're cool or with a pastry cutter if you don't like getting your fingers dirty (wack!). Continue to work the butter in until the texture becomes that of coarse crumbs. Add the buttermilk in and stir to form a dough. Divide in half.
Spread half of the cobbler dough into a thin layer on the bottom of the pan. Spread the fruit out over the dough, and then use a spoon to scoop evenly-spaced dollops of the remaining cobbler dough across the top. Sprinkle the 2 tablespoons of brown sugar over the cobbler blobs. Put the cobbler into the oven until the dough on top is golden-brown, about 20-25 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream.


We didn't add any cinnamon or vanilla to the fruit because we wanted the natural flavors of the fruits themselves to be front and center, but if desired, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 2 of vanilla can be added to the fruit before the sugar and flour.

Bottom crust... yesss.

Bake Hard,
Azara

Experimental Cake with Bavarian Cream and Mango

Yesterday I went off-book and made up a weird cake recipe. I can't say I'm completely in love with it, but it was a worthwhile experiment and I'm going to keep playing with it to see what I can come up with. I started with what was essentially a kasutera batter, in which whole eggs and sugar are beaten together until quite thick and foamy folded together with flour, but I added some extra flour, a little baking powder and a little oil and milk. The oil of course completely deflated the eggs (which is why I added baking powder), but I wanted to see if beating them affected the quality of the finished product. I did end up with a loaf that rose beautifully and had a very lovely, very fine crumb; however, the cake was fairly coarse once it cooled completely, and quite dry.

What I'd like to do is bake another cake with the same ingredients but with no beating of the eggs to see whether beating them made a difference despite the oil-induced deflation. Then I'd like to bake one with more oil or maybe some butter in order to try for a soft, moist cake.

It did come up beautifully though, and baked through without threatening to over-brown! All too rare in a cake recipe.

To add some zazz I whipped up an eggless Bavarian cream and made some layers (Bavarian recipe below). The layers are so crazy uneven because I was in a terrific rush. I put this cake together in about ten frantic minutes, so think about the skill needed to achieve that before judging!
 

Also we didn't have any baking paper (I'm at my family's house in NYC) so I lined everything with foil... Looks kind of awesome, I have to say.

I also took some dried mango and boiled it in sugar syrup, let it soak for a while, drained it and studded one of the layers of cream with it. I used the syrup as a soak for the cake layers, but they still managed to remain remarkably dry. To my surprise, this coarse texture ended up working with the soft Bavarian cream, and my family likes the cake quite a bit! I'll still want to play around with the recipe before I post it though. 

 

Eggless Vanilla Bavarian Cream (adapted from festivalfoods.com)

1 Tbsp gelatin 
2 Tbsp very cold water
2 cups whipping cream
1/2 cups milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Bloom the gelatin in the cold water for about five minutes.
Mix one cup of the cream with the milk, reserving the second cup of cream in the refrigerator. Put the cream and milk mixture over a medium heat and scald it, removing it from heat before it boils. Stir in the sugar and the salt, and stir in the bloomed gelatin until it dissolves completely. Chill it, adding in the vanilla once it's cooled but is not yet set (ten minutes or so). Once thickened, beat it until fluffy.
Separately, beat the reserved cup of cold cream until soft and pillowy. Fold it into the gelatin mixture, or beat it a bit if the gelatin is so set that it remains chunky after folding.
Pour the Bavarian into whatever mould is being used, lined with wax paper or wetted, or if using the Bavarian as layers of filling in a cake, build the layers immediately, using the pan in which the cake was baked in order to keep the Bavarian from squishing out as it sets. Here it helps to have very deep cake pans available, three or four inches works well.


So there we have it! I'm excited to be playing with vanilla cake and fruit combos. I am a committed chocolate person, but these flavors were great and I look forward to more fruit projects coming up, especially since I'll be hanging out in California for the next month and a half (starting the day after tomorrow!) and will be surrounded by gorgeous produce.

Next time I post it'll be from not-always-so-sunny Northern California! Maybe a fruit crisp or even a pie... yes...

Bake Hard!
Azara