I think I’m going to let the pictures do the talking for this post. I’m not feeling terribly talkative tonight.
Pure Pumpkin Cheesecake
Month: November 2009
Woody’s Lemon Luxury Layer Cake
…say that 3 times fast.
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Lemon Luxury Buttercream – White chocolate custard
Just a quick note, in case it helps anyone. My white chocolate custard completely seized up on me. I’m talking a big lump of white chocolate on the bottom of the bowl with a soupy mess of yellow butter (probably mixed with cocoa butter) on the top. The more I tried to whisk it back together, the worse it got. I even tried with an electric hand mixer. Nothing was going to bring that back together. I remembered something I’d seen Alton Brown say: a little bit of water causes chocolate to seize, but more water will smooth it back out again. I thought, “Hm. Eggs contain water, and they’re also an emulsifier. I’m supposed to be adding the eggs to this anyway. Worst that can happen is I waste the eggs, because the butter and white chocolate are already a total loss.” So, I slowly beat the eggs into my awful, disgusting mess with the electric hand mixer. Tada! Smooth and creamy!
Baby Chocolate Oblivions
I had a rather productive day in the kitchen today, using 3 recipes from 2 different books by Rose Levy Beranbaum, plus one off her website. 🙂 I started out by putting together a batch of Rose’s favourite flaky & tender pie crust. I’d never made this before, since the Pie & Pastry Bible is the only one of Rose’s “heavenly” books that I don’t own, but I saw some mention of the recipe somewhere and decided to try it. I think it may have been in one of Rose’s youtube postings. Jay has chicken pot pie on the menu for later this week, so he needed me to put together the shells. I have to say, the method for bringing together the dough worked really well. Better (and with less liquid) than a lot of pastry recipes I’ve used in the past. The latex gloves are an inspired technique. Once that was resting in the fridge, I started a batch of pizza dough, from The Bread Bible. Left that to rest on the counter, while I put together the sponge & flour mixture for the Golden Semolina Torpedo. By now, the pastry dough had its requisite 45 minutes in the fridge to hydrate, so I pulled that out, rolled it out into the dishes for the pot pies, and stashed them in the freezer. Jay hates rolling out doughs, so that’s the least I can do to help with supper. He does the cooking, I do the baking, so something like a pot pie is a joint effort. 😉
At this point, Jay wanted the use of the kitchen for a bit (more about that later), so I used that time to put together my mise en place for the Baby Chocolate Oblivions, which are this week’s cake in the Heavenly Bakers group. I decided to go with the milk chocolate variation, partly because I happened to have a large amount of milk chocolate in the freezer, and I’m running low on dark.
Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream
This week’s cake is a Pumpkin cake, for Halloween. Rose has a few of the “outtakes” on her blog. I wish my outtakes were that pretty! The cake part of this one is really, really easy, but the frosting has more than a couple of steps. You have to caramelize sugar, make a crème anglaise (which isn’t quite crème, given it contains no cream, but I’ll allow it…), make an Italian meringue, then whip the various parts together with butter.
Here is my finished cake.
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