The first time I started to have coffee with any regularity is when I visited my friend in Italy because it’s what everyone did, and I just went along with the “when in Rome (or Venice)” attitude. Naturally, my first coffee maker was a mini stove top espresso pot. After realizing that the pot, which I had picked up from a stoop sale, was boiling brown water even without any coffee grounds, I switched over to the French press at Matt’s insistence.
The problem with the French press is that I always end up making too much coffee for 1 person when I’m alone. I usually give the rest to my plants, but one day, I figured my plants had enough caffeine for the week. A normal person would just discard the rest, but why would I (a cheapskate) do that? Good quality fair trade organic snob coffee grounds are not cheap! I also had a big block of dark chocolate that I was afraid might be going stale. So then it was set. I was making a chocolate tart.
A seasoned pâtissière would probably chop the chocolate before melting, but I opted to place the whole block in a microwavable plastic bowl, sink it in a pyrex bowl full of boiling water and see what happens while I make the crust.
By the time the dough went into the fridge to ‘get chilled’, the chocolate was soft enough for me to cut into chunks with a dull knife. Most recipes for coffee+chocolate tart fillings call for instant coffee, or the actual grounds, but I wasn’t gonna do that, obviously. So after reading about a few different tarts, I came up with my weird hybrid recipe, which yielded more filling than I needed. So what was I do with the left over melted chocolate? Make cookies of course!
The tart needed time to get solidified in the fridge over night, so the cookies were an instant treat comparatively.
Here are the formulae.
Shortbread-Like Pie Crust (adapted from Bon Apétit)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1 ripe banana
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
Beat butter and sugar in medium bowl until light. Beat in mashed banana. Add flour, baking powder, and salt; beat just until blended. With fingertips, press dough into an 8 inch tart pan. Refrigerate 1 hour, then freeze 10 minutes. Preheat oven to 350°F. Bake tartlets until golden brown, about 25 minutes. Transfer to racks and cool completely.
Chocolate Coffee Tart Filling
1 1/4 cups coffee
9 ounces bittersweet chocolate (65% + cacao if marked) in a semi-melted block form, (but it should really be chopped)
1 tbsp egg replacer or corn starch
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
Bring coffee to a boil, then pour over chopped softened/melted chocolate, stir until smooth. Mix in with rest of the ingredients. Pour filling into cooled crust and refrigerate for at least 6 hours.
Next morning..
About an hour after I placed the whole thing in the fridge to cool, I took it out and laid some sliced almonds along the edge. There’s absolutely nothing healthy about this treat, so I figured, a little bit of nuttiness and protein couldn’t hurt. After coming out of the fridge, it went right in the lunch box with the pumpkin pasta.
As for the cookies…
This is the recipe that I roughly follow for chocolate chip cookies. I think it’s one of the variations of the Jacques Torres recipe. I just mixed everything right in the pot with the left over tart filling mix.
Brush with some marmalade on top, plant in some sliced almonds, and sprinkle with sea salt before putting in the oven.
Mandy and Ray’s anniversary/goodbye Greenpoint brunch on Halloween
My favorite coupled pals are leaving la petite Pologne for la piccola Italia in a few weeks. The distance between boroughs and even neighborhoods seem to be continents away in New York, which is kind of ridiculous. And I am completely guilty of being the typical NY person who makes every excuse in the world not to go across the bridge. I hope their moving will inspire me to venture out more outside of North Brooklyn.
Cornmeal battered fried tomatoes, tofu scramble, and pumpkin pancakes.
Saturday also happened to be their wedding anniversary. We all got together over brunch to celebrate, and bid farewell to their current apartment. Everything Mandy prepared was awesome. My contribution, in spirit of a sort of Halloween, was the pumpkin pancakes. It worked out well with Mandy’s fruit topping.
New favorite pastry to try out later: Cinnamon rolls with puff pastry dough, chocolate, dried cherries, and crème fraîche topping.
A bit too much food, seeing a bunch of friends, a nap, and hanging with a group of people who make me proud to be with them. All in all, Halloween was great.
Here’s the Pear Croustade as mentioned earlier!
After the series of failures on Matt’s birthday, I learned my lesson and stuck to the easy one. I love making fruit tarts of all kinds, because it’s so simple, and generally fantastic, if the fruit it self is in season. I used a Korean pear, and an apple, and followed this recipe from Epicuious, using soy milk in place of whipping cream.
Everything was great until we took the candle out, and discovered that it had melted in a pretty gross way. I guess quality candles are actually worth the extra few cents. As you can see in one of the images above, the birthday dude was not amused. I think it also bothered him to be given a candle that reminded him of the finite nature of life, and thinking about mortality has probably thrown him into a deep abyss of existential dilemma.
Birthdays are hard.
I’m just taking a short break from the excitement and thrill of tax preparation here. Actually, I am so incredibly bored and overwhelmed right now, the only thing that’s keeping me from going nuts right now is this Icelandic chocolate. (That, and fear and pressure.) Just looking at its simply regular small blocks and the deep brown color is doing wonders to calm me down.
This block of goodness had been sitting in my cupboard for a few weeks now. I had bought it impulsively at Whole Foods, because I liked the packaging. I finally broke down and opened it today, and this really might be the best chocolate I have ever tasted. It’s dark, and sweet with no bitter taste, its texture perfectly smooth. I don’t know how the Icelandic process of chocolate making differs from others, and I think this is the first Icelandic chocolate I’ve had. But it made me want to visit that magical land of annoyingly intriguing pop singers and northern lights and fjords even more.
Filled with curiosity, and a burning desire to procrastinate, I looked up the maker of this chocomagic like the real dork that I am. It seems that Nói Síríus really is just another mass producer of sweets, with possible affiliations with Kellogg’s, and Cadbury eggs. To my dismay, the rest of their products don’t look as nearly as nice. According to the package of my 45% semi-sweet chocolate, this packaging was introduced in 1933 and has remained the same since. I’m usually all for change, but…
Anyway, I’m just glad to have found this one, and I’m also thankful for it’s not so civil minded price tag that will keep me away from over-indulgence :D
Matt's Birthday Pt. II
So I started to tell you about my labor of luv on Matt’s birthday, but it’s really kind of sad in a way, because it really took days. And it was only possible because I had no work for 3 days! Even sadder still, were the failures. I’ve mentioned before that baking is one of my weaknesses, so the failures weren’t really surprises. But the ones that exceeded my expectations, like the apple tarte from the previous story, made me tremendously happy. Now for the ‘main birthday cake’, I really wanted it to be special, so I did a search for a recipe that includes all of M’s favorite ingredients- coconut, pineapple, and carrots. When I found a recipe that included all 3 of those and more, it was like magic.
But translating a baking recipe into vegan-friendly one is always problem-prone, at least for me. To my horror, this time, the batter turned out to be very thick, like clay. So I thought I’d soften it up with some water. Bad idea. After baking, it turned out to be way too moist, but not light and fluffy. I know that carrot cakes are usually more dense, but this just wasn’t right. The flavor on the other hand, was amazing. Despite its weird consistency, we both found it to be delicious. This is definitely something I’d like to try perfecting. I just wish that it didn’t take a whole fricking day to bake and assemble. Speaking of assemblage, the way it looks was a bit of a failure too, but I think it’s a little funny. It’s a pretty pathetic attempt at imitating the look of Lady M’s Gâteau aux Marrons, although you’d never know from these images.
So this one wasn’t a complete failure. And neither were the mini cupcakes I made for the birthday party. I can’t tell you how it’s made, because I just ‘winged’ it, but it’s pineapple cake with coconut frosting, with candied pineapple slice on top.
If the images of the brownies on top recalls something that you would normally not want to associate with food, you won’t be shocked to hear that that was the biggest failure of them all.
But it’s quantity that matters, right? I’m just kidding. At least, with this, despite the flu, and the hardship of leaving his 20’s behind, M began his 30’s as the man with the most cake. Literally.
Matt's Birthday Pt. I
When I think of spring, the first thing that comes to mind is an old Korean song that goes “spring, spring, spring, spring, spring has come, even in our hearts..” And when I start singing along inside, the funniest scene from a Kim Ki Duk’s film Breath starts playing in my head. The leading lady awaits her death row bound lover in the prison’s visiting room, which she had turned in to a vibrant scene of spring, and starts to serenade him upon his arrival. This is not a romantic, beautiful song. In fact, it sounds more like a marching anthem. And this scene, which in my chain of thoughts is what I associate ‘spring’ with, is not exactly a happy one in its essence, but bitter sweet and melancholy, despite of its inherently comedic aspect.
Still, like any semi-normal person in the world, observing the transition from the bitter cold of the long winter and welcoming the warmth is a completely pleasant idea in my head. But in reality, I anticipate misfortune and allergy attacks, and often I find myself feeling very close to how I felt at the end of Breath. This is year it’s no different, although it’s not even quite spring yet. Since the supposed last day of winter, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind, but I’ll tell you about just one thing this time- Matt’s 30th birthday. It also happened to be the day that he caught the worst case of the flu that I had ever seen. All my plans for this day went out the window as he could do nothing but drift in and out of sizzurp-ed consciousness from the couch to bed. This might sound like a party to some people, but trust me, he wasn’t having fun. So what could I do? What does every bed-ridden birthday boy (or man now I guess..)need? A crap load of birthday cakes!
This one was ready just in time for the midnight of his birthday, the beginning of the day. The first, and the most succesful. I was extremely pleased with this interpretation of Ina Garten’s apple crostata. I replaced the ‘butter’ part of the recipe with half Earth Balance, and half non hydrogenated shortening, and baked it as a tarte, with fuji apples instead of the apples called for. I also added lemon, tangerine, and orange zests.
It was a real test of self-control to keep myself from devouring the whole thing. The crust was deliciously flakey and savory, and the apples and the citrus zests combined with the sugars were almost perfect.
But as expected, not everything went so smoothly…..
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