Daring Bakers February: For the love of chocolate

I am happy to announce that as of February 2009, I am a member of an incredible online baking community called "Daring Bakers". The Daring Bakers was born in 2006, when a couple of bloggers decided to bake pretzels using the same recipe and then post about it. Since then, the group has grown and grown again, but the premises are the same: each month, a recipe is presented that all participants have to follow exactly, except for specifically allowed alterations. On a given day at the end of the month, the Daring Bakers post their experiences, photos and thoughts of the challenge. It's a great opportunity to challenge yourself and try recipes that you otherwise would not have chosen, and to get to know loads of wonderful bakers and food bloggers from all over the world. You can see the blogroll here.

So, the challenge this month:

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE's blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker and Chef. We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

The Chocolate Valentino is a flourless chocolate cake created by Malaysia's "most flamboyant food ambassador" Chef Wan. The recipe comes from his book "Sweet Treats", and contains three simple ingredients: chocolate, eggs and butter. We were given a totally free choice on what type of chocolate to use. It was said that the finished cake would taste exactly like the chocolate used - I will get back to that statement in a little while. I decided to go local (or at least national) and use Swedish Marabou milk chocolate. A lot of people get Sweden and Switzerland mixed up and say "oh, Sweden, that's where you have the cuckoo clocks and the chocolate, right?". Well, cuckoo clocks not so much, but chocolate - yes, we do have good chocolate in Sweden.

The other part of the challenge was to make our own ice cream - a first for the Daring Bakers. But not for me; I got an ice cream maker for my birthday a few years ago, and it has not been sitting unused in a cupboard since. So the challenge for me was not to make the actual ice cream, but to find a flavour that would go well with my chosen type of chocolate. We were given two different vanilla ice cream recipes, but we didn't have to use them and could go with other flavours than vanilla. After much thinking about what flavours go well with milk chooclate, I decided to make a caramel (burnt sugar) ice cream, using a recipe from our go-to-guy when it comes to anything pastry related: Jan Hedh. The idea was to play on the flavours of another Swedish candy, Dumle, which is a milk chocolate covered caramel toffee.

Now, the orginal recipe for the flourless chocolate cake is as follows:

Chocolate Valentino
(from Sweet Treats by Chef Wan)

16 ounces (1 pound) (454 grams) of semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped
½ cup (1 stick) plus 2 tablespoons (146 grams total) of unsalted butter
5 large eggs separated

1. Put chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of simmering water (the bottom of the bowl should not touch the water) and melt, stirring often.
2. While your chocolate butter mixture is cooling: Butter your pan and line with a parchment circle then butter the parchment.
3. Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites and put into two medium/large bowls.
4. Whip the egg whites in a medium/large grease free bowl until stiff peaks are formed (do not over-whip or the cake will be dry).
5. With the same beater beat the egg yolks together.
6. Add the egg yolks to the cooled chocolate.
7. Fold in 1/3 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture and follow with remaining 2/3rds. Fold until no white remains without deflating the batter.
8. Pour batter into prepared pan, the batter should fill the pan 3/4 of the way full, and bake at 375F/190C
9. Bake for 25 minutes until an instant read thermometer reads 140F/60C.
Note – If you do not have an instant read thermometer, the top of the cake will look similar to a brownie and a cake tester will appear wet.
10. Cool cake on a rack for 10 minutes then unmold.

I halved the recipe and decided to make individual cakes in muffin cups rather than to make one big cake (to make it a true Valentino it should be heart shaped but I don't have a heart shaped pan, so...). From the halved recipe I got 7 small individual cakes.

The only mistake we (Markus and I did this together) made was to whip the egg whites too early. I was on chocolate and butter melting duty while Markus was taking care of the eggs. When he had whipped the egg whites perfectly, the chocolate hadn't started to melt yet. Stiffly whipped egg whites does not hold their shape forever, so we were a bit worried about this, since we also had to let the chocolate cool a bit before adding the eggs. That's what you get for trying to be efficient, people! When we finally folded in the egg whites, the mixture got really grainy and had a weird consistency, so we were a bit worried about the end result and that the cake would get too dry. Other than that, everything was very straight-forward and easy.

We didn't use a thermometer but instead just set a timer to 20 minutes (our oven is a bit unreliable at times). When we got them out, the cakes that had been to the front in the oven were clearly done, while the ones in the back still looked too pale and undercooked. I chucked those back in the oven, went back to the computer and....... gaah, I totally forgot the cakes! Luckily, only about seven minutes had passed and they didn't look burnt at all, so, phew! I didn't notice any difference in taste between the 20-minute cakes and the 27-minute cakes so this seems to be a very forgiving recipe.

We let them cool for a while (they do sink quite a bit while cooling), got the caramel ice cream out of the freezer (don't worry, I'll give you the recipe below!) and plated. A small cake, a chunk of ice cream on top, a Dumle candy to decorate and then, to add a bit of tartness to complement all the sweet flavours, we sprinkled a few frozen lingonberries on the plate - lingonberries and caramel is a great flavour combo!

I said above that it was stated in the challenge that the cake would taste exactly like the chocolate used. We didn't find that to be the case at all. The cake tasted much more stronger and intense than milk chocolate does - as if baking had removed the mildness and milkyness and left a much more concentrated chocolate taste. We weren't saddened by this at all - it was still delicious and I am definitely making this again, and trying it out with different kinds of chocolate. Lindt has a Fleur de Sel chocolate that I love and I am very tempted to try that in this cake. The cake was fudgy and moist and it tasted even better the next day, and still good the day after that (I kept them in a well-sealed plastic bag in my pantry). Then the seven small cupcakes were gone!

This recipe is a keeper! Thanks Wendy and Dharm for a very tasty challenge!



Here's the caramel ice cream recipe. It comes from Jan Hedh's book Desserter (Deserts).

Time: 2 days

2 g gelatin (~1 leaf)
1/4 vanilla pod
2 ½ dl heavy cream
2 ½ dl milk
125 g sugar
120 g egg yolks (~6)
25 g honey

Day 1:
Soak the gelatin in cold water for 10 minutes.
Slice the vanilla pod open, scrape out the seeds and put them in a sauce pan with cream, milk and the opened vanilla pod. Bring to a boil.
Melt the sugar until it has a golden brown color. Get the vanilla pods out of the cream mixture and pour it over the caramel (be careful, there will be a lot of smoke and bubbles). Stir until the caramel has melted completely.
Whip the egg yolks light and airy together with the honey. Add them to the caramel cream mixture.
Stirring instantly, let the mixture reach 85 degrees C. If you don't have a thermometer, do the "rose test": dip a wooden spoon in the mixture. lift it up and blow at the mixture on the back of the spoon. When a rose-like pattern is formed, it is done.
Squeeze the excess water out of the gelatin. Put it in the mixture and stir until dissolved.
Transfer the mixture to another bowl that you place in a bath of ice-cold water to let it cool down fast. Cover with plastic and place in the fridge until next day.

Day 2:
Put the mixture in an ice cream maker for 30-45 minutes. Transfer to a plastic box and freeze until needed.

Jubilee

On Wednesday, February 25th this blog was visited by its 100th “absolute unique visitor” according to Google Analytics! Yay! Go us! :-) Our typical visitor runs Firefox on a Windows computer in Uppsala, Sweden... wait a minute, that's Jenny and me! I guess we attract a lot of people “just like us”... in a kinda' eerie way. :-)

Anyhow, thanks for all the traffic, even if no one comments, we still know we're being read, and that's what really counts!

Green and blue salad

This salad contains a number of green ingredients and one blue - blue cheese. You want to use a firm blue cheese that crumbles but doesn't get all smeary. We use Swedish Kvibille Gräddädel, but I don't know how internationally available that is. You could either add the cheese as is, or turn it in to a dressing by mixing it with some crème fraiche. Today we opted for the former.

We got a big bowl out of this, enough for the two of us and some leftovers for lunch tomorrow.



Green and blue salad

2 handfuls of mixed greens (we used mostly baby spinach today but aragula/rocket, maché and swiss chard also works. But please, don't use iceberg lettuce.)
1 pear
2 stalks of celery
100 g firm blue cheese
½ dl walnuts

Rinse the greens and put them in a large bowl. Dice the pear, slice the celery and dice/crumble the cheese. Mix everything and top with walnuts. Done!

Semlor

Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, which means that us Swedes ate semlor. A semla is a cardamom-flavored bun filled with whipped cream and almond paste. They are very popular; according Wikipedia, a Swede will eat on avarage five store-bought semlor a year (me, I have only had one so far this year). All bakeries and grocery stores will sell them, even places like 7-Eleven does, and even though traditionally just eaten on Shrove Tuesday (before Lent), nowadays you can find semlor on sale from Christmas up until Easter. The quality varies vastly though, and every year the local paper will do a test of the different bakeries' offerings and tell you where to go for the best semla in town. Another way of guaranteeing good quality is to make your own, which we decided to do this year.

First, you need to make the almond paste for the filling. You could buy it ready-made but making our own is easy. Now, some people don't like almond paste and will fill their semla with vanilla custard or jam instead. I really don't get this, so let's move on. To make your own almond paste you need equal parts of blanched, peeled almonds and white sugar. We used 250 grams of each which yielded (surprise!) about 500 grams of almond paste. We really don't need that much for making semlor, so I see an awful lot of almond paste-related baking coming up. It keeps in the fridge for quite a while though, so no worries.
So, when you have blanched and peeled your almonds, you chuck them in with the sugar in a food processor and work it until everything is very finely chopped. If you have an almond grinder you really want to use that for the almonds (before mixing them with the sugar), because a food processor really doesn't make them finely ground enough, but it still works. At this point the almond-sugar stuff will mostly be grainy, the paste part comes later. Pack the paste-to-be very firmly in clingfilm/plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to firm up, at least over night.

Now, on to the buns. This recipe will give you seven buns, and one semla is very filling, but they do keep for a few days (unfilled, of course) and you can freeze them. For the buns, you need:

½ egg, at room temperature (use the other half for brushing the buns)
25 g fresh yeast (in Sweden we have a kind for sweet doughs, use that if you have something similar)
50 g butter
1½ dl milk
Pinch of salt
½ tsp ground cardamom
½ dl white sugar
~5 dl flour
1/4 tsp hartshorn salt (ammonium carbonate)

Crumble up the yeast in a bowl. Over low heat, melt the butter, add the milk and let it reach 37 degrees C. Add a little of the butter-milk mix over the yeast, and stir until the yeast is dissolved. Add the rest, and then the salt, cardamom, sugar and egg. Stir in the flour and hartshorn salt, a little at the time, until everything is incorporated. The dough will be very sticky at this point, but after rising it will be extremely easy to work with! Cover the bowl with a piece of cloth and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.
Put your oven to 225 degrees C. Get the dough on to a clean, lightly floured surface and knead the dough until all the air bubbles are gone. Cut the dough into seven equal parts and roll them into buns. Place them on a parchment covered baking sheet, cover with a piece of cloth and let them rest for another 30 minutes.
Brush the buns with lightly beaten egg. Bake them for 8-10 minutes, and allow them to cool completely before filling them.

To make the actual semla, you cut off the top part of the bun. The lid, as we call it, should be very thin:



After this is done, you hollow out the bun to make a hole in it for the almond paste filling. Thus:



Save the crumbs you get from hollowing out the bun, 'cause you will need those now. Get the almond paste out of the fridge. Now I don't have any proportions for this part, you just have to feel your way around this. What you do is that you mix the almond paste with part of the crumbles and a little milk to make the actual paste. It should taste like almonds, not like bread crumbs or milk, but you need the milk and crumbs to bind it together. It should have a soft consistency, but not so that it's running all over the place.
Whip the cream until soft peaks are formed. Fill the holes with almond paste (about 2 tablespoons) and top with whipped cream (if you want it to look fancy you could pipe it). Put the lid on top and sift a bit of confectioner's sugar over it. Enjoy!

Spicy, fruity salmon

This recipe originally comes from a really nice book on food and wine pairings (Kombinera mat och vin by Jens Dolk and Mette Ankarloo.) It pairs this dish with a dry German Riesling, and let me tell you from experience that the acidity in that wine works really well together with the spicy and sweet flavours, and with the fattiness of the salmon.

The original recipe uses Jerusalem artichokes and says to serve with rice or couscous, but we usually substitute potatoes, oven-roasted in the same dish as everything else, and then skip the rice/couscous. The potatoes works really well with his, and less pots and pans to clean is a good thing in my book! This time we added some carrots too; they get wonderfully sweet when roasted in the oven. The original spice mix contains cayenne pepper which makes it quite hot. This time we used ancho chili instead which made it less in-your-face spicy and gave it a more subtle, but still noticeable, heat. The original also adds curry powder (1 tsp) so chuck that in there if you want to. (And sorry, no pic of this - we were too hungry!)

Spicy oven-roasted salmon with mango

Serves 2

200 g salmon
1 mango
6 potatoes (or more if you're really hungry)
4 carrots
Olive oil
Salt

For the spice mix (you should only use dry, ground spices):
1 tsp each of ancho chili, turmeric and cinnamon
2 tsp each of cumin and ginger

Put the oven to 200 degrees C. Mix the spices together. Peel the potatoes and carrots, cut the potatoes into wedges and halve the carrots lengthwise. Put them in a roasting pan, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and add about half of the spice mix. Using your hands, mix everything around. Put in the oven for about 15 minutes.
Peel and slice the mango. Cut the salmon into portion-sized pieces and rub the rest of the spice mix on the salmon.
So, when 15 minutes have passed on the carrots and potatoes, you get the dish out and add the mango. Mix it around with the the carrots and potatoes, and then place the salmon on top of the whole deal. Cook for about 10 more minutes or until the salmon is done. (If your mango is a bit unripe, like ours was today, you might want to get it in the oven a bit earlier, say when 10 minutes or so have passed on the potatoes and carrots.)
We served it with some plain greek yoghurt as a sauce. It's also nice to add some freshly squeezed lime juice on top of the salmon. Just get some acidity in there.

Birdie nam-nam

Roasted chicken is one of my favourite comfort dishes. It's simple, homely and fills your house with the most wonderful smell. If I don't know what to make for dinner and I'm in the mood for easy and stress-free yet filling and "robust" food, chances are I'll end up making roast chicken of some kind. The flavorings vary: sometimes it's lemon and parsley, sometimes it's chorizo and peppers.

Of course you could use a whole chicken as well (I usually do, but my store didn't have any today) and adjust the cooking time accordingly. One thing though: I think the kind of mozarella I used melted quicker than normally, so you might want to roast the eggplant for a while first, get it out and add the cheese, and then put it in the oven for a few minutes again to let the mozarella get warm. I ended up with an awful lot of melted cheese all over my baking sheet and the eggplant was not completely done.



Roasted chicken with tomatoes, eggplant-mozarella towers and potatoes

Serves 2, and leaves extra for lunch boxes

1 kg chicken legs
250 g cherry tomatoes
As much garlic as your want (I used about 5 cloves)
Half a dried red chili pepper
1 tsp thyme (dried)
A couple of potatoes (maybe 3 per portion)
1 eggplant
125 g buffalo mozarella
Salt and black pepper
Olive oil

Put your oven to 200 degrees C. Place the chicken legs in a snug fitting pan. Poke a small hole in each of the cherry tomatoes. Peel the garlic. Place garlic cloves and tomatoes on/around the chicken. Cut up the dried chili pepper in small pieces and sprinkle it on top of the chicken (I dry my own chilies by hanging them on pieces of string in a pantry). Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt, pepper and thyme. Put the chicken in the oven and get to the potatoes.



Wash the potatoes, but you don't have to peel them. Slice them about ½ cm thick. Place on a parchment covered baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil and give the salt grinder a good couple of turns . Put the potatoes in the oven (under the chicken) when the chicken has cooked for about 15 minutes.
Slice the eggplant ½ cm thick in an even number of slices (I got 12). Slice the mozarella in half that amount (i.e. 6 for me). Place a slice of mozarella on an eggplant slice, cover with another eggplant slice, drizzle olive oil on top and season with salt and pepper. As I said above though, you might want to bake the eggplant for a while before adding the mozarella. Bake until the eggplant is done and the mozarella is melting (but not competely runny). Make sure the chicken is cooked through before serving. I put the eggplant-mozarella thingies on top of each other to make little "towers" but of course you don't have to.

Asian beef salad

This was a dinner last week, on one of the few days I've been at home lately - I have been very busy. We got bok choy (pak choy/pak soi - this Chinese vegetable has a lot of spellings) in our organic produce box last week. While I really wanted to attempt to make char sui (Cantonese BBQ pork) served with rice and bok choy - one of our Hong Kong favorites - I had neither the energy nor the time to run around looking for all the required ingredients. Uppsala lacks a Chinatown...

So instead, I made a beef and rice vermicelli salad. It incorporates a lot of flavors used in various Asian kitchens, but is in no way authentic. It's like Jamie Oliver once said: it's got a little Asian fusion thingie going!

I'm not giving you any amounts this time cause I have no idea how much I used. But this is what went into the salad

Thin rice noodles (vermicelli)
Thinly sliced beef ("lövbiff" in Swedish)
Salt and black pepper for seasoning the meat
Mango
Alfalfa sprouts
Bok choy
Peanuts
Fresh cilantro
Freshly squeezed lime juice

Cook the rice noodles as directed on your package*. Cut the beef into bite sized pieces if needed. Fry the beef quickly in a hot pan with some butter - do not overcook cause then it will get dry and stringy. Season with salt and pepper. Cut off the hard stems of the bok choy and toss it around in a hot pan with some butter until it gets soft. Dice the mango and chop the peanuts coarsely. Mix all the ingredients into a salad and pour the lime juice over it. We ate this with chopsticks (to maintain our skill level) and I'm happy to report that I can still pick up peanuts with chopsticks!

*Does anyone have a tip on how to prevent the noodles from sticking together in a big lump once they're cooked? I really want to make a Vietnamese salad based on cold vermicelli, but I don't want it to be a cold lump of vermicelli...