For the love of Chocolate

Today (Sunday) has been the last day of my Spring Break and I can't wait to get back into the kitchen at school. I feel like I have truly taken a break from cooking - I did nothing but bake during my short vacation. There was no rest for the wicked. After my Easter Bread baking marathon, I moved on to baking with Chocolate. Sometimes the stars aline and one is destined to bake great things.

Pecan Sandies

A few weeks ago my friend Eva posted a recipe for Pecan Sandies from the Thomas Keller 'Bouchon Bakery' book on her freshfromevaskitchen blog. I felt inspired to bake and the cookies were really yummy. We had been to the Bouchon Bakery a few times when we lived in San Francisco and so I decided to treat myself to the book. And what a fabulous book it is. I could hardly wait until my Spring Break to try more of it's recipes.
 The perfect excuse for my baking mania was the visit of my girlfriend from San Francisco who arrived on Easter Monday. She is a self-confessed chocaholic and has come to expect nothing less than being treated to the best chocolate creations when at my house.

So, I started by baking one of my favorites - Sweet & Salty Chocolate Cake. Co-incidentally, this is also a recipe from my friend Eva's freshfromevaskitchen blog. The cake takes a lot of preparation and assembly work, but once you taste it, you will notice it's worth the effort. The combination of sweet and salty really works, but you must spare no expense and buy some french fleur de sel salt as requested in the recipe. It really makes a difference and I speak from experience. Anyway, the cake is pure decadence, so I decided to scale down the recipe for a smaller version for next time. Nobody can deal with that much chocolate, although my girlfriend made a pretty good stab at it.

Three layers held together by salty caramel and chocolate ganache

The finished cake with more chocolate ganache

The next thing I baked were the brownies from the 'Bouchon Bakery' book; they contain more cocoa powder than flour: lovely. The great thing about the book is that the recipes have been adapted for the home cook and are very easy to follow. Some of the techniques used in the recipes are classical French but all are well explained and possible to re-create at home with little effort. As you know I am not a frequent baker (although after the last 10 days, one might think otherwise) and so I was surprised to learn that the recipes where measuring the eggs by weight. Why and how? It is done by cracking and whisking the eggs in a bowl and than straining the beaten eggs into another bowl as so to remove the chalazae (that's the white tissue that connects the egg yolk to the egg's membrane) and any tiny fragments of shell. A little bit more work, but genius. I found the egg to be much smoother and mixing better with the dry ingredients. The recipe also requires the dough to rest for approx 2 hrs before baking. Now, I don't know the scientific explanation for that, so I can only speculate that this helps to combine the various ingredients more effectively than when baked immediately. Whatever the reason, it works. The brownies are awesome and don't seem to last long in my house.

With all this baking going on over the last week, I have to admit that I sometimes had to cut short my dog walks in order to follow the timetables for the recipes. Not fair on the dogs, I thought, particularly since they weren't getting any of the goodies. So, feeling somewhat guilty I set out to bake some dog treats. Sure enough the 'Bouchon Bakery' book has a recipe for those too, and they sell the dog treats at the Bakery. According to the story in the book, the bakery used trimmings of fois gras from the restaurant for the dog treats, though the recipe in the book uses chicken liver and bacon. Very fancy, right?! My husband couldn't believe the smell of bacon streaming through the house wasn't destined for his delight but for the dogs. Since Easter was just gone, I decided to create some bacon and liver Easter bunnies. From the picture, it looks like quite a mess of blood on the parchment paper, but no worries as there is no real blood involved. In fact the dog treats are glazed with a ketchup mixture and then dried in the oven again. It surely smelled good in our house all afternoon and the dogs couldn't believe their luck.

Time to go and get my knife kit ready for tomorrow. I start again with a 4 am wake-up call and I am looking forward to the next 6 weeks of Culinary Foundations part III.

So stay tuned, have a great week, and happy eating.