When Derrick announced the theme for this month’s Sugar High Friday as molasses, I was stumped. What do you go with molasses? The things that immediately jumped to mind were ginger crinkles, ginger snaps and gingerbread – none of which fit terribly well with springtime snacking. Cakes and pies and puddings… molasses just seems to make everything heavy. Then I realised that molasses doesn’t have to make things heavy. It is just often used as a sweetener in heavier things.
So what is something nice and light? Hmm… how about marshmallows. And what goes with marshmallows? Graham crackers and chocolate to make s’mores.
Now we were talking.
I’ve been wanting to try homemade graham crackers for some time now. I even went out and bought a cookbook, Retro Desserts by Wayne Harley Brachman, that I knew would have a recipe for it. Grahams use both honey and molasses, so the flavor of molasses isn’t overwhelming. The cookies turned out to be amazingly crumbly and delicious. I didn’t have 1/2 cup of graham or rye flour, as the recipe called for, so I just substituted whole wheat flour. This led the final product to have a texture strikingly similar to store-bought grahams, meaning that they were flakey and not dense. In fact, I was thrilled since a similar texture means that probably I made them correctly!
I whipped them up in the food processor in no time. The dough was incredibly easy to roll out and I’m sure it could be rerolled once to use up any scraps, though I just ate some raw and tossed the excess. The only change I would make to the recipe is to roll the crackers out thinner than the 1/4 inch called for. I aimed for 1/8 inch and they puffed up a tiny bit in the oven.
I would not hesitate to use this instead of graham cracker crumbs the next time I was in need of a pie crust, either.
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Today we had our chocolate class. We started with a taste test of chocolates. 56% is baking percentage and, unless otherwise specified, this is the percentage called for in all chocolate-using recipes. If you want to use a higher percentage, you’ll have to increase the butter (or other fat) and sugar in the recipe to keep the texture. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a more fudge-like and dense cake or cookie. This may not be a problem if you’re making brownies. We tasted the 56% chocolate, 72%, 90% and unsweetened. We also tasted a milk chocolate and a vanilla bean infused white chocolate. I can’t recall all the chocolate brands that we tasted. French and Italian chocolates, like Valrhona, are a darker roast and have a very deep flavor. Belgian and Swiss chocolates, like Callebaut, are generally milder. Scharffen Berger, an American chocolatier, has more rustic chocolate that is noticeably less smooth than chocolates made by, say, Valrhona.
But this post isn’t about chocolates. It’s about chocolate cake.
We made one, two layer chocolate cake today. It was a basic buttermilk chocolate cake, quite similar to one I made earlier this year. We split the batter between two 8-inch round cake pans. As the cakes baked, we made a chocolate ganache. One batch of ganache was used to glaze a chocolate cake that we ate in class. Once the rest of the ganache was cool, we poured it into the bowl of a stand mixer and whipped it until it was fluffy and light colored. Once the cakes were cool, we spread frosting on and stacked them up. Talk about chocolaty! The cake is nice a moist with a great, tender crumb. The frosting is not very sweet, but very rich. The whipped ganache chocolate frosting will set up nicely on the cake. Do not refrigerate the cake once it’s frosted, or you’ll have a hard time cutting another slice!
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I love artichokes and always look forward to their first appearance in the stores. They’ve been around of a while at this point, and I’ve been steadily munching my way through them each week. I like to boil or steam them and pluck off the leaves one by one. My favorite dip involves roughly 4 parts mayonaise to one part dijon mustard, spiked with a few drops of tabasco sauce and a good sized dash of dill. I actually have no idea as to the amounts, since I have never measured any of the quantities; I measure by color. Sometimes it’s nice to have a recipe that you don’t have to think about.
As an alternative, I recommend lemon juice and sea salt.
Anyone who says that chicken is boring is missing out. I prefer to think of chicken as being versatile. I’ve made this recipe from AllRecipes a couple of times now and I really love it. It’s just chicken breasts glazed with a honey and mustard mix. It’s incredibly simple and very flavorful, with the sweetness of the honey countering the mustard nicely.
Tonight I mixed 1/4 cup each of honey and dijon mustard, added a teaspoon balsamic vinegar and 1/2 teaspoon of paprika to make a glaze for two chicken breasts. 350 degrees and 40 minutes later and I had delicious, perfectly cooked chicken that I turned into salad. I also put in cherry tomatoes, red onion, avocado, cucumber and oranges. If you’re going the salad route, do yourself a favor and reserve a bit of the glaze and drizzle it on as a dressing.
If you have ever visited or read a review of bills in Sydney, Aus., chances are you are aware that Bill Granger produces exceptional scrambled eggs. They are incredibly light, fluffy and creamy. They also contain 1/3 cup of cream for 2 eggs.
Now, I am so fortunate as to have had the eggs on a visit to bills and can assure you that it is worth it to use the cream. That said, I am not usually going to cook my breakfast with that much cream at home. Sometimes I’ll substitute milk, and have even used fat free half and half with great results. Bill’s method of cooking the eggs is what makes them so wonderfully light, so I employ it whenever I am scrambling eggs. Simply melt butter in a hot pan, pour in the eggs and gently push them from the sides to the center with a wooden spoon or spatula. This creates fluffly little curds of gently cooked eggs. I have a copy of Sydney Food, but Mr. Granger has kindly posted the recipe on his website. I have posted it below.
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