Tea Party Truffles

The main secret to a successful afternoon tea is the company and a never ending pot of hot tea.

The second secret is to try and achieve a balance between starchy foods and non-starchy foods. I love going to tea here, here, and I've even been here, but you really have to steel yourself for feeling overbreaded and bloated at the end of the tea that features sandwiches, tea cakes, and scones.

All three of the items are traditional to a tea, but I would recommend when throwing one at home, to choose two of the three traditional tea foods, and make the rest of it up with a combination of fruits and salad, and a sinful surprise (to make up for a lack of cake, or sandwiches, or crumpets).


My surprise treat of choice for my first tea party in our new home was the truffle. I remembered from my college days, when a friend made them for a dorm party (talk about an overachiever!) that they were supposed to be ridiculously simple. As one of the few recipes to make chocolates that does not involve tempering, a process I am sure to make a hash of when I finally get to it, I realized they would be perfect for the tea.


I found a simple recipe in this little cookbook - essentially, you make a ganache, melting fine chocolate with cream, then cool it in the fridge before rolling into balls (a messy business, as the chocolate does start to melt all over your hands). Then you can roll the chocolate in a topping - cocoa and coffee powders are popular, but I rolled mine in muscovado sugar for some added crunch.

Couldn't be simpler!

As Promised - Gelato

I promised you some stories about my new toy - the freezer bowl ice cream maker attachment for the Kitchenaid.

First, a note about fridges.

We went through a few weeks where I was certain the fridge was broken. The milk kept going solid (not just sour, but solid: one day it would pour, and the next day, cheese). Everything developed a rind of mold, white, green, black, a veritable rainbow of different molds, including my jar of grape leaves, which are pickled!

I had basically decided I wanted a colder fridge, and had examined the dial. It said Medium. Well, I wanted the fridge colder, so I turned the dial all the way to Minimum. For Minimum temperature...

It was in this confusing time of non-refrigeration that I started using my ice cream maker. The liquid in my freezer bowl was always sloshing around when I got it out of the freezer (instead of being a solid frozen mass of ice cream-making capabilities).

All this to say that for the first round of ice cream making, everything was working against me. Well, my own refrigeration snafu was certainly working against me.

As was the recipe I chose. I decided to start with the purest of ice cream recipes - one from My Favourite Ingredients - which involves making a custard of multiple egg yolks which you heat over the stove.

Heating egg yolks over the stove can lead to curdling...and my custard curdled. Not curdled in the gone-bad kind of way (thankfully; I'd had enough of rotten food). But curdled in the oops-the-eggs-have-cooked-and-made-large-eggy-blobs-in-my-custard-kind of way.

Not to be deterred, I put this lumpy custard in my unfrozen freezer bowl and proceeded to churn the ice cream. I will not mention that I did not have the patience to cool the custard ahead of time, because without a frozen freezer bowl, this would have made no difference in the end. What we ended up with with a lumpy yellow runny liquid that was sweet and vanilla-flavored.

An inauspicious beginning.

But...as you may have guessed from the deliciousness pictured above, things certainly got better.

First, J had a go at the fridge. "You had it on the warmest setting," he said. I did a dance of joy. My freezer bowl was not broken after all!

Second, I decided to avoid egg yolk custard ice cream recipes until I had more of a handle on them. I wanted something a bit...easier.

Third, I found this easiest recipe known to man on the Scharffen-Berger site. It has four ingredients. Which even häs Häagen Dazs beat.

Sicilian Chocolate Gelato

3 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tablespoons corn starch

Hmm. Corn starch. After having researched coconut fats last year, and discovered that the corn lobby was in part to blame for disparaging coconut oil, and with everything I know about corn being fed to animals who shouldn't really have corn, and corn replacing sugar, and corn in my breakfast, I'm not one to gravitate towards recipes with corn in them.

Also, it doesn't seem genuine. A gelato, probably the eggiest of ice creams, made without an egg in sight.

Ah well, I'm sure glad I gave in. It helped that I saw recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit that also featured gelati thickened with corn starch.

On I went with simmering 2 cups of the milk on the stove, and mixing together the remaining milk with the other ingredients. These were then all "scraped together" and heated until thickened.

Then, with uncharacteristic patience learned from experience, I cooled the custard in the fridge before churning it in the freezer bowl.


Once churning, the results were promising. It was thickening into a glorious shiny chocolaty dessert.

And then. The moment of truth. You have to taste it to believe it. I would say that this was the most delicious chocolate ice cream I have ever tasted except you might suspect I was exaggerating.

To which I say, you'd just have to try it.

Coconut Coconut Cake

I walked to the grocery store with the full intention of buying almond flour for Nigella's Damp Lemon and Almond Cake - a buttery eggy yellow cake with a base of almonds moistened with lemon juice and lemon zest. When I arrived at the grocery store and surveyed their flours - semolina, amaranth, and numerous others I would have no idea what to do with - it became clear that they had no almond flour to speak of.

But they did have coconut flour. It was so fluffy and white and appealing. I thought, I'm sure I can replace the almond flour with coconut, and then, not being sure that coconut and lemon would be a perfect combination, I decided to replace the lemon juice and zest with coconut milk. And so we have a perfectly coconutty adaptation of one of Nigella's nicest tea cakes:

Coconut Coconut Cake.

1 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar (a little less actually - coconut seems a sweeter base than almond)

4 eggs

1/3 cup flour

1 1/3 cup coconut flour

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 can of coconut milk (half thick stuff, half watery)

8 inch springform pan

350 degree oven

Cream butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs, adding a bit of flour after each egg. When all flour, eggs, and butter have been incorporated, stir in the coconut, vanilla, and coconut juice. Pour into the pan, and bake on a baking sheet for about an hour (until the edges go brown - a gorgeous caramelized rust). Moisture will leak out of the springform, so be sure to have a baking sheet to capture this or else you'll make a big mess in the oven.

Enjoy.

Braised Duck Legs

Ha! So, I have discovered I cannot tease my readers (thanks, Y!) with photos of delectable food without any background as to how it came to be. I would like to fill you in.

First of all, duck legs are surprisingly affordable. I would recommend buying them whenever they show up at the supermarket (if you are lucky enough to have a butcher, then buy them whenever you want). They are also arguably the most delicious part of the most delicious bird. Ever since I was a child, and my friend's mother said, "I've made duck for dinner, I hope you like it," not only have I loved it, I have viewed duck as the premo-super-luxo-meat. It is rich and fatty and dark and moist and there's really nothing quite like it (not beef, not turkey, not pork - all of which can dry out and frequently need sauces to bring them back to life).

I learned in this exercise what braising was - cooking big pieces of meat slowly in liquid. I referred to Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food to learn how to braise, although I left out the olives and leeks in her braising sauce, as I wasn't sure how much I would like olives with my duck. Instead, I seared the duck legs skin side down for a moment, before adding broth and wine to the pan, and sticking it in a 425 ° oven for half an hour. Turn the legs skin side up again, remove liquid if the skin is not exposed, and then keep in the oven, lowered to 350°, for another hour. At the end of it, you will have, as witnessed, deeply browned duck with a glorious braising sauce. One is not supposed to eat poultry skin (have you ever noticed how they always include the question, "Do you eat chicken skin?" in those "How Healthy Are You?" or "What is your Body's Age?" quizzes?), but I defy you to miss out on the golden skin of these duck legs.

Favo(u)rite Ingredients

We were the happy recipients of no fewer than six cookbooks this past Christmas, and while I have read several of them back to back, it was high time I gave some of these recipes a go.

This lovely book fascinates me. I have seen single subject cookbooks (meat, dessert, chocolate, cheese), but never a book organized around someone's favorite ingredients. To have that kind of chef-ly authority is impressive and a move like this, audacious. I kept thinking, Who are you, and how come you're so awesome that you can arrange whole chapters around cherries, or olive oil, or tomatoes?

I thought on my favorite ingredient, and wondered if I lacked imagination when the first one that came to mind was salt. Salt salt salt.

Then it would have to be olive oil, lemon, and garlic. How very mediterranean of me.

What are your favorite ingredients?

One of Skye's favo(u)rite ingredients is asparagus. Given the time of year that it is, bouquets of bright green asparagus are abundant at our local grocery store, and it seemed like a perfect time to try a new recipe.

The recipe is a bacon-based soup with rice - you fry up bacon and onions, add water and rice until the rice is almost ready, throw in sliced asparagus until it goes an even brighter green, and drizzle with olive oil.



If you're wondering why my version ended up entirely purple...it's because I used a wild rice we've been throwing in almost everything - the grains are almost black, and release a beautiful purple stain into the water. But it does make for odd-looking food. I served this to my mother on her first trip to SF, and I said to her, "Dinner's purple. But it's delicious."

Top of the World

Looking down on creation.
And down a great big waterfall.

My New Toy

I finally ordered it. Muchos frozen (and not-so-frozen) adventures to come.