Baking

Chocolate lava cake

Posted on by Dan

Mmm, chocolate! No pics here, but maybe I’ll update this later with some. Sizes and temps in imperial measures because they balance out nicely with my cooking stuff.

Ingredients

6 ounces (170g) high-quality dark (60% or higher),  chocolate*
1 stick/113g unsalted butter
31g all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (60g) sugar (superfine is good, confectioner’s is OK, granulated is fine)
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
splash of vanilla (or chambord, or frangelico, or kahlua, or bailey’s, or a nice glenfiddich)

Directions

Heat an oven to 425°F. Grease (OK, fine, butter, you know you will) 4 six-ounce ramekins and dust the insides with cocoa. If you want you can drop little parchment paper disks on the bottoms but that’s not obligatory. Alternately you can butter/cocoa 6 muffin tins if you don’t have ramekins. 

Melt butter and chocolate in a microwave. (Chop both into bits first) You want them melty but not really hot. (Hot isn’t necessary)

In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, and salt together. Yes there’s more sugar than flour, this is decadent, be happy.

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, egg yolks, and flavor liquid together.

Make sure the butter/chocolate mix is not too hot to touch. After you lick your finger from the checking, dump in the eggs and whisk together. Then dump in the dry ingredients and whisk a bit.

Pour the results into your ramekins or muffin tins. Bake for 12-14 minutes (8-10 for muffin tins) until the sides seem solid and the center still gooey.

Let cool for a minute or so, then decant to plates. (Or leave it in the ramekin if you want, that’s fine) Dust with cocoa and powdered sugar, and if you’re so inclined (which you are, let’s be honest) drizzle on some chocolate ganache. (equal parts dark chocolate and cream by weight, though you can replace some of the cream with vanilla or chambord, or bailey’s, or frangelico, or glenfiddich — up to 100% in the case of bailey’s/chambord/glenfiddich though toss in a bit of butter for shiny creaminess)

Eat while warm!

Note that if you underbake it you still have lovely gooey chocolate pudding (yay!) and if you overtake a bit you have a nice chocolate cake. So, y’know, no worries there, toss on some vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of ganache and claim it was what you intended. Nobody’ll know better and they’ll have chocolate pudding/cake.

Lazy bread!

Posted on by Dan

Preheating ovens is a waste of time

It’s snowing here today, so I figured it was an excellent day for stew and fresh crusty bread. And, as I didn’t have any fresh crusty bread it was time to make some. So I did.

This is a simple 65% loaf, with 500g of flour. No big deal, pretty standard, but the thing here is I got really lazy baking it. I’d heard that you could skip the oven/dutch oven preheating step and just toss the loaf into the oven cold. Since the loaf had already risen well before baking I figured my worst case was an OK loaf, but… this one worked out really, really well.

Baked in a 450F oven on fan, inside a french oven. (Which is just a dutch oven only without the lip on the lid to hold coals) Put the loaf into the cold pot, put the pot in a cold oven, turned on the heat, and let it go for an hour. Then I took the lid off and let it go for another 10 minutes to finish.

This worked great. Seriously, lovely loaf, the crust was all crackly while I took this pic and I’m quite looking forward to dinner and a chunk of this. I don’t think I’m going to bother preheating the oven ever again, at least not for simple lean loaves like this.

Also, entirely separately, the Fellow Ode grinder in the background remains awesome. Silt-free french press coffee is lovely and my only regret is not getting a nice grinder earlier on in our communal zombie apocalypse.

 

German Buttercream is awesome

Posted on by Dan

Really really lemon cake. Seriously, that frosting is about 1/3 lemon juice by weight. Yes, I know, both my food photography and food styling skills need work. Gimme a break, we’re in a zombie apocalypse, I don’t get much practice.

The recipe

German buttercream frosting is one of the four and a half main kinds of buttercream frostings, and one that’s not as common here in the US as it really ought to be, because it’s both really easy and you can pack it full of flavor.

The recipe is simple:

  • 1 pound room temperature (~65F/19C) butter
  • 1 batch of pastry cream

Beat the butter until it’s light and fluffy. Beat it a lot. Once it’s fluffy start adding in the pastry cream one spoonful or so at a time, beating to incorporate. When all the pastry cream is added and the frosting is fully beaten (it’ll be a normal buttercream frosting consistency, fluffy and reasonably spreadable) then you’re done.

If your butter is too cold the frosting will be a bit thick and hard to work with, and if it’s too warm it’ll be thin and a little loose. Like with all other buttercreams, or most anything else that uses butter, temperature is important. If you’re somewhere warm, add extra corn starch to the pastry cream (it can handle up to about twice what my linked recipe has) which will make the pastry cream nearly solid but lightens up with the butter and helps offset higher temperatures.

This is enough to frost an 8″ or 9″ round cake. It might be a bit tight with a 9″ if you frost the middle, too, but seriously don’t do that — the middle layer should be something else that complements the cake and buttercream. (In mine here it’s lemon curd)

Why German Buttercream’s great

German buttercream frosting is great because it’s so simple, doesn’t require molten sugar, and you can make up the pastry cream ahead of time. If I want an actual white frosting I’d use something else (probably a Swiss buttercream made with goat butter) but for anything else? This is my current go-to frosting.

The other thing you have going for you here is that you can pack a huge amount of flavor into the frosting. Most buttercream frostings are buttery and sweet, but only mildly flavored. Some people like that but I prefer something with a bit more presence in the cake, and that’s what you have here. In the pic the (somewhat amateurish) cake is frosted with a buttercream that’s about 1/3 lemon juice by weight. It’s intensely lemon, and even though I added a bunch of sugar (almost 200g of powered sugar) it’s still really sour and it’s just awesome.

It’s really hard to get anything even close to that intense a flavor from other kinds of buttercreams. In some cases, where your flavoring agent is dry and intensely flavored like with freeze-dried berries, you can manage but it’s hard and you’re limited in the flavors available to you. For a German Buttercream, as long as your intense flavor is liquid you can go wild with it.

An apple spice cake with apple-cider frosting? Just make your pastry cream with cider and that’d be awesome and now I want it. Cranberry frosting for a chocolate-cranberry cake? (Or, at least, a  chocolate cake with a cranberry chutney filling and cranberry-juice-based frosting) Nice.

Once the office re-opens I fully intend on making a rich chocolate cake and a Jameson’s frosting. (Which, if I math out right, will be about 10% ABV (maybe a little less, there’s air in that volume), so eat responsibly when it happens)

 

 

Generic pastry cream

Posted on by Dan

Pastry cream is a simple starch-stabilized variant of a custard. Traditionally it’s vanilla flavored, with some sugar and faffing around with tempering your eggs and such, but it turns out that’s not actually necessary.

350g liquid (~12 fluid oz)
50g egg yolk (~3 yolks)
22g corn starch (I dunno how much, weight it)

Optional: sugar (75g gives a reasonable sweetness most of the time)

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