Category Archives: chocolate

Peach and chocolate crisp with almond topping

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Peach, chocolate and almond crisp

In our first house together, we had a peach tree in the back yard. The peaches never ripened. They would fall to the ground, hard little stones, and rot into oddly beautiful, decadent green velvet balls. Steenbeck was a wild little puppy, then, and she’d play with the rotten fruit, throwing it around the yard and chasing it. I always wondered if the moldering green peach fuzz gave her strange dreams. I had such an odd dream this morning. I know it’s boring to read about other peoples’ dreams, so I’ll keep it quick. Like all the best dreams, it was a dizzying mix of anxiety and joy. It was dark, and we were in a strange town, on an empty lot. I was worried about Steenbeck, alone in one of the low houses that ran in rows off the lot, so I went to find her. Somebody told me she’d been taken somewhere safe, with people that would look after her till I could be with her. I turned back to see my family, playing at the edge of the lot. Then waves started crashing towards them. Gentle at first, and then higher and higher, as high as the buildings. They knocked the telephone poles down into the houses. I waited till the wave subsided, and started across the lot, and then a larger wave came. I wasn’t scared. The water was clear and golden green-grey. I felt that I could breathe, even in the water. And then I heard the waves singing. They each had their own bell-like tone. I was lifted higher than the buildings, but I didn’t worry. And then I woke up.

I love peaches! So plump and juicy and summery. The boys like them, too, and they like to choose them at the store. They’ll pick hard, unripe peaches, and then take little nibbles of them. You’ll say, “they’re not ripe yet, you have to wait.” An hour later, “Mom, are the peaches ripe yet?” “NO!” And then by the time they’re actually ripe, the boys have forgotten all about them. I had a few large, beautiful peaches, in danger of turning green and squishy, so I decided to make them into a crisp. This was so simple, and turned out so tasty, that I’m very pleased with it. You cut the fresh peaches, without even peeling them. Spread them onto a pie plate. Sprinkle some bittersweet chocolate chips over. Peaches and chocolate is not an oft-used combination, but they’re very good together! You divide two eggs (you’ll use both parts!) The yolks become a very simple custard, with rum and vanilla, and the whites are whipped stiff, and mixed with almonds to make a sort of amaretti-type of topping. It’s humid as hell here (I imagine hell would be very humid!) So the crisp didn’t stay crisp for long, but the almonds kept it nice and crunchy. You could put this in a pate sucree crust, and make a pie, but I liked the simplicity of it baked as it is.

Here’s Elmore James with Rollin and Tumblin. I love this song so much! I can hear the first chords from several rooms away, and it’s still thrilling. And if you don’t want his peaches, don’t shake his tree!
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Chocolate gateau basque with apricots, cherries & cassis

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Chocolate gateau basque

I made a cake on my birthday, and it provoked a minor existential crisis. Making a cake for somebody else on their birthday is easy. You just arbitrarily decide that they like something (based, say, on a piece of cake they ordered at a restaurant a decade ago, which they might not have particularly enjoyed) and you make them the same kind of cake for every single special occasion ever for the rest of time. Easy! But to make a cake I like, on my own birthday, well…that raised all sorts of questions. I like chocolate, sure, but do I like chocolate cake? Not really. But I like brownies. What’s that all about? I love fruit, but what kind of fruit, and should it be fresh? Do summery fruits taste good when they’re baked in a cake? I like apple cake, but this isn’t October, for heaven’s sake. Good lord…DO I EVEN LIKE CAKE?!?!?!?!

I decided to make a cake with chocolate in it, but melted chocolate, not cocoa. And fruit, but with apricots and cherries baked in, and fresh fruit and ice cream coming in over the top of it, at the moment of ingestion. I decided to make it like the gateau basque I’d made a while back, because I loved that. I’d put apricots in, because I really like them, and I know Malcolm isn’t crazy about them, but that would be the selfish It’s-my-birthday-and-I’ll-bake-with-apricots-if-I-want-to part. I love cassis, so we’d be having some of that. And, of course…chocolate chips, because everything in life is better with chocolate chips. The boys helped me make the cake, and it was a lot of fun. Malcolm decorated it with my initial and my age, which looked much nicer than the pattern I would have made with the tines of the fork. We ate it with vanilla ice cream, and lovely fresh strawberries, blueberries and, as a special treat, rainier cherries. It’s a nice cake, because it keeps for days, so you can look forward to some with your coffee in the morning as a reason to get out of bed.

Chocolate basque cake

Here’s Black Sheep with The Choice is Yours. Sometimes it’s hard to be the decider! I love this song!
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Blackcurrants and black oxen

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Blackcurrants

School’s out for the summer! This was the last week (well, 2 short days) of school. As Isaac said, we’ll be together every minute from here-on-in. And I’m genuinely happy about that! Last week was a funny week. The boys had field trips and mostly goofed off during the day, but they were wound up. They were exhausted. They couldn’t fall asleep on the light-late nights. They woke up through the night thinking they were late for their field trips. They were fragile. David and I agreed to give them plenty of space, and recognize their status as volatile substances. Malcolm had a few meltdowns. You’d ask him to tie his shoes. He’d give you a (ridiculously, unfairly adorable) sticken look, and then he’d lie on the floor and wail that nobody liked him. I never react well in these situations. I get impatient and yell, and worry, and make everything a thousand times worse. One evening we decided to cool down by picking blackcurrants. I have one blackcurrant bush. I’ve had it three years, and it’s just now starting to produce lovely lovely fruit. It’s laden!! I’m so thrilled. Malcolm was still in a serious, reflective mood, and as he picked the fruit he said, “starry night.” “They look like a starry night?” I asked, in my slow way. “A galaxy somewhere in space that you could never go.” Malcolm replied. “Doesn’t space seem awfully dreamy?” He asked. And then we talked about space for a while, and darkness, and dreams. And we both felt calmer and happier.

One thing I love about Malcolm is that he’s game. If you want to go for a walk, any time of the day, he’ll pop on his shoes and come along with you. If you have to go to the grocery store, he’ll push your cart, and only ask for two or three treats you wouldn’t ordinarily buy. If you want to go for a jog, he’ll come with you, and you’ll discover a secret path on the other other side of the towpath, and running along it will be like flying with ewoks, and he’ll chant “fun fun fun fun,” the whole time you run. And if you want to go take photographs of oxen you’ve been admiring for months – he’s your man! There are these oxen that live in a field up the road. They’re gorgeous! There’s a black one, a grey one with a white face, and a blue roan, which is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen! I’ve had a crush on them for some while, and I’ve nearly driven into oncoming traffic innumerable times, trying to get a better look at them. ONE OF THEM HAD A BABY!! THE BLUE ROAN DID!! Holy smoke! (They look like holy smoke!!) On hot days they wander in this little wooded section of their pasture, and the sight of three giant oxen in a lovely dapply little patch of trees just kills me. And then there’s the baby!! Phew.

Blue roan &baby ox

Another way that Malcolm is game is that he’ll try anything I make. He really loved this blackcurrant, white chocolate, dark chocolate chip ice cream. It’s kind of a frankenstein ice cream. I picked a bowl of blackcurrants – a scant cupful, and I couldn’t wait to try them. So I cooked them with plenty of sugar (probably equal parts to the currants, in the end, I kept adding more) to make a syrup. I strained it, mixed it with some leftover white chocolate pastry cream, stirred in some chocolate chips and some (unwhipped – Malcom’s idea!) heavy cream and froze it in the old donvier. It turned out a lovely texture, but the blackcurrants do have a little bitter kick – even under layers of sugar and cream.

Here’s Jurassic 5 with Monkey Bars, because Malcolm likes them and he’s such a little monkey!

Red velvet apricot & cherry upside-down cake

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“ONLY CONNECT”

E.M. Forster

Apricot cherry upside down cake

Following on this morning’s post of quotes, (yes, it will be on the test, children!) I’ve been thinking about how the quotes connect in my head, when I think about them all together. I think about how they relate to each other in unexpected ways. And then I think about how it’s in our nature, as humans, to make connections. If you give us 3 random facts, we’ll put them together to make a story. That’s how we watch films – we connect still pictures (somewhere in the upside-down back of our brain) to make a coherent, fluid movement. And then we’ll connect those images to make a narrative, to give them meaning. Of course, Forster was talking about connections between people, and I love that idea as well. But I’ve been thinking lately about how a connection with a person becomes more solid when we share some random connection of ideas or images, and when they make sense to both of us. For instance…the other day we were listening to the Pogues in the car, and Malcolm asked if they’d written the theme to Sponge bob. (Which my boys don’t actually watch, as it happens.) I had a chuckle, thought “Who lives in a feckin pineapple under the sea, boys?” We came home, I told David about it, as a cute things the boys said. Then, days later, David took that funny connection, drew this picture… And I felt really grateful to have somebody to share silly things with.

So, when I showed David this cake, and he said, “bloody stumps,” I knew exactly what he was talking about! There was a show called Home Movies. We loved it!! It was about an eight-year-old that made art house films. Classic! One of the characters, McGurk, is possibly the worst soccer coach ever. When one of the children on the soccer team won’t run down the field, he threatens to cut his legs off. “Bloody stumps!” he yells. (It’s not a kid’s show!) Well, one night, after the boys were a-bed, we had a chuckle about McGurk witnessing the hand-cutting-off-scene in Star Wars, and yelling… (tee hee hee) “bloody stumps, Anakin!” The point is…this might not make sense if I explain it in this long and tedious fashion, but sharing some odd connection that makes you laugh, with another human being, is the best way to connect. And we’re passing the craziness along to our boys!

Another nice way to connect is to share food. I have a friend-mom at school named Jamie. She had a son in Isaac’s class. She’s a vegetarian, too! She gave me these beautiful red velvet apricots, and I thought they were so pretty, I’d bake them upside-down. I put them in a cake with cherries. And I’d read that they were apricots crossed with plums, which made me think about plum pudding, which made me think about cinnamon and ginger and spicy black pepper. So I put those in the cake. And I love cherries and chocolate, and apricots and chocolate, and sweet spices and chocolate, so I thought I’d throw some chocolate chips in as well. And these apricots are known for “bleeding” red into gold. And then…well, I’m going to stop talking now or nobody is ever going to want to make this cake.

Here’s Niney the Observer with Blood & Fire I love the surname “the observer.”
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Red wine and dark chocolate cookies

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Red wine & dark chocolate cookies

I like wine. It’s almost a defining characteristic. If I was coming over to your house for a meal, you’d probably say, “Claire’s coming over? Let’s see. She’s a vegetarian, so lets get some vegetables, and she’ll be wanting wine, so let’s stock up on that.” And then someone else – the imaginary friend of my imaginary friend – would say, “Should we get a good bottle?” and you’d say, “Nah, she’ll drink anything.” Well, not anything! I wouldn’t drink mad dog 20/20 kiwi strawberry, for pete’s sake. But I am fine with cheap and cheerful, it’s true.

I grew up in a house that had a little silver dish that said, “a dinner without wine is like a day without sunshine,” and I seem to have taken that to heart! When I was younger, before I even drank wine, I would listen to this song by Antoine Forqueray. It must have been wintertime, I remember a glowing sort of light in the kitchen. My mother must have been making dinner. The song sounded like red wine, and I remember thinking, “I hope someday I’m in love, and making dinner, and drinking red wine, and feeling like this song makes me feel.” Welladay! Here we are!

Of course, there’s no combination better than red wine and dark chocolate. And this was the inspiration for these cookies. There’s red wine in the batter. It makes the cookies a little soft and cake-like, but pleasantly so, I think. The taste of red wine in a baked good is quite nice. It’s like a little fruity tang. It’s not overwhelming – you can have these with coffee in the morning. You can feed them to your children. It’s just really nice. These went fast!

Here’s the Forqueray, as played by Jordi Savall. It’s the 2Eme Suite, Chaconne La Buisson. God, it’s gorgeous!!
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Strawberry tart with white chocolate pastry cream & hazelnut cocoa crust

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Strawberry white chocolate tart

According to family legend, my mother ate a quart of strawberries each day when she was pregnant with me. One of the nice things about a June birthday! To this day I love strawberries, and so do my boys. I could bring home two quarts of strawberries, and they’d eat them before I even had a chance to wash them, if I let them. So I don’t get to make fancy strawberry desserts very often. There’s something so plump and rosy and youthful about strawberries, that it’s no wonder Ingmar Bergman employed them as his time-travelling device in Wild Strawberries. I’m fascinated by the idea of food as a trigger of memory, and I love films that explore memory and dreams, so this scene is one of my favorites. I love his quiet, gentle voice. He’s telling his own story, so he can slow time, and move through it with dream-like ease. And with the odd logic of dreams, he can’t speak to the people that his memory conjures, though he can witness scenes he missed in real life. I love that he’s dressed in dark clothes, and stands in a quiet, darkened hall, but the glow of whitewashed memory washes over him from the bright, busy room he’s looking into. Beautiful! Perhaps this tart is one they might have made for somebody’s name day, on a lovely summer day by the sea. It’s quite simple…a cookie-like crust with dark cocoa and hazelnuts (nutella combination!) is filled with white chocolate pastry cream, and fresh, unsweetened strawberries. It’s like a white-chocolate covered strawberry in tart form. It was fun to watch the boys eat this – the pastry cream is soft and slippery, the crust is a little crunchy, and the strawberries plump and ripe. An alternative preparation would be to fold some unsweetened whipped cream into the pastry cream before you spread it into the tart shell, which would make it like the pretty pavlova cakes I used do dream about as a child!

Strawberry tart

Here’s Shuggie Otis with Strawberry Letter #23
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Chocolate covered cherry cookies

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Chocolate covered cherry cookies

We don’t go out to dinner very often, because I enjoy cooking dinner so much, and because we’re poor as church mice. (Not really, but I like that phrase. I can just see the church mice. Why are they poorer than other mice? Why?) But we went out the other night (thanks mom and dad!) for our anniversary. I think I enjoy going out to dinner more because we don’t do it very often. I love the space that we make sitting across from each other at a table. A little private pocket in a room filled with other people. I love the conversations we have when we go out to dinner, which always feel a little different from conversations we have any where else. We went to Sprig and Vine, a vegan restaurant, which I would recommend to anyone, be they vegan, be they meat-eaters, be they whatever. We ate fiddleheads and ramps and baby artichokes and castelvetrano olives. Yum. Then we came home and put the boys to bed and sat in the backyard by a fire, eating these cookies. Which is just what I’d hoped we’d do! I’ve told the story before of our courting days and my ingeniousness with wrapping chocolate ice cream around cherry ice cream. Well, ever since those days, I seem to be stuck in a rut with the cherries and the chocolate around valentines day and anniversaries. But they’re so perfect together! In any form! Such a perfect pairing. These particular cookies take a little while to put together, they’re a labor of love, which is exactly what I wanted them to be. They’re fun to make, though, and not difficult. You make a shortbread-type cookie. You roll it out and cut it into rounds. You cup a round of dough in your palm. You put a spoonful of good cherry jam in the center. You fold the edges up and seal them. You bake the cookies, and then you dip them in melted bittersweet chocolate. Good, messy, fun and delicious!

Here’s Soul Food by Goodie Mob because everyone in town is out at the restaurants, and they say “looking to be one of those days when mama ain’t cooking.” I love this song so much in every way.
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Cinnamon bittersweet chocolate sandwich cookies

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cinnamon chocolate sandwich cookies

You know what’s almost always good? Cookies sandwiched together with chocolate, that’s what! They’re all at once childishly comforting and sophisticated. Good with a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, a glass of wine. I knew I wanted to make some sort of cookie sandwiched with bittersweet chocolate, but I couldn’t decide what kind of cookie. I wanted to do something different. I ran some options by David. Coffee, pecan, lemon, orange, lime, mustard seed, tamarind (yes, he was paying attention!) Nothing sounded quite right. Then I said, I can’t do cinnamon, that’s sort of boring, right? And he said, “What! Cinnamon boring?!? Never! NEVER!” Well, he wasn’t quite that emphatic, but he made the valid point that you can never go wrong with cinnamon and chocolate. So I made these small, sweet, spicy, crunchy chewy cookies, sandwiched with dark chocolate. As David pointed out, they’re a bit like deconstructed chocolate chip cookies. They have similar flavors, but you experience these flavors differently. Simple and quite lovely. I made them very small, because you eat them two at at time, and because they are rather sweetish.

Always You, Chet Baker.
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Apricot almond cake w/ apricot-cassis cream

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Apricot almond cake

I love the idea of a cake with apricot glaze – I always have. It’s strangely associated with some childhood notion of sophistication in edible form. Strange, because I can’t remember the actual moment that I ate an elegant cake with an apricot glaze. I can remember plenty of battenburg cakes, wrapped in plastic like the block of modeling clay that they resembled. They had a layer of apricot glaze under their oddly chewy marzipan layer. I loved them! But I’m sure I never thought of them as elegant. The truth is, whether sophisticated or not, a layer of apricot makes sense in a cake! It adds a pleasant fruity tartness that offsets the sweetness of whatever else happens to be in the cake. This cake happens to have almonds – a classic match with apricots – and bittersweet chocolate, which adds its own version of bitter-with-sweet, to complement the apricots.

Inexplicably, I became semi-obsessed with making apricot-cassis cream. I thought about a million different things to make, but I kept returning to this. So I turned to my new BFF, the pastry cream, and I added a purée made of apricots and cassis, and then folded in a little lightly whipped cream. I thought it was very nice with the cake – I don’t think I’ve ever had pastry cream or any of its subsidiaries alongside a cake before, but I thought it was a lovely combination of textures. You could easily eat the apricot cream on its own as a mousse, with some crispy cookies!

I just can’t not share this! It’s a song called Apricot, by the Armenian Navy Band, and it has my Malcolm dancing around the room in his pjs.
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Brown butter caramel ice cream with chocolate chips

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Brown butter – chocolate chip ice cream

This is a story of redemption! This is a story of ice cream that lost its way, somewhere on the journey, but found it again to become glorious. (And was then eaten.) It started out with so much promise. A lovely brown butter caramel was made, and it was worked into a custard that thickened and didn’t curdle. Good custard!
Obedient custard! And then it sat in the fridge all day in a spacious bowl, getting nice and chilled, just like you hoped it would. But when you tried to put it in your little antiquated ice cream maker, it was all, “Whatever, I’m not going to freeze! That’s so totally uncool!” You tried a few times. You coaxed it, you tried to talk its language. To no avail. So, in despair, you set it aside. And it spent some time in the cold dark underworld we’ll call your freezer. Hobnobbing with the ne’er-do-well frozen peas, the reprobate frozen waffles. Chilling story! The next morning, faced with the harsh light of day, the ice cream was a mess. Weirdly icy in the middle, with a strange sugary coating on top. Well, we’ve all been there. We all know what it’s like the next morning. But you gave it what for! You worked it up good! And what you had before you, after a rigorous workout, was a creamy, slightly icy confection that you really needed to eat three bowls at a time.

So! If you have a regular functioning way to make ice cream, you don’t need to go through all this drama. You can just make the ice cream. I started by browning some butter; added the brown butter to some brown sugar; cooked till it was bubbly (but not petrified); made that into a custard, with the slight addition of a tablespoonful of tapioca flour. To thicken and preserve against curdling. You could easily leave this out or add the same amount of cornflour. I added chocolate chips, but I processed them first in my tiny food processor. This meant that you had some solidly chunky chocolate pieces, and some pieces of flaky chocolate “dust.” I think this was one of the absolute best things about this ice cream!! You could also just chop the chocolate chips with a big knife, and be sure to include all the little gravelly bits, if you don’t have a processor.

Here’s Blackalicious with The Fall and Rise of Elliot Brown

THE CUSTARD

3 T butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 cups milk
1 T tapioca or corn flour
pinch salt
1/2 t cinnamon
2 eggs
1 T vanilla

1 cup heavy cream
1/2 t seasalt

Warm the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat till it’s toasty and brown. (Ten minutes?) You’ll have brown solids on the bottom of the pan. Strain through a paper towel, collecting the brown liquidy part in a clean bowl.

Put the brown butter back into a saucepan with the sugar, and heat again at medium heat till the sugar is melted and boiling away. After about 1 minute of boiling, take it off the heat.

In a small bowl, combine the tapioca flour with a bit of the milk. Whisk to mix well. Pour this mixture into the rest of the milk, and pour it all into the sugar/butter combination. Whisk it all together until it’s well combined, and add the vanilla and the salt and cinnamon.

In the same bowl, whisk the eggs till they’re light and fluffy. In a slow stream, add the warm milk, whisking the whole time. Then pour the whole mix back into the saucepan, and cook over low heat, whisking the whole time, for about 10 minutes. You don’t want to let anything boil, or the eggs will curdle everything. After 10 minutes, it will just leave a light coating on the back of your spoon.

Pour it into a cool bowl, cover, put in the fridge, and leave for 5 hours or over night.

When you’re ready to freeze it…process 1 cup of good bittersweet chocolate chips for about a minute, till they’re mostly in tact, but they have some flaky dusty bits of chocolate all around them. Stir this into your custard, stir in the heavy cream, and then freeze according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. I shook a bit of sea salt in before freezing as well!