Sunday Spluge

I have a confession to make...

I'm a Shopaholic...

But I'm no regular shopaholic, I love to shop for books, baking equipments and out of this world baking ingredients...I'm always in a look out for good quality ingredients.

I've just recently found out through

Market Manila that Bacchus Epicerie is the local distributor of Valrhona chocolates! They sell them by the kilo! I was so excited!!! I know that they are quite expensive them being if not the BEST, they are definitely one of the best chocolate makers in the world. So I know I just have to have them!

Do I sound like an addict?!? Hopefully not, I'm just so glad I have them safely stored away in my fridge.

Inside the store I've got a WHOLE fridge filled with nothing else but Valrhona chocolates, different versions of it. Being not prepared for my chocolate expedition, I bought a kilo of good quality cocoa powder and a good quality dark chocolate. Any good pantry MUST have those right? So now all I got to do is where to use these exquisite ingredients.

While I was struggling, lugging around the mall those heavy chocolates, I saw espresso bean covered with chocolates!! Oh my, is this my lucky day or what?!?

SMS: Double Chocolate Cherry Cookies

Sweet Melissa Sundays is group for people who adores the Sweet Melissa Bakery in New York, and with the help of Melissa Murphy's book aptly called The Sweet Melissa Baking Book, we plan to bake our way through it. Although I haven't been to New York and haven't tried personally pastries from Sweet Melissa, having read so much good reviews about her bakery and book, I just knew I have to try it.

This post is my first time in joining this group and this is also my first time in making sliced cookies! Weird though I know, I've been making cookies for so long but I always used the scoop method and this cookies definitely wouldn't work with the scoop method because they don't flatten out like other cookies I've made several times before.

They are quite easy to make and shape though cutting through them equally tends to be a bit trouble for me. But of course these are so much easier than cranking out my ice cream scooper. I cut them both tick and thin version. The thin version I found have to bake until a bit crisp because they tend to fall apart when picked up. The thicker version are like cakey and not at all cookie like which is what I was expecting. But then I'm not so sure what the texture should be.

What I love with this dough is that it's very soft and yet not sticky, so it's easy to shape into logs. Although there are some issues I wanted to address, the recipe specified that it makes 24 cookies? Well that seems to be a mistake because I already doubled the recipe and I just barely reached the 24 count, hmmm...maybe the circumference of my logs are a bit big or something. The dried cherries are hardly noticeable in terms of the look and the taste, the cherries that I get here in Manila are dark in color so they tend to blend in with the chocolate dough and as for the taste, in my humble opinion the chocolate overshadows the cherries. Next time, I'll probably try this version from non other than Martha Stewart. For the meantime it's no biggie, I've enjoyed the process and my family enjoyed the end product.

Making of a Pastry Chef

Starting this month of June until September this year, Fully Booked, which is a very popular bookstore here in Manila is hosting an event called THE BLOGGERS' CHALLENGE which basically is blogging about your favorite book and if get chosen, you get to win a FREE book. How cool is that!
Unlike most people, I read cookbooks like regular people read paperback books, so my choice for this event is Andre MacLauchlan's The Making of a Pastry Chef. This book to be honest started to bore me, but then I forced myself to read it and got truly inspired to change a career. This book gave me a glimpse on how some of America's best pastry chef started their culinary career all the problems that they have encountered and what they did to turn it into their advantage. Thankfully I persevered in finishing this book because it gave me an insight how self fulfillment and self satisfaction in our way of living is much better than any monetary amount, PASSION is everything in this field of work and striving to learn and invent something new everyday or else you'll get left behind. It opened up my eyes that being a chef is hard work not just what we see in the TV, it showed me the back end view on what it takes to be a great pastry chef.

This book is perfect for those people who loves to bake or cook who are thinking of a culinary career but are not sure with it. I highly recommend it, for your next birthday or Christmas splurge a little and give this book a read that it deserved.

For those who wants to join this event, drop by Fully Booked website to read more details about it.

Very Chocolaty Peanut Butter Ganache Tart

Still don't have any all purpose flour in the pantry, no nuts, I feel so deprived! hahahaha...weird I know but it's true. Good thing I made a tart dough few weeks back, I finally got the chance to use it. For the filling, I went with something simple and something I know everyone in my family love, a CHOCOLATY PEANUT BUTTER GANACHE TART!

The tart dough is a bit delicate so roll out gently, I did mine between two sheets of cling film, no mess no fuss. Even so when I transferred it to the tart pan it kind of cracked specially on the sides, good thing about this though is it patches up nicely. For both the filling and the topping, I decided on a dark chocolate ganache, which is quite simple to make a ratio of 1:1 to make a medium consistency ganache. I used a combination of 8 oz bittersweet chocolate to 4 oz unsweetened chocolate. As spur of the moment thing, I added smooth peanut butter to the filling to differentiate it with the topping. The filling has a thicker and sturdier structure compare to the whipped ganache which is what I used for the topping, both are quite nice and very rich texture, the tart dough added the right balance between the smooth , creamy texture of the chocolate/peanut butter layer with the buttery crust. This is definitely a must try.

CHOCOLATY PEANUT BUTTER GANACHE TART
Recipe by Sweet Tooth

• 1 1/2 cup of cream heated
  
• 12 oz of chopped chocolate (I used a combination of 8 oz bittersweet chocolate to 4 oz unsweetened chocolate)
• 3/4 cup of smooth peanut butter (you can use chunky if you want to add crunch)
  
• 1 10-baked sweet tart (from Pierre Herme)

1. Chopped the chocolates into small pieces, divide into 2 heat proof bowls and set aside.
2. In a sauce pan, heat the cream. While waiting for the cream to get hot, in one of the bowls, add the peanut butter. Set aside.
3. Equally divide the heated cream into the two bowls of chocolate.
4. Let it stand for a few minutes and gradually mix with a rubber scrapper to incorporate the cream and chocolate mixture. Cover with cling wrap and refrigerate until cold.
5. For the chocolate peanut butter mixture, once the cream is added gradually mix with a rubber scrapper to incorporate. This mixture is thicker in consistency than the pure ganache because of the peanut butter. Keep on mixing until it cools to room temperature, with a help of an ice bath.
   
6. Pour into the baked tart shell, spreading the mixture as evenly as possible, cover with cling film and refrigerate. For 30 minutes to 1 hour.
   
7. Get the bowl of pure ganache (chocolate & cream mixture) from the fridge, whipped until it change in color and becomes fluffy, will take only few minutes specially if using a hand mixer or a tabletop mixer.
   
8. To decorate the tart, get the tart from the fridge, put the whipped ganache in a pastry bag with a star tip and pipe shells around the top of the tart starting on the outer perimeter of the tart until you reach the center.
9. Chill of several 2-3 hours for the flavor to develop or if you can't wait like my brother eat at once.
10. This is a very rich tart, so a sliver of it goes a long way.
11. Enjoy!
    

Red Velvet Birthday Cake

Red velvet cake is a type of rich and sweet cake with a distinctive dark red to bright red or red-brown color. It is most popular in the Southern United States. The most typical frosting for a red velvet cake is a butter roux icing also known as a cooked flour frosting but cream cheese buttercream frosting are popular too.

I've been meaning to try this cake for quite sometime, I'm mighty curious with that red color and the butter roux icing. I haven't heard and tried that before this. It's my birthday so I get to try any cake I want, and this is the cake I chose. Buttermilk is not readily available in Manila, however there's a powdered buttermilk available, I wanted to give it a try. It's weird though the powdered buttermilk smelled like ordinary milk, so I'm not sure if I was ripped off or that's how it's suppose to be, I still persevered.

This red velvet cake takes TWO bottles of red food coloring, it's messy stuff after everything is mixed everything is RED! Even after baking look at my serving platter, its red! I don't know its psychological or what but when I was preparing the ingredients for this cake, I thought that the red food coloring smells like blood! Eeek! Maybe I watch too much True Blood, hahahaha...

Its such a easy batter everything comes smoothly. What intrigued me more in this particular recipe, is that the last step is mixing bicarb with vinegar, then mix it to the cake batter. Of course, the bicarb reacted with the vinegar and I thought that was cool! Yeah yeah...I'm kinda a geek too! The book says it would make 3 layers of cake, but I find it utterly impossible. I barely was able to make it into 2 layers let alone three. I think I really should have made it into 3 layers as you can see I had too much icing on top of my cake! Next time I make this cake, I will really try to make it into 3 layers.

The butter roux icing is something I've never tried before so I was excited to do so. It was actually quite easy making the icing. Although it only confirmed what I've always known which is that I really really do NOT like buttercream icing, i find it too rich and buttery. I know I'm just weird that way. All in all, the experience in making this cake is not bad a lot of first time experiences which was fun.