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Sunday, December 20, 2009

Chocolate layered Cake Disaster!

Well, I did try the Chocolate layered cake I referred to in my last post. Here are the results!

Glazed chocolate layer cake
1 cup flour
salt
5 large eggs + 2 large egg yolks
3/4 gran sugar
3/4 stick of butter

filling:
2 large eggs, separated
2 cups mascarpone cheese
1 cup confectioner's sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Disaster! First of all the above ingredients give no sponge like feel to the cake. It was super dense and very eggy. The eggy part is ok; however, it was like eating 3 dense pieces of cake with no "boing." I made two batches to make 6 layers as I saw in a picture. Double the disaster.

The best part was when I put the assembled cake into the refrigerator to set. The entire cake - all 6 layers toppled because the filling was not "sticky" enough. I used yogurt instead of the cheese. Bad move.

Learning: when using filling, you need a filling ingredient that will stick the layers together; otherwise, the filling oozes out and the layers fall on you when you open the refrigerator. haha, made for an interesting cooking session before my dinner party arrived to my place. Other than that, the party was a success!

The dinner party menu was Indian fusion, which is, as I am discovering, my style.

Chicken Tandoori (that is, braised with tandoori seasonings)
Roasted rosemary Okra, potato, edamame, corn in a light lemon vinagrette with shallots
Roasted yams and parsnips (out of this world)
Curry beef with potato and carrots
Rice

Dessert:
Cinnamon buns (made from scratch, and a prize dessert)
Toppled Chocolate cake

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

To find or not to find

To find or not to find, that is the question.

I am in search of life, and have decided to blog about it. I am a well-rounded person with ambitions, that is, the ambition to find my gig. From my introspection time over the last few weeks, I think I have found it in food. We all have ambition of some sort, but the question is, should I go on that search to really find it? Or, is what I have today good enough.

Since my passion is about food - I plan to share what I am encountering, learning and feeling.

My latest is buying food at the grocery store that I have never purchased before. I bought leeks for the first time. I made a quiche with those leeks for the first time. I have never eaten a low fat quiche before, and that is what I made for the first time. No cream, with milk, add an extra egg. Pinch of nutmeg gives it some flavor. And, I just realized that Julia Child does taste test uncooked eggs. I spit it out after I realized that my quiche batter had uncooked egg yoke. However, I guess it is not that unusual, as one recipe for a chocolate cake used egg yokes for the filling.

That chocolate cake will be my discussion point on a future blog, because I have been looking at the recipe for SO LONG (Martha Stewart's Everyday Food), I will be making it for the Christmas Holiday.