The deliciousness: homemade pita and zataar.
While I usually have a sweet tooth, I also have a deep love for warm, bready objects straight from the oven. And homemade pita with zataar definitely falls into that category. The pitas are a different species than those found in a supermarket and the garlic/lemony/spicy zataar combo gives this bread a wonderful kick. This was intended as a Saturday lunch project, but as the eight pitas come out of the oven, I’m realizing this is really the perfect party of dinner party food. Regardless, I know they will all get consumed :)
Ingredients
Arroz con leche. Mmmmm.
So after a long hiatus, I’m returning to Procrastibake. But with five weeks left to go before I return to my kitchen in Cambridge, it will have to be in aspirational form. I’m violating another rule in including a dessert that doesn’t even need to be baked. But the dessert pickings in Latin America are slim so some rules have to be bent. And I have many beautiful food memories from France to fill in, yet the thing on my mind right now is far simpler than anything I ate in French pastry shops: Mexican rice pudding.
Now it’s easy to insult rice pudding. It is just a vehicle for spices at the end of the day. I understand that many cultures do excellent rice puddings, from Turkey to India to Peru, and some fancy shop in Nolita even makes rice pudding seem like ice cream by blending in every type of candy and flavoring produced by chemical engineers in New Jersey. But the slightly chewy texture is so perfect, and any excuse to eat cinnamony-vanilla goodness works for me. I find that in Mexico, the spice combination is just that perfect combination of traditional and exotic—lemon or orange zest, cinnamon, vanilla, tequila-soaked raisins. The only downside is rice pudding tends to be served cold (at least in Mexico City), and as I think about most desserts in this world, warm trumps.
When I get back to Cambridge, I’m going to try my hand at a few rice pudding recipes. It seems like the type of dessert I could whip up in 15 minutes and have around for a week of delighted consumption. That is, when I start working again, I can return to some procrastibaking…and the simple goodness of rice pudding is hard to surpass. The key to the Mexican pudding is threefold from what my friend here told me: 1) soak the raisins in tequila, 2) cook the rice with a vanilla bean, orange/lemon rind, and cinnamon stick with it, 3) use milk/heavy cream instead of condensed milk (otherwise it’s ungodly sweet no matter what you do). I’ll test and report in a few weeks!
Exams are approaching, which means that procrastibake season is upon us. Rather than consume the enormous hunk of delicious chocolate-hazelnut cake that I have rapidly been trying to bestow on friends, I thought it would be better to produce a second dessert (two sweet objects are better than one to woo visitors with, right?). And I didn’t have a craving for just any old dessert. Oh no, it was absolutely necessary to make by favorite lemon blackberry buttermilk tart. This recipe initially used blueberries, but lemon and blackberry is a completely underappreciated combination of tastes. The lemon curd filling is divinely creamy and the blackberries just have the right combination of tartness to capture the best of warm weather on a fork. I served the tart with blackberry lime sorbet and it was truly divine, and such a delicate complement to the chocolate monstrosity that I produced. I consider this the perfect lunch dessert…it’s so light that it could/should even be eaten for breakfast, and then there is still space for chocolate cake in the evening…
Some tips for the recipe: 1) This is a great procrastibake dessert because it’s really best when made in stages. Make the dough one day, let it chill. Roll it out, let it chill. Bake the crust. Wait. Make the filling. Bake. Let the tart chill again before eating. It wonderfully draws out the baking process, but this means that this isn’t the right dessert to decide to whip together right before a dinner party. 2) The tart crust always shrinks. It’s a fact of life, even if you put an entire stack of books on top to weight it down. The best thing to do is accept it and, rather than waste the filling (because it inevitably will not all fit with all the beautiful blackberries) make a small little side dish of filling. It can be a little morning custard treat :) Also, the tart crust should look like it has massive blobs of butter in it (see the picture). This will turn into flaky richness when you bake it.
Lemon Blackberry Buttermilk Tart
Adapted from Gourmet (July 1990)
For the shell
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) cold unsalted butter, cut into bits
1 large egg yolk, beaten with 2 tablespoons ice water
raw rice for weighting the shell
For the filling
1 cup buttermilk
3 large egg yolks
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon freshly grated lemon zest
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups blackberries
confectioners’ sugar for sprinkling the tart
blackberry or vanilla ice cream as an accompaniment
Make the shell:
In a bowl stir together the flour, the sugar, and the salt, add the butter, and blend the mixture until it resembles coarse meal. Add the yolk mixture, toss the mixture until the liquid is incorporated, and form the dough into a ball. Dust the dough with flour and chill it, wrapped in plastic wrap, for 1 hour. Roll out the dough 1/8 inch thick on a floured surface, fit it into a 10-inch tart pan with a removable fluted rim, and chill the shell for at least 30 minutes or, covered, overnight. Line the shell with foil, fill the foil with the rice, and bake the shell in the middle of a preheated 350°F. oven for 25 minutes. Remove the foil and rice carefully, bake the shell for 5 to 10 minutes more, or until it is pale golden, and let it cool in the pan on a rack.
Make the filling;
In a blender or food processor blend together the buttermilk, the yolks, the granulated sugar, the zest, the lemon juice, the butter, the vanilla, the salt, and the flour until the mixture is smooth, spread the blueberries evenly over the bottom of the shell, and pour the buttermilk mixture over them. Bake the tart in the middle of a preheated 350°F. oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until the filling is just set.
Let the tart cool completely in the pan on the rack, sprinkle it with the confectioners’ sugar, sifted, and serve it at room temperature or chilled with the ice cream.
As promised, last night was an ultimate procrastibake experience, but a long awaited exploration of Tartine’s gorgeous cookbook. The true unsung joy in making a chocolate cake is realizing that it literally consists of transforming chocolate into various consistencies: crumbly layer, crunchy layer, shiny-smooth layer, and finally crusty-crumb layer. Beyond the fascination with different states that chocolate and sugar can acquire when heated/cooled/mixed, the best part of this process was definitely the decoration. This cake was made for a dear friend, the founder of Roboguice and therefore you can see the sad attempt to replicate the site’s splendid icon!
For those who wish to reproduce this chocolate explosion (be prepared to cover yourself in chocolate…I’m still wondering how it will come out of my clothing), I’m going to break up my instructions into these subcomponents:
1. Crumbly layer: The base layer for this cake is exceptionally simple. I’m still skeptical that this can the optimal cake layer recipe because it only uses cocoa powder. I’ve never found as high quality cocoa powder as chocolate, but I figured I would remain true to the recipe for this test run. To make the cake layer, mix the dry ingredients:
1 3/4 cups flour
4 1/2 tsp cornstarch
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 cups cocoa powder (4 oz)
1 tsp salt
Then you are going to need:
1 cup butter, softened
5 eggs
1 1/4 cups buttermilk (the fattier, the better)
In a mixed, beat the softened butter for about 2 minutes on medium speed. It should be light and fluffy. Then add the eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition. I had to scrape the bowl like 50 times during this process to make sure that everything was combined. Finally, alternate between the dry ingredients (adding a 1/3 at a time) and the buttermilk (adding 1/2 at a time) so you start and end with the dry ingredients. This is one of those instructions that I doubt had any value whatsoever.
Pour the goo into two 9” cake pans that you have buttered, floured and lined with parchment paper. Bake for 45 mins at 350 degrees.
Let the cake layers cool, they will inevitably be uneven so stick them in the freezer for about an hour. This hardens up the layers so that you can even out the layers. Take a giant serrated knife (the larger, the better) and slice off the uneven parts of the layers. Slice each layer into two so that you have four layers to fill with the hazelnut splendor.
2. Crunchy layer: As I mentioned before, the plan for this cake was to substitute the lousy caramel filling with a delicious hazelnut praline. Unfortunately recipes for hazelnut praline are hard to come by and usually involve just mixing the hazelnuts with sugar and oil, letting them harden, and then blending the whole mixture. So this was a bit of an invention, but hopefully it will generate the requisite crunchy hazelnut goodness:
1 cup hazelnuts, roasted for 10-15 minutes in a 300 degree oven, then chopped
2 oz dark chocolate
1/4 cup hazelnut butter
2 tsp sugar
4 oz butter, softened
Beat the butter in the mixer. Then over the stove, heat the chocolate, hazelnut butter, and sugar. Let cool. Add to the butter and beat on medium for 3 minutes, until the mixture is smooth. Stir in the hazelnuts.
You’ll need to make the ganache next because the hazelnut crunch is impossible to spread and works much better when done over a thin layer of ganache. Also be wary that the hazelnut crunch is sort of lumpy so will it takes a bit of work to make sure that you get an even layer (otherwise, the cake turns out like a leaning tower)…
3. Shiny-smooth layer: This was the easiest, most miraculous part. Two ingredients. That’s it:
24 oz bittersweet chocolate
3 cups heavy cream
Heat the heavy cream until just under a boil and pour it over the chocolate. Wait 5 minutes and stir. It turns into the most glorious ganache. The only trick is make sure that your chocolate is broken up into relatively small pieces (I had a rather chunky ganache and had to take a knife to break up the remaining chocolate).
To get a more even spread of the ganache, due a light initial coating then stick the cake back into the fridge for an hour. You can leave the ganache sitting out until you work with it again (cooling and reheating the ganache totally ruins it so don’t try it)…
4. Crusty-crumb layer: This was a mistake. It is a pure mess for an unclear payoff. Unless you love the look of crumbs on your cake just forget this entire part. The only redeeming factor is that it does make use of the extra trimmings that you get if your cake layers are uneven. But this also means that there are fewer trimmings for the baker to eat as you proceed :) Nonetheless, if you want the look of a blackout cake (i.e. crumb-explosion that sticks to your carpet, floor, clothing, counter, and hair), here’s the process:
Using the cut trimmings from the cake, put them on a baking sheet covered with a piece of parchment paper. Bake the trimmings for an hour at 250 degrees. Let them cool and run them through a blender. I didn’t have a sift, but if you do, then the best way to get out the large chunks and truly replicate the Tartine look is to run the crumbs through a MEDIUM sift (the crumbs are pretty large so you can’t use a nice fine mesh).
Now here’s the messy part: how do you actually get all the crumbs to stick on the cake? How do you tip a cake enough to get the crumbs on without having the cake slide onto the floor? This is all very unclear to me. But essentially I tipped the dish and flung crumbs madly onto the floor. Enough stuck so it looks vaguely like cake, but it’s not a process I want to replicate. Too much work, unclear gains = never again.
Ok, c’est fini! Now back to studying…
Tomorrow I embark on an important mission: the production of Tartine’s Devil’s Food Layer Cake. As you can tell from the aspirational picture (darn does that crumb top layer look amazing), this is a dreamy profusion of chocolate. But I think that Tartine makes a major mistake in this recipe. They bind the layers together with a simple caramel. Caramel is fine. But hazelnut praline is divine. So tomorrow evening the modification process begins—over half a pound of hazelnuts and hazelnut butter are prepared to go into this process— and the quest for the Platonic chocolate cake continues…
The first piece of evidence of rampant procrastibaking in Cambridge. Ever wonder why PhD students take 5, 8, 12, (insert very high number given there is no infinity sign on the keyboard) years to write their dissertations? Hint: they aren’t in the library and working hard the whole time. But they may make progress on other critical fronts, like the production of magical carrot cake (the special trick: a bit of orange rind in the cream cheese icing). Who says academics don’t make contributions to knowledge?
