Every Easter I see these pretty speckled robin’s egg cakes pop up all over the food internet, and I’ve been wanting to make one myself for a while. I’ve also been wanting to make a coconut layer cake, so I combined the two and here we are!
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Blackberry Basil White Chocolate Tart
Blackberry season almost completely passed me by this year. Normally I’m out scouring the neighbourhood ditches and roadsides for blackberries the minute I notice they are ripe, but somehow I missed the signs and nearly forgot. Luckily, once I remembered, the blackberry item I had in mind only required a small handful of berries, which is how I ended up foraging for blackberries in the rain at the very tail end of the season and came up with just enough for this pretty little tart.
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Homemade Wedding Cake, Part II: Fillings and Frosting
Previously, we talked vanilla butter cake… and now we’re talking fillings, frosting, and et cetera (and assembly and decoration talk can be found here). The fillings here are blackberry compote and chocolate ganache, the frosting is vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream, and the et cetera is a vanilla bean-bourbon simple syrup for brushing on the cake layers.
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Daring Bakers: Chocolate and Candy!
The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!
Did I mention that right now, Nate and I have sworn off refined sugar six days a week? Oh man, this challenge came at the wrong time! But it was also so, so right…
The premise of this month’s challenge was to have all us Daring Bakers learn to temper chocolate, and then use it in our candy creations. To temper chocolate, you heat it, cool it, and heat it again to specific temperatures in order to create small, uniform crystals of cocoa butter in the chocolate so that it stays nice and shiny when it hardens and has a good snap when it breaks. It also gives a thin, even coating to things like dipped candies. Untempered chocolate will have a mottled, dusty look when it hardens, and will crumble rather than snap cleanly when broken. For chocolate making, couverture chocolate is the gold standard – this is chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa butter that, when tempered properly, results in a shinier, snappier, mellower finished chocolate. Lisa and Mandy provided chocolate tempering instructions plus a ton of chocolate and non-chocolate candy recipes, and to be eligible for the Chocoley contest, we had to make two kinds of candy: one chocolate, and one of our choice (chocolate or otherwise).
I started out with a non-chocolate candy: sponge toffee.
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