Double Chocolate Bread Pudding:

So, lets see, I get my manuscript off to my advisor to review, think I have at least a week of down-time... and I get sick. And waiting for me when I get better... revisions! Gah, the last year of grad school really is a vicious cycle of writing and trying to have a life.

Oh well, I'm back now, and with a dessert that will definitely wreck any diet you may happen to be on. My history with this particular bread pudding goes back to the beginning of the year. Coming back from my winter vacation with my mom's forgotten bread maker, I now had the means to craft all sorts of breads in my rather busy and chaotic schedule. One such bread was a brownie bread that made for great eating all on its own, but I knew would make an excellent base for bread pudding. Of course, time went buy and I never got around to it (as usual). That was, until a few weeks ago when on Throwdown with Bobby Flay they had a challenge based on chocolate bread pudding.

In that episode, Flay had to best The Dessert Truck, a NYC food wagon specializing in desserts but best known for their chocolate bread pudding with bacon crème anglaise. He lost, over-complicating things by adding coconut and a passion fruit syrup. Both contestants, however, used normal white bread (ok, brioche) and made it chocolate by adding chocolate to their custard for the pudding. You can see where I'm going with this...

Double Chocolate Bread Pudding:

For the bread:
2 tsp. yeast
3 cups bread flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 egg + 1 yolk
2 tbsp. butter
1 cup warm water

1. Either put all the ingredients in a breadmaker and run on large loaf normal or follow the rest of the instructions.
2. Add the yeast to the water with a pinch of the sugar to get it going. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar and salt. Combine the egg, yolk, and butter in a small bowl and add to the dry mix.
3. Pour in the yeasty water and mix for about 5 minutes to incorporate well. Incubate in a warm place for 30 minutes.
4. Pre-heat oven to 350°F. Knead dough for 5-10 minutes and incubate another 15.
5. Add to greased loaf pans and bake in oven for ~45 minutes to an hour till set (No set time seems to work best for me).
6. Leave the bread (no matter which way its made) out on your counter for a day (or two) to harden before trying to use in the pudding.

For the pudding:
Bread from above, cut into 1/2" cubes
2 cups heavy cream
2 cups milk
4 eggs + 2 yolks
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
8 oz. dark chocolate, chopped up

1. Combine the cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla in a saucepan and heat over medium/high heat just till it bubbles, stirring occasionally. Add the chocolate slowly and stir throughly to integrate.
2. Whisk the eggs and yolks really well till they're pale in color in a large bowl. Slowly add the chocolate cream mixture, whisking constantly to prevent the eggs from cooking.
3. Add the bread cubes to the custard and toss thoroughly. Pour everything into a 13x9 baking pan, distributing the bread evenly. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F now.
4. By the time your oven warms up, the custard will have completely soaked into the bread. Give the pan a jiggle to even things out, and then bake for 35-45 minutes (this depends on how dense your bread was, but you're looking for a firm top that gives a little when pressed).
5. Find lots of friends to share with...

Brownie bread, just waiting for some custard.

The final, ungodly delicious product.

So, there you have it. Straight out of the oven, the top is all nice and crusty, while the bottom is like warm chocolate mouse. You could top it with some crème anglaise, but quite frankly, this is sweet and rich enough as it is to stand on its own. If you can't find people to help you eat this all right out of the oven, don't worry, after a day in the fridge, the whole thing turns into a homogenous creamy, chocolatey mass of awesome. As I said at the beginning of this, say good bye to your diet, at least for a week.

I'm hoping to have time to post again next week, but no promises about anything from now on. Hopefully by the time I do post you'll all have recovered from your sugar coma's after making this.

Cheers,
Mike :)

Champagne-Pear Sorbet

Ok, so I've been a bit AWOL of late, its been almost a month since my last post! But to make the long story of why very short, work > blog, so unfortunately that comes first.

But now I'm back (at least for a while...) and I've got a recipe that I'm really excited about. Anyone who's ever been to Columbus, OH, and many who've never even come close, know the name Jeni Britton (or at least the Jeni part). For those who have no clue who she is, take a moment to check out her day job. The site unfortunately does little justice to the general awesomeness that is Jeni's ice cream, sorbet, or frozen yogurt. Ms. Britton likes to push some boundaries when it comes to her creations, a current 'seasonal flavor' is celery while a standard 'signature flavor' is thai chili. So after a recent visit, I decided to try my own hand at a unique yet totally awesome frozen treat.

The key to making this type of endeavor pan out on the first attempt is to start with a flavor pairing that already works well. I don't know how or why it popped into my head, but fancy dinner desserts seemed like a good place to start. Having gone on a few cruises in my currently short lifetime, I thought about when they had the 'dessert tray', which erroneously had a plate of fruit, cheese, and nuts next to the crème brûlée and triple chocolate cake. Now that I'm older I realize adults consider a glass of champagne with an assortment of nuts, cheeses, and fruits to be a worthy dessert, and they're actually right. Since I planned on using champagne, a sorbet was a natural fit over an ice cream. And pears are just hitting their season, so like Ms. Britton I figured I'd work with what's naturally abundant.

Now, a simple champagne and pear sorbet is pretty pedestrian compared to Red Beets with Lemon & Poppy Seeds, so that's where the nuts and cheese come into the picture. Having just bought a bunch of walnuts to make candied walnuts for salads, those were a natural addition. For the cheese I decided a mild crumbly blue would provide come interesting contrast to the rest of the flavors, as well as a dose of salt to intersect the sweet and tart flavor of the sorbet itself. But cheese in a sorbet? And blue cheese!? I had to do some checking with others to make sure I wasn't going crazy. After sampling an n of 3, and getting back overwhelming statistical evidence that it sounded yummy (p<0.001), I went for it... and boy am I glad I did.

Champagne-pear sorbet with walnuts and blue cheese:
1 bottle champagne (nothing fancy...)
1.5 lbs. pears (pref. bosc)
1 cup sugar
1 cup chopped walnuts
1/2-1 cup crumbly blue cheese

1. Pour the champagne into a container big enough to hold the pears when chopped up.
2. Peel and core the pears. Chop into smaller pieces and put into the container with the champagne. The acidity in the champagne will help prevent browning and infuse some flavor into the pears.
3. When the pears are all chopped, let them sit in the champagne for 5 minutes and then pour the champagne into another container. Take 1 cup of the champagne and add to a small pot with the sugar. Bring to a boil and hold for 5 minutes, then cover and turn off the heat to make a champagne simple syrup.
4. Put the pears into a food processor, blender, or food mill and purée. When done, add the pear purée, champagne, and champagne syrup to a container and put in the fridge till well chilled.
5. Add the sorbet base to your ice cream maker and process like always. When finished, mix in the walnut pieces and blue cheese crumbles thoroughly! Pack into containers and harden in the freezer (although eating it immediately is really really good).

The final product. You can see bits of the cheese (in white) and the faint darker tan of the walnuts.

Pick out the dark walnut pieces and use them for something else; blue cheese crumbles shouldn't be bigger than a pencil eraser.

As I said, no need to buy anything fancy. I would suggest a brut or extra brut if you have really sweet/ripe pears.

So, there you have it. The perfect fancy after dinner dessert, made into an even more perfect sorbet. I will admit, that before I made this, I wasn't too sure of how it would turn out. I mean, goat cheese in ice cream is one thing, but blue cheese in a sorbet can go horribly wrong. Fortunately my culinary intuition (or is it insanity?) was right. If the cheese really is putting you off from trying this, do yourself a favor and try this: make the the sorbet as given, and only add some nuts and cheese to half the batch. The champagne pear sorbet itself is great, especially right from the churn when the acidity of the champagne is still at full power. The nuts and cheese just give it that little push into uniquely awesome, its a recipe that Jeni Britton would be proud of... and I'm sure you'll all love it too!

New recipe to be out next week, so until then...
Cheers,
Mike :)

Rainbow Angel Food Cake

Apologies for the lack of a post for a bit there, I've been focusing more on the redesign than the actual blogging lately and, well, I've accepted that I won't have the new design done for today. Then again, its the posts that are important, so here's a recipe that I'm really proud of.

Along with pilfering my mom's bread maker and waffle maker that she never used when I was back in DE for the holidays, I grabbed her mini-bundt cake pan, cookie press, and angel food pan as well. She'd be the first to admit that she would never use them again, so I feel no guilt in taking them. And I had been tempted to buy my own angel food pan for a while. Who doesn't like a little sweetness after a rich and savory dinner, and angel food cake is relatively guilt free. It also helped that since I bought an ice cream maker on clearance last fall, I had a lot of left over egg whites in my freezer. A lot. Which is a good thing because angel food cakes are a lot harder to make than it first appears. This cake represents try #4 for me.

On my first attempt at angel food, I tried using the store bought egg whites rather than the ones in my freezer because I read that frozen egg whites don't work well (apparently a myth by the way). Well, after a bit of fluffing, folding, and fussing, the cake went into the oven, and 35 minutes later I had a light and foamy top with an omelette bottom. Try 2 ended up much the same, although more omelettey. Deciding to give up on the store bought egg whites and switch to separated eggs, try 3 ended up as a spectacular failure when the eggs never whipped at all. And thus I felt doomed to never get an angel food cake to turn out correctly.

Until this past Wednesday when Serious Eats posted this post about a rainbow colored cake. The follow-through blog post by Aleta at The Omnomicon has apparently turned somewhat controversial, but the idea of using food coloring to add some visual appeal to a cake is still pretty cool in my book. So, I decided on last go for an angel food cake. Fortunately for me, and select people at work, this one came out perfect.

Rainbow Angel Food Cake:
1 1/4 cup egg whites, no yolk!
1 tbsp. water
1 cup cake flour
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cream or tartar
1 tsp. almond extract
liquid food coloring


1. Pre-heat the oven to 350F.
2. Sift together the flour, half the sugar, and salt and set aside in a small bowl.
3. In a large bowl, using a hand whisk, whip the egg whites till foamy. Add the cream of tartar and whip using a hand mixer till you get firm peaks. Using a silicone spatula, fold in the almond extract. Fold the sugar in with the egg whites in multiple batches.
4. Sift enough of the flour mixture onto the egg whites to cover the top and fold in. Repeat until all of the flour mixture is incorporated.
5. Divide the batter into 5 portions in small bowls and add 1/2 tsp. food coloring for each color you want. For some colors (e.g. orange), you'll need to combine two colors (e.g. red and yellow) to get the 1/2 tsp. Gently fold the color into the batter.
6. Pour the batter into your angel food pan, don't try to even out the batter as it will rise evenly when in the oven. Bake for 45 minutes.
7. After removing the cake from the oven, flip the pan upside down and leave it alone for at least an hour. After the hour, use a fine knife to loosen the cake from the sides of the pan and separate the two parts of the pan. Then use the knife to loosen the cake from the bottom of the pan.

Don't try to even out the batter as you'll only mix the colors up. The cake will rise evenly as it bakes.

You can see four of the five colors I used, and that I didn't mix the green very thoroughly. I rather like the white streaks though.

They white streaks really provide some visual contrast when the cake is sliced.


So, it took me four tries to finally get it right, but I'm pretty happy with how this cake turned out. Its light and airy just like an angel food cake should be, but also has a nice dense feeling that makes you think its a richer cake than it really is. The coloring also makes it more interesting than a simple hum-drum angel food cake. I will note that for those who don't like the idea of using that much food coloring in a single cake, just keep in mind that your general red velvet cake uses a good 2 tbsp., or nearly double what I used here.