Insanity Cake #2

Ok so I realize that this is my second post in a row about a truly insane birthday cake that if you have any sense at all you'll never make. But it's my blog and I can, so I will. Backstory: N's birthday was on Friday. When I asked what kind of cake he wanted, he suggested chocolate (duh) chevre cheesecake with rum and raisins. Which is incredibly sweet - the chevre part was for my benefit, since goat's milk is way kinder to my system than cow's milk - but also kind of weird. So I considered for a while and came up with this monstrosity. I'd been wanting to make him the amazing Raw Brownies from My New Roots, because they're amazing and chocolate (duh). I'd also been wanting to make the chocolate tart from my Payard cookbook, even though that got shot down as an idea in the initial round of cake planning. And he did say cheesecake. So... a layer of cheesecake? Under a layer of tart? With the raw brownies as a shell? Chocolate (duh), flavored with rum and cinnamon. Anything else?

I called my sister, who is a far better baker/far more insane than me. The two layers, she said, need some differentiation - just cinnamon up the bottom. And why make the bottom layer chocolate cheesecake when it could be marbled? It occurred to me that the whole thing was going to be a pile of very creamy textures; some crackle and crunch would be nice. Chopped almonds? Bruleed top? Both! I ordered a creme brulee torch on Amazon. I googled cheesecake recipes. I got the torch, realized my existing tin of lighter fluid wouldn't fill it, and not one of the drug stores in New Haven carries butane (really?!?), and ordered that on Amazon too. I de-milkified the whole thing to the extent possible, added graham crackers to the crust because cheesecake, went shopping, and baked for a total of about six hours. Mark Bittman, in his How to Cook Everything, says that replacing the cream cheese in his recipe with ricotta is just fine, so I figured replacing half of mine with goat cheese wouldn't be a disaster. Halfway through baking I realized - after ripping apart my pantry to find it - that my block of good chocolate had been finished in an earlier project, and ran out to get more, only to discover that my options were milk, white, or unsweetened, no bittersweet to be found. So I bought milk chocolate and finished my cocoa powder compensating (don't do that). And on Friday I snuck into N's apartment while he was in rehearsal, bruleed the top, drizzled the whole thing in melted chocolate, lit a candle, and surprised him. And it was fantastic. Totally over the top, rich, decadent, insane, and delicious. And totally worth it. Happy birthday.

Some notes: I've given instructions below for both low- and high-lactose versions. I used goat cheese and almond milk, but go ahead and use all cream cheese and heavy cream. I flavored with cinnamon and rum, but you could leave one out, leave them both out, replace the cinnamon with orange zest or the rum with creme de menthe or or the almonds with hazelnut or whatever flavor combination strikes you. Also, while the marbling of the cheesecake was cool, it all ended up kind of mixing together so you could skip a step and just make it all chocolate or plain. Your call. The original recipes list baking times as rather shorter than what I found necessary, so keep an eye out and check for doneness with a toothpick early and often.

Bruleed Chocolate Marble Cheesecake Tart Brownie Cake with Cinnamon and Rum Because Why the Hell Not.

Brownie crust (Adapted from My New Roots):
2 cups walnuts
1 cup almonds
5 cinnamon graham crackers (Omit if you want it gluten-free, or for Passover, or whatever)
2 ½ cups pitted dates
1 cup cocoa powder
2 tbsp coconut oil
¼ tsp. salt
(This will make extra. Enjoy the rest sprinkled over ice cream, eaten with a spoon, or pressed into another pan to make the originally-intended brownies.)

1) Make the crust: Whizz nuts in the food processor until well ground. Add graham crackers, and whizz again. Add remaining ingredients and blend until it starts to look kind of like garden soil and sticks together when you squeeze it. If it's not sticky enough, add more dates. Be sure to get the pits out first if you want any of this to work.

1) Dates. 2) Nuts & Grahams. 3) Ready to go. 4) Finished consistency.

2) Grease a 10x10 pyrex dish (I used coconut oil). Press the dough into the pan to form a layer a quarter-inch thick over the bottom and sides.

Marble Cheesecake (Adapted from Smitten Kitchen)
3/4 cup sugar
2/3 cup heavy cream/coconut creamer
4 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped finely
1/2 cup (goat) yogurt
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
4 oz of the mildest goat chevre you can find (or another half package cream cheese)
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla
cinnamon
rum

3) Make the caramel. Yes, this is nuts, but as the original recipe points out, it's also not hard and very delicious. Put the sugar in a heavy-bottomed pan (I used my cast iron) over medium-low heat, and stir fairly constantly. First it will clump up, then melt into a clear pale puddle. Keep going til it hits a nice golden brown. Pour in the cream or coconut creamer. It will bubble and get all steamy and the sugar will harden up again. Keep stirring. Let the sugar re-melt. Be careful when you can't resist dripping a bit on your pinkie to taste; this stuff's hot. Pour half out into another pan and set that aside over low heat.

1) Sugar starting to melt. 2) Post-cream. 3) Re-melted with cream. 4) Plus chocolate & yogurt.

4) Stir the chopped chocolate into the caramel still in one pan and stir til everything melts. Still over low heat, stir in the yogurt. you should end up with something nice and creamy. (If you want a firmer cheesecake, use slightly less yogurt, down to a quarter cup total/eighth of a cup per half-batch.) Turn off the heat.

5) Stir another quarter cup of yogurt into the caramel in the second pan. You should now have one pan of chocolate caramel and one of plain. (Or do these sequentially, washing the pan in between. Just realize that the second batch of caramel will be hard by the time you finish the first, and you can re-melt it in the microwave but use about 60% power and beware that it gets hot fast.)

Whipped cheeses.

6) Use a mixer to whip half of the cream cheese and half of the goat cheese til fluffy. Beat in the chocolate caramel at low speed. Beat in one egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla, a tablespoon or so of rum, and a good shake of cinnamon.

7) Repeat step 4 with the non-chocolate caramel in a separate bowl. At this point you've got one bowl of plain cheesecake filling, one bowl of chocolate, and a lot of dirty dishes.

Payard Chocolate Tart

8 oz bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

1 cup cream or coconut creamer
1/4 cup milk or almond milk

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1 tsp vanilla

2 tsp rum

8) Put the chopped chocolate into a heatproof bowl. Pour the milk and cream into a small pot and bring to a simmer. Pour over the chopped chocolate and stir til melted. Let cool 10 min.

9) Whisk in the beaten egg, vanilla, and rum. Stick in the fridge.

Etc.

Raw or turbinado sugar

Chopped almonds

Melted chocolate

10) Preheat oven to 350. Pour some of the plain cheesecake into the crust, then some chocolate, then some more plain, etc, til you've poured it all in. Use a chopstick or the handle of a butterknife to swirl it around til it's all marbled. Bake about 35 min.

11) Pull the cheesecake out the the oven. Sprinkle with some chopped almonds and extra clumps of crust mixture and pour the chocolate tart mixture over. It'll still be a bit goopy and you won't  get nicely defined layers that's ok. Return to oven. Start checking for doneness after 15 minutes. The middle should be a little wiggly and the edges a bit cracked. This might take another half hour, so keep checking with a toothpick and don't despair. Pull out and let cool a bit.

A done cake.

12) Brulee: Cover any exposed crust with tin foil. (I didn't; that's why mine got singed.) Sprinkle an even layer of sugar over the top of the cake. Go to with the blow torch. I found this worked best if I went over an area once lightly so it got little beads of melted sugar, than again to melt most of it, then a third time to get any spots I'd missed. Once you get the sugar bobbling you can lay off with the flame; it will melt the bits around it and fill most little holes itself, and that way you avoid burning the sugar. If you do catch a bit on fire, blow it out, pull it off, fill the gap with more sugar, and re-brulee. 

13) Drizzle melted chocolate over everything. Scatter chopped nuts over the melted chocolate. Stick a candle in the middle. Yell 'Surprise!'. Enjoy.

A Birthday Cake to End All Birthday Cakes

Welcome to Wolf Chops, Thanksgiving Edition! In honor of the holiday, I present you with a guest post from my sister, describing the birthday cake she made me six months ago. But it's utterly excessive, so frankly I think it fits with the whole spirit of Thanksgiving, and it includes roughly 3 sticks of butter, which is almost the same as oil, so bam, Hannukah too. This recipe is picky, and time-intensive, and a crap-ton of work, and absolutely one of the best sweets I've ever eaten. And I now fresh apricots are basically impossible to find right now, but I don't see why you couldn't make the pastry cream with, say almonds or walnuts or pecans instead of pistachios and then put some cinnamon-poached apples or pears on top instead for something seasonal. Or roasted chestnut and quince. Or pumpkin pie filling. Whatever. It's more or less just a giant croissant with fruit and cream on top, so you can do what you like. Yes, it will have a million calories and take all day, but a) it's the holidays so it'll fit right in and b) worth it! So without further ado, Sarah's Insane Giant Croissant Cake. 

Pretty, ain't it?

***

Each year, I have to top the last birthday cake I made for Emily. Last year, I made a beautiful peach blueberry tart (pictured above in the sidebar). (EAG: That was a damn tasty tart.) Emily gave the in inspiration for my cake in April. She texted me a picture of a pistachio apricot danish that she gets at a local farmers market. She kept raving about that pastry, so I decided to make a variation of that. 

My first question was what to use a base. I wanted something denser than a cake. Emily suggested making a crust with almonds (EAG: gluten free so Mom could eat it!), but that was too close a tart crust. Then it came to me: I should base the crust on croissants I had experiment with making croissants last fall, and had found a really good recipe. The croissant dough would be similar to the danish base, but even better.

The tart that started it all...

There are basically three stages for making croissants. The first step is making the dough. You melt butter, add some milk, and once the butter dissolves and the temperature of the milk is below 90`F, you mix in the yeast. You then combine the milk mixture with flour (preferably King Arthur all purpose flour; it has the best protein content), sugar and salt in a mixer with a dough hook. The dough should form a slightly sticky ball. The dough then rests in the fridge on a parchment-lined baking sheet overnight.

While the dough was resting I tackled the pistachios. My first thought was to make a pistachio-flavored pastry cream, using pistachio extract, but that would be too close to last years’ again. Then I came across a recipe for "Snow Eggs in pistachio cream" in the Gourmet Cookbook. To make the pistachio cream, you grind the pistachios in a food processor with a little milk, and then refrigerate the mixture for at least 8 hours to develop the flavors. I originally made one batch of this, but it was so yummy, I made another.

The second stage or croissant making is laminating the dough. You beat butter into an 8" x8" block, then place the butter in the middle of the croissant dough, that has been rolled out to 24"x8". You then fold the dough over the butter block and seal it in the dough. Then you roll the dough out to 8"x24" again, and then fold the dough in thirds, like a letter. You repeat the rolling out and folding a couple more times (at least 3, I did 5), to layer the butter between the layers of dough. After it was laminated, the dough had to rest in the freezer for 2 hours. 

Decorating the tart.

While the dough was resting, Emily and I tried one of the apricots that had been bought for the cake. They were very tart and mealy. To improve the flavor and texture, I decided to roast the apricots with vanilla. I had hoped that it would add more sweetness, and the vanilla would mellow the tartness. After they were done roasting, they still weren't quite sweet enough, so I finished them off under the broiler, with a little vanilla sugar sprinkled on top. At this point, they were still quite tart, but the tartness was no longer overwhelming.

After the dough had rested for 2 hours, I rolled it out until it was about 1/4" thick at the center. I then draped the dough into a tart pan and molded the dough to the edge of the pan. Because the cake is a riff on a cheese Danish, I rolled 1 inch of the excess dough in to create a rolled edge. In hindsight, I should have painted the excess dough with the pistachio cream before rolling it, to break up the monotony of the huge crust. I set a straight-sided bowl in the middle of the giant Danish to stop the dough from rising too much and obliterating the center depression, and left it to rise for 2 hours.

An hour and a half later, I preheated the oven to 425`, and took the bowl out of the center of the Danish. I then painted the Danish with a basic egg wash, with a little extra sugar. When the oven was preheated, I put the Danish in and immediately lowered the heat to 400`. The Danish baked for 15 minutes, when it was nicely puffed and golden brown.

To assemble the cake, I spooned the pistachio cream into the depression, the draped the apricots on top. The blackberries were placed around the apricots, along with some almond slivers. The final step was to eat it. And it was very tasty. (EAG: Damn straight.)

By the slice.

Apricot-Pistachio Danish Cake

Croissant dough:

3
tablespoons unsalted butter plus 24 tablespoons (3 sticks) unsalted European-style-butter, very cold

1 3/4
cups whole milk

4
teaspoons instant or rapid-rise yeast

4 1/4
cups (21 1/4 ounces) all-purpose flour

1/4
cup (1 3/4 ounces) sugar

2 tsp salt

1
large egg

1
teaspoon cold water

Pastry cream:

1/2 cup shelled pistachios

2 tbsp sugar

7 tbsp of whole milk

Roasted apricots:

7 apricots

1/2 vanilla bean, seeded

1 cup white wine

1/4 cup vanilla sugar 

Slivered almonds

Egg wash:

1 egg

1/4 cup sugar

Dash of salt

Dash of water

Optional:

Fresh blackberries

Slivered almonds, after being roasted with the peaches.

1) Melt 3 tbsp butter in over low heat. Take of the heat and immediately stir in the milk. Let cool til the temperature is under 90’. Whisk in the yeast, and pour it all into a stand mixer. Add flour, sugar, and 2 teaspoons salt, then knead on low speed using the dough hook roughly 2-3 minutes, until dough forms. Up the speed to medium-low and knead for another minute. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rest on the counter for half an hour.

2) Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper dump in the dough. Shape it into a 10-by-7-inch rectangle, about an inch thick. Wrap tightly with plastic and stick in the fridge for 2 hours.

3) Meanwhile, fold 24-inch length of parchment paper in half to create 12-inch rectangle. Fold the 3 open edges over to form an 8-inch square with enclosed sides. Crease the folds firmly. Place 3 (sliced) sticks of cold butter directly on the counter and whack them with rolling pin for a minute or so until the butter is just pliable but not yet warm, then fold butter in on itself using bench scraper. Beat it into rough 6-inch square. Unfold your parchment envelope. Using the bench scraper, transfer the butter to the middle of the parchment, then refold it enclose. Turn the packet over so that the flaps are underneath, and gently roll with the rolling pin until the butter fills parchment square, making sure it’s even. Refrigerate at for least 45 minutes.

4) Put the dough in the freezer for half an hour, then lightly flour your counter and roll the dough into 17 by 8-inch rectangle with the long side along the edge of the counter. Unwrap the butter from the parchment and place it in the center of the dough. Fold the sides of the dough over the butter so they meet in the center, and press the open edges together so they seal. Roll the butter/dough package out lengthwise into 24 by 8-inch rectangle. Starting at the bottom of the dough, fold it into thirds like a business letter. Turn the dough 90 degrees, then roll it out lengthwise again into 24 by 8-inch rectangle and fold into thirds again. Place the dough on your cookie sheet, wrap it tightly with plastic, and put it back in the freezer for another half hour.

5) Put the dough back on your lightly-floured countertop so that the top flap opens on the right. Roll the dough out lengthwise into a 24 by 8-inch rectangle and fold into thirds (yet again). Place the dough back on the sheet, wrap it tightly with plastic, and refrigerate it for yet another 2 to 24 hours.

6) Make the Pistachio Cream: Finely grind the pistachios in a food processor with the sugar. Add 2 tbsp of milk, and grind until it forms a paste. Add the remaining 5 tbsp of milk and mix in the food processor until well combined. Transfer the cream to a bowl and refrigerate for a few hours to develop the flavors.

Pistachio cream (can also be eaten straight with a spoon).

7) Shape the Crust: Remove the Croissant dough from the refrigerator and roll it out until it’s about 1/4" thick. Drape the dough in a tart pan, so that there is a least an inch of excess dough all around when the dough is molded to the sides of the pan (trim off any extra excess dough to use/eat later). Paint a little of the pistachio cream on the excess dough. Roll the excess inch of dough to make a Danish-like edge to the tart. Place a buttered bowl with straight sides in the middle of the pan to keep the dough from rising in the center, and let the dough rest of 2 hours.

8) Prepare the Apricots: Preheat oven to 400`. Slice each apricot into 4 flat slices with parallel cuts and place them in one layer in a baking pan. Scatter a handful of slivered almonds. Mix together 1 cup of white wine, the vanilla seeds, and 2 tbsp vanilla sugar. Pour the mixture over the apricots, and place the vanilla bean pod in the pan. Roast for 30 minutes, or until most of the liquid is gone. Put aside and let cool.

Apricots, pre-roasting.

9) Preparing the Crust: Raise the oven temperature to 425`. After it has sat for at least 2 hours, remove the bowl from the croissant crust. Combine the egg, sugar, and a dash of salt with a dash of water, and mix until well combined. Paint the croissant crust with the egg wash.

10) Bake the Crust: Place the croissant crust in the oven and immediately turn down the oven's heat to 400`. Bake the croissant tart for 15 minutes, or until golden brown. The dough will puff up a lot. Remove from the oven and let cool. 

Final assemblage.

11) Turn the oven to broil. Sprinkle the apricots with the rest of the vanilla sugar, and broil them, just until they begin to brown. (Keep watch so they don’t go up in flames!) Take them out of the oven and let them cool.

12) Assembling the cake: Spoon a quarter cup of pistachio cream into the center of the croissant crust, and spread it evenly. Cover the cream with the broiled apricots. Place the slivered almonds and blackberries on top of the apricots prettily. Add candles, sing happy birthday, and bask in the adulation of everyone there.

(with a bowl of pistachio cream & fruit for the gluten-free set)