Practice makes perfect...

...both in photography and cake-making.

This weekend's adventures started out with a simple cake-making agenda for a friend's upcoming birthday and spiraled into a multi-part, multi-layered affair. What have I discovered as a consequence?

1. Layered cakes are intensely effortful, but I imagine this has more to do with my lack of practice (first go around) at making genoise bases and bavarian creams.
2. The bavarian mousse will set up! (eventually). It might be easier next time to refrigerate the mousse for an hour and pipe it into the mold rather than pouring in the cream while it's still soft.
3. The result will look amazing to you, no matter how amateur it compares to others' work - and it will taste all the better for your hours of labor.



I started with accidental burnt caramel, leftover from a batch of faux-samoa girlscout cookies, and burnt graham cracker sable pie crust. Burnt, burnt... a theme in the works. The graham sable crust is actually quite wonderful and unique from the typical graham crusts. I took a packet of grahams, added a hardboiled egg yolk, a few tablespoons of powdered sugar and 3-4 tablespoons of softened butter. Mixed them together to form a crumbly dough which I pressed into a pie tin with the back of a spoon. 375F oven 30 min later yielded an unworkable base for a sweet potato pie, but the great beginnings of my first layered bavarian cake.

With these flavors in mind I decided to opt for flavors resembling a s'more (with the addition of caramel) and I built my cake up from there:
- 2 genoise sponge cakes: 1 chocolate, 1 vanilla
- 2 bavarian creams: burnt caramel, and Hershey's milk chocolate (Shudder. I know it's a crime to have those in the kitchen but my roomie had a bunch left over from an event).
- 1 layer graham sable crumble

I've never bought more than a pint of heavy cream at a time but bavarian creams require certain obscenities. An entire quart accompanied me home from the market.

Genoise is the basic French sponge cake. I say basic as though I know something about them, I don't. I ended up under-baking my cakes (400F 10 min) and then over-baking them a tad dry after reinserting them into the oven, after letting the cakes cool. Just proves to show that this (particular) cake was quite resilient - I'm sure if I had dappled with more delicate flavors they would not have been so forgiving.

For the bavarian creams I started with a creme anglaise base (milk + tempered yolks) without additional sugar, since I would be adding caramel or milk chocolate into the creams. One creme anglaise can be finicky enough to handle but no, I had to attempt them both at once. To be fair I was more concerned with the gelatin in the bavarians setting too quickly if I made them one at a time. However there was no need for that concern, the creams stay liquid for awhile. To the heated cream bases I whisked in caramel or chopped milk chocolate and then softened gelatin. Cooled to room temp before folding in my newly purchased carton of whipped, heavy cream. Using a square mold, I layered chocolate genoise, a layer of chocolate cream, vanilla genoise, a layer of caramel cream, graham sable crumble, another chocolate genoise, another layer of chocolate cream, and a final layer of vanilla genoise. Stuck in the freezer to firm up overnight for easier slicing.



So the layers aren't all beautifully thin and of equal heights. I don't mind too much, at least this time around :)

If You Dare: Hand-rolled Lobster Ravioli

You know you have confirmed an obsession when you spend several hours hand-rolling ravioli dough simply because you just haven't had the time to get a pasta roller and because homemade pasta tastes that much better than wonton wrappers. Is it a curse or a blessing? Neither I've decided, it's just a way of life.

I've been harboring this recipe for lobster ravioli in my mental catalogue of dishes to try for over a year now when it first piqued my interest viewed here. It never seemed to make sense to go through the trouble of securing a lobster, boiling it, grinding it, seasoning it, and sacrificing it to make raviolis until a fortuitous lobster sale at Ranch 99 offered the suckers for $7.99 a pound. Not bad for two (outstanding) meals (the first was lobster pad thai urgently prompted by Steve Almond's Death By Lobster Pad Thai. Anyhow, back to the raviolis, the texture of the claws and upper half of the body had been somewhat degraded by freezer storage while the tail was enjoyed fresh first. Perfect for churning into raviolis. (Add another step to the process, thawing).

I followed this recipe a little too precisely for my personal taste (reinforce note to self: go with your instincts, everyone's flavor preferences are different). The filling was a standard lobster and cream mousse to which chopped lobster meat, basil, and cilantro is added. No need for salt since there's plenty of ocean residue already. For the pasta dough I used a basic ratio of one egg + one yolk : one cup of 00 Caputo flour (extremely fine grind - it makes all the difference). Two cups of flour, two eggs, and two yolks for a total of eight decently large raviolis. Roll roll roll, fold, repeat until your arm workout compares to an afternoon spent at the rock wall. Two sauces - elaborate no? - both made with the lobster broth as a base. One, keeping with the Asian theme, is infused with lemongrass and coconut milk, while the other is more French with tarragon, carrots, tomato, and cream.



Improvements to consider:
1) only use the lobster mousse for the filling with maybe a touch of chopped basil (the additional meat does not add favorably to the texture)
2) separately reduce the lobster broth to a sauce
3) use cream for the base rather than the lobster broth) and infuse it with the flavorings. Also, stick to one sauce (I recommend the lemongrass coconut, keeping to just one continent)
3) boil the sauce down to a condensed, drizzle-consistency (these flavors are intense, a very little goes quite far)
4) oh, and invest in a pasta roller, even if it's just a hand crank one

All in all, it made for some tasty artwork and an accomplishment to bathe in for awhile. But I'm serious about the pasta roller, your ravioli sheets will be much finer and silkier.