Three Dessert Custards with Vanilla Tuile and Espresso Cream

This little set of desserts was an experiment. It all started when I went to Teo, home of both the best espresso and the best gelato I've yet had in Austin. (In fact, David Lebovitz sent Matthew, owner of Teo an email, which is printed out and taped to the register, saying that in a recent tour of the United States, theirs was the best gelato he had -- the best in the nation!)

I was sitting outside enjoying my usual short double cappuccino and small gelato, and Matt came out and handed me a cup. "Here," he said, "You have to try this. It's great." It was a few shots of their Italian espresso with a scoop of their "Texican Vanilla" gelato. I swirled it together with my spoon and half-slurped, half-spooned it into my mouth. It was a fantastic combination.

It was also my third, fourth, and fifth shot of espresso, so my heart damn near exploded. It was worth it.

It got me thinking about flavor combinations and how we choose the flavors we assemble into dishes. I tend to think of both vanilla and coffee as relatively European, in terms of dessert. When I think of vanilla I think of pastry cream, creme brulee, caramel. When I think of coffee, I think of tiramisu.

But thinking about them that way is kind of a dead end. It doesn't really help me think of new ways to use them.

That day at Teo I realized that they're connected in a totally different way: by their region of origin. Mexican vanilla and coffee beans come from the same region of the world. And I think flavors from a given region often have a natural affinity for one another. Not always, of course, but it kind of feels right to me, seems intuitive that they should work together.

I decided to play around, and figured I'd take this vanilla & espresso and add other flavors from Central and South America or even the Southwestern United States. I picked three: squash, corn, and bananas.

I started this whole experiment thinking primarily about flavor, but texture is no less important. I juggled a bunch of ideas. Soft warm cakes of banana, squash, or corn, sitting in a small pool of cold espresso and topped with a warm vanilla custard? Thin rolled tortillas of the three filled with a vanilla gelato and coffee syrup?

Anything could have worked, I suppose. But I decided to go with little custard cups. Each of those three ingredients became a custard, sandwiched between a crispy vanilla cookie base and an espresso whipped cream garnish.

Vanilla Tuile & Espresso Whipped Cream

First, then, the cookies. I've never made tuile cookies, but I love the light, wafer-thin crispiness, and they're often made with vanilla, so I took the first Google result for "tuile cookie recipe" and mixed up some batter, adding some extra scraped vanilla bean.

The technique for making these cookies took some practice, and is relatively unlike what the recipe claimed. First, the only way I could get them thin enough was to take a glob of batter on my index finger and swirl it on a silpat into a disk, like these:

The key is to move in concentric circles so you end up with a disk of perfectly even thickness. It needs to be exceedingly thin, too. To top it all off, you need to move quickly because if the batter heats up too much from your fingertip, it stops sticking to the silpat and you're just dragging it around.

I baked the cookies for just a few minutes, until the batter had bubbled a bit on top. The goal here was to get them just solid enough to lift off the silpat, but no firmer. Then, pull them from the oven, lift them off the sheet, and press each cookie into something oven-proof and cup-shaped. I used silicone muffin molds:

Ramekins or custard cups would likely also work. Then, I baked them for another minute or two until the edges were brown and the whole cookie was at least golden.

They still aren't the most precise-looking cookies, but they do the job and just have a certain, uh, hand-made-ness to them. Ahem.

For the espresso whipped cream, I just cold-brewed some coffee so it was nice and strong, and then poured a little bit in with some whipping cream as I whipped it, adding a bunch of ground espresso beans right at the end. Voila.

Now, for each custard. Err, soup. Err, whatever. I'm calling them custards because it's convenient, and because they are custard-like, but they're all actually different. The squash component is technically a pudding, thickened with a bit of starch (oatmeal). The corn component is just a simple puree. Only the banana component is an honest-to-goodness custard, cooked with egg yolks in a double-boiler.

All of this was pretty ad-hoc, so I'm not doing a formal recipe here, but they're really pretty hard to screw up, so if you follow my imprecise lead, you'll no doubt have something quite good.

Squash

I'll start with the squash because it's the one I made first, although it's the one I liked the least, in the end. I sliced up a butternut squash and boiled it with just enough water to cover and a small handful of old-fashioned rolled oats and cooked until the squash was tender.

On the side, I chopped up and toasted some Scharffen Berger cacao nibs, and mixed them into the puree. Then I sweetened that with agave nectar to taste.

The oatmeal gives it a nice silkiness and a sheen; as starches go it's a good one for thickening soups. The problem was that the squash wasn't really very ripe, and boiling it won't really accentuate the flavor much, so the soup tasted extremely bland, but sweet, so it was pretty unremarkable. The prominent flavor, in fact, was the oatmeal. Hmm. Not what I'd intended.

Next time, I'd probably slice the squash the same way, maybe 1/4" thick, and oven-roast it with salt until it was a bit browned and tender, and then puree it with only enough water to make a nice consistency, and omit the oatmeal altogether. The squash has enough sugar to it that the browning flavors would be really nice, and a slight smokiness to the soup would be complemented well by the bitterness in the espresso and matched nicely by the warmth of the vanilla.

Corn-Guajillo Puree

The corn-guajilla chowder was a superstar. It's a beautiful, vibrant orange, intensely flavorful, and was super-simple and easy to make.

First, I took a few dried guajillo chiles, sliced them into strips, removed the seeds and ribs, and soaked them in warm water to let them plump up and soften. Then I sliced the kernels off a few ears of corn, and sauteed them in butter for a bit. I added the chiles after about 10 minutes of soaking, added some heavy cream and good kosher salt, and simmered for maybe ten minutes to let the flavors mingle.

Then I pureed it, and it was perfect.

If I'd been serving it on its own I would have added some more complexity -- a mirepoix or other base of sweated veggies, maybe another kind of pepper, maybe roasted the corn first, whatever. Since I knew it was already going with the vanilla cookies and espresso cream, I left it alone. Enough flavors, already!

It was fantastic. I served it at room temperature and then, later, chilled, and both ways it was great. Thick, creamy, and simultaneously sweet with the corn and a bit picante, acidic, and smoky from the guajillo, it was very full, comfort food, which went well with the vanilla and was offset well by the espresso cream.

The experience of eating one of these things, by the way, if you pop it whole into your mouth, starts with the cold, smooth slick of the espresso cream on your tongue, followed by the textural crunch as you bite through the cookie, after which the soup washes over your mouth, followed finally by the vanilla coming in and then the espresso mingling with the rest of the flavors for a nice combined finish. I think it's serendipity that I happened to sandwich the soup in between the vanilla and espresso, because I think it makes for a nice little experience, start to finish. In the case of the corn, if you tasted the corn and chiles first, it would overwhelm the rest of it too quickly.

Banana Custard

This banana custard was easy to make and delicious. What's more, it's not really that unhealthy. I used no added sugar, and only a little dairy; it's really just bananas and eggs. It came out so well that I've made it a few times since, especially when I've had leftover egg yolks or old bananas that are on the verge of going bad.

First, I took 3 bananas and pureed them in the blender with just a splash of cream to facilitate the blending. I mixed them with 5 egg yolks in a metal bowl and set it over a saucepan with an inch or so of boiling water over medium heat, yielding this improv double-boiler:

I cooked that mixture, whisking it fiercely until it registered 180F on a thermometer. If you try this, you'll know it's getting there because it starts tangibly thickening around 150F and is really gelling by 180F, cohesive and pulling away from the sides of the bowl and all that.

Here it is at, I think, about 170F.

For measuring the temperature I use my IR thermometer, which I love and wholeheartedly endorse, but I know it gives a reading significantly below the internal temperature (because the surface is so much cooler) so I compensate accordingly. You could also use a normal thermometer (here is the one I have, and it functions quite well) and it'll give a clear reading, but it's kind of in the way. Or, once you're comfortable, you could just do it by feel.

Once it hit 180F, I removed the bowl from the pan immediately and set it off the heat. I let it cool a bit, whisked it a bit, and when it was getting near room temperature, so I had some idea of its cooled consistency, I whisked in some more cream to thin it just a bit.

Subsequently I've used whole milk instead of heavy cream, and it comes out a bit less creamy, of course, but still tasty. And while I've always used entirely yolks (it gives it a nicer yellow color, I think, and lately I've had a lot of leftover yolks from meringues), you could substitute a roughly equivalent volume of whole eggs.

The custard is nice because it's hard to screw up. Fundamentally, as long as you don't wildly screw up the proportions (say, combine 8 bananas with one egg yolk) and cook it gently, the eggs will form that protein matrix. It's like making scrambled eggs with some banana puree mixed in. And an eight-year-old can scramble eggs! It's that easy. And impressively tasty.

Results?

I talked about the individual results in each section, but how were these things overall? They were really very good. I brought them to a party and one woman popped one of the corn-guajillo cups into her mouth and excitedly proclaimed it "The most amazing thing I've ever put in my mouth!"

Her boyfriend was standing nearby, but he seemed not to hear.

I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but they were good. The flavor, texture, and temperature combinations all go together surprisingly well, and I'm labeling this one a success. The only liability with it is its lack of portability: the tuile quickly sog with the liquids in them, so you need to assemble them moments before eating or the effect is seriously diminished (or, worse, the sogged bottom falls out and the effect becomes "Orange soup down your shirt.")

Assuming the portability's not an issue, though, they're definitely worth a shot. Plus, I like this kind of format: three major flavors in separate components with distinct texture and temperature, simply combined and eaten. I might have to play around with it some more. Maybe I'll try savory, next time.

How do the rest of you think up new ways to mix flavors? Any particular success stories recently?

Tartine Lemon Meringue Cake

In case you needed another reason to buy the Tartine cookbook, here's some pictures of their Lemon Meringue Cake that I made this week. It's layers of lemon chiffon cake filled with simple lemon syrup, vanilla caramel, and lemon custard, frosted with thick meringue and torched to a golden brown.

It came out very well; the cake is delicious. It's so time-intensive, though, that I'm not about to make it again soon. I made the caramel, lemon syrup, and lemon custard on the first night, made and filled the cake on the second, and then made the meringue, frosted the cake, and torched it and served it on the on the third.

No recipe with this one: The scones were a relatively short, self-contained endeavor, but this one relies on several of Tartine's basic preparations and is very detailed; reprinting it all here would be like giving half the book away.

Preparing the caramel

Cooking the lemon custard over a double-boiler

Making the cake batter: gently folding in the egg white foam

The finished cake

Filling the cake layers

Delicious thick meringue

Frosted cake

The torched, finished cake

This cake is fun to make because it's an opportunity to practice a bunch of different techniques using well-written, detailed recipes --the caramel doesn't even use a thermometer. The lemon custard is wonderfully simple and essential. The cake recipe is good enough that, surprisingly, it came out perfectly on my first attempt. As an added treat, you get to make two separate egg white foams in this one -- the one folded into the cake batter is plain, simple, room temperature egg whites whipped up. The frosting is egg whites, first whisked with sugar and heated over a double-boiler and then whipped up into a foam. It's a good opportunity to see the difference: in the frosting, adding the sugar right at the start prevents the foam from rising as high, and heating it up before whipping makes the texture velvety and extremely smooth.

Furthermore, while it's time-consuming overall, each component of the cake is relatively simple, and everything but the meringue frosting can be prepared days in advance.

It came out well. It's surprisingly heavy, given that it's an egg-heavy but dairy-light cake, and so much of it is whipped. I was expecting it to be a bit lighter. I guess when you soak that fluffy cake in chilled sugar syrup, caramel, and lemon custard, it gets a little bit more... solid.

So cut those slices thin.

Buttermilk Scones with Peaches

Scones are one of my favorite breakfast foods to make, especially for others. In fact, only for others, because these scones, more than any other baked good I've ever made, are significantly better fresh from the oven than reheated later in a toaster. They're still good later, don't get me wrong, but the difference is really shocking.

I think of scones just like I think of espresso: Most scones you can get, at stores, coffeeshops, wherever, are really not very good. Similarly, most espresso at the average coffee shop is painfully bitter and acidic. I'm a little sensitive to being called a food snob, and I think it's happened once or twice with the coffee, but my contention is that it doesn't take a particularly sophisticated palate to appreciate the difference. It's just that a surprising number of people have never had the fortune to drink a great espresso, or eat a really excellent scone. Once they do, I contend, they'll never go back.

On Saturday, I brought a chicken pot pie to friends who just gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, and while hanging out them and talking, I mentioned scones and she said, "I don't think I like scones." I asked a few questions, suspecting she'd just never had a really good one, and indeed, she described the average scone as leathery and tough.

Never one to turn down a challenge, I went straight to Central Market to pick up the couple things I didn't already have on hand for this recipe -- some buttermilk and the currants. Only, the peaches looked so good I ditched the currants and bought a few peaches instead.

I doubled the recipe, on a whim, thinking if I was going to deliver scones to one friend on Sunday morning, I might as well deliver them to more. I brought scones to 7 different homes in south Austin, all my friends who responded to my text messages, and it made for a great Sunday morning. Actually, it ran long, so it made for a nice Sunday afternoon, too. Luckily the scones obligingly stayed warm for several hours.

This recipe is straight from the Tartine Cookbook. It is amazing. The scones are buttery, warm, crumbly and soft, just the tiniest bit tangy from the buttermilk, and with a faint crust of sugar on top to give a little crunch.

I wasn't sure how I felt about reprinting a recipe verbatim, but this is one of the book's simpler ones, I don't think it's illegal, and hopefully this post will convince at least a few of you to go buy the book. You should; it's fantastic. Tartine is one of the best bakeries in San Francisco, and their cookbook lives up to the pedigree. It's full of useful tips and observations, subtle technical details of pastry and baking, and it is worth its weight in gold if you ever want to make pies, cakes, custards, croissants, any of that. Everything I have made from the cookbook has been wonderful.

With that introduction: first, take some peaches. Pit them and then dice them into 1/4" dice or so. Be as even as you can; if they're all haphazard, some will cook more than others and your scones will be inconsistent.

Note: Like I said above, I doubled this recipe, so all my photos are of twice the amount. Don't freak out that I show four sticks of butter and later say you should use only two.

After that, the dough follows a familiar pattern. Sift together the dry, cut in the butter, then add the wet. In this case, there's not actually that much sugar, but there is quite a bit of butter.

The secret to this, just like the secret to a good butter pie crust, is not to be gentle with it, not to get all OCD about mixing everything together into one homogeneous mass. Cut the butter into small pieces so you don't need to beat the holy Hell out of it to get it to combine:

And stop mixing the butter with the flour when there are still pea-sized lumps of butter in there. Fold the buttermilk into it gently, mixing only as much as you must.

It's hard to tell from that photo, but there are still chunks of butter in there, not at all combined, still about the size of peas.

I added the peaches at the very end because I didn't want to freeze them first, and if I'd mixed them in with the buttermilk they would have gotten smashed and bled color into the dough. So I just gently cut them in with my hands at the end, when I turned the dough out onto the counter:

When you shape the dough into long rectangles to cut the scones, again, be gentle! Don't knead it. Just gently pat it into shape. Cut it into triangles:

Then transfer them, using the side of the knife like a spatula, onto a buttered cookie sheet. Brush with the melted butter and dust with sugar:

Finally, bake. Even as they go into the oven, you should still see small discrete chunks of butter in the dough.

Serve them immediately, before they cool off. Eat them plain, or with honey, or clotted cream.

BHS, 11/2/07: I emailed Tartine about posting the recipe; nobody ever responded. I went there when I was just in San Francisco, and asked the girl helping me if there was someone I could talk to about getting permission. She shrugged and said, "I'd just go ahead and do it. I'm sure it's fine." At this point, that's good enough for me. Sorry for the delay.

Buttermilk Scones
Makes 1 dozen

1 ripe peach, pitted and cut into 1/4" dice
4 3/4c all-purpose flour
1T baking powder
3/4t baking soda
1/2c granulated sugar
1 1/4t salt
1c + 1T unsalted butter, very cold
1 1/2c buttermilk
1t grated lemon zest
melted butter and crystal sugar, for topping

Preheat the oven to 400F and butter a baking sheet.

Put the peaches in the freezer briefly so that they are easier to mix with the dough.

Sift the flour, baking powder, and baking soda into a large mixing bowl. Add the sugar and salt and stir to mix with a wooden spoon. Cut the butter into 1/2" cubes and scatter over the dry ingredients. Cut together, either with a pastry blender, 2 table knives, or a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, but don't overmix. You want to end up with a coarse mixture with pea-sized lumps of butter visible.

Add the buttermilk all at once along with the lemon zest and mix gently with the wooden spoon. Continue to mix just until you have a dough that holds together. You still want to see some of the butter pieces at this point, which will add to the flakiness of the scones once they are baked.

Dust your work surface with flour, and turn the dough out onto it. Using your hands, pat the dough into a rectangle about 18" long, 5" wide, and 1 1/2" thick. Brush the top with the melted butter and then sprinkle with the sugar. using a chef's knife, cut the dough into 12 triangles and transfer to the prepared baking sheet.

Bake the scones until the tops are lightly browned, 25 to 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve immediately

Fig & Anise French Macaroons

These cookies are my submission for Sugar High Fridays #35: The Beautiful Fig.

I remember the first time I had a French macaron, which I suppose should be "macaroon," but most people hear "macaroon" and think of a dense, moist mound of coconut, perhaps half-dipped in chocolate. Those are good, too, but the French macaroon? Divine.

I was at the French Laundry with my sister and aunt. It was late. We'd already eaten probably 9 courses, but they just wouldn't stop bringing food. I felt like I was going to burst. And then they brought a plate of these perfect, glossy little sandwich cookies, pale yellow with golden filling. I bit through it, and my teeth first broke the crispy outer shell, then sunk into the chewy-but-fluffy, caramelized center of the meringues, and then through the milk caramel buttercream filling. I was in heaven. I closed my eyes and savored the cookie as it melted slowly in my mouth. The next day we went to Bouchon and bought a whole bunch more. My sister intended to bring them home to share, but confessed later that she ate almost all of them herself.

No other cookie I've had provides the same textural depth and perfect balance of richness, fluffiness, and crispness. They're elusive, too; in San Francisco you really just had to go to Miette in the Ferry building to get good ones, and then they were several dollars apiece. And so I thought, all this time, that they must be impossibly difficult to make and full of prohibitively expensive ingredients.

Well, they are a fair amount of work, and they do require more technical skill than any other cookie I've ever made, but like anything, it just takes practice. When I spotted SHF #35 I'd already been practicing my macaroon-making, and so I decided to take the opportunity to try another batch.

As for the flavor combination, I once made the fig, roasted pepper, and fennel salad from the French Laundry Cookbook, and it was fairly easy and delicious, the figs and peppers marinated in balsamic vinaigrette and served with a variety of fennel: shaved, powdered, and infused in oil. The flavors worked well there, in a savory dish, so I thought, I bet anise and fig would go well together.

I've based all my macaroon-making so far off of David Lebovitz's extraordinarily useful post on the subject. So go read that first, if you haven't already, and then come back. Back? Good.

Oh, and before you try to make meringue, it's worth reading Heidi's excerpt from Madam E. Saint-Ange's detailed notes on whisking egg whites.

And, last but not at all least, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking contains an exceptionally detailed chapter on eggs, including a big section on egg white foams. Reading that will take your understanding of eggs to a whole new level. If I could only have one book on cooking, that would be it. No question.

OK, enough with the preamble. On to the recipe! I started with the recipe from David's post, modifying it a bit to make the dacquoise shells taste of anise instead of chocolate. (Dacquoise is a nut meringue; macaroon shells are always meringue with nut flour of some kind.) Cocoa powder is somewhat starch and somewhat fat, so I compensated for it by adding ground star anise and boosting the volume of nuts. Because the recipe calls for dutch cocoa powder, which is treated with alkali to neutralize its acid, I didn't need to compensate for that (I almost missed that and added some cream of tartar, which I suppose wouldn't have been the end of the world.)

For the filling, I wanted a very thick fig jam. I bought some black mission figs, and at Lulu's suggestion, diced them very small:

This took a bit of time. Here's a hint: no matter how sharp you think you keep your knife, go ahead and sharpen it right before doing this. It really speeds things up.

I mixed the diced figs together with sugar in a saucepan over medium-low heat. My figs weren't as ripe as I would have liked, so I mixed 8oz figs with a little over 1/4c of sugar. With very ripe figs I would have used a bit less.

I let them cook for a while, and when they started to release their juices, I added a splash of red wine vinegar, several generous coarse grinds of black pepper, and the flesh from a quarter of a navel orange, minced fine to break up the starchy membrane.

I turned the heat down to low, covered the pan, and let it cook while I made the shells.

To make the shells, I took about 10 grams of star anise and ground it up in a mortar & pestle (10g comes to about a heaping tablespoon when ground)

It's not necessary to get it completely powdered in the mortar & pestle, because the blender will finish some of that. The key is to get it broken down enough for the blender; it'll be in the blender with the nuts, and if you put the star anise in the blender whole, it'll mostly just get flung around. In the time it would take the blender to grind it to powder, the nuts would have gone past "nut flour" to "nut butter."

I asked a pastry chef over at the new (and awesome) Oakville Grocery Austin if he had any tips for making these shells, and he said, "Throw a pinch of flour in with the nuts to help absorb the oil when you grind them." It really helps a lot. I put the ground star anise in a canning jar with 65g of nuts (which is maybe 1/2c or so of whole almonds) and a generous pinch of all-purpose flour. The threads on canning jars fit on most blender bases, which is handy for things like this where quantities aren't large enough to use the full blender jar.

I ground that down in the blender until it was a relatively coarse meal. You don't want to overdo it or the oils in the nuts will take over and it'll get really goopy.

Then, as per David's recipe, I mixed the powdered sugar in with that, being grateful that it all (barely) fit in the jar I picked:

Then I blended it all together. This time I ground it further, so it was the texture of a flour. The powdered sugar and especially the cornstarch in it (an anti-caking agent) absorb some of the oil, making it possible to grind the nuts down further while keeping things dry.

I sifted the resulting dry mix through a coarse wire-mesh sieve into a bowl. A lot of home cooks I know treat sifting of dry ingredients as some kind of joke, like an absurd detail to be skipped. But there's nothing funny about it.

The oils in the nuts, even with the sugar and cornstarch and flour and all that, will still cause clumping in this dry mix, and when you mix this stuff into the meringue, every spatula-stroke counts. By sifting this, you break up those clumps, filter out any debris that didn't get ground fine enough, and aerate it all so it's nice and fluffy and easy to mix into the meringue.

Nerdy-but-important detail: When left with little clumped pebbles, instead of pressing them down against the mesh to break them up, I grab a pinch of them at a time, lift them off the mesh, and roll them around in my fingers to break them up. Pushing them against the mesh risks pushing through other stuff you don't want, like coarse splinters of star anise. Don't be afraid to throw stuff like that away (there shouldn't be very much of it, if you ground it all properly.)

After that, all that remained was the meringue. I took the 2 egg whites at room temperature (that's critical: cold egg whites won't whip as well) and whipped them in my Kitchenaid mixer at top speed for maybe 1 minute, until the mass was solid white, glossy, but still soft. Without stopping the mixer I poured in the 65g sugar -- I used baker's sugar, so it's granular but extra-fine -- and continued whipping until the meringue was as stiff as possible without losing its gloss.

Meringue is kind of like whipped cream when it comes to folding things into it. The more you whip it, the fluffier it is, but also the harder it is to mix with other things. This makes sense, intuitively: the more you whip either foam, the more air bubbles and the thinner the liquid membrane encasing all the bubbles, and hence the harder it is to get it all in contact with whatever you're adding.

Nonetheless, you want the meringue for the dacquoise as fluffy as possible. It just means that when you fold the dry ingredients in, you have to be extremely patient and very careful not to crush the meringue. I took my meringue, sifted half the dry ingredients over it, and folded them in very gently. The technique is this: slide the spatula down through the center of the meringue, sideways, so the blade edge goes in and you're not mashing the meringue. Then, draw it back towards you, scoop up as much of the meringue off the bottom as you can, and flip it so you deposit it on top of the rest of the mix in the bowl. Then, rotate the bowl a quarter-turn or so, and repeat.

It will seem at first like nothing is happening, and the meringue and dry ingredients are just getting piled on top of each other. It will be very tempting to press the broad side of the spatula down through the meringue to smash it and mix the dry ingredients in. Resist the temptation. Doing that will crush the air out of the meringue and your cookies will lose some of their lightness with every bubble that bursts. Keep on folding, trusting that eventually it will start to genuinely combine.

After about half of that mix was integrated with the meringue, I sifted the rest in and finished folding it together. I still get a minor reduction in meringue volume from doing this, but every time I make it, it's better and better.

I scooped that batter into a pastry bag -- David's recipe calls for a broad tip, I just leave it tipless, with about a 1/2" hole at the top -- and piped them onto baking sheets lined with parchment. They ought to be about 1" around. They won't settle, rise, or change shape much at all while cooking, so whatever size you pipe them is the size you'll get in the finished cookie.

I've made these shells on a number of different surfaces now. On a Silpat, thanks to silicone's non-stick property, they're certainly easy to remove, but thanks to its heat-insulating property, they end up a bit too chewy because the bottoms don't get enough heat for my liking. On parchment on an insulated baking sheet (one of the ones with the double layer of metal with air in between) I find they're just about perfect. On parchment on a single-layer baking sheet, the bottoms get a touch too brown.

My piping, as Lulu gently observed, could use some work. The reward for a perfectly-folded batter with a very lofty meringue is that it doesn't settle at all, but the downside is that it will reveal all the imperfections of your piping work. If you screw up and flatten the meringue a bit as you mix, it'll settle more during cooking and the shells will, aesthetically speaking, be more forgiving of your poor piping, but then of course the texture of the cookies suffers. This time I kept the batter loftier than ever before, but unfortunately it does show up my mediocre piping skills. It's something to work on for next time!

David mentions rapping the sheet firmly on the counter before baking them to help flatten them out, but I found that my batter was too stiff, and that had no effect at all.

I popped those in a 375F oven for 15 minutes. I find that any less than 15 minutes and they are a bit too chewy; more than 15 and they brown too much. 15 is the magic number, for me. I also have had poor results trying to bake multiple sheets at once on different-level oven racks. I strongly suggest baking them one sheet at a time with the oven rack in the center.

When the shells were done, I took them out of the oven and lamented my poor piping skills, but celebrated the perfect development of the little, crispy "foot" a good macaroon cookie has at the bottom:

Something I've found in my macaroons that surprised me -- I hadn't read it anywhere else -- is that the shells will not have the proper texture after cooking (or, at least, mine never do.) When you let them cool, the bottoms and interiors will seem too crisp, the insides too full. A finished macaroon should have the crispy outer shell, but then a big air pocket and a softer, moister meringue towards the filling. I worried at first that my cookies were overcooked, the bottoms were so crispy, the insides so solid.

Not to fear. After filling the macaroons and letting them sit in an airtight container on the counter overnight, their texture dramatically changes. The meringues absorb some of the moisture from the filling and the insides of the meringue fall towards the filling. It's surprising how significant that change is, even with a relatively viscous filling like this one.

Speaking of the filling, where did we leave that? Yes, I'd set it on the stove to cook. I checked on it periodically, stirring it, and it was very low in moisture so I generally left it covered while cooking, and just as I put the meringues in the oven I checked and it seemed about perfectly done. The skins didn't quite break down as much as I'd hoped, though, so I pureed it just a little with a hand blender to smooth it out without destroying the crunchy fig seeds. Then I mixed in some chopped orange zest to taste, and the result was a very thick, sweet, sticky, perfect fig jam:

I smeared some jam on a cookie, pressed another cookie on top of it, and repeated until I had a nice little pile of macaroons.

Like I said, it takes several hours of sitting for them to develop the right texture. Resist the urge to bite into one as soon as you've filled them. The cookies will be too solid and crisp and it'll just squeeze them together and squirt filling out the sides. Instead, take a deep breath, put them in a tupperware container, leave them on the counter overnight, and then bite into one in the morning, and claim your reward:

Result? These are delicious. The flavors combine exceptionally well. As for what I'd do differently, well, I'd certainly work on piping them into perfect little domes next time. I'd also probably cut the anise by a little bit, maybe to only 6 or 7 grams, adding almonds to compensate, and also put more fig jam in each one (I was worried I'd run out, but in fact I had some left over.) The fig is a noticeable flavor in these, but the anise is a bit bossier than I expected.

This recipe is, like I said, a modification of David Lebovitz's, here.

Fig & Anise Macarons

For the batter
1 cup (100g) powdered sugar
1/2c (65g) whole almonds
1T heaping (10g) pulverized star anise
generous pinch all-purpose flour
2 large egg whites, at room temperature
5 tablespoons (65g) granulated sugar

For the filling
8oz black mission figs
1/4c sugar (more or less depending on fig ripeness)
generous splash red wine vinegar
flesh of 1/4 of a navel orange, minced
2t fresh, coarsely-ground black pepper
orange zest, to taste

Preheat the oven to 375F (180C).

Cut the figs into small dice. Combine the figs and sugar in a saucepan and heat on medium-low until the figs begin to release juices and the sugar is dissolved. Add the red wine vinegar, orange flesh, and pepper, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the figs break down. Depending on the ripeness of the figs, this will take roughly 30-45 minutes.

In the meantime, put the almonds, star anise, and flour in a blender and chop it, pulsing the blender, to a coarse meal. Add the powdered sugar and continue pulsing until fully combined and ground finer, nearly the consistency of flour. Sift the mixture into a bowl.

In a mixer, whip the egg whites until they are glossy and form soft peaks. Add the
granulated sugar and continue whipping until the whites are very stiff and firm, but still glossy, 2 minutes or so.

Sift half the dry mixture over the whites in the mixer bowl and fold carefully with a spatula until mostly combined. Sift in the remaining dry mixture and continue folding until barely combined, when no streaks of pure white are visible and all the dry ingredients are integrated.

Scrape the batter into a pastry bag with a 1/2" circular tip and pipe onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Each cookie should be about 1" in diameter, roughly 1T of batter, and cookies should be 1" apart.

Bake for 15 minutes on the center rack, 1 baking sheet at a time.

When the jam is fully reduced and thick, puree it with a hand-blender until the skins are broken up but the seeds are still intact. Mix in the orange zest to taste.

When the cookies have cooled for a few minutes, remove them from the parchment and fill them, spreading a bit of the jam on one with a butter knife and sandwiching another on top.

Seal the cookies in an air-tight container and leave at room temperature for several hours, preferably overnight.

Caramel: By Way of Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my new cooking blog.

For a long time I've run my other blog and merely sat back as a passive reader of other food blogs, posting the occasional comment. At some point I realized my catch-all blog was more and more just about food, but it wasn't really a cooking blog, so I hesitated to really go more in-depth than, "I made this, and it was good."

No longer.

I picked the name Caramel Cook because, as a child, the thing my taste buds remember most fondly were the Christmas caramels my Dad always made, with the peculiar recipe handed down in his family, using strange substances like Milnot. Every year at Christmas-time I ate as much of that stuff as I could get away with. It was smooth, rich, sweet, but not cloying. The caramel flavors were intense and complex. Some years it tasted almost like fruit, with notes of cantaloupe. Some years it was more like molasses. Every year, it was heavenly. And so my love of caramel was born. Some people identify as "chocoholics." I appreciate good chocolate, but I think it's at its best when it's a vehicle for caramel.

That said, I'm certainly not going to talk exclusively about caramels, or even confections. Of course, caramel's more complicated than that: It's not just a candy. It's also a basic ingredient and a technique, all rolled up into one. Caramel plays a role in everything from creme brulee to dal toppings. And as versatile as caramel is, so is this blog. It's just Caramel Cook because, well, that happens to be one of my favorite things to eat.

I figured my very first post ought to be pretty exclusively about caramel, though. Conveniently enough, I wanted to make the site header image out of actual caramel, and so needed to make a pan. Two birds, one stone: Here's how that went.

I started with a basic caramel. With caramel, the basic process is the same, no matter how interesting your caramel. You cook the dairy a bit, you mix in the sugar, you cook to a particular temperature, and then you're done.

In the case of this recipe, because it uses granular sugar, you cook it down with water separately. Here are the two saucepans: the one on the right with the dairy and salt, already brought to a boil and now staying warm, and the one on the left with the sugar mix not yet fully dissolved.

As the sugar fully dissolves, crystallization starts to become a concern. We stop stirring the solution to stop smearing it up the sides of the pan, where it'll dry and crystallize, and instead gently swish it around. Furthermore, it's helpful to have a pastry brush and small dish of water; brushing water up the sides of the pans will dissolve the crystals and keep the caramel smooth. Furthermore, it does no damage to the caramel: if we poured in a lot of ice water, it would shock and disturb the fragile solution, but tiny amounts of room-temperature water are absorbed into the caramel with no ill effects.

The day I spent the $6 on a silicone pastry brush, my caramel-making became much more pleasant. No more goopy sugary bristle brushes to clean up afterwards!

In this recipe it's really up to us how long we cook the sugar solution before adding the dairy. The key is this: caramel's flavor comes substantially from browning reactions, but which browning reactions? There's sugar and there's dairy. A quick glance at Nina's neat temperature chart over at SweetNapa shows us that sweetened condensed milk begins browning at 212F, whereas sucrose doesn't caramelize until 320F. If that's true, now's our only chance to get sugar-browning, because once we add the dairy, we can't cook it higher than around 250F if we want it to stay chewy when it cools.

Indeed, we can confirm this first-hand: our sugar solution doesn't begin to change color until it gets very hot, as you can see here with the aid of my handy IR thermometer (no doubt the subject of a future post, I love it so much):

I like to let the sugar cook up that hot because I think it adds some extra complexity to the caramel to get some browning from the sugar and not solely the dairy. That said, it makes things a bit more, uh, exciting when we add the dairy, because the sugar solution is so hot that it very quickly boils the dairy mixture and froths and foams and expands dramatically. There's another important lesson: always use a large saucepan for caramel. Scorching-hot caramel boiling over and gushing all over your stovetop would be at best a giant nuisance, and at worst extremely dangerous.

If you've made it this far, all that's left is to cook the caramel to the right temperature and then stop it there. Still, easier said than done, sometimes. If you're not totally comfortable with your thermometer, and especially if you're relying solely on the cold-water test (though, really, you'd have to be very brave, very talented, or very foolish to make candy without a thermometer), keep the heat on medium-low, enough that the temperature will continue rising, but not quickly. Being caught by surprise by a rapid rise in temperature is nearly a guarantee of ruined caramel.

Oh, yeah. A note on cookware: I recommend using thin-bottomed pans to cook caramel. Why?

I have pretty lousy pans. I'd love it if I had a beautiful copper saucepan for making caramel, but I don't. My saucepans are either thick-bottomed aluminum core steel pans from Target or thin, flimsy stainless steel things from God-knows-where. At first, I used the thick-bottomed pans when making caramel to distribute the heat better, but after taking the caramel off the heat, the thick bottom of the pan had so much heat stored up that it'd cook the caramel up another 5 degrees or more -- disaster! I worked around that by pouring the caramel out of the pan immediately when it was done, which is fine if it's just going into a parchment-lined baking pan to be cut into candies, but can be a hassle if it isn't. Actually, no, it's a hassle either way. When you're making caramel you don't need any extra reasons to feel hurried.

Lo and behold, I tried using my flimsy stainless steel pans instead, and found that the heat distribution wasn't really a problem and that they worked very well.

Caramel has a relatively high specific heat, and doesn't scorch on the pan bottom as easily as something like plain milk. As long as you keep stirring it, the heat distribution isn't as critical as it is for most other things. Fundamentally, you're not cooking it for terribly long, anyway. And it's a big help with caramel to use pans that respond quickly to changes in temperature.

Here's the caramel, approaching completion:

As you can see, the dairy browns quite a bit at those low temperatures, so now we've got some sugar-browning flavors and some dairy-browning flavors in there. Delicious.

If you want the caramels to be solid, chewy candies, you probably want to cook them into the firm-ball stage, which is 245F-250F (again, see the cold water test chart.) If you live in a warmer climate, like them especially chewy, or need them to hold their shape impeccably, aim for the top of that range, or maybe even a degree or two above -- 252F or so.

In my case, I wanted a thick syrup that I could put in a squeeze bottle to draw letters, so I cooked it to 235F, right between thread-stage and soft-ball stage, so it would be about the consistency of very soft fudge, or very thick syrup.

And it worked out perfectly! I lettered the header with the caramel, and ornamented it with sugar, dyed blue, and sifted over a stencil:

... and then I ate it.