Strawberries and Saffron

This is a belated post, but when the elderchild and I made a strawberry rhubarb pie the other day there was a lot of pie crust left over. To give the elderchild more practice with rolling out crust, we collaborated on a rustic strawberry tart.

The filling was a little bit of strawberry jam topped with sliced fresh strawberries. When it came out of the oven, I immediately brushed it with the saffron simple syrup I'd saved from the youngerchild's baklava and zoolbia adventure. The liquid evaporates off and leaves a glaze which had a nice hint of saffron that went beautifully with the berries. Yum!

School Project

For English, the youngerchild had a project due today. The assignment was to pick a poet from a country other than the US and make a presentation about the poet and their poetry as well as incorporate some of the elements of the culture. Creativity was encouraged. My child chose Hafez, a poet from Persia in the 14th century. So, in addition to the writing parts, we jointly decided that there should be traditional Persian sweets for the class to consume while the presentation was happening.

Last week the youngerchild and I made baklava. It went pretty well, considering the youngerchild hadn't really done anything like it before. My goal was to step back and let my kid do most of the work and we had a lot of fun. This stayed in the fridge, uncut, until yesterday when we were putting everything together.

Yesterday we attempted zoolbia. This was much harder as it required deep frying and then dousing the fritters in saffron and rosewater syrup. First we made the syrup and set it aside. Then we made the batter with corn flour, yogurt and water. On the first attempt to use a squeeze bottle to drizzle the batter into hot oil, the squiggles were too thin and they looked like shredded wheat. I cut off the tip of the squeeze bottle and tried again but the batter sank in the oil and stuck to the bottom of the pot. So I carefully transferred the hot oil to a muffin tin and tried again, getting hot oil EVERYWHERE. Amazingly enough, nobody got burned. In the muffin tins, the batter came together more like a cookie than a squiggle, but at least they didn't stick. I would transfer the zoolbia into the syrup and the youngerchild would take them out when they were sufficiently infused and put them on the cooling rack. We put them in a container and poured more syrup over them to give them more flavor and then this morning before taking them to school drained off the excess syrup. They taste good even if they don't look quite right!

Profiteroles

Before the onslaught of illness, we were supposed to have dinner with friends at their house. I planned to make profiteroles, which are pate a choux puffs filled with ice cream and then topped with some sort of chocolate sauce. I made them, and then they hung out in the freezer until we finally all got well enough to reschedule.

Gougères

I wasn't sure how my oven would deal with pate a choux. It's not well sealed, and loses heat all the time, and I was afraid it would lose the moisture created in the first half of the baking process. Thankfully, it didn't, and I got 20 puffs made without much fuss. I used the rest of the pate a choux batter to make gougères by mixing in shredded cheese and some mustard and scooping the batter onto a baking sheet. These were amazing and got consumed within a few hours. Yum.

The next step was making rose flavored ice cream, just like I did for class a year ago. A custard base, with rose water added, then that rested in the fridge for a day. After that I churned it in the ice cream maker and, while it was still soft, piped it into the puffs. I know this isn't the usual way to do this, but I thought it might be interesting to have them filled this way. It did work out, although I had to move quickly to keep from being covered in melty rose-flavored ice cream!

These then lived in the freezer in an airtight container until last night. To top them off, I made a saffron-white chocolate ganache, with 4 ounces of white chocolate, 4 ounces of cream, a little butter, and a generous pinch of saffron (added after the cream was heated, before being added to the chocolate). By the time we got to dessert the ganache was the perfect pouring consistency. I also brought chocolate fudge sauce because I wasn't sure how the kids would like the saffron. We ended up all trying both. I think the saffron ganache was the better choice!

Days 15 and 16: Cakes, More Cookies, and an Experiment or Two

Yesterday we made an insane number of cakes. It's hard to keep it all straight but, as we were learning about sponge cakes and other similar cakes, we made about ten different types of cake. In insanely huge quantities. We made an immense batch of white genoise which made 18 cakes. The bowl in which it was mixed was big enough for a small child to sit in (we so rarely get to use that bowl!). There were also chocolate genoise, almond genoise, coffee biscuits (for Tiramisu), joconde (4 layers), Alhambra cake (like a chocolate joconde, 3 layers), ladyfingers (two kinds), a lemon-ginger cake, and another chocolate cake called a Sacher. Almost all of these were frozen, more gifts for the future when it comes time to assemble more cakes. The only one we used was the white genoise to make a Poeme cake. Here it is:

Buttercream on the sides and top, with a kirsch mousseline on the inside.

By the end of the day I was wearing a little bit of every ingredient we'd worked with. Even the strawberries. I had coffee extract on my face. Everyone, including the chefs, was amused. Amazingly enough, all those stains washed out.

After I got home it was time to make my project for class. I still have to hand in the written assignment but here's what I did. I made a tart using pâte sucrée dough, saffron pastry cream, poached Asian pears, and sumac. The sumac was sprinkled on the dough before pouring the cream and then again on the pears after the tart had cooled. The whole thing was glazed with some apricot glaze thinned with the syrup from poaching the pears. It was served with rose ice cream and garnished with candied rose petals. I would have liked to get organic roses because then they would have actually been edible but apparently I will just have to use my own roses in the summer if I want people to eat them. The tart was well received by my classmates and the three chefs who tried it. Everyone really liked the ice cream! It was a simple base of egg yolks, cream and sugar and then I added rosewater and a drop of red food coloring when it was cool enough.

Today's classes involved Italian cookies. We had 15 recipes to make and Chef asked each of us to work individually. I made Biarritz cookies which were almond and hazelnut with orange zest and sandwiched with hazelnut paste. My other batch was Rochers, essentially a Swiss meringue that was piped (the easiest time I've had piping so far, so I took advantage of it and made a bunch of shapes), topped with nuts and then baked at a very low temperature for a very long time. We were efficient today, finishing in enough time to start our evening lecture at 3-ish and we were out for the day at 6 pm.

Tonight's lecture topic was herbs. We were each tasked with making a chocolate ganache with some sort of herb or herb combo and then made them into truffles. Chef said there were only a few herbs that didn't apply well to desserts, one of them is chive. Challenge accepted! I decided to try to make a chive truffle. I used chives and some lemon zest. It was really interesting: after steeping the milk with the chives, you could really taste them. As soon as it went into the chocolate, the chive flavor disappeared. Chef suggested I add more chive straight into the chocolate ganache. His theory was he already knew it was going to taste bad so I couldn't make it any worse. They were finished with a little flake salt and cocoa powder. Since they were so controversial, I even drew skulls and crossbones on their tray so people would know they were eating it at their own risk. Even my own husband wouldn't try one. The elderchild did, and reported, "This should be a thing you don't do."