Tag: dessert

Möeca: A wonderful new restaurant for Cambridge

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Möeca at 1 Shepard Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts is a classic example of a Boston-area restaurant that offers wonderful flavors in new and compelling dishes. It is presented by the folks who gave us Giulia, so expectations were high.

The dish of the evening was the green crab custard with black truffles and leeks. Our (warm, friendly, knowledgeable) waitress explained that the idea behind the dish is to make an appealing dish out of an invasive and destructive species—green crabs are bad for oysters in particular.

The savory, creamy result was a big hit. A very creative and delicious solution to a problem.

The big dishes were equally well done. The cassoulet was a big hit among a party that has spent a good deal of time in France and paid attention to the food while there. The butter beans in that dish, always a key element, were delicious.

Dessert offered, among a list of compelling items, a lemon bombe that was out-of-the-park good. I don’t know when I’ve had a better lemon curd. Intense without the harsh edge that sometimes accrues. Even one spoonful made a memorable conclusion to a wonderful meal in a memorably charming restaurant.

Learn more about Möeca on their website: https://www.moecarestaurant.com/

The Cookie Bible

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If you have any interest in baking, you know Rose Levy Beranbaum, acclaimed for her must-have tome The Cake Bible. She offers both creative excellence and technical mastery. Her advice is compelling and masterful, and she provides a treasury of technical information as well as peerless judgment. This work is every bit as valuable as The Cake Bible and every bit as wide-ranging geographically. Have you ever made kourambiethes? Chocolate puff pastry? Pepparkakors – a stunning recipe with lots of black pepper from Norway?

If you have children, start with her recipe for Lion’s Paws, adorable-looking cookies complete with claws. This is one she invented as part of a magazine article. Look for the hidden chocolate chips. Brilliant!

Altogether, this is a master’s program in cookie making. You will find both techniques to improve your cooking and many wildly delicious recipes. Here is one:

Rose’s Crescents

Ingredients:

  • 113 grams of unsalted butter
  • 33 grams of sugar (ideally superfine)
  • 28 grams of blanched, sliced almonds
  • 118 grams of bleached, all-purpose flour
  • A pinch of sea salt

An hour before you begin, cut the butter into tablespoon-sized pieces and set them aside to soften.

Process the almonds with the sugar until the nuts are finely ground. Add the butter one piece at a time, and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the flour and the salt and pulse until they are incorporated. Scrape the sticky dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Press into a thick disc. Wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours, until the dough is firm.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees for 20 minutes at least, with a rack in the middle of the oven.

Topping

Make a topping with 50 grams of superfine sugar and a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon.

Shaping the Dough

Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Refrigerate three and allow the fourth piece to sit for 10 minutes, then knead it until it is malleable. Pinch off half-tablespoons of dough, roll into cylinders, bend them into crescent shapes, and place them an inch apart on a cookie sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and continue until the sheet is full.

Bake for eight minutes, rotate the sheet, and bake for six to eight minutes more (don’t let the cookies brown). Use a skinny offset metal spatula to put each cookie into a bowl with the topping. Store them at room temperature in an airtight container.

Adding Indian Flavors

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Chetna Makan, a participant on the Great British Baking Show, created a cookbook worth adding to anyone’s culinary library. The Cardamom Trail: Chetna Bakes with the Flavors of the East, brings Indian spices to familiar treats and introduces recipes that are familiar in Britain and may be new to American taste buds. Here is one I have found to be a universal favorite.

Pistachio, cardamom, and white chocolate cake

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces of unsalted butter
  • 8 ounces sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • 9 ounces of self-raising flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon cardamom seeds, crushed to a fine powder
  • 3 ½ fluid ounces of whole milk
  • 1 ¾ ounce pistachio nuts roughly chopped
  • 1 ¾ ounce white chocolate

For the icing

  • 5 ½ ounces white chocolate, chopped
  • 5 ½ ounces butter at room temperature
  • ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
  • Generous handful of finely chopped pistachios

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter two 8-inch cake pans and then line them with parchment.

Cream the butter and sugar together with a hand-held mixer or a stand mixer, using the whisk attachment, until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time making sure the batter is smooth before adding the next egg. In a small bowl, mix the flour, cardamom, baking powder, and milk, then add that mix to the butter and egg mixture.

Beat for one minute, then fold in the chopped pistachios and the white chocolate with a spatula. Divide the batter between the cake pans. I weigh the pans to make sure they are equal in quantity.

Bake for 30 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cakes cool in the pan. It is important to allow them to completely cool.

To make the icing, break the white chocolate into pieces in a heat-proof bowl and set t over a pan of steaming water until it melts completely. Keep the bowl from actually touching the water. Let it cool somewhat. In a separate bowl, cream the butter. Add the vanilla and the melted chocolate. Mix until light and creamy.

Spread half the icing on one cake layer. Place the second layer on top, ice with the remaining icing, and sprinkle with the finely chopped pistachios.

Note: Cake layers naturally rise in the center. To make a more attractive final product, use a sharp bread knife and slice off the bulge, making the top of each layer flat. That makes the cake easier to ice and the result is far more attractive.

Hunger in Cambridge

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When I started working for a small Cambridge-based Foundation. I commuted by bike. That offered the dual advantage of sidestepping the traffic that had become overwhelming and reintroducing me to a city I had known for decades. How the place had changed! I remember when East Cambridge or rather Greater Kendall Square seemed to be primarily a collection of vacant lots between MIT and Cambridge Street. 

As I made my way around. I kept seeing people in lines. To my surprise, they often turned out to be clients of food pantries. In this rich, progressive, thriving city, the big secret just out of sight was hunger. As I got more familiar with that reality, I quickly encountered an organization called Food For Free which addressed need with the qualities that for me define Cambridge: a genius for innovation, a commitment to community and a willingness to engage across lines of traditional separation.

But hunger turns out to be powerful. It can inspire connection. I became fascinated by the organization which responded to local need with an organization that rescues food otherwise going to waste and gets it into the hands of those in need. Under the direction of Sasha Purpura, Food For Free does a heroic job. One of the goals of this blog is to make this work more visible—both to help us all understand the nature and scale of food insecurity here in our community and also to honor those who are making a difference in a tough time.

So I have two goals here: to write about food up close, and to present the greater context. I hope you’ll follow our work, and visit www.quakerlasagna.com/food-for-free to learn more about how you can get involved.

How much information is enough?

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The Carthage (Indiana) Cook Book was found in an heirloom highboy offers fascinating reading. Page 1 is missing so the publication date is a mystery, though clothing ads suggest early 20th century (I suspect 1908-1910).

Here’s a sample recipe:

Fruit Cake

1 pound butter, 1 pound sugar, 1 pound flour, 3 pounds raisins, 2 pounds currants, 8 eggs, spice, ½ teaspoon soda in a little water, ¼ pound citron.

That’s it. No time, no temperature, no sequence.

Also intriguing is a big ad that boasts a bank with total capital of $25,000.

A mistake-proof cake!

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Here’s a recipe I love because it is fool-proof. Make a mistake? Just keep going. The first time I made this I misread one ingredient and replaced a half-teaspoon of balsamic vinegar with a tablespoon. It tasted great. Now I always use more vinegar. Cut up fresh fruit and it becomes a kind of clafoutis. A chopped-up bar of good chocolate will work just as well. It is perfect when you realize you promised to bring dessert and then forgot all about it.

Call it Whatever Cake.

Ingredients

  • One and one-half cups of fruit sliced or chopped, or pitted cherries, or chopped-up chocolate.
  • Three-quarters cup flour
  • Three-quarters teaspoon baking powder
  • Fat pinch of kosher salt
  • One egg at room temperature*
  • One-half cup sugar plus an extra tablespoon for the top
  • One-fourth teaspoon lemon zest
  • One-quarter cup EVOO
  • 0ne-quarter cup milk
  • 1 tablespoon good balsamic vinegar

Preparation

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and place an oven thermometer in it to check. 
  • Brush a 10-inch springform pan with olive oil. Line the bottom with parchment paper and brush the paper with oil. Dust with flour.
  • Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
  • In a standing mixer beat together the egg, the half-cup of sugar and the lemon zest until the mix becomes fluffy, pale yellow and doubled in volume. Add the olive oil, the milk and the vinegar and beat until thoroughly combined. Fold in the flour mixture. 
  • Pour the mixture into the pan and add the fruit or chocolate (or both!). If you toss the fruit with sugar first it will extrude less juice.
  • Bake 50 minutes, until a sharp knife stuck in the middle comes clear and the top is a golden brown.
  • Let is sit in the pan for about 5 minutes, then remove and cool on a rack. Before serving, dust the top with powdered sugar using a small sieve.

*If you take the eggs out of the refrigerator, let them stand in a small bowl of hot water before cracking them. That will quickly bring them to room temperature.