So one day I was thinking I’d make an apple cake.  Since I had never really made an apple cake, I turned to my good buddy Google and soon found this recipe on Group Recipes. Kate and I had gotten a Bakers Edge pan for Christmas and on a chilly winter evening soon after I first tried the Best Apple cake In 47 Years of cooking recipe.  At the restaurant I churched up this simple, outstanding, breakfasty cake into something a bit more.  Maybe another 47 years? Who can say without the benefit of time travel. The genius of the cake is it’s basic nature.  A true quick bread leavened with both eggs and baking soda you really just kind of mix it all up; not much to it.  When it comes out of the oven, let it sit for a few minutes ad then glaze it with the brown sugar glaze.  The smell stirs one to salivation, heads turn and sniff, they sniff-sniff.  I actually have a bit of a thing for the raw batter.  So anyway, give it a try.  I change up the recipe a little from the original: where it says 3 cups of apples I just slice three apples, Also and I brown the butter in the glaze before adding the sugar and cream.  At the restaurant I leave out the walnuts so people with “nut allergies” can order it too.  I get back at them by serving it with toasted walnut ice cream, sage caramel, brown butter struesel and candied walnuts.  I fucking love walnuts.  The sage powder is I cool trick I learned working with Chef Eric Suniga, a man of true kitchen prowess.  Pick a bunch of sage, pile up the leaves, and roll into into a blunt with plastic wrap.  Freeze rock solid and micro plane at service.

The Best Apple Cake in 47 Years of Cooking.

3 c flour

2 c sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

3 large eggs, beaten

1 c vegetable oil

1/2 c apple juice

2 tsps vanilla

3 finely sliced apples

1 c packed brown sugar

1/4 c butter

1/3 c whipping cream

Preheat The oven to 350. Grease and flour desired pan. (9×13 or 7 - 3X2″ cake pans)

• In a large bowl mix flour, sugar, soda & salt. Make a well in the center & set aside.

• In a medium bowl mix eggs, oil, apple juice & vanilla. Add the egg mixture to dry ingredients, just until moistened.  Add the apples and mix until homogeneous.

• Bake for 45-50 mins.

• In a small saucepan brown the butter, then in mix the brown sugar & cream. Cook & stir till bubbly & all of the sugar is dissolved. Cool slightly.

• Drizzle warm sauce over cake, when it has cooled for 5 minutes, so it can seep into the cake, keeping it moist.

Enjoy the Best Apple Cake (In 47 Years of Cooking) recipe.

A fucking bomb went off! Chocolate flourless cake, salty caramel core,  milk chocolate shell and blood orange ice cream.  The dessert is inspired by a pastry I had in Paris, from the shop of the revered pastry Chef Pierre Herme.  It was a bombe, tempered shell and caramel core, I enjoyed it on a park bench in Luxembourg gardens. Mr. Herme ingeniously used a macaron base, his desserts were all marked by inventive skill and imagination.  I employ a compressed devil’s food cake sealed with icing to seal in the oozing salty caramel, just a candle held towards Chef Pierre’s brilliance. The milk chocolate shell is just that, tempered 38% milk chocolate.  Here’s a recipe for my faithful readers.

Blood Orange Ice Cream

2 cups milk

2 cups blood orange puree

1 1/2 cups sugar

4 oz butter

pinch o’ salt

2 cups heavy cream

3/4 cup egg yolks

P.S.  See this in the Willamette Week?

Two thousand and motherfucking TEN?!? The future is now my faithful readers. I command the powers of the internet in my pants. I make ice cream base in an immersion circulator. As a race we fringe on symbiosis with technology; and I can’t wait to realize this next phase of evolution. Anyway, I been busy as shit.  The holidays kicked my ass; and with in-laws in town and hell of prep, plating and me plowing through it all it went by in a pop!  Shit 2009 was a pop, a bang, a blast, dice cast and rolled and truth be told past year was fucking fast. I turned thirty, I got married, I’ve become a half way decent pastry chef and an annoying blogger.  I’ve made some bad-assed desserts and also learned some killer savory food. Pretty standard actually.  Looking to the new year, I’m hoping to step up my game.  Turn it up to eleven so to speak.  I just need to work harder, cleaner.  The desserts will be smaller, more precise.  Flavors? Louder.  Here’s a recipe bitches.  I adapted it from one of the best recipes I’ve learned in a long time.

Graham Cracker Sponge Cake

250 g soft butter

375 g sugar

5 g salt

6 eggs

375 g fine ground graham cracker crumbs.

7.5 g baking powder

100 g A.P. flour

1.  Preheat your convection oven to 300 F.  Spray and line with parchment one half sheet pan.

2.  Cream the butter, sugar and salt light and fluffy in the bowl of a stand mixer.

3.  Weigh the crumbs, baking powder, and flour into a bowl and whisk them together well.

4.  Add the eggs 2 at a time, allowing the batter to fully absorb each addition of eggs.  Scrape the bowl twice during this step.

5.  Scape the bowl again and add the dry ingredients all at once.  Mix the batter on low speed until homogeneous.

6.  Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake 12 minutes, rotate the pans, and bake an additional 6 to 8 minutes, or until golden brown and springy.  Use as a base for a no bake cheesecake or serve it warm with a cream cheese ice cream.

It’s funny how one idea leads to another and sometimes the most obvious idea is the best one.  Looking at my Fat Spouse dessert, it was good; hell it was great even.  What it lacked however was a warm element.  Something to start melting that malted milk ice cream and pretzel bark.  Something rich and fatty.  Like pootang…BREAD pootang. All peanut butter chips and compressed devil’s food cake stratifying a rich brioche custard.  There’s been some discussion of pootang technique in the kitchen as of late, and one thing again leading to another, I’m now pureeing my base.  It creates an even, dense, almost cakey texture.  The chunks of devils food are compressed in the vacuum sealer then diced.  Finally a good use for that bomber technique.  You can get cool potions this way, but a realized dessert was tricky. Now how about that fancy cruise ship garnish?  I got the idea from a dish wifey had dining when we dined at Spago Beaver Creek.  A simple piped lattice of tempered chocolate onto acetate, scored and bent in a PVC half pipe.  The other tile of tempered chocolate underneath the ice cream is a buffer between the cold scream and the warm pootang.  Cocoa nibs help it grip.  I brought back the dulce dessert Watchmen blood drip plate saucing technique for good measure.  This fucker gets oohed and ahhed every time it hits the table. Here’s the recipe for enjoyment of my faithful readers.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Bread Pudding

6 oz butter at room temperature

6 oz sugar

2 oz dark chocolate

4 oz peanut butter

5 eggs

3 cups heavy cream

12 -15 brioche buns

2 cups diced compressed devils food cake that has been diced

1 bag Reeses peanut butter chips

1.  Cream the butter and the sugar with the paddle.  While they are achieving light and fluffy in your stand mixer, melt the chocolate and peanut butter over a double boiler.

2.  When the sugar and butter are light and fluffy, add the melted chocolate and peanut butter.  Mix until well incorporated, scraping the bowl as necessary.

3.  Add the eggs one by one, scraping and incorporating.

4.  Switch to the whisk and add the heavy cream on low speed.  Keep the machine going while you prep the bread.

5.  Cut the bread into large chunks.  Take the custard off the machine, add the bread and mix thoroughly.  You need enough bread to make a messy paste.  Too much and your pootang will be dry, to little and it will be a custardy mess. Cover the mix and let it soak over night.  This is essential to chingon pootang.

6.  Next day pull the base and puree it in the food processor. Transfer to a large bowl and mix in the chunks and chips.

7.  Prepare one half sheet tray with sprayed parchment.  Pour and spread the base into an even layer.  It should ride the rim of the pan.  Cover with plastic wrap, then cover with aluminum foil.  This will create a nice even top.

8.  Bake in a 300 degree convection oven for about 25 minutes, rotating once. It is normal for the pootang to souffle a bit while baking.  When it is done it should be dry (baked looking.)

9.  Cool completely before slicing to de-molding desired shape.  Reheat portions in the microwave for 20 seconds.

This here dessert is like a bong hit.  It’s all “Dude, It’ll be all hazelnut, banana and mascarpone, man!”  I based it on an excellent brunch item I had over at Belly Timber, a Stuffed French Toast. It combined house made Nutella, mascarpone, hazelnuts, and a specially made brioche.  It was the first time I ate with David and didn’t have the Chicken Waffle.  Anyway, I make a hazelnut sponge cake, the same recipe I used for the Grilled Almond Cake, I just switched the nuts.  This formula is moist and buttery; and works with any nut.  This dessert is selling well so far, no surprise considering the banana factor.   Maybe a certain Chef will see fit to add her recipe in the comments!  Thanks for your patience with this blog everybody who is still reading.  The web is bloated with food blogs, everybody’s cooking!! The ice cream recipe is one from one of my favorite Chefs, David Lebovitz; author of The Perfect Scoop.

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Pretzel Bark

6 oz milk chocolate

6 oz dark chocolate

6 oz creamy peanut butter

3 cups loose chopped pretzel sticks

1. Melt the first three ingredients over a double boiler.

2. Stir in the pretzels and pour onto a sheet pan with a silpat or parchment.

3. Chill the bark for 30 minutes before cutting into desired shapes. Store in an airtight container in the fridge.

I can still hear the rapid-fire “smek smek smek smek” of bare feet on solid pour polyurethane. As he rounded the first bend I looked at myPhone’s stop watch and realized he was going to beat his time.  He challenged himself to get 1:25 and he was way ahead.  Chepe was running this track barefoot; and he was doing it fast, burning it.  Moments before he sat on the edge of his seat, pysching himself up, amping himself.  Moments after he had to lay on the ground, about to puke passionate, pumping vessels throbbing in his head.  As he lay there panting, my mind rewinded the days events.  The fun-as-shit-I-love-being-a-chef lunch dish up.  A dip in the fountain, a boozy aftrnoon nap; a reprieve from relentless heat, a snorey slumber.  Soon after as we lined up for salmon and started to spot other Chefs, enjoying service or fine wine; poured by more familiar faces.  The fish roasted over a long trench I couldn’t get too close, I was sizzled, scorched.   A trench of fire!! We ate salmon and salads in the sinking sunlight.  There was also pork. We drank wine with decadent abandon; swilling with senseless pretention and simply sloshing out as the next selction sauntered up smiling.  Our table mates included the former director of the American Heart Association, his friends and relatives.  Behind us nearby eating; the Chef from Toro Bravo; we felt friendly in good company.  Ditching our table at dusk we hit the dessert buffet and then the still scalding fire. A couple chasing each other around the trench made me grin.  It was fast approaching the opening of the Library Wines so we turned to the center of the venue.  Soon after we had more sips to swirl and ran into my old friend Jeremy, he had also worked the event and was now partying.  After tasting so much wine it all began to taste the same we bounced, we knew of a secret stairwell somm soiree with more wine and friends. In a flash my head hits the present, the way-back machine having caught up with itself.  Fuck I love days like this.  My best buddy sprawled supine below trying to catch his breath, and me in the stands, reeling.

We found ourselves perched precariously with too tall speed racks in the back of a pick up.  As the truck’s engine revved ready to pop the curb my mind flashes through this pasts weeks events.  Moving tons of product, slaving mad and crazy hours.  Tarts.  Shit tons of little tartlettes.  Cookies.  Over five hundred; twenty some odd pounds of dough.  White Chocolate Panna Cotta.  Four hundred of them, forty eight at a time.  Cleaning and processing six flats of blueberies. The truck struggling to summit the curb forces me from my reverie, the speed rack tilting, threatening to spill its payload.  Perez and I look at each other, shaking heads.  Wham!! The truck nails a huge rock and we almost lose our shit.  The shits were up on two wheels, I dropped and tucked against our stacks of plates and dug in , gripping.  In that split second I knew I’d lost the load, that I’d blew the mission.  We braced against the rocking and steadied the racks, cussing and kicking and carrying on.  I felt in that instant…peace.  I’d known it was out of my hands, beyond me.  I couldn’t be more prepared for this event than I was.  I had my product, I had my boy, I knew we had this.  Right until it all was about to fly out of the back of this fucking truck, out of my control.  Thankfully, none of that happened.  The truck rocked back level, the speed racks clunked upright.  We rolled silently over the grass to the plating area.  We had a few hours earlier spread the custards out onto about a dozen sheet pans, each on a little square of acetate; easy to slide off onto chilled plates.  They thawed slowly in the fridge for about three hours, and finished perfectly in the spanking afternoon sun.  The entire plating, 275 plates in the end, took about eighteen minutes.  We had so many hands helping, I just poked around, answering questions and pulling fucked up plates off to be replaced with perfect ones. All said and done, we nailed it.  The silky custards were ice cold but not frozen, the compote thick and rich, the simple essence of blueberry.  We retreated from the heat to the cool of our dorm room to pound tall boys and take a nap.  I slumbered happily elated, stoked to be a chef that day.