Kickass Cupcakes 3.29.11

Kickass Cupcakes, Davis Square, 378 Highland Avenue, Somerville

My second visit to Kickass Cupcakes.  This time I brought home two of their signature flavours, the mojito and lucky cupcake.  These cupcakes are smaller than the standard muffin size.  I think the small size is the most common criticism I hear about these cupcakes.  To show the size, I photographed the cupcakes alongside a large lemon and a lime.

On the left: The Mojito (Vanilla cupcake soaked with Brugal Blanco rum, sugar cane lime frosting and fresh mint) and on the right: Lucky Cupcake (luscious lemon cupcake with white chocolate buttercream and candied ginger, comes with a fortune)

My fortune: Life is not a struggle.  It's a wiggle.

Black & White Cookies 3.27.11

I could not get the Smitten Kitchen cookie recipe to work.  I'm not sure what I did wrong. First, I thought I incorrectly mixed the ingredients.  Then, I thought I underbaked the cookies.  I'm not convinced either one of these were done wrong, though.  I made the cookies again using a different mixing technique and still got the same cookie result.  The cookies turned out gummy, but I wanted them to be crumbly, soft, cakey, lemony, and buttery.  The flavor of the cookie was alright, but the texture completely ruined it for me.  And I know it's something I am doing to the recipe because none of the posts in the thread say anything about gummy cookies (or other descriptive variants). 

On the other hand, the icing turned out pretty fabulous.  The perfect icing for this bland cookie.  (I say bland, because these cookies are supposed to be bland without the icing.  The icing is super sweet and gives nice balance to the plain cookie base.)

Cookies after baking.  The flat side looks like a pancake! The cookies domed very nicely.

Cookies after white icing

Cookies finished

  

The second time I made the cookies, I successfully made the cookies an appropriate size.  I used two level scoops using a #20 portion scoop.  I placed the second scoop directly on top of the first scoop (just like a double scoop ice cream cone) and the cookies flattened out with a nice round shape during baking. The cookies came out slightly bigger than a large lemon.  See the correctly sized cookies below.

A larger cookie

  

So for next time I'm going to abandon this recipe and try the Epicurious recipe that uses buttermilk.  Hmm...what's the next appropriate holiday?...I think the Fourth would be best.  Black & Blue and Black & Red cookies anyone?  Or maybe Black & White with red and blue sprinkles in the white?

Note on my camera:  I'm still trying to find how to manually adjust the ISO setting.  For now, I'm using the preset 'aquarium' setting (ISO 800).  However, the photos don't let a lot of blue or green light through, so all the pictures come out looking red.  So after taking the pictures, I go into my photo editor and adjust the lighting, increasing the blue and green.  Tedious, but works for now.

Bacco Ristorante & Bar 3.25.11

Bacco Ristorante & Bar, 107 Salem Street, Boston

Tiramisu

This is the best tiramisu I have ever had in my life.  (And I eat a decent amount of tiramisu.  It's my go-to dessert at Italian restaurants.)  This desserts truly melts in your mouth.  The flavors blended so well and every spoonful was so delicious, even though I ate it with a fork.  ;)  I now have to recreate my tiramisu recipe so it tastes like this one.  I think I might need to take my externship at Bacco just so I can plate these delicious desserts ...and steal the recipe.

Although you can't see it in the picture above (you can tell there's a slight coloration difference in person), the two cream layers are different in this cake.  The bottom layer of cream filling (appears more yellow in person) is a mascarpone-based filling (I'm guessing) while the top layer was whiter, so I'm guessing it was cream-based. I know one problem with making tiramisu is that if you place cheese and cream layers next to each other, they may slide around and you dessert may not be able to be cleanly sliced (many recipes will blend the cheese and cream fillings).  This dessert was best taking a forkful through all of the layers for each bite, so then you experience all of the flavors.  And they are spectacular!


Cannolis

Okay, I must admit.  I only got the cannolis because we got tiramisu and cannolis at Tuscan Grill on Wednesday.  Good thing I started with the cannolis and ended with the tiramisu.  I never went back to the cannolis and left half of them on the plate.  That said, the cannolis were very good. The shells were super crisp and the filling very yummy.  It's unfortunate for them that the best dessert plate in my entire life was sitting on the same table as them.  The tiramisu really blew the cannolis out of the water.

Tuscan Grill 3.23.11

I have finally found a better solution to taking pictures in dark restaurants.  Unfortunately, I only made this discovery after taking these pics from last night, so the quality is still subpar here.  (They are too dark and out of focus...I'm working on it.)  I couldn't find out how to change the ISO setting on my cheap camera, but I found the preprogrammed "aquarium" setting which has 800 ISO.  Using this setting with no flash on macro, has seemed to work very well, at least for my test shot. 

Test shot in my dark kitchen - I'm not kidding here.  It was a cloudy day and I had all the blinds closed and no lights on.  However, the picture makes it look like the sun is shining right into my kitchen. Way to go ISO!

As a reference, here's how dark the flowers presently look in my kitchen.



Now, back to the food!


Tuscan Grill, 361 Moody Street, Waltham

Pear/Apple Martini - Orchard pear liqueur, grey goose vodka, splash of apple cider, spiced rum

This drink was delicious.  The flavors blended so well and the cinnamon sugar rim (with extra fine sugar) was perfect. 


Cannolis

Filling was cheesy and slightly tangy with lemon... so I heard.


Tiramisu with an additional scoop of housemade molasses pecan gelato

Not the best tiramisu I've ever had and I'm not sure what it was.  The cake was well soaked with coffee and alcohol, but maybe there was too much cake relative to the amount of filling.  The filling was good, but not as rich as I'm used to.  Seemed more whipped cream than mascarpone.  I am super fortunate to have gotten the free scoop of molasses pecan gelato, though.  It was good and light and the nuts added a nice texture.  I think I was secretly hoping for something sweeter, like caramel.  Also, it was a little icy.

Purim celebration 3.19.11

Hamantaschen
Apricot jam, berry jam, chocolate and white chocolate with pecans and walnuts

These cookies were all delicious!  I ate way too many.  Unfortunately, there is no hamantaschen recipe in Professional Baking.  Fortunately, I just learned about taschen because it is currently the featured article on the Smitten Kitchen homepage.  The white chocolate with nuts was my favorite, followed by the apricot jam variety. 

Happy Purim!

Miel "Brasserie Provençale" 3.18.11

Miel "Brasserie Provençale", 510 Atlantic Avenue, Boston

Pear Tarte Tatin, salted caramel ice cream

We have not made tarte tatin in class yet, but I hope we do soon.  This tart is made in the style of the Tatin sisters of France and is traditionally described as an inverted caramelized apple tart. At Miel they served the pear variation.  In general I was a little disappointed with this dessert.  The tart crust was soggy and I was expecting it to be crisp.  The pear slices were arranged individually on top of the tart crust and I wished the entire dessert was baked all together.  I didn't see anything in this dessert that might have been flipped upside down either.  The ice cream had a subtle caramel flavor, which I though was too weak. 


Chocolate ice cream, three scoops

Simple and delicious.  I forgot to ask who made the ice cream, but it was fresh and good.  It tasted like my favorite chocolate ice cream recipe I make at home (Jerry's Chocolate from Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book)

Smitten Kitchen

I found a great website today:  SmittenKitchen.com.  It has great recipes for all the things I've been dreaming to make lately, with bakery quality ingredients that I'll have to buy online when I can't find them at Whole Foods.  Soft Pretzels, Chocolate Pudding (yes, a good chocolate pudding recipie is missing from Gisslen), and bagels.  The only thing is that I'm going have to convert volume measures to weights in my own notes because I'm super picky about the accuracy of weights now. 

The king arthur website has pretty great recipes too.  And there's always my go-to website, foodnetwork.com. 

The blog has been on pause during our 6 weeks of breads and Viennoiserie.  I'm brainstorming blog ideas for the next class.  Got wind that someone else in the certificate program has a blog on all the products we are making.  I'm not looking to do a complete description of all the items we make in our program, but something a little different.  But I have yet to choose what that will be. Perhaps I'll continue with Splenda substitutions.  Or perhaps I will take some pictures of desserts around Boston.  I recently had a great Tirimisu (more like a Tirimisu trifle) at Toscano in Beacon Hill.  It might be fun to take some pics of the next dessert I try.