On Thanksgiving, Christian makes the meal and I make the dessert.  On Christmas, I make the meal and Christian makes the dessert.  This year, Christian decided he wanted to make a buche de noel.  I came upon a recipe and his mother sent him some recipes.  After much consideration, he decided on the game plan.

The trick to the rolled cake is that the cake itself is (1) very thin and (2) very pliable (because there’s no leavening added).  After the cake was done, he had to wrap it in a towel and let it cooled down wrapped up in the towel.  This was the cake cools in the shape you want it.

After it is cooled, you unwrap and then brush on the French chocolate mousse made only with egg whites and chocolate.  Once the mousse is brushed on you roll it back up.

You then cut a little piece off the end to make a little stump/branch.

Christian choose to frost it with a very delicious frosting – chocolate with a hint of coffee.  It was really good frosting.  I like frosting.  Once the frosting was on, he took a fork and made it look like bark.

Then, together, we used fondant to make “woodland creatures” to decorate the cake with.  We have never used fondant in this way, so we were both pretty excited.  I had to color the fondant which left my fingers totally stained with food dye for a few days.

The first creature I made was … well, to be honest, it was a bit pathetic.  Good for a first try, but I was hoping for better.  It was big and square.  I wound up having to lay it on top of the cake cause that was about all that was going to happen with it.  I then made a second creature copying the technique Christian was using (he is the one with the big nose on the left in the picture below … the dog is Christian’s impressive rendition of our dog).

All in all, we were very pleased with the decorations.  For Christian’s first attempt, it was incredible!  I could have eaten the whole thing by myself and can’t imagine how it could be improved.

I couldn’t wait for the holiday vacation to get here.  Not just because it meant the end of the semester and a slow-down of work.  While that was certainly a big part of it, it was what the free time allows me: BAKING!

I have fond memories of Christmases as a child and my mother making Christmas cookies.  My brother and sister and I would often help.  To me, it’s just not Christmas without Christmas cookies.

The first cookies I made were for a party were were going to: sables viennois au cacao (pictured left).  They are from my Pierre Herme pastry book.  There is a full page picture of them in the book and they looked fun and easy.  They weren’t too hard, but the dough was really, really thick and you have to pipe them onto the baking sheet.  I was glad that I didn’t go to the gym that day, because my arms wouldn’t have been able to do the piping.  As the dough got warmer (you were supposed to chill it), it was easier to work with – because all the butter (it was a French recipe after all) softened in the warm kitchen.  Next time, I’ll probably not do the chilling step or do it and let the dough come to room temperature.

Then, for the actual Christmas cookies:  First up as is the holiday tradition were my grandmother’s cut-out cookies.  A couple of years ago, my mother had her mother’s cookie recipes for these cookies, the orange cookies I will talk about later, and brownies laminated and framed.  So, I have the original recipe cards with my grandmother’s handwriting (and my mother’s annotations) as well as various finger prints of butter, flour, and so on.  Anyway, I have experimented with other cut-out cookie recipes and like them, but there is something special about this recipe.  I did make a few alterations to it this year, but I think the recipe is special not because of the taste but rather because it passed down to three generations now and I plan to pass it down even further.  Pictures below.

I think this was the first time I made my grandmother’s orange cookies (not pictured, unfortunately).  I always loved them when my mother made them.  The thing is that my grandmother was quite stingy with her recipes.  She had them all in her head and only wrote them down because people begged her to do so.  I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that she got back at them by writing incomplete recipes.  The orange cookies are a prime example.  There is a frosting that is supposed to go on top.  My grandmother wrote at the end of the recipe to “frost with orange frosting”.  But, she doesn’t give the recipe for the orange frosting!  This year I braved it and made my own.  It turned out pretty good.  Unfortunately, I didn’t write it down.  I don’t think I will.

Another French classic which will be added to my repertoire are galettes bretonnes (again, not pictured unfortunately), also from the Herme book.  I discovered these cookies on our last trip to France when we went to Brittany.  They are really great and are famous because they are made with the salted butter from the region.  I didn’t have any of the salted butter, but they were still damn good if I do say so myself.

I also made kanellas (not pictured) and chocolate marshmallow sandwiches (pictured below).  The former is much more plain than all the other cookies, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good.  The chocolate marshmallow sandwiches are incredibly and unhealthily delicious.  They will become a staple … and they are not holiday-specific, so I plan to make them year-round!

So, that’s it for the cookies.  I had planned a lot more, but we already had so many that I didn’t want to gain too much weight.  I’ll save those recipes for another time.

So, I’m a bit late in posting about this, but for Thanksgiving dessert, I made a FOUR LAYER pumpkin cake.  FOUR LAYERS!  I was very proud of myself.  I’ve made very poorly constructed two-layer cakes before and wanted to avoid that this time.  I read a document on making a layered cake (specifically 4 layers) and realized what I had been doing wrong.  So, I made the two layers of pumpkin cake (in my new silicone round bakeware).  After letting the layers cool, I leveled off the top of the cake, which consists of taking a knife and trying to make the top of the cake level/flat.  The good part of this is that you get to eat the scraps.  And when your oven is lopsided like mine, you get a lot scraps.  Yum.  After leveling, you then cut the layer in half.  In order to do this, you put several toothpicks in the side of the cake where you want to cut.  You then use those toothpicks as guides as you cut so that you don’t wind up with a freaky, lopsided cake.  You then separate the layers.  Doing this with the two cake gives you four layers!

In the same document, I learned how to frost a cake so you don’t have crumbs in your icing – a problem I faced when I made my carrot cake.  After putting the layers on top of each other with frosting in between, you put a thin layer of frosting all around.  It’s okay if there are crumbs in this thin layer (called, appropriately, the “crumb layer”) since it will not be seen.  You then put the cake in the refrigerator until the crumb layer is hard-ish.  When it is, you then frost the whole cake for reals.  The hardened crumb layer keeps the crumbs from moving around and frosting the cake is totally simple after that.

The result is pictured above.  Over the holiday break, I’m going to practice my piping skills so that I can start to decorate cakes – ones of all layers!

Christian and I belong to a CSA.  For those uneducated few who don’t know what that is (please visualize dramatic eye roll and head-shaking here), a CSA is Community Supported Agriculture.  Basically, you buy a share in a farm and every week you get a share of their harvest.  It’s pretty cool and can be fun – except for when Christian cooks the brussels sprouts which he’s doing now (ew, gross).  We get a lot of vegetables so we are more likely to eat them and we get to try new things.  Celeriac is a good example.  Kohlrabi is another.

The down side is that sometimes you get a few weeks in a row where you get a lot of one thing.  This month: carrots.  I don’t like raw carrots and will only tolerate cooked ones.  But, there are only so many carrots one (meaning ‘I’) can eat.  So, I put my baker’s apron on and made a carrot cake last night.  (Alton Brown recipe here.  I don’t much like his show, but his recipes are really good.)

It was easy to make.  I was originally not looking forward to grating the carrots until I remembered that Christian brought a fancy food processor into the relationship.  I whipped that out and grating the carrots was a snap.  The rest of the recipe is pretty standard and not all that difficult.  Earlier in the day, I went to the baking supply store in Manhattan and got some silicone baking dishes – a loaf pan and a round cake pan.  I used the round cake pan to make the cake and it worked incredibly well.  If you’ve never tried silicone bakeware, you really need to.

Icing is not my forte.  I’m going to have to take a cake class, because I don’t know how to frost the side of a cake.  What usually happens is that the sides get all crumbly and then show up in the frosting.  Considering that a carrot cake has white (cream cheese) frosting and the cake is relatively dark, it doesn’t look perfect.  But, I take a deep breath.  Christian and I immediately cut into the cake (after Christian took a thousand pictures, that is).  At first I wasn’t impressed.  The cream cheese frosting was really strong.  But, we had another piece this afternoon and I don’t know what happened, but it tastes great now.  Good spices and you can barely tell there’s carrots in it!

Now I just have to find a recipe for cabbage cake.

Last weekend, Christian and I decided to go upstate to do some fruit picking.  We already had three pounds of apples because I was planning my next French baking adventure to be a Tart Tartin (which is a two-day affair in and of itself).  But, we wanted to get some berries and perhaps peaches or pears.

Turns out peaches and pears are not in season right now (at least on the farms), but raspberries and apples are and we got a lot of them.  Another seven pounds of apples, I-don’t-know-how-many pounds of raspberries … oh, and Concord grapes.  That was last Saturday.

The following Sunday (last Sunday, not today Sunday), I made Concord grape jelly (yum! it tastes like childhood), raspberry confiture (using my Pierre Herme book), and some small raspberry cookies (also from my Pierre Herme book).  It was a full day of tiring but tasty cooking/baking, but at the end of the day, I hadn’t used the ten pounds of apples and had only touched the raspberries.  I thought I had finished the Concord grapes, though.

So, this weekend we felt the pressing need to finish with the raspberries cause they were starting to go bad any minute.  The apples were staying pretty well and … well, I discovered that I had stashed a whole other container of Concord grapes in one of the refrigerator drawers!  Today, Christian made some pear jam (he had found pears at a farmer’s market), peach sorbet (he had also found some peaches at said market), and an apple cake.  I made Concord grape sorbet and some apple-raspberry jam.  Needless to say, we have a crapload of jam/confiture/jelly.

In the end, I still have the apples for the Tart Tartin, but that will have to wait until next weekend.  I’m too pooped now!

While in France, I made the (very) important decision to buy a French pastry and dessert cookbook and try my hand at cooking French sweet stuff from French recipes … in French.  So, after searching in a bookstore in Paris that was two levels and full of cookbooks, I chose Pierre Herme’s Le Larousse des Desserts.  It has over 700 recipes and includes the basic types of doughs, ganaches, creams, and so on and so forth … plus all the other advanced stuff.  Each recipe is rated with a certain number of whisks indicating difficulty.  One whisk is easy, three is difficult.

I’m not going to get all Julie/Julia here.  700 recipes might take the rest of my life, for goodness’ sake, and I’m not feel all bonded to Pierre Herme.  Although, he makes really, really great desserts and I’ve bonded with some of those, but I digress.  But, I sure will spend weekend time baking as a way to relax from the daily grind.

My first foray is into macarons … not the coconut stuff… the real French ones.  Christian and I took a class on them a while back and they are tough.  Things like too much humidity in the air can be a complete disaster.  These aren’t no chocolate chip cookies.  They say that there are few ingredients, but a lot of technique involved with macarons.  Macrarons are three whisks in difficulty, but I figured since I made them before, why not start there.  Herme’s recipe takes 7 egg whites and it seemed a bit wasteful to use 7 egg whites and throw the yolks away.  So, why not make ice cream, too?  They take egg yolks (and sugar and cream).  We took a class in that, as well, and I felt comfortable with that and it’s two whisks.  Tres facile.

To make the best macarons, they say to let your egg whites age for a couple of days, so on Friday night I made the ice cream.  It turned out very well.  Basically you make a creme anglaise which is the most difficult part.  If you cook it too long it gets chunky.  Cook it too little and it’s too liquidy.  I took it off the stovetop just in time.  I let it cool over night and Saturday morning I churned it in the KitchenAid mixer.  It turned out perfectly in terms of looking and tasting!

So Sunday was macaron day!  My egg whites were cranky and delusional, so I figured they had aged enough.  First, you mix the dry ingredients – sugar, almond flour, and cocoa.  Then you whip the egg whites until they have stiff peaks.  I can never get this right, to be honest.  Every time a recipe says to be careful to not over-whip, I get really scared and usually under-whip.  After you have the egg whites all whipped up into a tizzy, you add the dry ingredients and carefully fold.  Here, again, they warn you to not fold too hard or too long.

Then comes piping the dough onto the cookie sheet.  It was a work out, to say the least.  Christian had to dab my forehead with a paper towel so I didn’t sweat on the cookies.  Now, as it turns out, it shouldn’t have been this difficult.  The cookies came out okay, but way too moist and didn’t have the smooth, slightly crunchy top.  So, they taste real good, but don’t look right or have the right consistently.  The problem was with the dough – it wasn’t runny enough.  From what I researched, I can tell that it is one of two problems: (1) I overworked/over-whipped or (2) I underworked/under-whipped.  Yeah.  So I will try again with those, but enjoy them nonetheless now.

Now, you take the cookies and stick them together with some kind of filling, this time with chocolate ganache.  After dropping the chocolate on the kitchen floor (we speak not of that), it came off without a hitch.   But, the overall effect of soft macarons with the ganache makes the whole thing seem like a brownie.  That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it’s not very French.  Christian told me that I’ve actually discovered a new French recipe called the Maca-brownie.  I like it.

Tonight, dessert is a maca-brownie sundae.  Can’t complain about that!