Mango Mango - Taste Of Yellow

If you are not a food blogger you probably do not understand why so many of us are creating and posting yellow foods.... We are all in for a good cause.

Barbara of Winos and Foodies is the driving force behind so many yellow dishes popping on your screen. Currently fighting cancer, she still finds the energy to create an event, A Taste of Yellow, to raise cancer awereness. Her idea has been recognized as an official event supporting LiveStrong Day and the Lance Armstrong Foundation on May 16th. So, whether you blog about food, cancer knows no boundaries and I urge you to make a yellow dish and post about it before May 7th, and visit Barbara's page to learn more about it.

I have already mentioned how cancer affected my life. My brother died of oesophagus cancer at 38 years old, and recently my grandmother passed away from complications of breast cancer. One life cut too short, the other one well filled and ready for the next journey. Pain, anger and sadness are part of my daily routine but I feel comfort and strength in reading or meeting people fighting or surviving cancer. Whoever said the pain dimishes with time was wrong, way wrong, that's why I jumped on the occasion to participate. I hope and pray that no one has to go through the pain of saying goodbye to a sibbling, child or relative who suffered through cancer and did not make it. Our family has grown stronger and closer being tested in their faith, love and friendship and not in our futile attempts at cheating death.

I was staring at all the yellow foods at the store when I found my hands grazing a crate of beautifully ripe and fragrant mangoes. A couple lemons and four mangoes later I was back in the kitchen putting my yellow dessert together.

For this, I drew my inspiration from Richard Leach's Sweet Seasons, once again, adapting his "Lemon-Mango Coupe" to be easily made in a home kitchen.
The components can be made over several days and the whole thing put together the day you plan on serving it. From bottom to top:
-base of Ultimate Lemon Pound Cake
- lemon custard cream
- diced mangoes
- sour cream topping
- mango sorbet in spring roll wrapper tubes

All Mango - All Yellow:

Serves 8

Ultimate lemon pound cake : 8 slices needed. Recipe here.

Cut the slices using 2.5 inch metal rings (8 slices-8 rings). Set the rounds on a sheet pan. Set aside.

Lemon Custard:

1 cup (236 ml) lemon juice

1/2 cup (118 ml) sugar

4 eggs

2 egg yolks

1/2 cup (118 ml) creme fraiche or sour cream

zest of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.Combine lemon juice, sugar, whole eggs and eeg yolks in a bowl and whisk until smooth. Add the creme fraiche and lemon zest. Incorporate well.
Line the inside of an 8 inch round cake pan with plastic wrap. Do not worry, it will not melt. Fill the pan with the custard and place it on deep sheet pan or roasting pan. Fill the larger pan with water and bake the custard in this water bath for 30 minutes or until set. Allow to cool and refrigerate.
Cut the custard using the 8 rings previously used for the cake slices. The custard should remain in the rings, place them on the sheet tray on top of the cake rounds. I did this tricky move by using a spatula, sliding it under the tubes, lifting them carefully with my hand and quickly setting them on the cake rounds.

Mango filling:

2 fresh mangoes, peeled and diced

1/2 cup sugar, divided

1 tsp freshly grated ginger

2 cups cream fraiche.

Lightly sprinkle the mango with 1/4 cup sugar and toss gently. Fill the rings with the mango to withing 1/2 inch of the tops.
Combine the creme fraiche with the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Carefully spoon it into the rings and smooth the tops. Place in the refrigerator.

Mango Sorbet:

4 cups diced mangoes

1 1/2 cups water

2 cups granulated sugar

juice of 1/2 lemon

Combine all the ingredients ina saucepan and brigng to a simmer. Cook for 5 to 10 minutes, remove from the heat and puree until smmoth. Pass through a sieve. Cool completely and process in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer's instructions. Keepp frozen until ready to use.

Spring Rolls Rings:

4 large spring roll wrappers

1/4 cup clarified butter

1 egg white, slightly beaten

Heat oven to 350. Cut the wrappers into strips 3 inches wide and 5 inches long. Butter the strips, with a pastry brush, leaving 1 inch unbuttered. Using 16 metal tubes 1 inch in diameter, roll the wrappers around the tubes. Brush the butter free space with the egg white and overlap a amll ostion of the wrapper, sealing it.Bake for a couple of minutes or until brown. Watch closely.
Slide them off the tubes and let cool completely.

To assemble: place some mango sorbet into a pastry bag and pipe it into the spring roll tubes. Place 2 on a plate, side by side. Unmold the mango dessert next to them. Decorate as you wish.

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Chocolate Ice Cream Pops

It's hot here...really hot. Leave it to South Carolina to skip spring and go right into summer!

We are starting to crave ice cream...bad! I am impatiently awaiting David's new cookbook, the ice cream maker is all polished and shiny but we need something to cool us down...now! Yes, we could go and buy some but what fun would that be when I can whip this little cuties out?!

The day I made the Banana-Chocolate Bonbons I doubled on the recipe since it was pretty tasty. Turned out that half of the chocolate pudding stayed in the fridge while I tended to other creations. To top things off, we did not really feel like eating it "like that", so I came up with these.

Dark Chocolate Ice Cream Pops:

Chocolate Pudding:

1/2 cup sugar

2 tablespoons cornstarch

4 ounces fine-quality bittersweet chocolate

2 Tb cocoa powder

1 1/2 cups whole milk

1 large egg yolk

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

In a heavy saucepan whisk together sugar, cornstarch. Add chocolate and cocoa powder to sugar mixture. In a bowl whisk together milk and egg yolk and gradually whisk into chocolate mixture. Bring mixture just to a boil over moderate heat, whisking constantly, and boil 1 minute, whisking. Remove pan from heat and whisk in butter and vanilla.Divide pudding between two 8-ounce ramekins. Chill puddings in freezer, surfaces covered with plastic wrap, until cooled, about 30 minutes.

1 cup heavy cream, whipped to stiff peaks.

For the pops: once the pudding has cooled, gently fold the whipped cream into it. Pour the batter into 4 ice cram pops, or 4 glasses like I did. Put a wooden ice cream stick on the middle, and freeze until firm.

Easy to make on a hot day and easier to eat on a hotter day!

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We Have A Winner !

Well, it was another close call but all the votes for this Mousse round of Hay Hay it's Donna Day have been added and double checked and I have the pleasure of announcing the winner:

Katie from Other People's Food with her Le Kit Cat Mousse . Congratulations Katie! By winning Katie will receive this book by Trish Deseine and she will be hosting the next round of HHDD, so keep checking her blog!

It was a great pleasure to host this round and ya'll made my blog look moussy good. Thanks again for the pleasure of having me as host!

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Darkest Chocolate Crepe Cake

Don’t be fooled by how cute these look…I am almost 100% convinced I will not make them again…at least not like this…

These three chocolate crepe cakes were actually part of a bigger group of 10, and shamelessly served to my dinner guests so I could complete my April Daring Baker challenge and tell you all about it. Remember the croissants or red velvet cakes? Yep, it is that time of the month again and our group grew even bigger this time so if you see 29 other Chocolate Crepe Cakes in various sizes and flavors, do not reset your computer. We decided to go big, go high…except with my never ending love of individual desserts I went small but high. But fear not, from all our discussions it appears that all of us have had very different experiences with the same recipe, so I urge you to read all the other Daring Bakers’ posts to have a idea and in some cases a good laugh.

Don’t get me wrong, the guests were delighted with the presentation, all those caramel dipped hazelnuts and mini caramel corkscrews. Yes, I could have gone another road and make it exactly asand I love crepes. For crying out loud, I come from the country of crepes, I make them every February for the Chandeleur, I even once made over 100 for our Girl Scout troups meeting! Yet, I hated these!

I had no major trouble making the crepes, except that the batter was thicker than what I like to work with and the chocolate flavor did not really come through despite the 70% Lindt chocolate that I used. I like crepes on the lighter side, the ones I can swirl easily in a hot sauté pan with a slight and graceful wrist movement (or so I like to think!); the ones that have tiny microscopic holes in them once cooled thanks to a little added beer to bring some air into them. In my case, Martha’s crepes were on the heavy side, kind of gummy, took longer to cook and required much patience while being flipped and handled. I ended up with about 30 crepes. To make the mini cakes, I took out 3 inch metal rings, cut out rounds in the crepes and began alternating filling and crepes until I had used all the crepes.

The icing was the part that I liked the least. It was a thin ganache, which made it easy to spoon on top of the cakes but it slid down the sides way too fast to cover them nicely. Looking at Martha’s picture I understand that it was to show the essence of the cake, kind of like “rustic ingredient (crepe) goes to the ball (caramel work)”, but that did not do it for me…I like smooth when it comes to chocolate icing….



Now the filling was another story! “Awesome” pretty much describes it. When Brilynn chose the recipe (Martha Stewart’s) this month, she was kind enough to let us play with the original and some of us decided t go another route. I originally made a blood orange cream, inspired by a lemon one from Pierre Herme , but it was so good we ended up spooning it on toasts, brioches, scones, anything but the crepes…shame on us, but that cream is so good it deserves its own post, so I went for the filling given in the recipe but made my own hazelnut paste (see end of post) because unlike Martha I did not find any “hazelnut cream” anywhere…that was too vague for my taste. I could eat this filling simply with a spoon and it would be fantastic in a macaron or sandwiched in 2 thin shortbread cookies.



The final component of the cake was the caramel….and this is when I usually do a happy dance. I absolutely love working with caramel, but was not always the case but I had a great teacher in Old Chef and I am continuously learning from him. He is the same one who made me handle boiling hot sugar with my bare hands (burning them) almost 8 years ago so I “would get used to it”…(crazy old French man!) and yet I love him and love working with him. I disgress... To me caramel is as confusing, fun, tantrum-prone, and alive as yeast. There is always room for improvement and always thousands of way to handle it. At home, I use all kinds of weird contraptions to play with hot sugar. I duct tape 2 wooden spoon to my countertop above the dishwasher, open the door and spun my sugar in between the spoons. Once I am done, close the dishwasher door and turn it on…and voila…clean up done.

I thought about doing it nice little nest of spun sugar but I had already done that for the Chocolate Intensity challenge and I feared the mini cakes would get drowned under them, so I kept it pretty simple and clean. (Very Martha said B.) For the caramel hazelnuts I attached them to long skewers dipped them into the caramel, stuck the skewers into an apple and balanced the apple above the dishwasher. For the corkscrews, I lightly oiled a metal skewer and twirled the caramel around it. Let it dry a minute and let it slide off onto a lightly oiled parchment paper lined baking sheet. Make sure the caramel is thick enough to play with. One easy cooling method is to put your pan into a larger one filled with ice as soon as your caramel has taken on the right color on the stove. If it gets too thick, simply reheat on low for a minute. Oh, and have scissors near by in case those caramel strands start taking on a life of their own!

To sum up: it was kind of a mixed bag of feelings for me this month. Too much fuss for an okay cake. I can’t talk for the other gals just yet but I suspect that there were as many different experiences and opinion as they were Daring Bakers involved. The techniques employed are not difficult to master even for a novice ( ok-ok- I am the weirdo that thinks that practicing flipping crepe should be a Sunday activity!), but the batter consistency makes it a pain. Texture wise, I am guessing that unless you use good quality chocolate you won’t taste it much in the final product. Taste wise, it is a shame to say but the filling makes the cake.

To see what my fellow Daring Bakers have done, check out the drop down menu on the right side of this blog.





Hazelnut Paste, from Cook's Thesaurus
Coarsely chop one pound roasted hazelnuts. In a food processor or blender, finely grind about 1/3 of the nuts at a time, until mealy. Add egg whites from 3 large eggs, 2 cups powdered sugar and 2 teaspoons hazelnut liqueur. Blend until paste forms. Wrap and store in a covered container, up to 2 weeks. Makes 2-3 cups

Update: per Lisa's request here is my unprofessional technique to let my caramel dry...:

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Remember to Vote

Chef Louis here is keeping track of your votes on my chalkboard pantry door and he is not very busy at the moment.

Remember to vote for your favorite mousse to complete this round of HHDD. Voting ends tomorrow at midnight. Drop me an email at marinette1ATcomcastDOTnet with your favorite number!

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Outrageous Brownies Revisited

It 's not like I need a reason to make brownies, but Myriam's invitation to her Browniebabe of the Month event, prompted me to try my hand at a very much lusted after recipe: Ina Garten's Outrageous Brownies.
The thing is that I make brownies every other day or so, if not they are definitely in th menu on sundays...why? They are easy to keep around of a friend stops by, if the neighbors' kids are outside playing , see me and run toward my shopping bags asking "are you baking us something?", and let's be honest because B. and I have a huge sweet tooth when it comes to brownies.
After many years of brownie baking I have adapted and combined many different recipes to come up with one that turns plain chocolate into a square of deep dark fudge, and allows me to play with additions if flavors, liqueurs, nuts, dried fruits, etc....but to me the recipe is not original anymore as I make it so often. I will write it here someday but for the event I started dreaming about Ina's brownies (allright, Lisa, get your mind out of the gutter...).

Why "revisited"? Well, for starters there was no way I was going to use 1 pound of butter! Why? There are ways to have outrageously good brownie without an artery blockage. But I still wanted an "outrageous" factor so I decided use diced salted butter chocolate caramels as an add-in and cut the recipe in half. If you don't want to go through the troubles of making the caramels, you could use diced soft caramels or crushed hard ones.

Outrageous brownies with Salted Butter Caramels, adapted from Ina Garten:

Servings: depends on your gluttony

1/2 pound unsalted butter (8 oz)

8 oz plus 6 oz semisweet chocolate chips, divided

3 ounces unsweetened chocolate

3 large eggs

1 tablespoons instant coffee powder

1 tablespoons real vanilla extract

1 cup plus 2 Tbs sugar

1/2 cup plus 2 Tbs all-purpose flour, divided (1/2 cup for batter and 2 in the chips)

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 1/2 cups diced salted butter caramels

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour a 9 x13 baking pan.
Melt together the butter, 8 oz semisweet chocolate chips, and unsweetened chocolate in a saucepan over low heat. Cool slightly.

Stir together the eggs, instant coffee, vanilla and sugar. Stir in the warm chocolate mixture and cool to room temperature.
Stir together 1/2 cup of the flour, baking powder and salt. Add to cooled chocolate mixture. Toss the caramles and 6 ounces of chocolate chips with 2 Tbs. flour to coat. Then add to the chocolate batter. Pour into prepared pan.
Bake for about 30 minutes, or until tester just comes out clean. Halfway through the baking, rap the pan against the oven shelf to allow air to escape from between the pan and the brownie dough. Cool thoroughly, refrigerate well and cut into squares.

Want to know the truth? They are so good, they made me wish I had made the entire recipe...!

Fudgey, fudgey and again fudgey and they disappear faster then the neighbors' kids can "what did you bake today?"

So if you were ever tempted to make them , run to your kitchen and make a full batch! You won't regret it.

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