Runcible Spoon

Polenta, Rice, Lemon and Orange Cake

2012-03-07T19:31:00.005-08:00

Whenever a drama teacher decided to do improvisational games with the class or a group of friends gathered to play charades, I froze. Given a monologue from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", I would give the character all I had, but the moment I am told to improvise I tighten up. I would much rather write down a scene on the spot than stand awkwardly in front of a partner trying to summon up clever bits and revealing retorts.

Cooking disguises itself as a cold reading, hard but manageable and even entertaining if you stick to what's written. It's edgy and raw and is clearly your own interpretation of classical text. Inevitably, it won't turn out the way you expected it to, but that's what gives it style.

The other night I had an inexplicable urge to bake a Polenta, Rice and Lemon Cake from my Rose Bakery cookbook. I was preparing for my cold reading by setting my stage: I heated my oven and picked out my ingredients from the cupboard, when I realized that I had no white sugar, no almonds, and two few lemons, all of which were required for the recipe, I knew it was time for improvisation.

I thought briefly about a story I had when I was little, a parody of "The Three Little Pigs,"by A. Wolf (Jon Scieszka) called "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs." In this version, the wolf's version, "way back in Once Upon a Time time, [he] was making a birthday cake for [his] dear old granny. [He] had a terrible sneezing cold. [He] ran out of sugar." I thought about knocking on a neighbor's door and pleading for two and 1/4 cups of sugar, two lemons and 5 1/2 cups of almonds, but then I thought of the ending to the story.

"So I walked down the street to ask my neighbor for a cup of sugar. Now this neighbor was a pig. And he wasn't too bright either. He had built his whole house out of straw. Can you believe it? I mean who in his right mind would build a house of straw? So of course the minute I knocked on the door, it fell right in. I didn't want to just walk into someone else's house."

Of course you know the ending, but what you don't know is that the pigs were rather rude and said some rather distasteful comments about the wolf's granny. In short, I decided to improvise rather than borrow.

First improvisation: brown sugar instead of white sugar. Result: moister, darker, molasses- ëer. Second improvisation: two lemons a dash of lemon extract and half of one orange instead of four lemons. Result: tastes a bit more like orange than lemon, although the lemon is still noticeable. I actually misread the original recipe which calls for the juice of one lemon and the zest of four, but this worked as well. Third improvisation: 1 1/2 cups of ground walnuts and 1 cup of ground pignoli nuts instead of 5 1/2 cups of almonds. Result: Moister cake (less dry ingredients), tastes like walnuts and pignoli nuts. Foreseeable conclusion.

I also had to lengthen the baking time from 40 min to 50 min and raise the oven temperature from 325 F to 375 F. To begin the cake (I will give both scripted and improvised ingredients and methods, do with them what you will), mix 2 1/4 cups white sugar or 2 cups of brown sugar with the juice and zest of four lemons or two lemons and 1/2 an orange. Feel free to add either 1/2 tsp of vanilla or lemon extract as well. Mix the sugar and juice with 2 1/4 cups of butter.

Gradually add in 6 eggs and continue mixing. In a separate bowl combine 1/2 cup rice flour (amazingly enough I had this) and 2 cups of polenta, plus 2 tsps of baking powder. Mix together with your choice of nuts. Fold this into the wet batter until it is all combined. My recipe told me to bake in small, rectangular bread tins because this cake is known to sink in the middle.

Of course I had no small rectangular bread tins so I used a pie tin and used my culinary expertise to ensure a successful outcome, which consisted of crossing my fingers and wishing really really hard. I also frantically checked the consistency of the middle with a knife every few minutes. Granted it was soft for a longer time than I've ever experienced, but hey, I rolled with it, because that's what improvisation is all about.

I also sprinkled confectioner's sugar on the top and spread it around with a rubber spatula. This cake was an experiment, and one with great potential to explode or deflate or do whatever else it is that ad libbed experiments do, but is was a success. The polenta gave it a wonderfully grainy texture that rivaled the subtle flavor of the rice flour and the citrus fruits. I accompanied the cake with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, which I labored over for ten minutes, and downed both before school.

All of my drama teachers and summer stock directors would be proud of my improvisational skills. And unlike the wolf's eventual framing for the three little pigs incident, my adventure turned out to be quite enjoyable and delicious. "That's it, the real story."-A. Wolf

Manifest Macaron

2012-02-28T19:35:00.007-08:00

Ginger with Grapefruit Curd and Orange with Rhubarb Compote

I hope that I'm not boring you with my repetitive macaron entries but my goal is to experiment with the different flavor options available to me on this delicate, airy canvas. Cooking is a new world for me and the combinations of tastes and smells, textures and colors is simultaneously intimidating and thrilling. It is my undiscovered country, which I am exploring with every new recipe I tackle and every mistake I make (like using a plastic spatula on the brittle, yes there is some polymer mixed with my toffee).

On the last page of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", my favorite novel, Nick Carraway realizes that, "[he] became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world...

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

While I concede that there is a difference between the scale of our discoveries, the new world versus food, there is an unmistakable parallel. When one begins to learn how to cook, it marks not only an interest but a maturation. While making food is an accessory to my lifestyle now as a high school senior, soon enough I will have to do it for and by myself.

A seemingly quotidian occurrence for adults is my manifest destiny. I have so much to try, so many recipes to conquer and so many dishes to stake my individuality within. I am holding breath in the "presence of this continent" just as Nick and Gatsby did, enthralled by the allure of food and captivated by its hold on my imagination.

It is not as if these dishes have not been perfected before, but like any island or body of water, they can be rediscovered seemingly fresh to the explorer's eyes. So today, I decided to find yet another tantalizing flavor marriage between the shell and the filling. I settled upon ginger shells with grapefruit curd and orange shells with rhubarb compote and also decided to exercise patience and clarity of mind.

I used fancy almond flour from Citarella, which cut down the preparation time considerably. It was very fine and led to smooth macaron shells. Instead of grinding the almonds and confectioner's sugar in the food processor, I sifted it together to make sure it was mixed. I used a few shakes of ground ginger and a few tsps of freshly squeezed orange.

Since I decided to make two flavors, I cut the recipe in half and made each batch one at a time which was luxuriously time consuming. I won't go through the motions yet again, you can refer to my previous macaron posts, but heed my new suggestions.

I let the piped cookies sit on the counter for forty minutes so that they developed a pre-baking shell. The resulting macarons were much better: slightly taller and with more pronounced feet, exactly as they should be. Before I lead you on too long, I should confess that while my ginger macarons were perfect, my orange ones were on the whole pretty cracked and footless (with some photographed exceptions).

My conclusion is that since I used a few tablespoons of squeezed orange, I diluted the mixture too much leading to an under-mixed batter. Next time I will reduce the water content of the orange by boiling the juice. Try try again. However, like I mentioned before, even macaron failures are delicious.

For the grapefruit curd filling, I modified my lemon curd recipe by adding half a grapefruit and its zest. Since it was a bit too sweet, I also added some lemon juice and zest and a pinch of salt. The rhubarb compote called for two cups of 1/2 chopped bits of rhubarb thrown into a saucepan with 3/4 cup of sugar and the juice of one lemon. Simmer on a medium low flame for five plus minutes until the rhubarb is soft and then put in the refrigerator for two hours.

One success and one scrumptious eh. I am immensely pleased and tingling with excitement at this newfound method of increasing the chances of a macaron victory. I will continue to forge ahead and discover what older but not wiser people already find mundane. Nick Carraway finishes, "it eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," but always a step ahead of where we started...macaron-wise that is.

Walnut Chocolate Toffee Brittle with Sea Salt

2012-02-24T18:06:00.002-08:00

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain." And so today, even though I would have much rather been doing layback spins under the morning sun, I let it rain. While I thought of something to cook I studied for my upcoming Latin exam on the Vulgate (the Bible translated into Latin) and read a few chapters of "Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes for my social contract class. Suffice it to say that after a few chapters on the relative injustices of defying natural laws I fell asleep and napped for two hours unencumbered by the prospect of work. It is so nice to be on break.

By the time I was done studying, the idea of leaving the house to get ingredients seemed daunting as the sun set and the rain poured down. Some winter we've been having. But, since I am embracing the relative merits of rainy days I decided to make something out of what I already had in the cabinets and refrigerator. My linear algebra teacher last semester joked that he would put a question on our exam asking us to make a dish out of the elements that he listed from his apartment. Needless to say, he did not and the questions that he did put on were a trifle more difficult.

However, not only did I want to make a dish that I already had the ingredients for, I also wanted to try something new and after searching various blogs and cookbooks, I came upon a recipe for walnut chocolate toffee brittle with sea salt, which I don't think has quite enough modifiers.

To begin, I melted four sticks of butter (2 cups) with 2 cups of white sugar and a pinch of salt. This will take a few minutes to melt and you should help it along by mixing and simultaneously breaking up the butter. After it has melted, stir it into a homogenous mixture and put the flame on medium high. Within five to ten minutes the mixture will come to a boil and you should mix periodically during this time interval.

For the next ten or so minutes, I mixed the brittle continuously to make sure that it did not burn. You should do this until the mixture is a dark amber or 300 F on a candy thermometer, which I do not own, and then stir in two cups of chopped up walnuts (or pecans, peanuts, almonds...) and make sure they are evenly distributed.

Before hand, I lined two cookie tins with tin foil. You should pour the mixture onto these tins and then use a metal (not a plastic) spatula to spread it around until it is about 1/4 inch thick. Wait a minute or so and then pour two cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips on top. These will take four or five minutes to melt and then spread the chocolate around with a spatula.

After a few minutes, sprinkle on your sea salt and put the brittle in the freezer for 30 minutes so the chocolate solidifies. When you take it out, break it up into little pieces (the size is up to you but mine were mostly 2 1/2 to 3 in. long and 1 in. wide. I stored them in a plastic container in the fridge and put pieces of wax paper between the layers so the candies don't stick together.

Rainy days do have their place. They make you slow down and devise your own entertainment, whether that is an old movie or making brittle and licking the spatula covered with melted chocolate. But for tomorrow...rain rain go away come again some other day little Nika wants to play.

Macaron Madness

2012-02-19T16:00:00.005-08:00

Parisian Macarons: Star Anise and Vanilla with Lemon Curd Filling

I have been bitten by the macaron bug, a plague that has infected about forty percent of the foodie blogosphere and thus far is cured only by perfection. Since we can only advance asymptotically to perfection, we are left floundering with a chronic illness doomed to haunt us forever. Like any disorder, there is a large range of severity and I seem to have a milder version but nonetheless the agonizing symptoms drive me to alleviate them in whatever way I can: making more macarons.

Thus, like any clever parasite or immunological trickster, macaron madness is a positive feedback loop: when I make macarons, I get even madder and then I just have to make more macarons. Today was my third adventure into the world of persnickety cookies and while many of macarons cracked (apparently from being underwhipped and too humid), a few were pretty enough for a shoot.

I seemed to find the best possible flavor combination the last two times I made macarons: cardamom and lemon with buttercream frosting and so I found myself like a returning champion doomed to fail because I could not live up to my own creation. Luckily, as I searched through the spice rack I found beautiful star anise seeds, which smell like licorice and decided to combine the crushed seeds with 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Since the cookie was going to be slightly sweeter because of the vanilla, I chose to contrast the shell with a lemon curd filling from Tea and Sympathy's cookbook (see Lemon Danish post).

Mind you, I made these cookies in under two hours while I ate heated up leftovers for lunch before I left for my job as a figure skating coach, running out of the door the minute they came out of the oven. So, as one of my five year old students today said to me after we finished a conversation about the various designs of rink sideboards, "Speaking of shipwrecks..." you first grind your almonds and confectioners sugar (see specific amounts in my first Parisian Macaron post), and then sift into a separate bowl.

After you feel satisfied with the texture of your almond powder, whip your egg whites and sugar on low for three minutes, on medium high for three minutes and on high for three minutes. Now you should add your flavors and colors. I ground about five or six anise stars in a mortar and pestle and added the powder and one teaspoon of vanilla extract to the meringue. I also added a squeeze of yellow food gel to give the cookies a nice lemony look.

Then beat your meringue for thirty or so seconds on the highest speed of your mixer and pause. Fold in your dry ingredients and add 1/2 tsp of salt (better to add this to your almond flour before hand so it disperses). Use a rubber spatula to mix, folding for as long as it takes to create a homogenous mixture of lava like goo. Deflate the meringue as you go along to expel any potential air bubbles and then add your mixture to a silicone pastry bag or a makeshift ziplock one.

Squeeze out as many cookies as you can fit (they don't expand so you can bunch them as close together as you want) and then tap the trays on your counters to give a final kick in the butt to the bubbles. Your oven should be pre-heated to 300 F and you can cook them for 18 minutes. Proper macarons should have "feet", which are the little bubbles around the edges in the picture above. Like I mentioned before, for some reason or another many of my macaron shells had cracks in them, but the problem might be as simple as too high a temperature in the oven (place on the middle rather than upper shelf).

While Not so Humble Pie has a great, but wonderfully neurotic, diagnostic survey to diagnose your macaron ineptitude, my hypothesis is that these cookies will work when they want to. I cannot isolate a single error factor present today that was not present during my first two tries (I have always been in a hurry, same oven, same tins, same almond source...) but nonetheless, some of my macarons just were not in the mood today. Fortunately, even cracked and footless macarons still taste sublime.

Since I don't like to leave the ice on a bad jump (it leaves a bad taste in my mouth), I will try try try again. Whereas repeatedly falling on a bullet sit spin this morning at my freestyle session was not so fun for certain parts of my body, trying to improve my macarons is a treat in and of itself. This flavor combination was amazing and my next attempt might be....drumroll please...chocolate with a blood orange curd filling. Yet I, like many, are driven to make these cookies because in their facade of simplicity they offer up the ultimate challenge. It's as if the macaron stares back at me from its perch on my plate saying, try to make me again, just try. In "Isis" one of my favorite songs by Bob Dylan he finishes by singing, "Isis oh Isis, you mystical child, what drives me to you is what drives me insane." Like all that is worth doing, as I told countless four year olds today, you must fall down. But on a less corny and more poignant note as Dylan finishes, "I cursed her one time, then I rode on ahead."

Butter and Love

2012-02-15T10:46:00.004-08:00

Chocolate Chip Cookies

There is a Norwegian proverb that says,"Cookies are made with butter and love." Butter and love are often synonymous but here are distinguished simply because butter has a corporeal manifestation that is essential to the perfect biscuit. Like so many of the best inventions and discoveries, chocolate chip cookies were created by accident.

While Alexander Fleming was busy accidentally stumbling upon Penicillium notatum and Alfred Nobel was fooling around with stable dynamite (an ill-advised pastime), Ruth Graves Wakefield was creating chocolate chip cookies in 1930. It takes some skill to find killer mold growing on staphylococci bacteria and to understand the molecular structure of stabilized nitroglycerine, but to accidentally invent possibly the best cookie that exists is worthy of well a Nobel Prize (take that Alfred!)

What did children munch on when they returned home from school in 1929 BC (Before Chocolate chip cookies)? Cookies these days are contrived and ostentatious. A wonderful gourmet bakery in Williamsburg, Marlow & Sons sells Fleur de Sel chocolate chip cookies. In an episode of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye observes that, "champagne is just ginger-ale that knows somebody," and while I do love the fleur de sel cookies, there is something (a lot of somethings actually) to be said about simplicity.

My dad and I have made these cookies together since I was a little squirt and now I find comfort in their consistency and steadfastness. One of my primary reasons for making them is so that I can scrape the sides of the mixing bowl replete with sugar, eggs, walnuts, chocolate and butter. I use the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag which calls for 2 1/4 cups of flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt to be mixed together.

Then add 1 cup of butter, 3/4 cup brown sugar and 3/4 cup white sugar to the mixer. Gradually add in two eggs and continue to mix. Little by little, add the dry ingredients and finish by pouring in chocolate chips (semi-sweet Ghirardelli) and chopped walnuts. Bake in the oven for 10 minutes at 375 F. I let the cookies settle on cooling trays until they hardened a bit and then I set them up for their photo shoot.

They are wholesome, reliable, valiant little marvels that treat and cure sicknesses of the body and soul. Chopin once said, “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art." So perhaps after my dalliances with macarons and danishes, I shall return to Ruth's accident.

Oggy Oggy Oggy

2012-02-06T18:44:00.000-08:00

Cornish Pasties

Last summer, I embarked on an ancestral journey through archival records, family interviews, photographs and old books that documented members of my family. The 20th century emigrations in my family from both Italy and Poland were much more difficult to trace because of the lack of public records in both of those countries and the disorganization once they were processed in the United States. It was also very difficult to trace the slightly earlier pilgrimages from Scotland and France due to the commonness of the names Gilpatrick and Goudreau, but my family's emigration from England was well documented in Maine's historical records.

Using a combination of ancestry.com, family websites (I am distantly related to so many people), military records for my Crockett and Strout ancestors given to be my great aunt, Jean Gilpatrick, and a book that she was given concerning schooner owners on Chebeague Island, I was able to trace my English roots to the mid 16th century. I started with my third great-grandfather, Isaac Everett Strout, who built a church on the aforementioned island that still stands today. My dad and I explored it a few years ago and found our way into its attic where thousands of ladybugs had found a home.

From there, I was able to find his roots in Truro, Massachusetts and from there I found James B. Strowthe born in Cornwall, England in 1582. His son, Anthony and his daughter in-law Mary Olyver had a son named Christopher who is cited as the first Maine Strout to appear in the New World. He was born in a province of Cornwall called Egloshayle and died in Truro in 1715. When Isaac married Ella May Crockett, whose family was originally from Devonshire, the two English halves of my family were brought together. As a result of my Cornish roots, I decided to make a classic English dinner called Cornish Pasties also known as Oggies, since that is Cornish (a Celtic language in Cornwall still spoken by a few hundred people today) for pasty.

My motivation for making these ancient pies was informed partly by my quest for my historical roots and partly by my intense hunger after teaching skating to little weebeasties for 4 hours on Saturday. I found the recipe in my "Tea and Sympathy" cookbook, which called for suet in my dough. I however, did not read the entire recipe through and after adding the improvised suet (I used duck fat), I realized that I was going to need to steam the dough for nearly 3 hours, which simply put, was not going to happen.

So instead of my trusty recipe I scoured the internet for viable alternatives and found one that I liked from the food network's website. This did not call for steaming and suggested using lard instead of suet. I modified the recipe and added twoish ounces of butter and twoish ounces of duck fat. But before I get ahead of myself as Maria von Trapp would say, "Let's start at the very beginning, that's a very good place to start, when you read you begin with ABC's when you sing you begin with do-re-mi," when you make cornish pasties you begin with 2 1/4 cups of flour, 2 tsp confectioner's sugar and 1 tsp salt.

Add 3 ounces of cold butter and the combo I told you about earlier (2 ounces of butter and 2 ounces of duck fat or lard). You can also use vegetarian shortening like Crisco. Mix this together and then add a one egg yolk and 6 tbs of cold water whisked together. Knead this all together into a ball and place in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or more. In the mean time in between time, you should make your filling. I used Tea and Sympathy's filling, which called for 2 lbs of ground lamb although I recommend 1, since I had a lot of leftover, 2 onions peeled and diced, 2 small carrots peeled and diced, some herbs of your choice (I used basil and thyme), and two peeled and diced potatoes. I sautéed the onions in olive oil and then added the lamb, carrots, herbs and two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce. I boiled the potatoes until they were tender and then added them to the cooked lamb mixture and sprinkled on some salt and pepper.

I then removed the dough from the refrigerator and rolled it out on the counter until it was about 1/4 inch thick. I used a bowl with a 5 inch diameter to make circles and then cut them out with a knife. For each circle, I added about 3 tablespoons of the lamb filling to one side of the circle. Your finished pasty will be a semi-circle so close the circle by folding it over and pressing the sides closed with your fingers. Make three slits in the top of the pasty and brush with whisked eggs (use both the whites and the yolks for your glaze). I also brushed the egg onto the side of the circle before I closed it.

I baked these (yields 6) at 400 F for 20 minutes and then at 350 F until they were golden. I made mashed potatoes to accompany the oggies although they can alternatively be served with baked beans. The crust was uber flaky, I made my papa proud, and the lamb was delicious. They are very rich and I couldn't finish mine but as Parolles said in All's Well that End's Well, "I will confess to what I know without constraint: if ye pinch me like a pasty, I can say no more."

Parisian Macarons

2012-01-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

Cardamom Lemon with Buttercream Frosting and Chocolate with Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache

I have never eaten a french maracon, before today that is. All the bakeries in the Slope like Trois Pommes and Almondine have these exquisitely colored cookies, although that noun seems too ignoble for macarons, but I always give in to the chocolate eclair. As a result I was a macaron virgin until today, which apparently is very gauche in the cooking blog circles I now run in. There is an entire community out there in the blogosphere dedicated to perfecting macarons.

They diagnose your mistakes based on the symptoms of your lopsided, bubbly, or footless cookies and post pictures of their beautiful masterpieces. Based on the technicality and fragility of the recipes, one would think they are performing a hemispherectomy (which is exactly what it sounds like). But you're not, right? They're just cookies that happen to be a bit snobby.

After all they are Parisian. I was certainly timid when I sat down to view all my tutorials and down four different recipes but my confidence grew with help from Bravetart's recipe which assured me that I did not need to age my egg-whites or use dehydrated egg-white powder to stiffen my meringue.

I was nearly certain that my macarons (not to be confused with coconut macaroons) would fail miserably, but when I peaked into the oven and saw that they were developing perfectly ruffled feet (the little ring around the cookie), I squealed and ran into my dad's room screaming, "Daddy, daddy, my macarons grew feet!" He was on a serious conference call and stopped, pausing the entire meeting, to compliment my achievement. I think he was wondering why I didn't claim to be dying, since that's the only bona fide reason to interrupt him. I thought it was just as important and he did too after tasting them.

To begin you need almond meal, which according to all of these blogs, is rather easy to find. I however searched two grocery stores and couldn't find it so instead I made my own. I purchased about 150 grams of almonds, which I then put in the food processor off and on for ten minutes, until it was a fairly fine powder. It is very important to weigh all of your ingredients on a scale rather than rely on volumetric measurements.

Unlike in lab where we have digital scales that you can re-calibrate based on the weight of your weighing boat, I had to subtract the weight of my bowl from the final weight to make sure that all my measurements were specific enough to satisfy the macaron judges, whom I felt were most certainly watching me. I measured out 115 grams of almond meal and 230 grams of powdered confectioner's sugar into the food processor together and ground the mixture for a minute at a time.

Then I sifted the mixture through a strainer into a bowl and ground the parts that did not go through. I reground those afterwards until nearly all of the mixture was fine enough to pass through a sieve. I set that aside and in my mixing bowl I added 144 grams of egg-whites (aged for about 30 minutes not that that did anything but increase my chances of contracting salmonella poisoning), 72 grams of sugar and 1/2 tsp of salt and beat on a low speed (4 on a kitchen aid) for 3 minutes, on 7 for 3 minutes, on 8 for three minutes and then I paused to add my flavor.

I might also add that I split my ingredients in half: part for the chocolate macarons and part for the cardamom lemon ones. So for my first batch I added ground cardamom seed (I used a spoon after I broke open the pods to crush them), 1/2 tsp of lemon extract to the meringue, and some yellow food gel to color the cookies. I mixed it for one last time according to Bravetart's recipe on my mixer's highest speed for a minute or so.

Then I folded in the almond/confectioner's sugar mix with a rubber spatula. You must fold it so that everything mixes (this could take a minute or so) and make sure you press against the sides to burst any bubbles the egg-whites might be holding on to. I then cut off the tip of a ziplock bag and added my batter to it and squirted 1.5 inch circles of batter onto wax paper covered cookie tins (I recommend silicone mats instead because the wax paper stuck a lot to my cookies).

Tap the trays a few times to expel the air bubbles. Set your oven to 300 degrees and put them in for 18 minutes. Let them cool for 20 minutes or so and be careful not to break the very fragile tops when you pick them up. Each macaron uses two cookies like an oreo with frosting or some sort of filling in the middle. To complement my cardamom lemon shells, I made buttercream frosting out of Irish butter (just eyeball this), confectioner's sugar and a dash of brandy.

Mix it together adding more powdered sugar until it doesn't taste like straight butter, but rather like delicious frosting. I put a tsp or so on each cookie and then gently pressed them together. My chocolate macarons were not as successful as the cardamom ones simply because I added too much cocoa powder, which made the batter much too stiff.

Instead of cardamom powder (25 grams) and lemon extract, I added 25 grams of cocoa powder (I recommend less). My filling was bittersweet chocolate ganache. Boil 1 cup of heavy cream and then add it to a bowl of 8 ounces of bittersweet chocolate so that the chocolate melts.

Stir continuously. In the meantime I softened 4 tbs of butter and pressed it around my plate with a rubber spatula. Once the cream and chocolate mixture has cooled a bit, stir in the butter until everything is mixed together and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes or so.

The chocolate macarons turned out a bit lumpy and chewy, but still delicious, however, the cardamom lemon macarons were amazing. I am so excited to experiment with different combinations of flavors and to not perfect but improve my macaron skills. The possibilities are endless.

Lemon Danish

2012-01-25T18:57:00.000-08:00

Sunday mornings at grandma and grandpa's house in Fresh Meadows always consisted of two elements: jazz and lemon danishes from the Cake Box. Gretel, the baker, would make fresh pastries in the morning and my grandfather would bring my mother a jelly doughnut, my father a piece of pecan pie and for me well a lemon danish. That is until Gretel moved upstate to be closer to her family and in protest, all the bakers of America boycotted the lemon danish.

A few years ago, I found a nice version at the 'French' chain, "Au Bon Pain", which has since deteriorated primarily because they stopped making lemon danishes and resorted to apricot, cheese and cherry ones. No place else in New York City seems to make them and so Sunday mornings at grandma and grandpa's house now consist of jazz and cherry almond cream danishes. I scoop the cherries out with a spoon because in addition to my prejudice against raisins, I don't like Maraschino cherries either.

I did however come upon them in one of the oddest of places: Nerd Camp at the Johns Hopkins University. Every morning I could look forward to a banana and a lemon danish from the Fresh Foods Cafe referred to as the FFC by JHU kids. Each morning I would rush to the pastry cart and locate the lone lemon danish, which even in a pile of its own was unpopular. I rescued it. That is of course one of the reasons I chose Hopkins after all! No, ok, it was the neuroscience but the danishes definitely help.

In my Freshman Seminar class last semester (our version of a college english class), when we began "Hamlet", my professor decided to have us draw Hamlet because his age and physical appearance is never explicitly referred to by Shakespeare. I drew a hipster (I do go to school on the Lower East Side after all) wearing iPod buds and listening to Bob Dylan, who happened to be reading "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" by Tom Stoppard and eating a lemon danish. I thought that was ruther clevah.

Since I am on break I had enough time to dedicate to the arduous process of danish making. I started yesterday and finished this morning, mostly because my first batch did not work out very well, although my second more than made up for it. The trick to danishes, not that I am a seasoned pastry chef, is butter. I took 1 cup of softened unsalted butter (I used Breakstone but Irish butter might be better) and creamed it with 1/3 cup of flour.

I flattened it lightly with my rolling pin (the mixture is mostly butter so it's not a dough like consistency at all) and put it the fridge. Next up I added 1 packet of dry yeast to 1 1/2 cups of flour and mixed it. In a pot I warmed up (just so it's warm not hot) 1 1/4 cups of milk, 1/4 cup of sugar, 1 tsp of salt and then added it to the flour/yeast mixture. I added 1/2 tsp of almond and lemon extract and 1 egg and whisked it all together. Gradually I poured in 2 1/2 cups of flour to this mixture and knead. I left this dough to rise for a few hours but all you need is one.

When my dough had risen to nearly double its original size, I split it into two equal parts and took out one of the butter/flour sheets from earlier. I rolled one of the dough halves into a square and placed the butter sheet onto it and folded it over, then I pressed around the edges to enclose it within the dough. Then I rolled the dough out into a long rectangle and folded it into thirds. Roll again and fold it in thirds but this time put it in the fridge for 30 minutes and repeat with the second half. When I removed it from the fridge I repeated this process two more times and then put it in the fridge again for 10 minutes.

Now it is time to shape the dough into danish pastry like structures. The most common structure I used was the flower, which I found a tutorial for on youtube. You cut the dough into strips (the width depends on your taste but I had three-four inch strips) and then into squares. Roll out each square and then fold into a triangle and make two cuts one on either side. Unfold it and you should have little arrow tips on either vertex. Fold it into a triangle the other way and make the same cuts. Then unfold and draw up two ends and press together until they stick and then draw up the other two ends and do the same. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUcT8c5lNUM

You can add the filling before you do this or after depending on what you're using. I chose to fill afterwards since I didn't want my lemon curd cooked in the oven! Bake your pastries at 450 F for 8 minutes until the bottoms are golden brown, make sure they don't burn. Depending on size this should yield about 18 pastries according to my recipe from allrecipes.com.

To make the lemon curd filling I used "Tea and Sympathy's" recipe, which calls for 1/4 cup of butter melted in a double boiler. Then I added 1 cup of sugar and stirred until I had a smooth texture. I added four eggs and the juice and zest of three lemons. Stir every few minutes until the consistency is thick (25-30 minutes). Once it is thick enough, put it in the refrigerator for about an 1 hour or until it is cold. This thickens it even more.

I used an icing bag (or rather a ziplock with its tip cut off) to add the curd to each danish. I also made a glaze for the crust, which I added after they cooled off a bit, consisting of 3/4 cup of confectioner's sugar, 1/2 tsp almond extract, 1/2 tsp lemon extract, 1/8 cup of melted butter and a bit of water to make it smooth. I drizzled the glaze onto the pastries Jackson Pollock style and asked my mom fourteen times if she liked them or not. She liked them the first twelve times but the last two were resounding no's (but not to my pastries).

Flyless Graveyard

2012-01-15T06:42:00.000-08:00

While the English are not known for food, a fact which is substantiated by sardines on toast and black pudding, I have taken a liking to countless elements of the unloved cuisine. The posh names that accompany other ethnic dishes are substituted by monikers like spotted dick and flies graveyard. Both are named after the currants embedded within, but as I might have mentioned I have an irrational aversion to dehydrated grapes and in the words of Eloise, I simply must must must avoid them at all costs!

Luckily, I had the opportunity to make what I dubbed flyless graveyards more commonly known as Eccles Cakes. What strikes me so about English fare is its ability to bring me into a nursery rhyme and tuck me in with bedtime stories about fairies and maidens. I am an unequivocal anglophile and as such I will continue to cook English puddings and cakes, pies and the like.

I first learned about Eccles Cakes in a cookbook I have called, "Breakfast, Lunch and Tea," from a patisserie in Paris called the Rose Cafe. Yesterday I had planned on making something more complex, challenging my newfound skills, but after teaching little figure skaters all afternoon and then studying for finals and writing an essay on Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud, all I had energy for were Eccles Cakes. To begin, simply take about 3/4 cup of unsalted butter and knead in about 2 cups of flour and a pinch of sugar.

Add 3 tablespoons of ice cold water and roll into a ball. Put that in the refrigerator for 10+ minutes and in the meantime make your Eccles' mixture. Take 5 1/2 ounces of brown sugar and add 1 ounce of melted unsalted butter. Mix this together completely with a spoon or a whisk. Then add 6 oz of currants, 1 zested lemon, a few shakes of cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice and a dash of brandy or Grand Marnier. Mix this all together and make sure you smell it (just to see how good it smells).

Set that aside and take the dough out of the fridge and roll it out until it's about a 1/4 of an inch thick. Use a small bowl or large cup/mug (3-4 inch diameter) to cut out 12 circles. Then add a teaspoon of your mixture to the center of every circle, wet your finger with water and press down on the circumference of dough. Draw up all the sides and pinch them together, then roll into a ball. That is the bottom of your pastry. Brush the dough with egg white and make three horizontal slices (1/2 inch long) or a cross on the top. Set your oven to 375 F and cook for 10-12 minutes or until your cakes are tanned and slightly hard on the exterior.

You can eat Eccles Cakes for dessert as we did with a scoop of vanilla or lemon ice cream or for breakfast as I did this morning on my way to skating with a cup of hot cocoa. While the temperature was 17 F, the Eccles Cake warmed my soul...(not my toes however).

Operation Mincemeat

2012-01-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

In 1943, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu of the Royal Navy concocted a plan at the behest of the British military to divert the Germans' attention away from Sicily so that the allies could successfully invade. Montagu and a fellow intelligence officer, Charles Cholmondeley, figured that if they had a body wash ashore carrying letters between highly ranked British officers specifying Britain's attack locations as Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily, they could fool the Germans into exporting their troops, thus reducing the amount of casualties the allies suffered. They found a corpse, a Welsh man named Glyndwr Michael who had died of rat poisoning, whom the medical examiner believed could pass as a drowning victim, and called him Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. He was given an identity as moderately ranked officer who was flying elsewhere in Europe to deliver his top secret letters. The briefcase was strapped to a chain, which was attached to his trench-coat and personal documents were put in his pockets including a love letter, a solicitor's letter, ticket stubs and a receipt for his shirt.

To ensure that the Germans who would eventually find him understood why these letters would not be delivered through normal channels, personal and sensitive letters were included among the formal documents. When the submarine HMS Seraph released his body into the sea near the coast of Spain, currents brought him ashore where he was found by a fisherman, who alerted the occupying Germans. The Germans sent the letters back to the British consulate, as was custom, and Montagu had his resident scientist determine whether or not they had been opened: they had. He sent a message to his superiors, "Mincemeat swallowed whole." Mincemeat was the name of this entire covert operation and after the Nazis averted their troops to Greece and Sardinia, the allies successfully attacked Sicily. I was inspired after watching the film, "The Man who Never was," about Operation Mincemeat, to embark on my own mission.

Although there were lower stakes than the free world, I took my mission very seriously. I began with 1 and 1/4 lbs cubes of steak, which our butcher, Staubitz Market, generously cut for me. In a large creuset pot, I poured 1 cup of apple juice (feel free to use cider when it's in season) and the steak and waited for it to boil, turning the meat every once in a while so it cooked evenly. Once it came to a boil, I let it simmer for 20 minutes to tenderize the meat. Then I took each piece out and cut it into smaller bits, and put it back into the pot. While the meat was tenderizing, I peeled, cored and sliced four pears (use apples if you prefer). I added the fruit to the pot after I recut the meat in addition to 1 and 1/3 cups white sugar, a handful of citrus peel (orange and lemon), 1/2 cup of butter, 1 16 ounce jar of sour cherry preserves, 1 tsp ground ginger, 1/2 tsp ground cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. You can also add 2 and 1/2 cups of raisins and dried currants if you wish. I let this simmer, without the lid, for 90 minutes. This stage is supposed to radically thicken your mixture, although mine was left slightly liquidy. This turned out fine, but I would like to explore why it didn't thicken appropriately.

At the very end of the 90 minutes, I added 1/4 of a 16 oz can of pitted sour cherries, without adding the liquid they are sitting in. Turn off the flame and here's the controversial part for me: store it in the refrigerator for a week (this may congeal it more) so that the flavor has time to ruminate (official definition of ruminate: think deeply about something/chew the cud). I however, as I may have mentioned in my chocolate cake post, have a lack of patience when it comes to my culinary creations (ok, maybe it's just a sweet tooth). In short, I didn't wait a week, I waited two minutes, although I found some credible sources that gave me the go ahead. I warn you before researching mincemeat too much, that there are fanatics, and they are odd, very very odd. Who knew there was an art to throwing in every spice known to human kind into a pot filled with beef and sugar? They did.

I then put my oven onto 350 F and poured the mixture into my pie crust and let it bake for 40 minutes. I recommend orthogonal cross-hatching for your top layer of crust (if you aren't studying for a linear algebra final and getting it mixed up with cooking, just look at how I layered the crust in my pictures). I use my dad's pie crust recipe, wherein I take 1/2 cup salted butter and add it to 1 and 1/3 cups flour. Knead this together and add three tablespoons of ice cold water, continuing to knead. Once your dough is a singular mass, put it onto a piece of wax paper taped onto your surface and cover with another piece of wax paper. (Dust surface with flour). I then use my nifty ceramic rolling pin, which I can fill up with ice water, to flatten the dough to within an inch of it's life. You know the rest. Feel free to add a pinch of salt or sugar. You may need to make some extra for the cross-hatch pattern.

Once the pie was ready, we sat down to eat and watch "The Man who Never was," and as I put the first piece in my mouth I thought, "Mincemeat swallowed whole!"

Liege Waffles

2011-12-31T11:10:00.000-08:00

My love for Belgian waffles arose about two years ago when the Wafels and Dinges truck http://www.wafelsanddinges.com/ came to Park Slope. It would sit in front of Old First on 7th Avenue throughout the winter playing 1960's schmaltz, selling hot chocolate and of course a selection of Belgian Waffles. After experimenting with the mini-waffelini and even the pulled pork waffle, I settled on my favorite variation called the Liege Waffle after the Belgian town of the same name. These waffles are smaller than regular ones because of how dense and rich they are and small cubes of pearl sugar are dispersed throughout the batter. Unique among waffles, they have yeast in them and take about 1 hour to rise. Dinges are the toppings one can choose from and include nutella (my choice), whipped cream, strawberries, bananas, ice cream and a Northern European gingerbread like spread called speculoos.

Two summers ago, I purchased a waffle iron and with the help of my dad, experimented with a few different recipes, modifying here and there, always adding butter. We perfected the recipe, and my waffles have been treats at many weekend brunches throughout the summer or cozy afternoons in the winter. The waffles from the cart inspired mine as did those from Le Pain Quotidien, a delicious French chain scattered throughout the city and Europe. Today, I made my waffles for a New Year's Eve Brunch for some family friends. People who always refused dessert scarfed them down, drowning them in homemade whipped cream and strawberries.

To begin, take a packet of yeast and pour it into a small bowl filled with 1/3 cup of lukewarm water along with 1 1/2 tbs of salt and sugar. Put the timer on for 15 minutes to let the eukaryotes multiply. In the meantime, melt 1 cup (2 sticks of butter), while you can use any brand, I make it with Irish butter, which has extra fat in it for flavor. In a separate bowl pour in 2 cups of flour. Make a hole in the middle of the flour (not necessary but fun) and add three egg yolks. Set the egg whites aside and beat them later on. When the butter is finished, pour it into the flour/egg mixture and then add the yeast and water. Knead the dough with your fingers until everything is properly intertwined and covered with saran wrap or a bowl. If it's summer, set it outside for forty-five minutes, if it's winter just place it in the warmest spot in your kitchen.

You have forty-five minutes to an hour while you wait for the dough to double in size. In the meantime, I cut up the strawberries into quarters and set the table. As the finish line comes into sight I beat the egg whites and then I make the whipped cream (1 cup of heavy cream plus 1/4 cup of confectioner's sugar although this can be adjusted for your tasting pleasure). Also, plug in your waffle iron as it usually takes 10 minutes to heat up. Once your dough is finished rising, gently add the egg whites and 1 cup of granulated white sugar or pearl sugar. I usually put the sugar directly on top of the egg whites before I start to knead it, that way the sugar clumps and caramelizes when it cooks.

Add a drop of Grand Marnier, brandy or vanilla extract. Knead the dough until all of the egg whites have disappeared. Once your waffle iron gives you a green light (this can be a real green light or a metaphorical one), spoon out batter as you see fit and close until the light changes color on the iron. Mine usually cooks each waffle (four sections) in 6 minutes, and this recipe yields three full waffles. Mind you, each quarter segment should be considered one waffle. Most people can't even finish two, so since the three waffles yield 12 segments, you're good for a party of 1-12! To keep them warm before I serve them, I put the oven on its lowest setting and place them on the middle rack. Remember that these waffles take about 1 and 1/2 hours to make so, pace yourself and plan accordingly. Happy New Year!

Pfeffernüsse

2011-12-30T06:50:00.000-08:00

While my cousin implored me to make poppy seed cake for Christmas, I decided to make something a little more Christmasy...Pfeffernüsse, which are German, Dutch and Danish spice cookies covered with powdered sugar. Stella Dora sells a pretty convincing take on them in stores, and I've always bought them around Christmas, downing them with a glass of eggnog sprinkled with nutmeg. I found a recipe in a Christmas cookie book, which was on loan to me, and made them the eve of Christmas Eve, which if you don't believe me, is a thing. I adapted the recipe a bit since I didn't have Cardamom powder and didn't want to use almond slivers (my mom is allergic). Unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to snap a photo of the beautiful plate full of powdered Pfeffernüsses, nor did I document their consumption at Christmas dinner. I only remembered to do it when there was one left at the bottom of a container filled with my aunt's chocolate biscotti.

To begin, heat the oven to 375 F, and then mix 1 cup dark brown sugar with 1/2 cup butter. Add in the 2 eggs and cream. Continue pouring in 1/2 tspn. of your favorite extracts (I stuck to Vanilla) but you can also use lemon, anise or almond. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients: 1 3/4 cup flour, 1 tspn. baking powder, 1 tspn. ground cinnamon, 1/2 tspn. salt and black pepper, 1/2 tspn. of ground cloves, allspice and nutmeg, the zest of one lemon and then 1 tspn. ground cardamom. Gradually introduce your dry ingredients to the butter and sugar and mix together. Roll into little one inch diameter balls and some say let it cool in the fridge for 2 hours or overnight (although again, no patience, I didn't do either). Bake for 10 minutes. While they are still hot, coat each cookie in confectioners' sugar.

As I mentioned before, I didn't have Cardamom powder (Fairway was selling it for $11), but I already had Cardamom pods, so I opened them yielding about four seeds each and put them into my mixture. All but one of my Pfeffernüsse tasters enjoyed the blast of flavor when they bit into a small cardamom seed, so I leave the rest up to you. They were a big hit amongst the grown ups at Christmas, while the little ones preferred rainbow cookies and cream puffs.

Chocolate Cake

2011-12-30T06:20:00.000-08:00

I made a delicious chocolate cake for a Christmas party a few weeks back, and added a hint of almond extract to the batter to make it taste like marzipan or if you've ever had the pleasure "Sugar Sweet Sunshine's" cupcakes, located on Rivington between Norfolk and Essex in the Lower East Side. I made myself proud, pulling off a Samantha Stevens. Instead of twitching my nose to make perfect coco au vin, I ran to the corner bodega to find chocolate and powdered sugar, and my weakness: Choward's violet candies, ran back to the apartment and whipped up the cake using our electric beater. I brought it to the party still warm, placed it on the table and watched people nod their heads up and down and give a thumbs up because their mouths were full of cake. One kid even tried to buy a piece from someone. Nice ego boost.

I however, did not get to even taste a piece, so later that weekend I made a new cake following the same recipe from the "Tea and Sympathy" cookbook. This time though, I used Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate and it came out very rich, putting both my mother and me in a cocoa stupor. The pictures below are documenting the birth of my new Pistachio colored Kitchen Aid mixer, which I received for Christmas. It is a work of art.

"Tea and Sympathy" is an English teashop in Greenwich Village, run by a woman named Nicola Perry. One of her waitresses/writers, Anita Naughton, wrote her detailed cookbook, which not only provides recipes but also photographs and memorable stories of the restaurant's origin and life. This recipe is hidden between sugar glazed lemon cake and a story about the man who brings them their English bacon. It says to heat the oven to 375, then to melt the chocolate (1 cup bittersweet) in a double boiler. Meanwhile you can put the dry ingredients together (1 tsp. baking soda, 1 1/4 cups flour), cream the butter (1 cup) and dark brown sugar (1 1/2 cups) and 1 tablespoon of almond extract. Fold the chocolate into the butter and add the dry ingredients and 1 cup of hot water. Bake for 45 minutes. Below is a picture of my cake sitting on a complementary turquoise fiestaware plate, pre-icing.

The icing is 'ruther' simple and involves melting 4 tbs of milk, 1/4 cup of butter and 1/2 cup of bittersweet chocolate (although I recommend more than this). Mix this with 1 3/4 cup of confectioners' sugar and beat. Unlike me, you should wait for everything to cool before you ice it, since obviously the icing runs when you are impatient. To get my cake to cool faster (I really wanted to eat it), I put it in the freezer for one minute and then held it out of the fourth floor window on a freezing December night. As my father would say, "Do as I say, not as I do."

You'll be seeing a lot more "Tea and Sympathy" recipes from me, since it's my favorite restaurant of all time. In fact, in 10th grade General Chemistry, we were given a Periodic Table of Elements project, wherein we had to order themed objects/concepts in groups and columns. I ordered "Tea and Sympathy's" menu. As you descended a column the amount of fat increased, mirroring atomic radii. Going across a row one would notice that the calorie content increased analogous to ionization energy. My columns were ordered according to categories of the menus, so instead of halogens and noble gases, I had puddings and meats. I know, I know, get out more...

If you're interested, the website is http://www.teaandsympathynewyork.com/home.php

The cookbook can be purchased in their shop located in between the restaurant and their fish and chips store called "A Salt and Battery." Cheers!

Lemon Ukrainian Poppy Seed Cake

2011-12-29T19:22:00.000-08:00

My dad made this cake for Thanksgiving supper in Maine using Sahadi's poppy seeds, which yes are tastier and cheaper than all other poppy seed posers. I found myself getting up in the middle of the night drawn to the pan with the poppy seed cake, eating pieces of it with my fingers. I could hear the Wicked Witch of the West's voice in my head crooning, "poppies, poppies..."

Poppy seeds cloaked with milk and Irish butter is so intriguing so I had to make my own using poppy seeds from Associated in Park Slope. Suffice it to say they were not Sahadi's but they were delicious and they dispersed perfectly throughout the batter. I ate it every morning for a week for breakfast and fed classmates bits of it during boring segments of our lectures. My 10 year old cousin ate the two slices I prepared for him and my aunt, and made me promise to make it for Christmas. I didn't in the end, but you'll soon see what I did make.

This particular recipe calls for one cup of poppy seeds, milk and butter, two cups of sugar and flour, 3 separated eggs (I am now the proud owner of an egg separator), 2.5 tspn. baking powder, 1/2 tspn. salt, 2 tspns. vanilla extract, juice and zest of one big lemon. The poppy seeds need to soak in boiled milk for an hour (until the consistency is a little thicker). While you wait for that, you can cream the butter and sugar plus the egg yolks and then gradually add the poppy seeds and milk. Add the dry ingredients and then fold in the whipped egg whites plus the zest, juice and vanilla and and bake for an hour, or until your knife comes out clean. This cake is delicious with a glass of cold milk or alternately with black tea.

Mochi Mochi

2011-12-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

Pronounced, mo-chee, mochi's are wonderful Japanese rice cakes filled with your choice of either adzuki beans or green tea ice cream. I've always eaten mochis as my substitute for blueberries (miracle food), chomping on them before freestyle figure skating sessions or during finals week. They can be found in any small market in New York City, and are sold in either green or pink or covered with sesame seeds. They are dusted with cornstarch to decrease the stickiness quotient, which I'll call SQ, (but more on that later) and are rolled into circular, flat bialy-like structures. The ingredients include, one pound of rice flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 2 1/2 cups of sugar (although I recommend less), 1/4 teaspoon of lemon extract, four drops of red food dye (optional), and of course the adzuki beans.

While you can purchase whole adzuki beans, soak them and then puree them and add sugar, my grandmother brought me a can of red bean paste, which required no preparation at all. To begin, I heated my oven to 350 F and then mixed the rice flour, sugar and baking powder with a whisk. In a separate bowl I combined two cups of water with the lemon extract and red food coloring and then poured that into the other bowl and whisked until the consistency was smooth. I lined a cookie tray with tin foil and greased it with Crisco, poured the batter into the pan and covered it again with tinfoil.

My combination of recipes told me to bake for 1 hour, in lieu of using a microwave for about five to ten minutes (don't quote me on that), but this dried my dough out considerably and once it was cool, I had to knead it with water and then cover it with cornstarch to perfect the consistency. Suffice it to say that my SQ was borderline desert. I used my beautiful new rolling pin, which is ceramic and hollow so that you can pour cold water in it for short crust pastry and rolled the dough until it was about 1/4 inch thick.

I used a jar lid to cut out two circles, plopped some adzuki bean paste in the middle of one, covered it with the other and then pressed around to fuse the two sides together. This is definitely not what you are supposed to do, but it worked for me. I cut off the excess and powdered the finished cake with more cornstarch. They are a little dry but and I quote my mom they are, "Amazing!" who would not just dish out a false compliment because I'm her daughter. It was in the '20s today, so after skating for an hour at Bryant Park's portable rink, I ate a pink mochi with some jasmine tea in my "Keep Calm and Carry on" mug.