The Trials and Tribulations of Nika's Maiden Catering Voyage

Cucumber Soup, Quiche Lorraine, Watermelon and Cucumber Salad, Cardamom Ice Cream, Lemonade and Chocolate Salted Caramel Cake

When my mother mentioned a month ago that she wanted to have an "indoor" garden party for her upcoming birthday, I eagerly offered my catering services to her and planned out an audacious or rather aspirational menu including all of the delectables from the title plus watermelon sorbet and stracciatella (but no cardamom ice cream).

I was so thrilled about the dinner party and perhaps I thought that the energy from my excitement would be my assistant chef. Suffice it to say, I now have a new found respect for caterers. I realize that I left much of my cooking to the last minute as a result of a busy schedule and my only helper was a 9 year old girl (who turned out to be really, really helpful), but still man, it's hard.

To begin, I forgot my ice cream maker at my dad's house and thus had to rely on previously made cardamom ice cream (luckily there was plenty for our 13 guests). Dissappointed, I vowed to make up for the lack of the two promised flavors with a delicious cake. Here's where it gets trickier. I apparently am not skilled in the least when it comes to making layered cakes.

I don't know if the problem lies in my imperfectly shaped pie plates (which are not perfect cylinders since they're for pies) or in my general layering ineptitude, but my three tiered chocolate cake from Martha Stuart's website decided to spontaneously become the leaning tower of pisa.

I thought cursing loudly enough at it would scare it into being vertical again, but it only continued to slide and made no argument when I began taking fistfuls of the top layer and chucking them into the garbage...vehemently. But let me back track for a minute. I began making the cake on a Friday night after 7 hours of slicing mouse brains on a machine called a cryostat 14 microns thick.

I was really, really tired and so not in the mood for more scientific experiments, which this cake turned out to be. I began by making the caramel, which was supposed to be the glue that held the layers of cake together. This worked perfectly and allowed me to use my candy thermometer for the first time.

To begin, add 4 cups of sugar, 1/4 cup of water and 1/4 cup light corn syrup to a pot and put it on high. Mix it in the beginning to incorporate the ingredients but then just let it sit until it becomes a dark amber (around 15-20 minutes). Then remove the pot from the burner and pour in 2 cups of cream (careful of any splatter).

Put the pot back on the burner and wait until your candy thermometer reads 238 F (maybe 3-5 min). Then pour the liquid into a glass or metal bowl (no plastic, it's really hot), wait for about 5-10 minutes and then add one tablespoon of butter at a time until you've added 1 cup and 1 tsp of sea salt. I put it in the refridgerator to thicken and harden and moved onto the batter.

Be warned: this recipe makes 3 individual cakes, even though mine was only 2 layers (read on). First, I poured 3 cups of flour, 3 cups of sugar, 1 1/2 cups cocoa powder, 1 tbs baking soda, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, and 1 1/2 tsp sea salt into the bowl of my mixer. I used the mixer on a low setting to incorporate all the dry ingredients.  Then I added 1 1/2 cups warm water, 4 eggs, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 1 1/2 cups buttermilk and 1/2 cup plus 2 tbs of safflower oil.

Mix this until all the ingredients are incorporated and then divide into 3 buttered and floured tins and put them in the oven at 350 F for 3 minutes. I might add that due to our lack of counter space and my helper's height, I placed a foldable wooden table behind me in the kitchen for her to work on. I went to open the oven to check on the progress of the cakes, and instead knocked over the table with my rear end, sending the bowl of cocoa powder mixed with water onto the rug and back of the couch.

I also managed during dinner to knock over my mother's limonata, which was sitting precariously on the carpet. Slapstick aside, I moved on to the frosting using Martha Stuart's recipe included in her instructions for the cake. She said that you could put it in the fridge overnight until you were ready to frost the cake, but the next morning, I discovered that the frosting had hardened in the bowl in a way that forced me to melt it out so I could clean the bowl and start over.

This time, I used Tea and Sympathy's trusted recipe for frosting, which called for 8 tbs milk, 1/2 cup of butter creamed, 1 cup melted semi-sweet chocolate chips, a few dashes of salt and 3 1/2 cups of confectioner's sugar. The frosting worked perfectly. It was Saturday around 11 AM, with guests arriving in 4 hours when I decided to put the cake together.

I carefully cut the cakes out of their tins and flipped the first one onto a plate. Success. I took some caramel on a plastic spatula after letting it thaw until it was spreadable, and began to swirl caramel about the surface of the cake. I flipped the second layer on top and it seemed to be going smoothly. Again, I frosted the surface with caramel and added the last layer.

I am pretty good with science, and I say that because I have no explanation for what happened next, but the caramel seemed to melt when the last layer was put on as if it was having some sort of phase reaction with the chocolate (which was completely cooled overnight). Anyway, the entire bloody mess started to lean over and the caramel started to drip down onto the table and I began to reason with the cake.

Me: Fine, you want to do it this way? Cake: Apparently. That brings us back to the beginning of the story, in which I threw away a perfectly delicious layer of cake and in doing this unspeakable crime, managed to save my now two-story building.

It leaned slightly, but it was safe and I immediately put it back in the fridge as if to halt the caramel's melt down and mine.  When I felt it was time, I frosted the cake and one would never know the energy spent on it. I could hear Julia Child's voice in my head (I just finished her memoir, My Life in France), saying, "One of the secrets, and pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.”

Luckily I fixed this cake, with a lot of emotional cheering on from my mom and helper cook. We finally moved onto the quiche, now with three hours until humans arrived, and I designated tasks. My mom would cook one package of bacon and my helper would crack the 12 eggs needed for my 3 quiches, while I made the crust. Crack 12 eggs into a bowl and whisk until frothy. Then add 3 cups of cream (I used 2 cups plus 1 cup of half and half, and this worked fine). 

Then you must chop up three 8 oz packages of Gruyere cheese and add that to the cream and egg mixture. When the bacon is done, crumple it with your fingers and add it to the mix along with a few healthy dashes of basil and some pepper. Mix it all together a bit more and move on to the crust. I used Rose Bakery's recipe for shortcrust pastry involving 3 1/3 cups of flour and 1 cup of butter kneaded together. 

Then add 1 egg yolk and use a fork to incorporate the ingredients and a bit of ice cold water until the dough is kneadable but by no means sticky. Put it in the fridge for 30 minutes. When the 30 minutes was up, I rolled out the dough onto floured wax paper and flipped it into the pie plate. 

I poured in the batter, added a few shakes of parmesan cheese and put it in the oven for 20 min at 425 C and 35 min at 325 F. The quiche worked beautifully even though I dropped one further into the oven on the way out of the oven; which I managed to salvage with only a minor burn. 

While the quiche was cooking, I made the cucumber soup and cucumber and watermelon salad to be served with the quiche. My helper peeled and chopped all the cucumbers. The soup required 5 cucumbers, about 1 cup of minced cilantro (fresh), 1 minced jalapeno, 1 1/2 cups or so of sour cream (taste as you add), 3/4 clove of garlic, the juice from 2 limes, 1 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp black pepper. 

Add the vegetables and seasonings (not the sour cream) to the blender gradually until it is pureed and then once it is done pour it into a bowl, add the sour cream, mix until incorporated and then chill. I used our nifty ninja blender and it made enough for 2 small bowls per guest. 

I also made croutons to go along with the soup by chopping up some Italian bread into bite sized cubes, drizzling them with olive oil and a bit of oregano and putting them in the oven at 375 for about 18-20 minutes or until they were golden brown (depends entirely on your oven and their size). 

My mom chopped up the watermelon (about 1/2 a melon) for the salad and my helper added 3 diced cucumbers to the mix meanwhile I squeezed two limes and sprinkled a sprig of mint onto the salad and mixed it up. I had eaten the salad previously at a southern restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called Pies and Thighs. 

The lime juice changes the flavor of both fruits and takes away a bit of the sweetness. It lasted for about 3 days. Finally, I made lemonade using 20 lemons and a lot of water and sugar. I like lemonade to be lemony and even though I poured some concentrated mixture into a bowl and diluted the liquid in the pitcher, it was still pretty damn tart. 

Everyone seemed to love it though, leaving the Limonatas and Aranciatas untouched and it provided a wonderful companion to the chocolate caramel cake. 

I won't go into the details of making cardamom ice cream since I already have, but it too was delicious. In the end, it all worked out so perfectly that I forgot how frustrating the process was and the paper lanterns we strung from our ceiling danced above our guests dining on quiche and cucumber soup all evening long. 

Happy Birthday Mommy!

Alfajores Blancos y Negros

I was on Nantucket a few weeks ago and after having disappointing meal after disappointing meal, I finally found a restaurant called Corazon del Mar that served a myriad of Latin dishes including (what we ordered) Argentinean steak with roasted yucca, a country-less pork with fried plantains and some sort of jalapeño sauce and churros con chocolate.

There was something so wonderfully exotic and tropical about this food and I started to research South American desserts when I returned home. I've been having baker's block lately, especially when I am asked to make something for a group of people.

When I'm at home, in the comfort of my kitchen, it's like rallying in tennis. No swing is too big and no miss is too embarrassing. But cooking for a crowd brings the timidity and rigidity that playing for points does. I tend to go with tried and true recipes that I know will work and will taste delicious, and rarely find the opportunity once I'm done with that on weekends to experiment the way I would like to.

But I was really tired of European and American desserts, so I found a recipe for a classic Latin American cookie called alfajor. They are similar to shortbread, albeit they have markedly less butter, except that you sandwich two cookies with dulce de leche in the middle and dip half the cookie in chocolate sauce. Yes. There is butter, caramel with spice and chocolate all on one vector.

Lots of elements could be improved, but I managed to create dulce de leche from 1 quart of whole milk, 1 1/2 cups of sugar and 1/2 tsp baking soda. I put all the elements in together and simmered the milk until the sugar had dissolved.

Then I left it on the lowest flame possible for a total of 3 hours with supplemented 30 second intervals in the microwave due to my impatience. This thickens quite a lot in the fridge when you're cooling it, but I still would try a different recipe because it was not thick as it should have been.

Nonetheless, before I removed it from the pot, I added 1/8 tsp cloves, 1/8 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp cardamom and stirred it all together. As for the cookies, they're a bit like shortcrust pastry but with less sugar and no eggs.

I combined 2 cups of flour with 1/4 cup confectioner's sugar and 1 cup of butter and kneaded it until it was incorporated in a big ball of dough. I refrigerated this for about 30 minutes because of the humidity and then rolled it out until it was the appropriate width for a cookie (1/8 inch). 

I used a glass with a 2 inch diameter to measure out the cookies and put on them a buttered tin in the oven at 350 F for 15 minutes (may need up to 20 depending on your oven). I let them cool (be careful they are very flaky when you pick them up and may crumble easily).

Alfajores can be dipped in chocolate too, so I melted 2 packets of unsweetened baker's chocolate and added a few tablespoons of confectioner's sugar and cream. However, I would instead, either use semi-sweet chocolate so you don't thicken it with sugar, or make a chocolate ganache (before it hardens).

Anyway, I dipped half the cookie in the chocolate spread and then put about 1/2 tsp of the dulce de leche onto one cookie and made a sandwich.

Keep them in the refrigerator, at least in the summer, since the dulce de leche oozes out of the sides if it's not thick enough. They are surprisingly delicious and have a unique texture, almost like a small tart. Good on a hot summer night with a tall glass of milk.

Lemon Blueberry Tart

I had an hankering for a lemon tart a few weekends ago, inspired by the brilliant sunshine and bearable temperatures as well as the cloudless sky. As I've mentioned, my favorite flavor is lemon and my favorite color is yellow and tarts are well, well they're tarts. I've been making desserts lately based on what is available at the farm stand and that day the blueberries looked perfect in their cartons surrounded by sunflowers and honey.

My Rose Bakery cookbook has a recipe for lemon blueberry tarts, which is where I got the idea at least subliminally, but in reality I was just really craving a lemon tart and spontaneously decided to add blueberries to the mix.

It turns out that the combination of blueberries and lemon curd is beyond any lemon tart I've ever had. The blueberries compliment the sweet curd with an interesting tang and now I'm not sure I will ever be able to have just a lemon tart again.

To begin, I made the tart sweet pastry from the Rose Bakery's recipe, which you can find here. After you cool the crust in the refrigerator, roll it out and put it in your tart tin or pie plate. You can also brush it now with a beaten egg for a glaze. Then put parchment paper over the crust and pour rice over it (this is called blind baking and it keeps the shape of the crust without a filling to weigh it down while it rises).

Bake this at 425 F for 15-20 minutes (depends on your oven so watch the crusts to make sure they don't burn). In the meantime, make the lemon curd. I use Tea and Sympathy's recipe, but I doubled it and it was just enough for two tarts. When everything was cooled, I sprinkled blueberries all around the top of the tart.

There is nothing like a pie on a hot summer night. Sometimes I wish that you could bottle a moment, patent an olfactory preserver that would capture the feeling instead of just the one frame that a camera does. Some foods are proxies for this imaginary mechanism and they halt time whenever you eat them, transporting you to the first moment you had them.

Lavender Buttercream Macarons and Elderflower Sherbet

Last weekend involved a storm of cooking to celebrate Bastille Day. In honor of the French revolution, I made two peach galettes and a tray of lavender buttercream macarons. The day after, no longer confined to French recipes, I experimented with a new flavor and texture, but more on that later. 

I won't go into the peach galette recipe since I just recently made them, but the lavender macarons are a brand new concoction, which I felt completely justified in making due to the aforementioned holiday.

I've been wanting to make lavender macarons for a while now, but found lavender difficult to find. When I did see it for sale, it was going for $16.00, which is absurd considering how abundant lavender is. So I waited and waited until one day, walking through Union Square, I came upon a witch festival. One of the witches was selling herbs in little baggies for teas, remedies and cooking. 

I searched through the unalphabetized collection of wares and finally found a bag of food grade lavender for $3.00. The witch (at least she called herself a witch) was aware that most people were using her lavender for cookies, not tea as she advertised it, and giggled when I told her that I planned on using it for that as well. So I returned home, waiting for the right moment to make more macarons. 

Bastille Day presented itself as a ripe opportunity, so with my lavender in tow, I set out to make the cookies. I was walking through Chelsea the other day and came upon a baking goods supply store. It was the size of the factory and everything was extremely cheap. 

In the way back of the store I found egg white powder, which I'd been looking for for a while now since it's supposed to help the structure of the egg whites. I won't go into the details of my macaron recipe, which you can find here, however I always include a few modifications.

I don't add vanilla extract however as she suggests. I did however add 1 tbs of lavender, which I ground up in a mortar and pestle and a few drops of blue food dye (although please use food gel). And this time, armed with egg white strengthening magic, I added 5 grams of the egg white powder and 3 grams cream of tartar.

                                     

When I bit into my first shell, I was delighted to discover that finally...my macarons were not hollow, but rather were chewy and filled with cookie. For the filling, I creamed 1 cup of butter with a hell of a lot of confectioner's sugar and then added a splash of scotch for flavor.

                                             

When the macarons cooled, I spooned a dollop of buttercream onto one shell and then added the second shell. Before we guzzled them down, we lifted our glasses and shouted "Vive la France!"

Because cooking two desserts was simply not enough to satiate my need to bake, I decided upon elderflower sherbet (yes that is how you spell it) to complete the trifecta. I was in Cornwall, England a few weeks ago and while I was there I decided to try elderflower presse, which is a soda made from elderflower and sparkling Cornish spring water. 

                                     

Before ordering it, I asked the waiter what it tasted like and he said to me, "Well, I don't know if this means anything to you, but to me it tastes like Turkish Delight." He clearly did not know that I'm from Brooklyn, where Turkish Delight is ubiquitous, so I nodded my head and said, "Yes please." 

                                     

While it did not taste like Turkish Delight, it did taste like rose water (hence his association), but it was tangier and quite delicious. When I returned to the states I was determined to find elderflower in some form or another because it seemed like a drink that fairies often consume so I set about on my search. 

                                             

It was in Myers of Keswick, an English grocery store on the corner of Horatio and Hudson in the village that I found it in a cupboard waiting for me to find it. Instead of elderflower presse, which like I said, is diluted with sparkling Cornish spring water, I purchased their elderflower cordial, which is similar but not as concentrated as elderflower extract (if that exists). 

                                     

To drink it, you need to dilute it with water or seltzer, but to bake with, you leave it just as it is. So I decided to make sherbet, which is betwixt and between ice cream and sorbet, with less cream than the former and more milk than the latter. 

                                     

I would double this recipe, just so you can have enough, but it lasted us the weekend. First, pour 1 cup sugar, 3 cups milk (I did 2 1/2 cups milk and 1/2 cup heavy cream since I'm a bit of a rebel) and 1/4 cup corn syrup (light or dark). Mix this over a low flame until the ingredients are incorporated. 

                                             

You should then take it off the flame, transfer it to a bowl and add 1/4 cup elderflower cordial. The cordial contains citric acid, so when you mix it with the milk and cream the cordial curdles the dairy, but not to worry, it's just some fun chemistry. 

                                      

Put this in the fridge for a few hours so it cools completely and when it is ready, strain it to get all the curdled goop out and add it to your ice cream maker and voila.  The sherbet immediately transported me back to Cornwall, sipping elderflower presse and watching the waves crash over the beach at Sennen.