When my husband goes into the office during the week, I usually eat lunch alone. I have a hard time working up the motivation to cook a whole meal just for myself, so sometimes I end up having a “snack” like chips and hummus until–oops–no need for lunch! Stewart will come home from work and ask if I made anything fun, and it’s then when I realize that toast, or chips, or whatever I had filled myself up with that day probably wasn’t the best idea.
Therefore I’m always trying to come up with recipes that are a little more substantial, but are easy to make and consist of ingredients we always have laying around. Here’s what I decided to work with today:
Fettuccini, lemon, sundried tomatoes, red pepper flakes, and broccoli. For the past couple of days I’ve had the idea of this light, fresh, flavorful pasta floating around in my head. The only ingredients used in the recipe that aren’t pictured here are oil, salt, and black pepper. I love this dish because you can taste everything and it all works really well together. The tanginess of the lemon, the sweetness of the tomatoes, the crisp broccoli, the spicy peppper… it’s really yummy. And hey, any dish that involves broccoli is pretty much an automatic winner in my house.
This dish is written for one, but it should be really easy to scale up if you’re cooking for more. We usually buy whole stalks of broccoli instead of just the crowns because we enjoy eating the stems as much as the florets. While this recipe is for only florets, feel free to add the diced stalk in as well. Just cut 1-2″ off the bottom (the tough, woody part) and you should be good to go. You can peel the stem if you want it even more tender.
The key to this dish is balancing the salt, lemon juice, and oil. You want enough oil to distribute the flavors over the pasta, but not so much it’s greasy. There shouldn’t be any oil pooling in the bottom of the pan or on your plate - you want just enough to coat the pasta and no more. The salt and the lemon juice should even each other out; you should taste both without either being overwhelming. Start with 1 tsp of the lemon juice and then add the salt to taste. You should then have a better idea then if you need more of either.
Spicy Lemon Pepper Pasta with Broccoli
Serves one
Dried Fettucini, enough for one
2 tsp Olive Oil, to start
1 1/2 Cups Fresh Broccoli Florets
1/4 Cup Sliced Sundried Tomatoes (oil packed)
1/2 tsp Hot Red Pepper Flakes
1 tsp Fresh Lemon Juice, or more to taste
1-2 Pinches Kosher Salt, or to taste
Black Pepper, to taste
Lemon Zest, for garnish, optional
While the pasta is cooking in well-salted water, chop the broccoli florets in to small pieces (about the size of a nickel). Slice the sundried tomatoes. When pasta is nearly finished cooking, heat a wok over medium-high heat until it’s quite hot. Add oil and broccoli and toss to coat, adding more oil a little at a time if needed. After 1-2 minutes, add tomatoes and pepper flakes.
Let cook undisturbed for another two minutes, then toss. Repeat this process until broccoli and tomatoes have some color on them, and the broccoli is bright green and becoming tender. Drain pasta very well and add to the wok, adding just enough oil to coat the pasta (if needed). Add lemon juice and salt and taste, adjusting if necessary. Plate and grind fresh black pepper over the top, adding lemon zest if desired. Serve immediately.
This also makes a nice room-temperature pasta salad, so it’d be great for picnics, work lunches, or potlucks.
January 25th, 2008
The short version of this post: I don’t have a perfect vegan madeleine recipe, yet. But if you want to experiment for yourself, these notes might be helpful. For those of you who are interested, here’s the long version:
In my last post I talked about petits fours, specifically petits fours glacés–meaning iced. I mentioned how the term petit four can refer to many kinds of small sweets. As soon as my blood sugar returned to normal human levels, I began working on petits fours secs, specifically madeleines.
Even if you’ve forgotten the French you learned in highschool (goodness knows I have), you’re probably already familar with the word sec, as in triple sec. The world sec is often used to describe a lack of sweetness in an alcoholic beverage, but in the case of triple sec it means that the alcohol has been distilled three times, i.e. triple dry. What does this have to do with petits fours? Nothing, really. Just remember that sec means “dry.”
A common petit four sec is a madeleine - a lemony shell-shaped confection that hovers somewhere between cookies, cakes, and shortbreads. There is much discussion about what the original madeleines, the ones eaten and written about by Proust, were really like. Softy and crumby? Dry and sconelike? It seems that most people seem to prize the following characteristics of madeleines, so these are my goals for my final version:
1. Crispy and browned around the edges
2. Softish in the middle
3. Well defined, smooth shell ridges on one side
4. A nice “hump” on the other side
5. Slightly sweet and lemony, with buttery undertones
All recipes I’ve found seem to call for the liberal use of eggs, which are beaten with sugar to the “ribbon stage” before completing the batter. Obviously eggs are out of the question, so I’m experimenting with egg replacers and chemical leavening, but we’ll get into that in a minute.
The first thing I do when trying to create a vegan recipe is study as many non-vegan recipes on the web as I can. After getting a feel for the standard recipes in use, I usually pick the recipe that seems to be the easiest to veganize and substitute non-vegan ingredients with the vegan versions. Then I take stock of the results and change what needs to be changed, if anything.
For the madeleines, I decided to veganize a recipe I found on about.com. It only called for two eggs (as opposed the three or four that some other recipes used), and it only made 12 - I wouldn’t be stuck with three dozen if they didn’t turn out.
Madeleines - Trial One (Unphotographed)
1 1/4 cup flour (I used Pastry Flour)
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs Ener-G Eggs
1/2 cup icing sugar
1 tbs lemon or orange juice
6 tbs butter Earth Balance Margarine, melted
Grated rind of lemon or orange
Melt margarine and let cool. Mix dry ingredients together. Beat ener-g eggs and sugar together until frothy. Add juice and zest to the ener-g mixture. Alternately beat in dry ingredients and melted earth balance until all combined. Grease and flour a madeleine pan and fill each shell 2/3 full with batter. Bake at 375º until crisp and brown around the edges (15-20 minutes).
#1 Results: Too scone-like, a little ugly, tastes okay
1. They were crispy and browned
2. They were a little dry in the middle, but not bad
3. The ridges were undefined because of poor pan flouring (see photo)
4. No hump
5. Correct sweetness and buttery undertones (for my taste)
If you put to much oil on your pan, the flour sticks too well and actually fills in the ridges a little, making for lame looking madeleines. This is how the pan will look after it’s been properly floured. Use a cooking spray to oil your pan, and hold the pan a good two feet away from the nozzle. You want an even, light coating of oil which will ensure an even, light coating of flour. Like so:
Madeleines - Trial Two
I wanted to see if I could increase the moisture content, so I tried out a modified version of a lemon muffin recipe of mine. I increased the heat to 400º help brown the edges and create a peaked hump.
1 Cup All Purpose Flour
2 Tbs Sugar
1 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1 Pinch Salt
1/2 Cup Soy Milk
1 Tbs Lemon Juice and Zest from the lemon
3 Tbs Vegetable Oil
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
Whisk dry ingredients together. Whisk soy milk, juice, zest, oil and extract together until thickened. Fold the wet ingredients into the dry. Bake in an oiled and floured madeleine pan for 15 minutes. Remove and let cool on a rack shell-side up.
#2 Results: Total disaster
1. They didn’t brown
2. Too soft in the middle
3. No ridges, batter way too thick and bubbly
4. No hump
5. Not sweet enough
These were a disaster. It seemed I was better off with the first recipe. The batter was way too thick, creating a lot of textural and aesthetic problems. I decided to thin out the batter used above by adding 1/4 cup of water just to see what would happen:
Madeleines - Trial Three
Same recipes as #2 but with 1/4 cup added water.
You can see trial #2 madeleines on the left, and #3 on the right. I wanted to show you how a simple thing like batter consistency can have a HUGE effect of the final result. The third batch certainly looked better, by about a hundred billion times. But how did they stack up?
#3 Results: Pretty, but that’s about it.
1. Beautifully browned
2. Texture all wrong, too much like cupcakes
3. Beautiful Ridges
4. Humps!
5. Not sweet enough
So after all that, I’m still searching for the perfect madeleines. It wasn’t until after my third try that I realized I might have had the answer all along in my petits fours glacés - the cake had these beautifully crispy and caramelized edges. If I can combine those edges with a less cake-like texture I’ll be in business. I’ll let you know the final recipe, if I ever find it…..
January 18th, 2008
If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for a while, you know that I like all things miniature. Especially desserts. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to make petits fours. They’re the perfect mini dessert; a tiny layer cake, dipped in poured fondant and individually decorated. Bite sized individual cakes? Yes, please. Who on earth could say no to these?
Sometimes people use the term petit four generally. They might be referring to any small dessert, even a simple piece of chocolate. The majority of the time, however, they are referring to these fancy miniature iced cakes. They’re typically cube-shaped, though you’ll sometimes see diamonds, rectangles, and cylinders. The iced versions are technically called petits fours glacés, but rarely to people get so specific.
You can just dip a cube of cake into icing and call it a day (or rather a petit four), but the most traditional versions are layered with jam, soaked with liquor syrup, dipped in poured fondant and decorated. Pain in the ass? Yes. Worth it? Hell yes.
Let’s talk for a minute about the components of this type of petit four. The cake is typically a génoise, which is a French cake named after a city in Italy. Génoise cakes traditionally do not include any chemical leavening all, but instead trap air in the batter by vigorous beating before baking. In normal génoise recipes, eggs help to keep the air in the batter. In the oven, the heated air expands and causes the cake to rise. This recipe contains no eggs, however, so chemical leavening is used. I used Bryanna Clark Grogan’s recipe, but any fairly dense cake recipe (like a pound cake) will work for this. A tight crumb will make your life easier when slicing the petits fours. Make sure to visit Bryanna’s page, though; she has wonderful tips on making fancy vegan cakes, a nice buttercream recipe, and lots of photos.
I iced my petits fours with poured fondant. There are two types of fondant, rolled and poured. Before I started researching for this, I only knew of rolled fondant, which is the really neat sugar-dough stuff that is often used to decorate wedding cakes. Poured fondant is similar to rolled, but instead of rolling it out to use it, you pour it while it’s in a liquified state. Makes sense to me. It’s easy to make, but it does require a candy thermometer. You need to boil sugar, corn syrup and water until the soft ball stage, but we’ll get to that later.
Once you have the cake and the fondant figured out, give yourself a break and buy a jam, any jam, for the filling. Sure, you can pick berries and make your own filling, but store-bought jam works beautifully in this and saves you a step or five. You can also soak the cake with a liquor syrup if desired. I never do this for my cakes, but if you want to, use a ration of 1:1:1 water, sugar, liquor. In a saucepan, dissolve sugar completely in the water. Remove from heat, add liquor, and allow to cool.
Now you’ll also need a few tools. A candy thermometer ($10 for a standard one, $30 for an electric one that has programs and alarms and such), a jelly roll pan (aka cookie sheet with sides), a food processor, a large serrated knife, parchment paper, a rolling pin, and a cooling rack.
Right. Are you ready?
Petits Fours
Makes 30 1 1/2″ Pieces
1 Cake recipe, below
1 Fondant Recipe, below
1 1/2 Cups Jam, warmed (raspberry is nice!)
1/2 Cup Marzipan
Powdered Sugar, for rolling out marzipan
Melted Chocolate, for decoration, optional
Bryanna Clark Grogan’s Génoise
Makes 5 Cups of Batter
2 1/2 Cups plus 2 T. pastry or cake flour
1 1/2 Cups Granulated Sugar
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
3/4 tsp Salt
1/4 Cup plus 2 Tbs Earth Balance
2 Tbs Fresh Lemon Juice and Zest of 1 whole Lemon
1 Cup Water
3/4 Cup Soy or Rice Milk
1 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 tsp Pure Lemon Extract
Preheat oven to 350º F.
Brush a Jelly Roll Pan (half sheet size, 12 x 17 x 1″) with oil. Use two sheets of parchment paper to cover the bottom, overlapping each long edge of the pan. This will allow you to lift the entire cake out of the pan without breaking it. The oil helps the parchment stick to the pan, so it doesn’t slip while pouring in the batter.
Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Add Earth Balance, water, and lemon juice and beat well (with an electric mixer if available) for about a minute. Add the remaining ingredients and beat again. Pour the batter into the lined jelly roll pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, until the edges are golden brown and the top is lightly browned, and the center springs back to your touch. Allow to cool in pan until just warm.
Gripping the parchment in the center on either side, gently lift the cake out of the pan and place it on a large cutting surface. It should look like this:
With a serrated knife, cut off all the caramelized edges (eat them!), and quarter the cake. Below is a photo of one of the four trimmed quarters:
Alright, here’s the first tricky part. With a large serrated knife, cut each quarter in half horizontally. You can take as much time as you need. Cut a little bit at a time, making sure your knife is being held level. Ideally you want two even layers.
Carefully separate the layers. You should now have this:
Spread the warmed jam on one of the sliced cake quarters. You don’t need a ton of jam, just enough to color the cake. You should still be able to see the cake through the jam.
Begin stacking, alternating cake and jam, until you have four layers of cake. You should have enough cake to make two stacks, each stack containing four layers of cake and three layers of jam. Trim the edges if needed.
Divide the marzipan in half. Knead it until it softens, then roll each chunk out separately using powdered sugar to prevent it from sticking.
Roll it out until you get a thin, even sheet that is larger in all directions than your layered cake.
Brush one side of the marzipan with water to make it sticky, then place it on top of your cake, sticky-side down. Trim the edges off with scissors. Repeat for the second rectangle of cake.
The cake is now ready to be refrigerated. It should be approximately 1 1/2 inches high. Cover it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours or overnight; this helps the jam set up and will help the cake stay together when you cut it into petit fours.
Now the cake has been refrigerated overnight!
Using a ruler, score the marzipan with 1 1/2 inch grid as a cutting guideline. Each rectangle of cake should have 15 full squares, and a little extra that you can cut off and eat. Here’s the scored, trimmed cake:
Keeping your knife as straight as possible, use long, sawing strokes to cut the cubes. Cover with plastic wrap to prevent the cake from drying out.
Prepare your fondant:
Helen Fletcher’s Poured Fondant
2 1/2 Cups Sugar
1/2 Cup Water
1/4 Cup Corn Syrup
Written directions copy and pasted directly:
Heat sugar, water and corn syrup to the soft-ball stage (238°F; 114°C). Pour into the food processor fitted with the steel blade. Wash the candy thermometer well and reinsert into the syrup. Let the syrup cool undisturbed in the workbowl to 140°F (60°C), about 30 minutes. Remove the thermometer.
Add any coloring or flavoring (vanilla, almond extract, etc.) and process 2 to 3 minutes, until the syrup completely converts from a glassy syrup to an opaque paste. When thoroughly cooled, store sealed at room temperature for 24 hours. Use or refrigerate for later use. [I just want to add: It will harden once completely cooled, simply microwave to liquify. It is warm enough to use for the petits fours immediately after processing.]
Place your petits fours on a cooling rack and pour your fondant into a small bowl. You’re ready to ice them!
In my opinion, icing is the hardest part. You need to keep your fondant warm and melty, and you’ll notice that it starts to set up fast. Give it a stir with a spoon before you dip each piece, as this will break any skin that has formed on top of the fondant. If it gets too thick (thinner is better), pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds and try again.
Start with the ugly ones, that way if you mess up on the first few you won’t be as sad. Hold each cube so your forefinger is on the top of the cake (touching the marzipan) and your thumb is on the bottom. Dip all four sides.
Place the dipped petit four on the rack. Use a spoon to ice the top.
Let the petits fours set. You may need the help of a sharp knife to remove them from the rack once the fondant is hardened. I drizzled some melted chocolate over them to decorate, but you can decorate them anyway you want. Piped buttercream, molded marzipan, whatever makes you happy.
January 8th, 2008
