Anthony Lombardi

This is called Queen of Sheba. Pretty fancy name huh? Well it deserves it! I’ve made this chocolate torte quite a few times now, and every time I’m reminded of how good it is. If you’re looking for a super-chocolaty cake with a very unique texture, this is it.
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This was a spur-of-the-moment idea I had, and it turned out very delicious. I toasted croissant halves (which you may not need to do if they’re fresh and crispy still), let them cool a bit, and then topped them with pastry cream lightened with whipped cream, fresh raspberries, and powdered sugar. I’m sure other fresh berries could be used as well, but I love the tartness of raspberries in this.

Incidentally, pastry cream is a nice thing to have on hand as well as a good way to use up extra whole milk. I normally don’t drink whole milk but I do use it in recipes sometimes. When I have enough of it left over, I usually make pastry cream and freeze it. The recipe I use is from the Baker’s Dozen Cookbook. Allrecipes also has a recipe, but it has twice the milk, twice the egg yolks, and butter. Other than that it’s the same, except for using a real vanilla bean rather than extract. Personally I like a perfectly smooth pastry cream, so I prefer the extract.

This is another use of the Danish dough that I used to make the Danish Twists recently. The recipe is in the good but out-of-print book “The Best Bread Ever“. I made the variation with raspberry jam and cream cheese. Personally I think the cream cheese isn’t really needed. I’d add more raspberry jam instead if I make it again. As with the Danish Twists, the dough turned out perfectly flaky and crisp. It tastes best the first day, but careful toasting in a toaster oven (speaking from experience, flaky dough like this can burn pretty quickly) makes it almost like just baked.

I’ve been wondering what other fillings might taste good. Apple, cherry, and lemon – basically anything you’d put in a pie – would probably all be excellent fillings. It would be a nice alternative to pies too, as the crust to filling ratio is much higher. And that’s exactly what you want when you have such a yummy crust!

One of the stranger things I’ve made, but very tasty too. This is tangerine juice, sugar, citric acid, methylcellulose, and xanthum gum, all blended together until it increases in volume 8 times. Then it’s baked in a 150 degree oven for 9-10 hours. The recipe is in Johnny Iuzzini’s book Dessert Fourplay. It’s actually just a component of one of his desserts, but it’s pretty nice as a light snack too.

Methylcellulose has the strange property of gelling when heated to a certain temperature, which helps keep the shape of these sticks when they’re baked.

My beautiful girlfriend Lisa and I are now engaged! As you can see in the picture below, I made a pretty crazy ice cream cake for her and wrote the proposal on top in funny spelling, with the ring in the middle. We jokingly talk like that sometimes. She laughed out loud when she saw it.

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Today, for the first time, I made some homemade bagels. Both Lisa and I agree they’re the best we’ve ever had! We ate them with the usual topping: cream cheese. Part of the reason they were so good may have been simply that they were fresh. The crust was nice and crisp and the crumb had the perfect spongy-chewy texture unique to bagels. I think I’ll be making these again sometime. Perhaps I’ll add some interesting toppings like sesame seed.
Continue reading Homemade Bagels

I’ve made quite a few Christmas treats this holiday season. Here’s some pictures of some of them.

This is one of my family’s favorite Christmas cookies.  They’re called Wandering Jews but none of us quite know why.  We also don’t know where our grandma got the recipe.   This is one of those cookies that only gets better while it sits.  If you eat it right after baking the inside of the cookie is on the dry side, but if you wait a week or two (which is right about now) it absorbs moisture from the icing and ends up the perfect texture.

These are Rum Truffles. The recipe was from a book I just got for Christmas called Chocolate Epiphany, by Francois Payard. I noticed reading the recipe that he uses a very high chocolate to cream ratio for a non-molded chocolate. It’s 1:1. Usually for this kind of classic truffle, the ratio is much more like 2:1, but I decided to try out the recipe anyway.

The filling ended up leaking out a bit just after dipping, but I can’t blame the recipe completely since I didn’t follow it verbatim. I noticed the rum flavor wasn’t quite as pronounced as I wanted it, so before piping I stirred in 1/4 teaspoon of rum extract. With ganache, you can’t just stir it whenever you feel like though. It changes the resulting texture quite a bit, particularly when it’s been cooled to room temperature. Too much stirring results in a short texture, which is the opposite of creamy and smooth. My little deviation made the ganache so stiff that it was almost impossible to pipe out into mounds. It only really started moving after my hands warmed it through the freezer bag I used as a piping bag.

Luckily the finished texture ended up smooth and creamy and not stiff at all. If I did it again though, I think I’ll reduce the cream a bit just to be safe.

This is called a Danish Twist. The dough is a laminated dough, meaning butter is folded in several times in order to make it flaky when baked. Each type of fold is called a turn. The recipe called for one single turn (which makes 3 layers) and three double turns (which each make 4 layers) resulting in 3*4*4*4 or 192 layers of butter! I’ve made these a couple years ago as gifts, but this year they turned out flakier. I let them rise quite a bit longer than I did the first time I made them, and it seems to have made all the difference. I also turned down the oven temperature because I remember them browning quite fast the first time I made them.

I recently discovered a book called “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day”. It really does work and produces bread just as good as any other I’ve made using more labor-intensive methods. I highly recommend it. This version is the base recipe with 1/4 of the flour replaced with whole wheat.

Ever read a recipe that calls for a certain percentage of chocolate that you don’t have? Well here’s a calculator that tells you how to substitute a chocolate of a different percentage.

ChocolateCalculator

According to Alice Medrich’s book Bittersweet, the most important thing to keep constant when substituting one percentage chocolate for another is the amount of cocoa solids in the recipe, so that’s exactly what this calculator does. The formula is based on a curve-fit I did on the cocoa solid percentages as published in the book Bittersweet.

I’ve wanted to try making pop tarts for a while now, and I finally did after finding this blog about it: Chez Pim. My version is puff pastry (instead of pie pastry) wrapped around 2 squares of Ghirardelli chocolate.  I like the airy flakiness of puff pastry.  It works quite well with the chocolate because there’s not much liquid at all in chocolate, which means the puff pastry stays quite crisp throughout.

Strangely enough, these are best at room temperature, NOT fresh from the oven. There’s something about the chocolate that makes it taste way more chocolaty after it’s cooled. Yum!