Perfectibaking 2: Lessons in Lard

One of the beautiful things about a chocolate chip cookie is that it needs no occasion.*  I didn't have one the last time I baked a batch, but it just so happens that I had one this time.  Well, maybe not an occasion, but a reason: I wanted to try baking with lard.

This is not a desire that I'm accustomed to.  In fact, I have never before had any desire to use lard for anything; I'd go as far as to say I'd probably avoid it.  In reality though, lard is just shortening: the original shortening and trans fat free!  Even so, I'm still scrunching up my face right now thinking about it.  Old habits die hard.

The idea with using lard in cookies, as I was recently told by the owner of a wonderful little bakery, is that it makes them lighter and gives a more tender crumb than using butter alone (and from my brief experience I think crispier, though I've read it does the opposite).  Butter contains water where lard and other shortenings do not, which is why lard or shortening is often called for in pie dough to produce a light flaky crust.  Now I'm also wondering if this is why shortening is the fat of choice in the Waldorf-Astoria recipe for red velvet cake, to offset the liquid from all that food colouring...

The recipe is in the Recipe Box.  I used half lard and half butter, as directed by the bakery owner, to retain the creamy butter flavour.  Lard is (fortunately) flavourless.

I combined the dry ingredients to start, then cubed the butter and lard to cream them.

Mmm, creamed lard...

Then I combined the sugars.

I creamed the sugars into the fats before adding the dry ingredients.  In fact, I think I creamed the sugars and fats a little too vigorously, creating air pockets suitable for a cake.  Cakey cookies are good, don't get me wrong, but I'd wondered with the last batch why the cookies poofed up so high, and I think my creaming method may be the answer.  For the next go I'll use a spoon instead of the hand mixer.

I did use a spoon for adding the egg and vanilla, and then for combining with the dry ingredients.  Lastly, the chocolate!

Spoon out the dough and roll it up into balls, you know the drill.

They baked to a nice light brown, and the first round (I only have one baking sheet) puffed up like my last batch.  The second had more spread but I think that was because a.) the dough was softer from sitting out and b.) the sheet was still warm from the first round when I arranged the second on it.

The second round was thinner with more spread.

I let them cool a bit, and then stuffed my face.  As expected they were light and crumbly and I recommend serving with ice cream.

* I feel like I've begun posts like this before...  It may just be my excuse for baking whatever whenever...  Oh well.

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

This last Christmas I was given a slew of baking and cake decorating tools (hooray!), and among them was a rolling pin from the Little Venice Cake Company line of tools.  I'd been itching to try it out, though not to the extent that I wanted to make a buttercream cake that I could layer the test-rolled fondant over (because everyone knows that you can't roll fondant without using it to cover something).  Rolling marzipan was an alternative, but my default with marzipan is to make a princess cake, and I felt like something different.  I decided on a chocolate orange loaf cake with orange mascarpone frosting, covered with marzipan.

In retrospect, it sounds like a bit much.  I meant well.

The cake wasn't bad, but it also wasn't my best.  The sides of the cake itself came out quite tough, although they were not burned.  I didn't feel as though I had it in the oven too low for too long, but that seems to me the most likely explanation.  To top it off (*ba-dum ching!*), I made the frosting too sweet for my own tastes and it may have been better with a layer of marzipan on the top only, rather that covering the entire cake.

So, now that I've sold it!...

The recipe that I found for the cake appears on Better Homes and Gardens, but is duplicated here, with the credit going to Nigella Lawson.  I suspect that Nigella's cookbook is the original source since the recipe calls for golden syrup, which to my knowledge isn't terribly common in American recipes.  It also calls for dark brown sugar, but I used light brown because that's what I had on hand.  My adaptation can be found in the Recipe Box.

I got as many lumps out of the brown sugar as possible first, then beat it into the butter before adding the golden syrup.  After beating in the golden syrup, I added the combined dry ingredients.  I had already zested two clementines and set that aside.

The zest and squeezed orange juice are meant to go into the batter last, though now I'm struggling to remember if I mixed those in before the eggs.  If so, I was probably trying to lessen the amount of time the eggs were beaten in an attempt to stop the cake from sinking in the middle (see below, and note: it didn't work).  The recipe also says the batter may look curdled; I didn't find that, though it didn't look wholly appetizing...

Fortunately it didn't bake ugly.  The blogger writing about Nigella's recipe said to expect a dip in the centre of the cake - that it even appeared that way in the cookbook - so I was unsurprised to find one in my bake.

The mascarpone frosting experienced a similar transformation from yuck to yum.  When I was imagining this cake, all I really wanted to do with the mascarpone was to add some orange zest and juice to it (and it is this version that I've added to the Recipe Box).  Unadulterated mascarpone tastes to me like cream: smooth, heavy, spreadable whipped cream.  I thought adding a flavour to it would be enough, but in checking how other people make this type of frosting I found that either heavy cream or butter is almost always added (depending upon the desired consistency and weight - Martha even adds cream cheese), and so is powdered sugar.  This recipe from The Hairy Bikers was the only exception, but in the face of all the others I thought I'd better add something, and since I hadn't checked the recipes prior to shopping and butter was all I had, butter it was.  I beat the butter first, and added the zest and juice to that before mixing in the mascarpone.  It looked gross.

Combining the beaten butter with the mascarpone drastically improved the frosting's appearance.  Mascarpone is temperamental, however, so be careful not to over-mix; this temperament is why I chose to mix the orange with the butter first.

I spread a thick layer of the frosting over the top of the cake, and then domed it like an elongated princess.  I liked the look; this cake may have been more successful aesthetically than it was taste wise.

Returning to the reason for the cake: the rolling pin.  My sister, who had used one of these rolling pins before, warned me that the marzipan (or fondant, whatever is being rolled) needs to be very level; any bumps or unevenness will result in the pattern transferring to some areas (the higher ones), but not to all of them.  This makes the rolling pins somewhat less convenient than the texture sheets that you can buy to similarly impress images onto fondant/marzipan, but which, since they are flexible, adapt to lumps and bumps.  That being said, ideally the fondant/marzipan will be level anyway and so there shouldn't be too many problems.

I chose to use white marzipan for this experiment, rather than the natural off-white to slightly yellow coloured variety.  As seen in the photo, the pattern is visible, although perhaps not as visible as I would have liked.  I tried to highlight it by brushing it with some white but sparkly lustre dust, but unfortunately this did not have much effect.  I'm not sure if coloured marzipan would have produced better results (I look forward to further experimentation), but coloured lustre dust probably would have been a better highlighter.  As it was, however, the pattern was very pretty and lent a subtle elegance.  I also did not have any trouble with it disappearing when I covered the cake.

If you haven't tried it, there is a lot of smoothing involved in covering a cake.  The bottom edges and corners (if there are any) need to be gently stretched and fanned out by smoothing so that the fondant/marzipan covering the sides of the cake does not become wrinkled or doubled over; all this smoothing and stretching can result in pattern loss, whether it is a depressed pattern, as with the texture sheets, or in relief, as here with the rolling pin.  Happily, this pattern survived the process intact.

With the cake covered, all I did was put a bow on it.

And served it, of course.

A Pie for a Pi [Day]

3.14159...  That's all of Pi (π) that sticks in my brain now (much more of the other kind sticks to my waistline, I imagine).  My dad used to recite the number for far more digits than that, often at the mention of pie, because his is a different type of brain with a similar pun-based humour.  He of course also had one of those shirts; you know the type.

Because today is Pi Day (3.14, get it?), here is a brief post in its honour.  I haven't baked an apple pie out of pie numbers like this clever fellow, but if you do please don't soak your apples in 7Up.  Apples are naturally sweet, sugar is often added to pie anyway, and 7Up, or indeed any soda, serve the same purpose (lowering the Ph of the apples to slow their reaction to oxygen) that lemon juice does, only less effectively and with the addition of unnecessary sugar.  If you wish to cut the tartness of the lemon try using soda water, which at least does not have the added sugar (or shouldn't anyway, though I've found myself accidentally drinking sweet water a few times...).  For more fun with science and apples, visit education.com.

I've remarked before, however, that I like the colour of browned apples in a pie, and I've read that some chefs believe brown apples give a pie more flavour, though unfortunately I've since lost that reference.  It's a good enough excuse to bake two pies though, one with browned apples and one with lemony apples, isn't it?  All in the name of science.

The apple pie recipe I initially used was one of Martha's, though as I wrote in my previous post on pie, I adapted it.  I left out the lemon zest, which may have been a nice touch, and tossed in a bit of lime juice instead of lemon, because that's what I had.  On subsequent occasions I omitted the acid entirely in favour of increased browning and less acidic apples.  I also began leaving out the butter in the filling, because my mom says she never adds any; I didn't notice any difference in doing so, and hey, less fat!  I also added cranberries when they started appearing in the market, another mom tip, and yummmmmm.  Finally, I began adding some corn starch (aka corn flour) to soak up some of the extra juices (mom says to use tapioca, which sounds like a better alternative, but I didn't have any), and put a thin layer of butter on top of the bottom crust before pouring the filling into it.  This butter layer creates a grease barrier between the juicy filling and the crust, allowing the crust to bake through without getting soggy.  Placing the pie dish directly on the bottom of the oven for the last few minutes of baking doesn't hurt either; no soggy bottoms here.

As regards the top of the pie, friend sent me this link to the innovative pie crust techniques of the 50's (funnily enough it doesn't include the numbers game from our Instructables friend).  I made a stab at number one.  It didn't pan out...

For my next trick, with the leftovers of pie number one, I made a cartoonishly tall pie: four and twenty blackbirds meets apple and cranberry.

It may not have been fit for a king, but it was certainly fit for me.

Happy Pi[e] Day!