A is for Almond, B is for Butter...

I have an excess of almond extract (I couldn't help myself when an 8oz bottle of the good stuff appeared on sale), so expect it to be included in many recipes in future.  Also almond is delicious.  So is brown(ed) butter, which brings me to Brown Butter and Almond Cookies.

I adapted a simple sugar cookie recipe, adding the brown butter and almond and also turning them into a slice-and-bake variety because I wanted the edges of the cookies to be rolled in ground almond.  I consulted this slice-and-bake recipe for the thickness of the sliced cookies and the temperature, although it might also have behooved me to use icing sugar as it suggests instead of caster sugar.  It's an excuse for another go anyway!

The recipe is in the Recipe Box.  Start by browning the butter over medium heat, stirring continuously once melted to keep it from burning.  Keep stirring the butter over heat until it is brown and emitting a nutty aroma.  I took the butter off the heat when it smelled right to me, but once it was out of the pan I thought I should have left it longer, the butter could have been browner.

I stuck it in the freezer instead of in the refrigerator because I was in a hurry (no time to wait when cookies are at stake!), but I left it a little too long - the butter froze.

I let it thaw, but the butter was still quite cold when I creamed it with the sugar.  It's probably better to wait for the butter to be at room temperature before creaming it, but as you might have noticed, I have issues with patience...  While waiting for the brown butter to set - or waiting for it to defrost as the case may be - mix the dry ingredients and set them aside.  When the butter is set, cream it with the sugar, beat in the egg and extracts, and stir in the dry ingredients.  Roll the dough into logs, and then firm them up by rolling them tightly in parchment paper or wax paper.

Once all the dough is rolled, refrigerate it for a couple hours, or freeze it for 20-40 or so minutes (don't freeze it solid, unless you want to save it for use another day).  When the logs are ready, take them out and roll them through ground almonds.

After the logs have been coated in ground almonds, slice off cookies about 1/3" thick.

Bake at 350F (180C) for about 8 minutes.  I baked my first batch for longer, until they were a golden brown, and they came out very crunchy; not a bad crunchy, a bit like a biscotti, but still, you'd not want to bite into them if you had dentures...

If at first you don't succeed, bake some more!

'A Hedgehog loaded with apples...'

You may have heard of the 'office feeder'.  You may have met one of these sugar-loving creatures, or in fact, you (yes - you!) may even be the office feeder.  I myself am a department feeder.

Fortunately mine is a department that knows how to eat, and there were weekly cakes during term time well before I arrived.  Truthfully, I didn't bake that much before I started in the department.  Sure, I decorated cakes, but given that that was my day job it probably would have been an issue if I hadn't.  No, my current baking habits were born from a wish to keep decorating, were driven by a departmental need for cake and flourished as a tool of my procrastination.

Obviously the procrastiblog comes out of that same toolbox, but I digress.

With a department so supportive of cake, I wanted to make one representative of it for our latest potluck.  (That's right: I am not the only feeder).  I've done this before, but it's been awhile.  And this time, I had hedgehogs.  Normal people probably don't look at hedgehogs and think about Myrddin (or Merlin) of Welsh legend, but I can't help myself.  Specifically I think of Geoffrey of Monmouth's portrayal of his prophecies, and even more specifically, of this:

'A Hedgehog loaded with apples shall re-build the town and, attracted by the smell of these apples, birds will flock there from many different forests.  The Hedgehog shall add a huge palace and then wall it round with six hundred towers... The Hedgehog will hide its apples inside Winchester and will construct hidden passages under the earth.'  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), pp. 178-9.

It's not for me to put myself into the mind of the medieval author... well, not into Geoffrey's mind anyway, but the man must have had a pretty amazing imagination.  That, or someone behind some of his source certainly did.  Now tell me, will you ever look at a hedgehog again without thinking of him having apples on his back?  Good, I didn't think so.

Needless to say, my cake for the department was going to be decorated with apple-bearing hedgehogs.  In order to have a cake bearing hedgehogs bearing apples though, I had to make the cake.

For my layers, I wanted browned butter cake.  I always knew I liked butter, but I never knew that I could improve it until my sundaynighttreats friend let me in on the little secret of browning.

When you cook butter over a low heat for long enough (the recipe said 9 minutes total - it took me significantly longer), it begins to turn brown and to let off a delightfully nutty aroma.  It's that aroma that really lets you know that the brown or browned butter, or beurre noisette, is ready.  As I said, my browned butter was destined (not to push the prophecy line or anything...) for cake, but could be used for any number of things, including as a spread on some toast with cinnamon and sugar...

Moving on, I used this recipe for brown-butter cake from Seattle chef Tom Douglas, omitting his chocolate mousse.  Instead, I wanted to make a chocolate hazelnut mousse because what is browned butter to us is hazelnut butter to the French, and I wanted to make that flavour the star of the show.  Or rather, best supporting actress to the hedgehogs.  I used this recipe, found on The Food Network.  Please note, this is not a proper mousse, which often calls for gelatin, but rather a sort of nutella and mascarpone cheese frosting lightened with whipped cream.

Both recipes are pretty straightforward.  The most experimental step for me was definitely the browned butter, which, once set (I left it in the refrigerator over night), didn't look that brown...

... until I really dumped it over and found the browned bits.

Beaten, it essentially looks like butter with little nut-coloured granules.

When I say the butter was the most experimental part of this recipe, that's not strictly true.  I was also experimenting with a new set of pans.  To bake layer cakes, I had been using the same budget-brand set of sandwich tins for the last two years, and I never was able to get a level cake from them.  I was losing cake from having to level not only the top, but also the sides as the pans themselves were angled.  While this meant more cake scrapes for me to eat (or to make cake pops if I was feeling ambitious), it did mean that the finished product would come out rather small or flat.  Therefore, when I saw that a local store had some nice tins in, I broke down and bought a pair.

My new cake tins are heavy; one is probably twice the weight of both of my old tins combined.  That's what you want, weight to absorb heat so the sides don't bake too quickly or burn.  A darker metal also helps with this.  These tins, however, also have a light removable bottom.  I was somewhat leery about that at first, but after taking them home I found this helpful cake pan review from Cook's Illustrated.  They say that they found that lighter pans produce a more level cake, and I suspect that that is why my pans have light bottoms, yet retain the nice heavy dark sides.  They certainly did bake a nice tall, level cake!

Before

After

As for the mousse, the most important things to remember are not to over beat the mascarpone, which will look a bit grainy when mixed with the nutella:

And not to flatten the whipped cream when you put the two together.

Just about at soft peak.

The mousse looks a bit like pudding here, but it's fluffier than that:

I froze the cake layers ahead of time, so I split them (always easier and less crumby to do when the cake is cold or partly frozen) while the mousse was setting up in the refrigerator.  Then I layered the cake with the better part of the mousse, and frosted the outside with the rest of it.  Finally, I left the whole thing to freeze overnight so I could pour it with ganache in the morning.

I let the ganache set for a minute or two, and then smoothed the sides with an offset spatula.  Since I'd already had a pretty smooth layer of mousse underneath they didn't need too much work.

Last but not least, I topped the cake with my apple-topped hedgehogs.  I'd made the apples out of fondant a couple days ahead, which, come to think of it, was another experiment... you clearly cannot trust a word I say.

The apples were an experiment because I'd never used tylose powder before.  It's a powder that is meant to firm up or dry the fondant more quickly than simply leaving it to sit out, and since I bought some at the Cake and Bake Show I decided to give it a go.  That is why I'm not sure if it was the powder that caused the fondant to reject the liquid dye, or I just had so much of it in a tiny amount of fondant that it couldn't all be absorbed, but I wound up with some beautifully glossy miniature apples that couldn't be touched they were so sticky.  It was quite the balancing act with toothpicks to get them onto the hedgehogs, but at least they didn't need anything else to make them adhere!

With that finished, I plunked them down in a circle on the cake, giving them the appearance of a little troop marching endlessly on...

... directly to the potluck.

I'm sorry, this was a long post, but just one more thing...

In honour of National Cake Week next week (I know, I didn't know there was one either - shouldn't this sort of thing be government sponsored?), and because I would love a shiny new procrastibaking-enabling mixer, would you please head over to the National Cake Week Competition (find the full list of entries here) and vote for my hedgehog cake?  It only takes two clicks, once on the link and once to vote!  Thank you!