This was our second wedding at the restaurant since I started working here, and I think this might be my favorite cake so far. It pairs cute personality with simple elegance. And the best thing: it was easy to make! No fiddling with smoothing buttercream, no garish sugar flowers, no edible paint spraying. Even the pandas, with their matching bowler hats, were surprisingly a cinch to put together. The cake was built in more of a French entremet style, with a vanilla genoise at the base, a layer of sweetened red azuki beans spread on top, then covered with green tea mousse. Once frozen, I was able to unmold and stack the tiers. The naked sides were then shingled with plaques of white chocolate. The exposed borders of mousse got sprinkled with fresh raspberries and simple gum paste leaves.
One of my favorite textures is that of mochi. I first discovered mochi ice cream like many others, at the end of a standard Japanese meal. My preferred flavors were likely to be green tea, red bean, black sesame, or mango. Mochi can be found in many incarnations other than ice cream: a pancake stuffed with different bean pastes; wrapped around a sweet egg yolk; a ball simply rolled in coconut; another ball floating in a warm black sesame soup, etc.
Of all the different ways one can eat mochi, I think I like eating it with ice cream best. The cold gives this rice dough a satisfyingly firm chew, and combined with the creamy chewiness of ice cream, it makes a tasty light workout for the jaw. The thought of (and my past experience with) wrapping balls of ice cream with sheets of mochi just leaves me wanting to go to the store and buying the boxed version. I really can't make them better anyway. My shortcut is the ice cream sandwich. Pipe ice cream into a puck shaped fleximold and freeze until hard. Roll the dough and cut out rounds to fit. Pop out the ice cream and press two rounds of dough firmly around to stick. Done. I've done a black and white sesame version here, and it makes a divine afternoon snack. I'd take this over an ice cream cone anyday.
A blog is a diary, and I have been very bad at keeping it. Hence, this influx of posts to try to catch up on documenting my stuff. This candied yam dish is the last of my winter '11-'12 dishes, and it was just too pretty to let slide away unnoticed. I love the colors against the black plate, and it tastes pretty good too. Components include bruleed pucks of sweet potato gratin, toasted maple mallow, burnt milk ice cream, candied pecans, cranberry sauce and some fresh dill sprigs.
I love bread, making it and eating it. I can't say I've ever really mastered the art, but I think the bread we serve in the restaurant is pretty damn awesome. A good part of a month was spent testing and reworking the recipe to make it just right. I admittedly have no patience for the feeding and maintenance of a starter, so I chose to just always keep back a portion of yesterday's dough and incorporate it into today's. Six months down the line, the bread has taken on a pleasantly sour complexity. Crusty with a moist, chewy interior makes it the perfect carrier for our three homemade butters; not to mention the perfect start to a fab meal!!
Still waiting for that spring fruit!! Until then, I'll have to hold you over with this individual Alaska.. a sacher disk topped with salty praline ice cream, dipped in vanilla meringue and toasted. A little fruity brightness comes in the form of poached pear nuggets topped with a few leaves of thyme. Simple, satisfying, and perfectly winter.
