Baking for Heartbreak

Bringing a real deal apple pie to fruition

As I look back through these posts, I see a common theme of laughing and snickering my way through the things that go right (and sometimes wrong) on this journey known as the joy of cooking.

Here on this blog, I've talked about knife cuts and bad burns in pastry school. Held my tongue when I wanted to say something crushing. Praised good books you'd find most helpful. I've poked fun at myself and even revealed the flour up and down my arms when making croissants. If there was a chance for a pun or a self-made putdown, I frosted it onto the page, all for the purpose of smiling through the messes I make.

When my friend Jeanne Ambrose came out with a cookbook called "Heartbreak Recovery Kitchen," I embraced it for the cleverness of her approach. She weaves good vinaigrette with thoughtful vignettes from a talented circle of writers who talk about life's hurts, how to heal with food and the way to move forward. I thought of the book in terms of heartbreaks on a small scale - like losing your job, your friend, your home. It even makes a good Valentine's Day book; it's not a volume to open wide and commence weeping.

I didn't expect to email her in the middle of the night to say "emergency, which Heartbreak Recovery recipe is good for a family experiencing the loss of a child?" This hurt is so deep that the only way to breathe through it is to think about recipes I can leave on the family's doorstep. I've turned to food because it gives me something to offer when words and sentiments fall terribly short.

Homemade bread says "I care," as does a hearty soup that freezes well. I like a pie like the one shown above because the power of apple pie is long established. After all these years of flippancy in the food world, it seems incredible I'm just now thinking about what foods best express sorrow.

What, after all, is the essence of comfort food?

Jeanne suggests I make a big batch of lemon chicken lasagna. 

Swannee how I love ya

Pate a choux swan with pastry cream and whipped cream

I never know when an idea out of left field will bounce home. Quite often I have trouble fielding it when it does.

I didn't plan on making a swan for our friends Jay and Becky Dickman, Denver-based but in town to visit family. Jay is a longtime professional photographer, Nat Geo shooter and Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the war in El Salvador. You don't just drop a pastry cream swan on a guy like that.

It's silly, gooey and childish, but I felt like I wanted this fowl thing. I know Jay is a Teuscher chocolates man and figured I had him covered with handmade truffles, so why not play with choux paste, too?

It was my first attempt. I served it anyway.

To my surprise, Jay hoisted a camera and took a snap (not the one here by Write House shooter John H. Ostdick). In that delicious moment, he flipped the tables on me and gave me the treat, not the other way around. It made me smile. My heart was glad.

Now that I look at this swan, I see something else. This could be the body of a peacock that needs only a piped gaufrette tail to be magnificent, a few embellishments here and there, macaron wings or something, I'm not sure.

Ideas roll in when you least expect them and usually when you're desperate to focus on the more immediate, like how to fix a broken white chocolate ganache in front of a classroom of paying customers. Why do ideas elude us when we want them most, or more to the point, why do they turn us into makers of silly swans?

Oh, but when those ideas do come, how sweet the taste, how lucky I feel when the Jays of the world capture the moment.

It's picture perfect.

Chocolate you fresh devil

Sweet, it's time to talk about chocolate.

Here's the book I want for Valentine's Day: The Art of the Chocolatier.

Here's why. The day came to teach a class on how to make truffles. The concept is not hard. Make a filling of ganache (chocolate and cream, flavorings), pipe it into spheres and allow to set. Temper some couverture chocolate, dunk said spheres. Decorate.

Not difficult. And yet. If your ganache is out of ratio, with too much or too little cream, you'll get off on the wrong foot and leave trails of despair, nay, chocolate streaks, all around you and on the floor, perhaps even the walls.

If the ganache won't set, not even in the freezer, you've got to grab the calculator and do the math. Are you using dark chocolate? Ratio is 2 to 1 - two parts chocolate to 1 part cream, and if you're adding liqueur and butter, make allowances. If it's white chocolate, better use 2 and 1/2 parts chocolate to 1 part cream. White doesn't have the cocoa solids and the same amount of cocoa butter that dark has. Trust me about this.

Why should you? I've got the kitchen floor with the evidence to back up my claims that you must do your math. The Art of the Chocolatier is clear on the subject.

Chocolatier does a marvelous job of presenting the right steps for chocolate work. It's loaded with recipes and even more thrilling, guidance on how to do chocolate sculptures. If you go down this chocolate path, that could be where you end up, amazing and amusing your friends with impressive chocolate designs that defy gravity.

I heard about the chocolate book because one of the gifted and talented kitchen assistants where I teach loaned me her copy. She knew me to be the kind of pastry chef who studies the problem from multiple angels. Yes I said "angels," not angles, but that applies, too. Angels step in when you are most perplexed and hand you something good.

Thanks to her and the book, we made it through class with only one broken emulsion (the white chocolate, wouldn't you know?) and 2 batches of leftover ganache, hidden in the fridge.

A class attendee asked me which is harder, making truffles or macarons. The better question is, which is messier!

The answer? Chocolate, that fresh devil.

French Pain Noir

Three little slices are all that's left of my journey to discover what Pain Noir - black bread - looks like. In one evening by the fire, we mopped up with this richly flavorful beauty of French origin. Yes, we nearly devoured an entire loaf in one sitting - what you see are remains of the day.

Notice, the bread is not black but it's certainly dark, and why not, since there's molasses and bittersweet chocolate in the dough. Mashed potatoes, too. Bernard Clayton, the master baker (now deceased) who shared the recipe in his "The New Complete Book of Breads" volume, suggests that it goes well with cheeses. Might I add that it also goes well with grilled chicken and roasted tomato basil soup paired with a good set of crackling logs? Trust me, it does. (If you make the soup, consider removing the pepper flakes, or plan to add cream and a pat of butter to lighten the fire.)

Now to divulge the truth: Either I messed up this bread by shoving it onto a hot baking stone, or we need to tweak the ingredients, because the dough is extremely hydrated at 88% and quite wet, loose and sticky. It cracked in the oven like Humpty Dumpty's head. During rising, I never saw this bread double in size as the recipe suggests. Who cares, when it comes out so scrumptious? Listen, cracks don't bother me because once you've sliced the bread, nobody knows.

Clayton suggests sprinkling kosher salt on the top before baking to give this bread a savory sensation against the sweetness. For this, I used the Murry River Pink Flake finishing salt, a product of Australia and available at Sur La Table. I went with pink flakes for their color and size, but a smoked Salish or Fleur de Sel would also be "yum toy," as my dear mentor in words Gay Smith used to say.

Next bread to tackle is the Pain de Campagne Poilane, which takes three days from starter and sponge to dough. I've mentioned before that Poilane is the famous bakery in Paris where taste as art is revealed. When I visited one of its outposts on Rue Grenelle last year, they had an Eiffel Tower in the window, entirely made of bread. This recipe is also in Clayton's book, but others also have attempted to capture versions of the legendary country loaf, including Peter Reinhart in "The Bread Baker's Apprentice." For more on the Poilane legacy, check out "The Village Baker" by Joe Ortiz.

All three of these books have now joined me by the fireside, and what good companions they are. Oh, the places we'll dough!

Bread for the Soul

I had 3 choices for a book to haul down to the courthouse for jury duty, mon dieu, not that! Two of the choices were bread books, the other was "Little Bee," a best-seller but one that I had been warned would make me question my character. That little step I was not ready for on a Monday morning headed to a large and chilly room filled with hundreds of people bearing up under the same dread as I was. Too early for character scrutiny.

Why take a bread book to court? It represented escape from everything around me - the prospect of catching the flu from those who were coughing loudly and often, of being seated on a jury and hearing awful details involving sawed-off shotguns, houses set on fire, or worse.

I considered taking "The Art and Soul of Baking," a book from Sur La Table, which would carry me off to thoughts of pastry as well as bread, but it had a big drawback, weighing in at 5 pounds. The other was Bernard Clayton's "New Complete Book of Breads," a better weight at 2 and a half pounds. Clayton understands the weaving of back stories and bread histories - how to transport you to a different time and place, how to see that bread come to life. He can take you below decks of the SS France to read about boulangers toiling in their skullcaps to produce thousands of fresh rolls for the passengers. He'll set you down beside Antonin Careme in the early 1800s with his daily bread recipe, surviving all these years. He knows a good detail when he sees it, like biscuits nicknamed "touch of grace," or a Viennese bread shaped like a Zeppelin. He knows all about taste, how to get it, shape it and bake it. He offers the breads the world adores; you can't help but drift away.

While sitting on various chairs and benches, I turned down the page ears on several fronts - for Pain Noir, a French black bread; for the Pain de Campagne Honfleur, from the Normandy coast. Also Pain de Campagne Poilane - well come on, how could I not want to throw that together, since I have visited Poilane in Paris in both of its city locations and once plunked down 49 Euros for one of their canvas-lined wicker banneton baskets. When you have eaten Poilane bread, you understand all things. It sticks to your soul like no other. Of course I can't re-create it in Dallas, not really. I have the same chance as making sourdough that tastes like a San Francisco boule. No, it can't be done, but it can be imagined. That is bread's power.

Thinking about it soothed me to the core. Believe me, I needed a core workout. I later made an absolute fool of myself in a room full of potential jurors hearing a robbery case. Robbery? Doesn't the story line of "Les Miserables" involve a theft of bread? No, I couldn't handle it. I owned up to my quirky biases and was out of there, cheeks flaming, bread book wedged under my coat.

Switching tracks, why is there a cupcake on this page? It's from one of the classes I taught at Sur. I like how the student didn't pipe one long curl of buttercream but broke it up into dollops hither and yon. It's not bread, but it has promise.

I think it might be good for the soul. If I can't eat it, at least I can think about it while choosing which bread to go bake. A bread that is braided into a beehive. Or something in black, I think. Pain Noir

Sweetacular Star Mints

My fabulous friends do 2 incredible things for me: Send ideas that grab attention, and loan equipment to try them out. Hats off to Jeanne Ambrose at Taste of Home Magazine for finding the star mint idea - and to Trish Ballard for loaning me an oven - she is always willing to watch what happens.

Jeanne knows I like to melt things down, like Jolly Rancher candies to make "stained glass" images. She sent this link to the star mint trick of melting ye old holiday beauties and cutting them into shapes. http://abc.tv/VEGlzY

In a nutshell, get yourself a sheet pan, parchment paper and a bag of star mints. I found them at Walgreens - there seemed to be a shortage of mints in the grocery stores.

Whack the oven up to 350 degrees. Remove candy papers from mints, and line them up on the pan, about 1/4 inch apart, leaving room at the edges of the pan since these will spread. Bake up to about 7 minutes (keep an eye on them)and see that hot sugar move out.

Remove pan from oven, set on counter and place cookie cutters into the sugar. Leave cutters in place as the sugar cools. Careful, they are hot to the touch.

As the mixture cools, it will become hard enough to "break out" the sugar pieces, if you're careful. No need to rush this; they will separate.
 
The idea's original intent was to make serving trays, but I like cutting them into shapes even better. 

Next, I'll try cutting them in truly small shapes to make cupcake toppers.

It's been a busy season at my home base, Singing Wheat Kitchen, with many classes to teach at Sur La Table. Kitchen and Sur join me in wishing you passionate baking and delicious moments with family and friends this holiday season. 

What does that look like? At Singing Wheat we always pause to attend the Stimson Family Christmas Party on Dec. 23. Charlie, Meredith and their children preserve for me the essence of my Christmases in Connecticut in olden days. Yes, in their house you'll find wonderful food and friendship - but it's the mandatory singing around the piano that grabs my heart. Charlie brings out the kid in all of us as he plays the piano - and sometimes the sax or ukulele. He has the good songs, too, you best be armed with a hanky. 

There's a reason the word "Singing" is a part of my bakery name, and I'm told there's an old Jewish saying that music and singing touch the deepest part of our soul. This I do believe.

Good food, good friends and a songbook are the recipe for a joyful heart. Lift a friend, a cookie or a song this holiday season. Get a lift, is what I'm saying.

Holiday Cookie Tips

If you were in my holiday cookies class at Sur La Table, you heard me say "Vodka!"

Let me explain. We were flourishing the royal icing onto gingerbread, and I was giving caution that these white icing surfaces need time to dry before painting designs on top. If you missed how alcohol entered the conversation, here it is:

To paint any design on the royal icing of your cookie, first let it dry completely. To apply the paint, mix a little gel food coloring with a splash of vodka. You can stir it up with a toothpick until you get the color you want. The vodka helps hold the gel paste in suspension for brushing.

Simply mix - I use an old muffin tin and mix in the different muffin holes - then apply with a brush. If you want to check your color before committing yourself on the cookie, use a broken cookie or one you don't like and make it your test version. Practice on that.

Friends, it can be hard to get everything said in a 2-hour class, so let me offer a pledge that if clarification is needed, I'll use this space to add background. Helping you get a handle on breads, French pastry, macarons, cupcakes, chocolate, all things involving butter, sugar, flour and eggs is a pleasure and a joy.

Please let me know what I forgot to blurt in class, and let's get it solved.

Head to your rolling pins and take off!

(Photo: Hand-painted Highland Park Scots and tuile-batter peppermint sticks)