Cocoa chiffon cake

I've been making quite a lot of cakes lately. Soft, billowy sponge cakes are the perfect snack to nibble on in summer. Even though the actual process of making cakes requires more work than cookies, at the end of the day you are just responsible for making one 'thing'. For some reason I find the whole process of dividing up a cookie dough into individual cookies strangely tiring, so I tend to shy away from making cookies unless I have an insatiable craving or upon my friends' request.

Chiffon cakes, in particular, are a cinch to make. True, you have to whip up the egg whites, but so long as you make sure your bowl and beaters are clean and use a bit of cream of tartar to stabilise the meringue, it's almost fail-proof. It's much easier than génoise and what I love about it is that it is fantastic served on its own. You can of course glaze it but it's entirely optional.

Chocolate is my favourite flavour of all and here's my rendition of it in the form of a chiffon cake. It's essentially 'basic' - it uses only cocoa powder so it's light enough for people who aren't crazy about chocolate (and trust me, there're more out there than you think!).

Brown butter chocolate chip cookies

Chocolate chip cookies. That iconic cookie that is loved and raved about universally, and one that provokes the strongest personal responses and biases. Crisp vs chewy; giant vs dainty; nuts vs plain. A quick search on Google yielded 24,200,040 results which only shows how popular and divisive this humble cookie is! Every serious baker has got to have his own chocolate chip cookie recipe in his sleeves. Well, this is mine. I must qualify that statement because I always tweak the recipe slightly depending on what I have on hand - less nuts, no nuts, more chips, using a higher percentage of chocolate, etc. I suppose that's what makes this American cookie so endearing and endlessly creative - it's the fact that you can mix and match to suit your own taste.

With this in mind, this version sums up how I like my chocolate chip cookie: flat and crisp, with nuts, and loaded with the finest dark chocolate chips. I'm fully aware that in America, which is where this cookie originated, the majority of the people fancy the thick and chewy kind. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've always found that underbaked chewy centre rather challenging. Most American versions also contain an astonishing amount of sugars (white and brown) to attain crispiness/chewiness. In fact, it's impossible to recreate the traditional American cookie texture if you cut down on the sugar.

Darkest dark chocolate cookies

I received these Scharffenberger 99% chocolate and cocoa nibs in the post a few days ago. I had been wanting to have unsweetened chocolate for baking for some time since its high cocoa content gives me more room in eliminating sugar in the recipe. If you haven't figured out by now, I like my chocolate desserts very dark and minimally sweetened, but sadly a lot of recipes that require a whole egg foam or a meringue need a good amount of sugar for the foam to be stable. If I used a 70% chocolate in such a recipe, the dessert would end up too sweet for my taste. Much better, then, to use less chocolate quantitatively, but up the cocoa content to 99 or 100% so that you have complete control of how much sweetness you add!

I scratched my head looking for a good recipe to use these fruity and pretty acidic Scharffenberger unsweetened chocolate. I dug in my word document of recipes and was reminded of these very dark and quintessentially American chocolate cookies. They're unusual because they rely on beating whole eggs until they reach a stable foam before folding in melted unsweetened chocolate. A minimal amount of flour is then blended in along with more unsweetened chocolate chips. I saw versions of this cookie by David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich as well as Essence of Chocolate (by Scharffenberger). My version is based on Alice Medrich's with some amendments:

1. I'm using baking soda rather than baking powder to neutralise some of the acidity of all the unsweetened chocolate.


2. Since I've kept the sugar amount very low, it's difficult to keep the centre of the cookies moist and gooey. I came to think of these cookies as miniature cakes, and I use Shirley Corriher's technique for adding a little cream to flourless chocolate cakes to keep them moist. I therefore replaced some of the butter with cream. Use only butter if that's what you have on hand.

3. I also added some SP cake emulsifier to fight with the deflation that inevitably comes with folding chocolate into a whole egg foam. Your cookies will have less volume if you don't add SP, but the recipe doesn't use SP to start with. Worry not!

Fastest chocolate fudge cake

It must be a sign of my lack of creativity that I've been shamelessly posting recipes by famous authors lately. I have been spending a lot of time on the piano rather than in the kitchen (believe it or not!) and therefore had to resort to quick, simple recipes that could satisfy my (slightly) sweet tooth.

Let me introduce you to this wonderful, super-easy quick-fix chocolate cake by Alice Medrich who many consider to be America's First Lady of chocolate. She first had an epiphany making and eating real French truffles in Paris - it was a revelation that changed her conception of how chocolate could and should taste like. Upon her return to America, she opened the famed Chocolat shop selling giant truffles as well as other chocolate confections (in California I believe). She was instrumental in awakening America's interest in *real* chocolate rather than the mass-produced, milky stuff produced by Hershey's and other brands.

The very first book I bought by Alice was Bittersweet. It answered many questions about using chocolate in dessert recipes with a depth and thoroughness that was unique. It made me understand why my brownies were so crumbly and almost impossible to hold without breaking: most recipes ask you to fold in the flour as little as possible, but as Alice points out, with the high-fat content of modern brownie recipes, you want to whisk the batter as vigorously as you can so that you develop gluten to hold everything together. I also loved how she varied the amounts of chocolate in a dessert recipe according to the percentage of the chocolate. It just all made perfect sense.

This is Alice's chocolate fudge cake from A Year in Chocolate. I have reduced the sugar amounts dramatically to highlight the chocolate flavour (rather than sugar) as well as modified the mixing method. Do not skip the divine frosting though - it's to die for.

Christmas yule log

Noël, Noël!

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us”. Matthew 1:22-23

As an ex-Christian-turned-agnostic, my feeling towards Christmas is somewhat ambivalent. While I think that the claims of Christianity are probably untrue, I continue to be moved by the image of a God who is 'Emmanuel' - not the terrifying God of the Old Testament whose name is so holy that one cannot even utter his name - but a God who loves us so much that he became incarnate and lived amongst us. As Umberto Eco puts it so eloquently:

If I am a believer, I find it sublime that God asked his only son to sacrifice himself for the salvation of all mankind. That's what is specific to Christianity: it isn't the fact that Christianity spent 700 or 800 years debating whether Christ is endowed only with a divine nature, or only a human one, or both, or how many persons and wills he incarnated. Such questions seem to me to belong to a futile theological game, whereas what was really at stake was understanding of the following mystery: How could God have done that for us? But if I think that God does not exist, the the question becomes even more sublime: I have to ask myself how a section of humanity possessed enough imagination to invent a God who was made man and who allowed himself to die for the love of humanity. The fact that humanity could conceive of so sublime and paradoxical an idea, on which mankind's intimacy with the divine is founded, inspires me with great admiration for it. There's no doubt but that this same humanity has done some terrible things, but it was able none the less to invent this really extraordinary story, even if God himself does not exist.

Eco's words resonate with how I feel about Christianity in general: the idea of God becoming man is so paradoxical that, on the one hand I feel that it's the most sublime conception of God imaginable, and a pathetically anthropomorphic conception of the ultimate reality on the other.

The Nativity by Federio Barocci

In spite of any misgivings I might have about Christianity (and fundamentalist Protestantism in particular), every year during this season I cannot help but think of what a wondrous idea the Nativity is. It is in this season that (Christians believe) God is born among us and experiences what it is like to be human. No wonder Christianity still exerts such a magnetic hold on so many peoples even after two thousand years.

Please forgive me for ranting about religion in a food blog - but it is Christmas after all and we should all remember why we have this season in the first place, even for non-believers. Since I will not partake in the Church's celebration of the birth of its Saviour, the best offering I could put on the table is a Christmas yule log, which I'm told is the dessert served around Christmas-time in France. It is essentially a chocolate Swiss roll slathered with frosting and decorated like a tree trunk. There's no end to the possibilities of decorations for a bûche de Noël, and I'm sticking to meringue mushrooms as the only additional decoration, although I may try some crushed pistachios next year as well.

Merry Christmas to you all! May this season be filled with joy, peace and traquillity and may we be thankful for the miracle that we are living in.

A more artistic rendition I made last Christmas...

Meringue mushrooms

It's Christmas season! It's advent in the liturgical year of the Church, and even though I'm a retired Christian, it is by far still my favourite season of the year. I feel a heightened awareness of the blessings in our lives and it's not difficult to see an abundance of joy everywhere in this season of festivities.

I like to make Christmas yule logs in this season even though it's a lot of work (and therefore has to remain a once-a-year undertaking), and one of the funniest elements involved is making meringue mushrooms. I was transfixed by their look the first time I saw them: I had no clue how it could be done. Even though I do a lot of baking, I'm more into the actual mixing of batters and doughs and I'm not really into decorations and piping. Since last year I have been inflicting my friend Hitomi to pipe these meringue mushrooms for me - I mix the batter and she pipes, and I assembled the stems and caps to form mushrooms.

This recipe is from the chocolate guru Alice Medrich. Her instructions on how to make them are fantastic and I'm quoting them almost ad verbatim here. I love her addition of coffee to the meringue to give them some actual flavour other than pure sweetness too. I did however reduce the sugar to make them less tooth-achingly sweet...

Homemade chocolate milk

En blanc et noir

If you grew up in Hong Kong as a kid in the 80's you must have seen this advert:

Like many Asian children, I was forced to drink milk every morning when I was little. I actually didn't mind it, although I knew many friends who absolutely hated it. That said, given the choice, I would have chocolate milk rather than 'plain' milk any day - and I'm sure I'm not alone here! Milk was tolerable, but chocolate milk was just yum.

I still remember how amazed I was when I had my first taste of English milk at 16 - only then did I realise that good milk could actually taste sweet, even grassy. The kind of white watery drink loaded with dry milk powder in Hong Kong obviously gave me the wrong impression of the drink. I became a convert, and chocolate milk gradually faded out from my life.

Since I'm subscribing to a herdshare programme with Highland Haven Farm, I receive 3 litres of milk each week. As much as I love my dairy, I usually have a hard time finishing the stuff unless I use most of it for dessert making. What I tend to do is turning the milk into different beverages:  usually milk tea and matcha latte. This week I have a whopping 6 litres of milk to finish, and I didn't want to repeat milk tea and matcha latte again, so I decided to give chocolate milk a shot. It turned out much better than I could have hoped for, and I think I'll be drinking the stuff every other day for the rest of my life. Incidentally, research shows that downing chocolate milk after a tough workout can help replenish exhausted muscles and significantly aid exercise recovery. Plenty of reasons to consume gallons of chocolate milk every day!

My 29th birthday

I don't know if I'm alone here, but as I started approaching the end of my 20's, each birthday almost became a dread rather than a blessing. That said, I had a very relaxed and pleasant 29th birthday yesterday - especially since I had a stomach flu on my birthday last year! I spent the day meeting up with some of my students and chilling at uni, and had a potluck with friends in the evening at home. After dinner we watched tonnes of YIF magic videos and tried to decipher how he did those unbelievable feats. It was a day well spent and thanks to everybody for their kind birthday wishes!

First of all, the wacky birthday gifts:

Baking gadgets that I requested, courtesy of my flatmate Tim!

Also from Tim: an unusual recording of the Chopin Etudes by Evelyn Brancatt, with 24 accompanying recipes...

My favourite potato crisps and Vita lemon tea from Yuqing and Bing Bing:

Truffles from one of my students

Free vacuuming tickets from my neighbour Hitomi!

And roses (!!) from Jin Hai - the first time I received flowers outside of a recital...! I'm not sure how I should feel about it haha! :P

Thanksgiving 2012

It's holiday time! I went to two friends' houses for thanksgiving this year. It was a busy schedule for a holiday, but one that's filled with laughter, joy and lots and lots of food. I'm thankful that I didn't have to do any savoury cooking and could just show up and be fed - how much better could it get?

Wednesday 21nd November

Arrived at Mark and Jaewon's house in Frankfort, Kentucky with Tim, Hitomi, Assaf, Noa and their cute little baby Mickey.

Mark, the victim of our thanksgiving dinner. He'll be slaving in the next two days.

Assaf and his 18-month-old baby Mickey.

Tim and Hitomi.

We just pottered about while everyone else was busy!

Cocoa génoise cake with Iron Buddha tea cream and milk ganache

Conquering génoise

I've waited for a long time to write about the génoise cake (海綿蛋糕). It's one of the most basic cakes, yet possibly the most difficult to make. It's the go-to cake in European cake-making and is often used as the building block for layer cakes. The main difficulties in making a génoise are the whipping of the eggs to its optimal (but not maximum) volume, and how not to deflate the batter when you fold in the flour and the fat. Even the most experienced bakers can fail a génoise. There're just too many variables involved, and each deviation would make a noticeable difference in the end. If my memory serves me right it was the very first cake I attempted - why a génoise, of all cakes?

World Peace Cookies, regional version

Et In Terra Pax Hominibus...

Those of you who are frequent visitors of food blogs might have heard of World Peace Cookies, a cookie that has captivated the hearts and minds of countless fellow bloggers and foodies all over the world. It is essentially a chocolate sablé (shortbread) studded with dark chocolate chips and fortified with sea salt - not your average sea salt, but the legendary fleur de sel ('flower of salt') from Britanny, France. It is hand-harvested by Breton women traditionally, and even in this day and age it is not mass-produced and is produced by small local enterprises. Fleur de sel is by and large used as a finishing salt - for sprinkling onto finished dishes - rather than merely making a dish salty. It has a finesse and purity in flavour that is quite difficult to describe when you taste it on its own, but wait till you taste it side-by-side with normal table salt and you will be shocked by how harsh the commercial stuff suddenly becomes.

World Peace Cookies are the creation of the great French pâtissier Pierre Hermé, who came up with the brilliant idea of pairing chocolate with salt in a cookie. The idea might raise some eyebrows in our day, but remember that the Aztecs didn't have 'sweet' chocolate at all, and it wasn't until chocolate was introduced to Europe that people started sweetening it with sugar. In recent years, chocolate with sea salt has been all the rage - chocolate with salted caramel, chocolate bars studded with sea salt, Ferran Adrià's famous toasted bread with dark chocolate and sea salt, etc.Whether or not Hermé was the first person to set the trend, the idea of adding fleur de sel to a chocolate cookie is truly a stroke of genius. Without the salt, they are moreish; with the salt, they are sublime.

Coffee chiffon cake

I've always found it bewildering that in America 'coffee cake' doesn't mean what it appears to mean. While chocolate cake means... chocolate cake, coffee cake has nothing to do with coffee flavour at all. It's simply a cake eaten with coffee - usually a large, flat cake, and often with loads of crumbs on top - think of New York-style coffee cake. I suppose this usage of the word isn't so outrageous when English teacakes aren't really tea-flavoured either!

I think I'm also justified in saying that coffee-flavoured desserts aren't so common in the West. While vanilla, chocolate, lemon, etc. are dominant flavours that you can find across the board, coffee-flavoured desserts are much rarer - maybe ice cream? When coffee is used in desserts it's mostly for enhancing the flavour of chocolate. Other than that I can't think of many desserts that are purely 'coffee'.

Not so in Asia! Coffee-flavoured desserts are among the most popular, ranging from coffee-flavoured Swiss rolls to coffee shortbread. I find this intriguing because Western people drink a lot more coffee than Asians, so you'd expect that coffee-flavoured desserts would be a staple in the West too (rather than in Asia which is by and large tea-oriented). Maybe they already drink enough coffee as a beverage to want it in anything else? :P

There's a marked differences in the kinds of cakes Asians and Westerners like, too. While butter cakes or pound cakes are the most common in the West, Asians like their cakes soft and light - i.e. sponge cakes. Westerns usually find this kind of cakes too dry and plain, and would slather them with syrups (an idea which might prove abhorrent to Asian cake-lovers...). In fact, most Asian cake recipes centre around génoise and chiffon cakes. While genoise cakes are often used as the base for layered cakes, chiffon cakes have an impressive range of flavours and are usually eaten on their own.

Matcha génoise

Food blogging and flourless chocolate torte

I'm a bit apprehensive writing this first post. Even though I love food and give it a lot of thought every day, it's something else when you have to write about it, let alone starting a blog! However, the idea of starting a blog to document (as it were) what I cook and bake has been germinating in my mind for some time. Since there's no better time to embark on it than now, I'm sharing a flourless chocolate torte recipe as the first post of my blog.

For those who know me, I'm a shameless chocoholic. I love chocolate in all its myriad forms - chocolate bar, truffles, ice cream, mousse, cake, hot chocolate - so long as it is made with a good high-percentage chocolate, rather than the milky stuff known to most people as 'chocolate'. I'm kind of a loner among my friends in this respect since most of them find real chocolate too bitter - and in some cases even too acidic. I've therefore secretly made a list in my head dividing my friends into for and against-chocolate camps so that I know who to share my chocolate creations with! lol

Compared to fancy desserts like a frosted chocolate layer cake or chocolate cookies, a flourless chocolate torte showcases the qualities that make chocolate a 'food of the Gods': the voluptuously melting mouth-feel, the earthy aromas, and the indefinably enticing flavours. The plurals here are important I think, since we are blessed with so many fine chooclates from so many chocolatiers worldwide, and each chocolate bar has its own distinct flavours and aromas that there's really no such thing as a 'common chocolate taste'. Mass-produced chocolates of course do have a flat, familiar flavour that most people associate with chocolate, but there's just so much more to the humble cocoa bean!

In something as 'basic' as a chocolate torte, there's not much to mask the flavours of a high-quality chocolate that you have chosen. Most recipes call for chocolate (a hefty amount, of course), eggs, butter and sugar. That's it. For my version, I have also included some espresso to complement the flavour (chocolate and coffee have synergistic powers!) as well as some whipped cream to keep the cake moist. I learnt this secret to a moist flourless chocolate torte from Shirley Corriher's Bakewise: apparently the milk solids in cream partially interfere with the setting of the batter and therefore the torte would end up moister. I've also kept sugar to a minimum so that all you taste is the unadulterated taste of pure chocolate. There's no butter in this recipe so it's relatively low-fat. Strictly for chocolate lovers!