eonom

It's Banana Bread! It's a muffin! It's novel! It's not really that novel! In any case .... It's a banana bread-ffin!

Review: Amoxicillin*

I recently got a few (3 of 4) wisdom teeth plucked out at once. The procedure was great - I was knocked out for the entire thing and woke up to feel a bit woozy but pretty aware. 

I was hoping that I could spend the time recovering making savory mousses and blended soups but my body's "meep. I'm broken right now. Don't wanna cook" attitude got the better of me. Therefore, I present to you - a two (possibly three) part series review of my post-surgical drugs. 

But before that! I have a confession to make.. I, in my 19 year old glory, cannot swallow pills for jack shit. I've always been terrified of them. Yes, I'm terrified of swallowing teeny tiny pills and yes, I do get constantly made fun of for it T_T. Usually I chew them up or dissolve them but this time, I WASN'T HAVING ANY OF THAT. I manned up and told the surgeon that I couldn't swallow them. She, being the wonderful glorious surgeon she was, made no remark and just prescribed me liquid forms of all of the drugs! Woohoo~

Here's amoxicillin (to treat against infections). I have to take this twice a day for the next week or so and boy am I glad it doesn't taste as bad as it looks. You know that flavor that we all fear - the cherry. The disgusting medicine trying desperately to disguise itself as cherry flavored liquid. I bet you know exactly what I mean. It was the same thing I feared as I poured this down the hatch and boy, was I surprised! It's sweet, but not overwhelmingly sweet. It has subtle flavors of medicine, but they aren't overpoweringly so. In fact, if you don't swirl it around in your mouth (which I totally did for science), you don't taste it at all! Man, has liquid medicine really come a long way since I was a youngin'.

This happened earlier today and it felt like God was telling me to stop baking... 

Shokugeki no soma is a hilarious manga about food written in the style of battle manga. It presents some of the most beautifully drawn food items along with hilariously orgasmic reactions of those who eat them. It is dramatic and incredibly addictive. (It's also not too long right now, so you can read all of it in a sitting if you wanted to.) This manga also gives some recipes to help you recreate things you have seen the characters make. Here's the Jellied Meat Broth and Scrambled Eggs Furikake Gohan recipe:

While making this, I added the chicken wing meat to the broth and refrigerated them together. By doing so, it took a lot longer for the broth to set, but I think that the overall result was worth the wait. Ta da! <enter sparklies here>

 If I were to make this again (which I probably would), I would cut the chicken pieces up a bit more. Regardless, this was an incredibly delicious dish. The broth continued melting as I ate the rice and by the end of the meal, all of the rice was pretty much coated with it. The flavors of the chicken and the bonito broth really marry well together. In other words, it really just makes you react like:

Ease of preparation: 3/5

Taste: 5/5

Cost Effectiveness: 5/5

I used the Rilakkuma silicone mold that came with the Snack Time book to  make some Rilakkuma chocolates.

Here's the front of the mold

and the back.

I filled them with chocolate that I didn't temper since I wanted them to melt. If you're doing something similar (filling molds), and you want to be able to keep these at room temperature without having them disintegrate upon touch, you should use tempered chocolate instead.

I used milk chocolate for the mouths, and white chocolate for the bellies (and later for the snouts too). I also added gel food coloring (golden yellow and lemon yellow) to some excess white chocolate to color it for the ears and the pillows. Most of these details were applied using a skewer.

After these parts had set, I filled the mold with some milk chocolate and tapped all the air out.

Many taps later~

This mold was then left to set up overnight in the fridge (it could have been left in there for 10 minutes.. but I fell asleep ^^").

Whee~ The morning after, I pulled this out of the fridge.

The silicone mold makes them really easy to take out.

Here are the chocolates that worked out.

The one on the bottom right is the one that had the extra snout on the back. I honestly have no idea where it came from.

The good ones aren't without the derpy ones.

Yeup. They're ridiculous. Completely mutated. They're not even groovy mutations. 

So for lunch today, I thought I would conquer the okonomiyaki again. I had made it once before with thin slices of pork belly as the base of this monstrous pancake. This time, I wanted to try it with the popular combination of mentaiko (pollack roe) and cheese. 

I followed this recipe for this dish. Here are all the ingredients gathered in a big bowl.

Mix mix mix~

Onto a frying pan it goes. I flipped my okonomiyaki with two spatulas and it almost worked out... until a bit of it broke off. So close! Anyway, here's the finished product with Otafuku's Okonomiyaki Sauce and some mayonnaise. 

Haha I'm so punny. (Please don't hurt me @ A @)

After binge watching the second season of the Legend of Korra, I had the world's largest itch to make these snacks.

Varri-cakes: a delicious snack cake supplied by our favorite corporation, Varrick Global Industries. Even police officers can't resist their iced, jelly-filled wonderfulness.

For the "cakes," I used this doughnut recipe and started with activating my yeast. After it got foamy, I whisked the mixture together.

This mixture was added to a mixing bowl containing 2 cups of flour, 1-1/2 cups of lukewarm milk, 2 eggs, 1/3 cup of butter (which I substituted for shortening), 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt.

Mix mix mix~ (I used my KitchenAid at the "Stir" setting fitted with a paddle attachment for this). I then added in the rest of the flour 1/2 cup at a time until this happened.

I then threw it onto a "lightly-floured surface" and kneaded it together.

I let it rest for a bit on the counter since the gluten appeared to be breaking in order to figure out whether or not I was overworking it.

Turns out I did overwork it and all was well after 10 minutes or so. 

Whee~ It rests... for two hours

It eventually grows and grows and ..

.. Well yeah. It doubles in size. (I totally forgot to take a picture of the new form of my ball of dough, but you know its ready when you poke at it with your finger and it sinks in a bit). Then you squash out all the air and throw it on a table and abuse it roll it out.

I sliced them into 2"x 3" rectangles for the cakes.

These rested for a bit to proof some more under a wet paper towel.

THEN I UNLEASHED THE ELEMENTS ON THEM IN MY AVATAR STATE.

.. But actually, they were just deep fried at 350°.

One flippy flip later.

There were soo many..

Like actually.. so many. The smaller ones were cut with circular cookie cutters because I was too lazy to measure out more rectangles.

For the top, I made a vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. I heated them egg whites and dissolved that sugar on my double boiler.

They were then whipped into stiff peaks.

My favorite part~ Holding the mixing bowl above me so that I could take a photo of how stiff the peaks were.

Oh yes. I then switched from the whisk to the paddle and waited for the meringue to cool down. 

While doing so, I sliced holes in the cakes for the jam

and filled them all up.

By now, the meringue was cool enough and I threw pats of butter in while the paddle was mixing to complete the buttercream. Towards the end, I added in a bit of vanilla for flavor. The buttercream was a bit gritty so I ended up not coloring it and piping the Varrick ship logo so they aren't completely Varri-cakes but they're pretty close.

Still though,

since they aren't perfect.

My friends and I visited Mitsuwa, a Japanese supermarket, out in New Jersey a while back. We originally went there for the annual food festival featuring specialties from Japan. After eating until our bellies were on the brink of explosion, we visited the book store next door... and I couldn't help but splurge~

This is the Rilakkuma Snack Time book, which came with a silicone mold and a "chopping board sheet." 

It has such pretty insides~

All the pages are beautifully colored and have recipes on how to make sweets that look just like the images. I can't wait to start on them.

I also recently acquired the Morinaga Hot Cake Mix (ホットケーキミックス) since it was on sale at my local supermarket. On the back of the package, there were alternative recipes that utilized the hot cake mix like doughnuts and a banana foil cookie which I'm also really looking forward to trying out.

ITS THE LAST LESSON. CULINARY SCHOOL HAS PRETTY MUCH COME TO AN END (though I might actually end up taking the macaron class since those are some finicky sweets that actually require supervision). 

Alright, lets not get distracted here. First the food, then a review of my experience. 

Alrighty, today was butter cakes, the more flavorful fat aunt of the sponge cakes. These cakes were significantly more easy to make than their sponge counterparts since we didn't really have anything major to watch out for.

We baked three sets of cakes: a white butter, a devil's food, and a high-ratio pound cake. The white butter and the devil's food followed pretty much the same process: cream the butter and the sugar together until they're white, whisk liquids together, whisk drys together, add in liquid and dry (while alternating between the two) into the butter and the sugar, pour into molds, pop in oven. 

On the other hand, the pound cake started with the drys and the butter was then added in such that it forms into a ball. Next in was the wet, in additions, until everything was combined. This was poured into a loaf pan and thrown into the oven.

For the white butter cakes, we made a lemon flavored Swiss meringue frosting and for the devil's food, we made an egg white icing (which is pretty much just a meringue with a bit of light corn syrup).

The Devil's Food~

The coconut lemon butter cake.

The pound cake before it was chopped in half and then continued to fall apart into pieces @ A @

Now for the review:

mmmmmmmmm chawwwwwwwclaaaaate.

Today we started off with a variation of yesterday's sponge cake, the chocolate variation and in my opinion, the better one. The procedure is the same - heat up the egg whites, beat the egg whites, pour the egg whites into a bowl, sift in the dry, fold the dry, sift more in, fold completely, pour into mold, spread, bake, wait. We made half-sheet pans full of the sponge cake in order to make a roulade (a roll cake), so these lovely children only took 10-12 minutes.

For the roulade's filling, we made a filling ganache by heating milk and cream and pouring it over chocolate chunks. After letting it stand for 5 minutes, we whisked it together 'till it was smooth and beautiful.

By this time, our chocolate sponges were out of the oven and cooling so we swapped gears and worked on decorating our chocolate rum cakes. Chocolate plastic is a magical material. It tastes just like the semisweet chocolate we had used to make it and it firms up really well. It's incredibly pliable after you knead it a bit. We rolled out pieces through a pasta maker and used them to cover up the sides of the cake. I also ended up making a rose out of the plastic for the top. 

Now for the roulade~ We spread out the ganache on one of the sides and rolled up the cake. This was then left to set in the fridge for a bit. When it had hardened up, we covered the top and sides in more of the ganache and added bits of white chocolate for decoration. It ended up being quite the long cake.

Today's lesson: Vanilla Sponge Cake, Swiss Meringue Buttercream, Simple Syrup, Chocolate Rum Cake, and Chocolate Plastic.

Vanilla Sponge Cake~ A deceiving little bastard it is. It's all like "Whee I'm fluffy. Please eat me." But making it was a bit frustrating. We first heated egg whites in a mixing bowl over a double boiler and then whipped them so that they tripled in size and were real foamy. This mixture was poured into a giant bowl and we sifted the dry ingredients in, 1/3 at a time and folded everything. I..... actually didn't understand how folding worked until today. Apparently you go down the middle with the wider side of your spatula, and flip it up and over. Since the wider side has a larger surface area, you're able to flip more of the batter with a smaller number of total strokes. Anyway, the batter was poured into a few pans and left to bake.

Next was the chocolate rum cake. Quite literally the easiest cake I've ever made - it was pretty much just melt chocolate, then mix everything in a big bowl, pour into a cake pan, bake and Bam. World's fudgiest chocolate cake.

We then made simple syrup (water and sugar) for the cakes since they tend to be on the drier, less flavorful side. I flavored mine with lemon juice.

Afterward came the Swiss Buttercream for the cakes. It began with egg whites and sugar in a mixing bowl, which were heated together until the sugar had melted and the mixture felt really hot. This was then whipped to a stiff peak, so stiff that the meringue really didn't fall out of the bowl when you flip it over (Quite literally my favorite thing ever). Butter was thrown in bits and pieces after the meringue had cooled and there we go, Frosting. We also added raspberry jam and framboise liquor to it for some flavor.

The Chef toasted some almonds coated in sugar for decoration.

caaaaaaaaake.

THE DAY HAS COME.. for me to finally learn how to properly work with chocolate. During the final days of my solid state chemistry class, we learned all about why tempering chocolate produces the beautiful shiny, hard chocolate but that didn't help me learn the process of doing so (nor did it make it any easier).

We started our truffle filling by heating up milk and chocolate. This had to then be cooled to a warm 90°F.

While waiting for that to chill, we worked on a buttercrunch. We melted butter, mixed in sugar and corn syrup, and cooked it to 300°F (the crack stage). When it reached that temp, we threw in a bunch of toasted almonds, mixed it vigorously and poured it out onto a sheet pan. Later, we went back to break it up.

Holy jesus it's practically crack.

By this time, the milk and chocolate had cooled enough so we mixed that together and then incorporated ground ginger and butter. We then threw it all into a food processor to aerate and later, mixed in crystallized ginger.  This was poured between two pieces of parchment and left to set up. We scoped it into a pastry bag and piped it out into little rounds. These were then left to set up so we could roll them into spheres. Apparently, they're not supposed to be perfect spheres since they represent the truffle (mushroom) and the cocoa powder we roll them in represents the dirt. In any case, here came the most anticipated part, the tempering.

We melt the chocolate and heat it up to 110° and then cool it down to 85°. In order to do this, we worked the chocolate on a slab of marble with an offset spatula to cool it down. We then placed the cooled chocolate back into the original mixture to lower the overall temperature. This was then thrown back onto the heat to reach 87°. 

WOOHOO TEMPERED CHOCOLATE.

We first used this chocolate to enrobe the truffle centers. Instead of using forks, we used our palms by dipping a palm into the chocolate and rolling the center in our palms. This left a perfect thin coating. We then topped it with some crystallized ginger to finish off our ginger truffles.

With the left over tempered chocolate, we dipped our buttercrunch and also made clusters (apparently potato chips are great for this).

Everyone in the class made a different flavor of truffle and we ended up with a lot! On a side note, THE TABLES IN THIS CLASSROOM ARE TRAPEZOIDALLLLLLLL. WHOAAAAAAAAAAA.

Anyway, today's spoils:

Creamin' that butter like there ain't no tomorrow until it's light and fluffy was the foundation of these piped cookies.

My partner and I worked on palets aux raisins. The batter was really simple to make - mix all the wet ingredients and then stir in the dry. Then it went into a pastry bag fitted with a 1/2" round tip to be piped into little mounds. These mounds were placed in a fiery furnace of 350 degrees and there, they spread out into these flat beauties. 

Here are some of other cookies that other groups made (the techniques for these are also very similar).

Amandines

Chocolatines

Crisp Amaretti (topped with roasted pine nuts and pearl sugar)

We also made some checkerboard cookies and American-style biscottis but I totally forgot to take a picture of them so here's one of El Pescado (a coincidentally fish-shaped cookie made from the checkerboard scraps).

The checkerboard cookies were made of vanilla and chocolate flavored pate sablee, which is pretty easy to make. We roll it out to 1/4" thick and then let it chill. We brushed an egg-white wash on one of the layers to glue the other to it.  This process was repeated until it gave us a log of checkerboard cookies.

As for the biscotti, we mixed the ingredients together by hand, shaped logs from it and then baked it. We sliced it and then rebaked it to get the hard biscotti consistency.

After all of these cookies, we also made a flavored creme anglaise. It's a cousin of the pastry cream and doesn't get as nearly as thick (since it doesn't have the corn starch thickening agent). Here's mine - it's earl grey flavored.

From it, we made ice cream! Oh man industrial ice cream machines really churn out that stuff in a matter of minutes. It's crazy. It's like wait 5 minutes and then BAM YOU SCREAM I SCREAM WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM.

Pâte à choux~!

I made Sorted's profiteroles recipe a long time ago and it didn't come out nearly as nicely as today's did. I'm not sure what I did incorrectly the last time, especially since I baked the two batches differently, but our profiteroles didn't really have much of a hollow to them.

Anyway, I finally got to give  pâte à choux another try today! 

It was the simplest batter we've had in days. Boil water, butter, and salt together, sift in flour and stir until it's incorporated. Then cook it until it peels off the sides of the pot and holds together and put it into a mixing bowl with a paddle attachment. Whip the eggs in and bam. batter. Ready for piping Paris-Brests, eclairs, cream puffs, and gougères. 

Afterward, we made pastry cream for the nth time. (Even though I've made a lot of it, I still feel like it's something I can easily screw up.) From that, I then made creme mousseline for my Paris-Brest.

We cut the top layer off of our Paris-Brest and filled the inside with the creme.

We also cut holes in the bottom of cream puffs and eclairs and filled them with the same cream.

I drizzled caramel on top of my cream puffs

and coated the eclairs in a chocolate glaze.

Finally the gougères. They are really similar to pao de queijo but are much crispier on the outside and less chewy.

Omnomonomnom.

The time has come.. it's finally time to work with the accursed puff pastry dough.

We started cutting off 1 - 1.5 lb chunks of our dough and rolling it out into a thin sheet. As we each chunk was rolled, it was thrown back into the fridge to cool and harden up again. From these sheets I made: a pear strip, a strawberry mille feuille, palmiers, and pailettes. 

For the pear strip, we cut the sheet up to get us two 1" border pieces and a bottom. We docked and egg washed the bottom and added on the sides. The bottom was then coated with a thin layer of almond frangipane. On top, we placed our fanned out pears. Bam. Pear strip yo. (More like pear rectangle since our dough had an odd size.)

Next was the mille feuille. For this we squashed the two rolled out sheets between parchment paper and sheet trays and unleashed the heat of roughly 350°F on them. Half way through, they were flipped upside down and rotated to bake evenly. After they reached a golden brown, they were pulled out and left to cool down. We then cut them down to the same size and spread raspberry jam over them. The bottom piece was placed jam side up and covered in a layers of lightened pastry cream, strawberries, and whipped cream. It was then topped with the other piece, placed jam side down. 

Phew. Two down. Two to go. Palmiers. So common that they're even found in the bakery section of BJs and actually not too tough to make. When rolling out the sheet, it's rolled out in sugar instead of flour - such that the sugar becomes embedded in the dough. It is then folded up to make six layers and sliced into 1/2" pieces. These pieces are dipped in sugar and set, sugar side down, to bake. 

I've made palmiers before (with premade puff pastry dough) and I usually flipped them halfway through their cooking process. I think that doing so gives a much prettier result (also both size caramelize instead of just one). 

Onward to the last puff pastry item - the paillettes. They're these adorable corkscrew shaped savory bits (almost like bread sticks). The sheet is egg washed and half of it is then covered in a mixture of Parmesan, paprika, and a bit of salt. It is then folded in half, rolled back out and then sliced into strips. The strips are twisted and set to bake.

Man, we made way too much. Oh! Before I forget, we also unmolded our cheesecakes from yesterday. 

Now to eat everything~