Too many cakes
How did our weekend of cake tasting go? It was fun, and mostly quite tasty. That was all expected. But I didn’t expect to be so confused.
Here are the results. If you want the names of any of the bakeries, let me know and I can tell you.
One egg cake
One egg cake from Mark’s father – He makes this every year for Mark’s birthday. It’s quite sweet. Both Mark’s father and the cake, especially the frosting. But that’s not for the wedding. That was just bonus cake.
Wedding cake baker #1
Wedding cake baker #1 – We liked the design options and we like the cost. The design consultant was really nice and we talked about a custom-ish design that combined various designs that they already do. And since we sort of designed it ourselves, we’re a bit attached to it. But the cakes were either too moist (chocolate) or too dry (swirl or white). The fillings were good, but not great. So this would be a good option, but not perfect.
Wedding cake baker #2
Wedding cake baker #2 - These cakes were considerably tastier. The flavors are also more interesting and the slices look much prettier (if you ignore the saran wrap – we picked up the slices from the baker and ate them at my sis’s apartment). This baker would be more expensive, and we’d have to use one of the basic designs unless we want to pay even more money for a custom design.
Cupcake place #1
Cupcake place #1 – Not very good. Not worth talking about
Cupcake place #2
Cupcake place #2 – Better. But not what we’re looking for. All the cupcake places would be cheaper, but probably more effort for us.
It would have been nice to try other non-wedding cake cake places, but there’s only so much cake you can eat in one weekend.
We’re probably leaning toward tastier but more expensive. I hope that I don’t see any leftover cake next July!
Speaking of leftovers, Thanksgiving leftovers have been turned into a curry turkey pot pie. It’s baking in the oven right now. I used turkey, gravy, and leftover cranberries from a pear-cranberry-almond tart. And I also used some of the extra onion soup. The curry part is inspired by our visit to a cooking class that my sister teaches. It’s a class for HS students at a charter school. We stopped by and enjoyed some curry chicken and roti and some creamy pasta. It’s a neat idea for a class. Each student has to do a little research on a country. Then they bring in a recipe from that country, often where their families are from, and they cook it together in class.
The curry chicken is stuffed inside the roti before it's all pan fried in butter!
It was all really tasty!
Before all our leftovers turned into a curry turkey pot pie, this is what it looked like:
Turkey!
Dinner is served
Designing the pear tart
The result of their hard work
The curry turkey pot pie is done! Good timing!
Post-makeover
Harvest Time!
We’ve been enjoying the fall in NYC again! Crisp cool air, blue skies, flaming trees! It’s the best time to be here, in my opinion. Certain people, like Mark, may try to convince you that it’s best in the summer. But hot in NYC means hot and sticky and muggy and stuffy and stinky. Don’t be fooled.
Why is fall considered the time for harvesting? It seems like at least as much stuff is harvested in spring and summer. Maybe it’s because stuff you gather in the fall is stored to help you get through the winter. But then they should call it storing time, not harvesting time.
We’re going apple picking this weekend to do some harvesting of our own. In the meantime, I’ve been gathering lots of goodies from the farmers’ markets. Summer may have the tastiest produce, but fall has lots of stuff that is fun to cook with. I made a pumpkin-pear cider-apple cake. And delicata squash with swiss chard and cipollini onions (spiced up with coriander, turmeric, and cinnamon). Yum! And some “Lakers soup” – butternut squash-corn-leek soup with purple cabbage. And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet!
And since we’re on the topic of harvests, my pepper plant is growing fruit! I think there are 3 baby peppers growing! It’s a little late, but it’s probably just confused because it’s in a yogurt container inside an apartment.
What I threw together for dessert
I threw these tarts together from bits and pieces that I had lying around. It came together so well, probably much better than if I had planned it out. These are goat cheese cake tartlets topped with slices of white peaches.
Since I was using bits and pieces, I only made three tartlets. Seems like three wouldn’t be worth the effort, but they were so delicious. And they weren’t much trouble to make. The crust was super easy – I used a French tart dough that I found through David Lebovitz. Easiest crust AND most delicious crust ever. I’ll be using it again. And the goat cheesecake part is modified from another recipe online. After the crust and filling were baked, I topped it with some thin slices of white peach, sprinkled some sugar on top, and threw it under the broiler. I was trying to get a little bit of a creme brulee-like crust. That didn’t work out. Maybe I’ll try it again with a blowtorch, once I find myself a blowtorch.
Even without a blowtorch, it was still delicious!
Delicious form and function…
… a.k.a. structure and function, for those of you who are in the protein biology, computational biology world.
Check out this pho bowl. It’s so smart and beautiful and efficient and functional!
I’m not doing ceramics these days, but seeing this makes me want to do it again. Even though I don’t have the skills or patience to throw something like this.
All the good stuff is coming!
Cupcake truck! It debuts on June 3! I don’t actually like cupcakes all that much. I like making them. And I like the idea of them. And I love the idea that there’s a cupcake truck!
The Union Square Greenmarket is finally showing some spring goodies! Winter is over! And the first (albeit expensive) strawberries are showing up! I know you guys out in California will mock me for rejoicing over leeks and peashoots, which you have had for months now! But you have to imagine half a year of just onions and apples!
And Mark’s coming home from Paris soon! Just in time for summery BLTs and tomato-bread salads!
More Parisian Yummies
The best meal that we had in Paris was at Chez Omar, I think it’s in the 3rd Arrondissement. I’m still not sure if you’re supposed to pronounce the ‘z’ in “Chez” cause “Omar” starts with a vowel. Pronouncing French confuses me. I’ve had very good tutors and I’m okay with the rules and the exceptions to the rules. But I get frustrated when I learn that there are actually exceptions to the exceptions to the rules. Back to Chez Omar – Moroccan. We had an amazing chicken bastilla. Any version of this dish (chicken, spices, flaky pastry, cinnamon and sugar) is always yummy, but the spices in this one were especially deep and rich and the pastry was especially light and crispy and fried. I’m sorry that the photo is fuzzy. I’m not apologizing to you, the person reading this, I’m apologizing to the delicious bastilla that doesn’t deserve to be photographed so terribly.
We also ordered an entree that came with couscous, a vegetable stew, and roasted chicken. Then you can mix and match on your plate. Simple, but very well done.
Back to the macarons, we got more macarons from Laduree to confirm that I like Laduree’s better. But actually think I have to get some more from Pierre Herme as well.
So the reason why the Laduree vs. Pierre Herme debate is still unsettled for me is that part way through the comparison, I realized that I prefer macarons with creamy fillings over macarons with fruity fillings. If I were just comparing the fillings by themselves, I would prefer fruity, but the fruity ones seem to make the cookie part too moist and soggy. I actually got all fruity macarons from Pierre Herme, but I got a mix of fruity and creamy from Laduree, so everything is all mixed up. Maybe I can do a better, more controlled comparison next time I’m in Paris – that depends on the scheduling of Mark’s current project. We’ll see! I hope he can come back to NYC soon, but I also hope that he stays in Paris!
Parisian Carb Count…
… so far
Baguettes: 2
Croissants: 3
Pain au chocolat: 2
Macarons: 7
Assorted other pastries: too many to count
This baguette is from Boulangerie Julien. It’s the pain de tradition. So amazing! The crust is perfectly crispy and the inside is flavorful and chewy. The worse “crispy” and “chewy” don’t really capture how amazing the textures are. When you break into it, it sounds and feels like heaven. And that’s even before you bite into it.
More on the macarons later. I’m off to take advantage of the beautiful spring day and explore and eat more.
Brooklyn’s Test Kitchen
Here’s some of what I’ve been up to. I baked up some cupcakes for the class I’m teaching. The idea was to explore acids and bases in baking, and baking soda and baking powder as well.
The textbook explanations: Baking soda is basic and requires an acid somewhere else in the recipe to create the reaction that generates CO2. Baking powder has both the acid and base together.
There were 4 different recipes for the cupcakes, all modified from the All Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake from the Cake Bible (R.L. Beranbaum). All four versions of the cupcakes had these ingredients:
- unsalted butter
- sugar
- egg yolks
- vanilla
- cake flour
- salt
And then I varied whether I used baking soda or baking powder and whether I used buttermilk (acidic) or milk (less acidic). And then I baked up 12 cupcakes for each combination.
| Cupcake A | Cupcake B | Cupcake C | Cupcake D | |
| Diameter, bottom of cupcake (cm) | 5.1 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.3 |
| Diameter, top of paper (cm) | 6.8 | 6.6 | 6.9 | 6.6 |
Discussion
I’ll make it short so that the post doesn’t get too long. And it’s not peer reviewed either.
I did my best to control for everything except for the variables that I was interested in (mixing order and time, baking time, etc), but I only had one oven and one kitchen and a limited amount of time, so I let a few things slide. I was concerned that the color of the paper cups might affect the outcome, so I used a strategy somewhat inspired by bioinformatics and randomized the color of the cups. I was also thinking about small molecule docking screens and how you can rank the hits and compare the ranks. So I was thinking about how you could rank all the cupcakes of the same type and compare cupcakes at the same rank. I didn’t do that. And I didn’t do a number of other things that would have made this a better experiment, but would have also driven me insane.
The differences between the cupcakes were way more complex than what I was expecting. And more complex than what is reported by people talking about food science. Buttermilk seemed to make things more moist (acid is supposed to prevent gluten development) and baking powder made things more fluffy. But it’s not this simple. All of the cupcakes rose – something was acting with the baking soda, even though there wasn’t anything very acidic in the batter. I probably should have made one without any chemical leavening, but remember my comments about insanity. The shapes and colors and flavors were quite different and I don’t know how to explain that. I think that using double acting baking powder complicated things as well.
I’ll leave it up to you guys to do more interpreting and further investigations to resolve the issues that come up with this one. Let me know how it goes!
I’m not sure I understand cupcakes better, but this was a good lesson about the scientific process for my class, I think. And cupcakes are always yummy and fun, even if some are yummier than others.
References
Not for this report, but I thought this was an interesting link about food myths.
It’s April, time to go to Paris
Mark’s on a project based in Paris now and I get to go visit him! I leave next week. Maybe I’ll have some stories about April in Paris soon!
Here’s a little preview. They’re some treats that Mark brought back a few weeks ago:
Macarons from Laduree in Paris
Iowa, check! 47 more states! We’ve already picked a wedding venue, in Massachusetts, but it’s nice to know that now there are 3 states where everyone can get married!
New York City vs. San Francisco Round 7: Egg custard tarts; And housing news!
I had some dan4 ta3 (egg custard tarts) from Egg Custard King in Chinatown today. I tried a regular one and a Portuguese one. They had a bunch of different types and flavors – maybe about 8. Ha ha, I couldn’t read any of the Chinese characters so I had to ask. At least I was able to do that in Chinese. And at least I was able to read one of the labels – the almond one. I pointed to the Portuguese ones and asked what they were, and they said “pu2 tao2.” I asked “Grape?” and thought to myself “what an odd flavor for egg custard tarts.” The woman looked confused and then I realized my mistake and said: “Oh, Portuguese! They’re Portuguese tarts.” Portuguese is also “pu2 tao2.” I’m such an ABC.
These are supposed to be one of the best places for dan4 ta3 here. So how do they compare to Golden Gate Bakery in SF? It’s definitely close, but I’d still give it to GG Bakery. The crusts are similarly light and flaky and tasty. The custard at GG Bakery, which is light and smooth and tasty, is definitely superior to EC King, both the regular and the not-grape kinds. But EC King’s custards are still better than every other dan4 ta3 that’s not from GG Bakery.
I don’t have any photos of EC King’s dan4 ta3. Here’s one of GG Bakery’s, with my cuz:
EC King had no line, while GG Bakery always has a line, often going down half the block. And GG Bakery often runs out or doesn’t have any that are ready. EC King also has many more flavors. So if those flavors turn out to be amazing (though I doubt it because the classic dan4 ta3 is pretty much perfect), I might give this round back to NYC, but for now, it goes to SF. There’s a reason the lines are so long and it’s definitely worth the wait.
Hmm… actually it’s a lot easier to get to Chinatown in NYC by public transportation than Chinatown in SF. So that’s another issue, but maybe the public transportation issue is for a separate post. So after Round 7:
NYC: 2
SF: 5
The other news is that Mark and I found an apartment. It’s in the Upper East Side. The landlords seem quite desperate to fill the apartments – many were offering 1 month free and no fees. When we first told our broker (thanks BCG!) our desired price range, she was very nervous that there would be nothing for us and wasn’t sure what to do with us cheapskates. But it turned out to be no problem, we found a lovely place that’s well within our budget.
We move in right after Christmas! I’m so excited!
There’s a gym in the building, with no extra fees! And there are individual TVs on all the machines. So because we won’t have a TV in our apartment, I’ll have to exercise to watch any TV! That’s a good healthy setup, I think.
The lobby of the building is really tacky. I’m hoping that a lot of the tackiness is due to the holiday decorations, but we’ll see how it looks in January.
So if you want to see this apartment, you’ll have to come visit! But if you’ll have to prepare yourself for the tacky lobby.
