Breakfast Love

I love breakfast. I really do. Mostly for the sugary treats. If you really know me...you'll know I have a pancake problem. A chocolate chip pancake problem. It's become a tradition in my life actually. Tom and I make chocolate chip pancakes every Sunday morning. I don't know if I could go a Sunday without them!

We've even experimented with some bacon. Bacon + chocolate + pancakes + maple syrup = holy crap! DELICIOUS. Salty, sweet, fluffy, crispy, gooey. It's truly ideal. Adventure time even has a song about it. Chocolate chips aren't mentioned, but they should be.

Okay, off topic! I'm here to talk about waffles right now, not pancakes! See, I'd love to make waffles...but I don't have a waffle iron!

If you're fortunate enough to own a waffle iron. You should really try out some of these recipes here. Just another good food find on the interwebz.

Oh myyy waffles can be savory, healthy, sweet, dessert, the list goes on. I don't know about you, but I'd love to try the red velvet waffles. The "cream cheese syrup" looks interesting. Definitely gonna test that one out when I have access to a waffle iron!

Aight. Just wanted to share some waffle lovin' with you. So go cook yo waffles. Bye!

Yellow Chiffon Cake.

In culinary school (patisserie side) you learn a lot of different methods. Methods, terminology, everything is very exact for baking. It's not the same as cooking. There is room for experimentation, you just have to do it right. You gotta use the methods.

Specifically, where I'm going with this is cakes. There are tons of different cake recipes. Special cakes have special names. It can get pretty confusing. I'll try to keep this simple though. Chiffon cake. The chiffon method is a special method that I've become fond of. We made a lot of chiffon cakes in class. They're simple, very versatile, and tasty cakes. They aren't very dense and I like that. The reason they aren't dense is because air (and baking powder) is the leavening agent.

The method goes something like this:

1. Make a meringue (egg whites, cream of tartar, sugar)
2. Make a batter 
3. Fold the meringue into the batter & bake right away 

So here, yellow chiffon cake:

Ingredients:

5 egg whites

2.5 oz sugar

pinch of cream of tartar

4 oz cake flour

1.5 tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp salt

2 oz sugar

1/4 C salad oil

5 egg yolks (keep the whites!)

1/3 C water

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

*Note: ingredients should be room temperature.

Nice n fluffy

Procedure: 

1. Preheat oven 350 degrees F. Prepare 8" cake pan (parchment round on bottom, ungreased). 
2. Set up a mixer (clean bowl & whip--aka whisk--attachment) 
3. Whip egg whites in mixer on highest speed until they form soft peaks. Add cream of tartar and sugar. Whip until firm (but not too firm!), moist peaks. 
4. Scrape out whipped egg whites (meringue) into another bowl and set aside. 
5. In the same (egg-whitey) mixing bowl, sift flour, baking powder, salt, & sugar. Put the bowl back on the mixer, but use a paddle attachment now. 
6. Turn mixer to second speed & gradually stream in the oil. Then add egg yolks one at a time (remember to stop and scrape down the bowl, this batter should be smooooooth). 
7. Stream in water, then vanilla. Keep scrapin' the bowl. 
8. Now, take the meringue you prepared earlier. Scoop out about a quarter of the meringue and fold it into the batter. 
9. Keep adding meringue & folding. Try to do this somewhat fast. Don't over mix! The fluffy air from the meringue is what makes this cake so light and nice. 
10. When everything is combined, pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 35-40 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean. Or! If you press the top of the cake gently and it springs back, it's done. 
11. Flip the hot cake upside down onto a sheet pan with parchment paper. 
12. When it's cool, run an offset spatula around the outside and pop out of the pan :) 

Woo! Chiffon cake! Next time I'll give you a strawberry shortcake...layering tutorial? Or an attempt at explaining the procedure. Yay! 

Back to Basics (Pastry Cream).

I'm going to share with you some of the basics I learned in Intro to Baking.

Pastry cream is such an important basic to know in patisserie. It's very very basic, so if you wanted, you could add chocolate, coffee, liqueurs -it can be transformed! It's used to fill cakes,  pastries, you can really get creative with it. It's also easily made into diplomat (a 50/50 mix of whipped cream & pastry cream). We used diplomat in class to fill strawberry shortcake. We had a nice layer of diplomat with fresh chopped strawberries in it. Yum!

Yup yup pastry cream, it's easy to make. All you really need to know is how to temper something. Tempering goes a little like this: you heat liquid over the stove in a saucepan and in a separate bowl you have some eggs or egg yolks (maybe mixed with other things, depending on what you're making). You need to slooowly stream in about half of the hot liquid into the eggs while mixing. Then you can add the egg/milk mix back with the rest of the hot milk. It can go back on the heat now. It's like you want the eggs and milk to reach an equilibrium so that the eggs don't cook (yuck, scrambled eggs). Yeah, so that's tempering. Easy peasy.

Creme Patisserie (Pastry Cream)

Ingredients: 
2 C milk
2 oz sugar

2 oz sugar
1.5 oz cornstarch
1 egg yolk
3 whole eggs

1.5 t vanilla extract
1 oz butter

Procedure: 

1. Prep an ice bath: you need two bowls, one larger than the other. Fill the large bowl with some ice  and rest the smaller bowl inside over the ice. Also have plastic wrap ready. 
2. In a medium saucepan, heat milk & sugar. Heat until you see steam, mix the milk so it doesn't burn. 
3. In a medium sized bowl, sift sugar and cornstarch into the eggs and mix together. 
4. When the milk is hot, temper it into the eggs (~1/2-1/3 of the milk).
5. Return the mix back into the pot with remaining milk & put back on the heat (medium/high heat). Continuously mix until it thickens. This should only take a few minutes. 
6. Remove from the heat and mix in vanilla & butter. 
7. If the pastry cream is lumpy, you can strain it. Strain it into the prepared bowl in the ice bath. 
8. Immediately cover the surface with plastic wrap so that a skin doesn't develop on the pastry cream. Make sure it's chilled in an ice bath. 

Viola! Simple, right? Now all you need is some pate choux and you've got eclairs or cream puffs  ;)