Herbivoracious Dinner #2

 
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Michael at Herbivoracious posted a write up of the dinner he put on at Cafe Flora this past Tuesday evening, which Baker Bee and I were lucky enough to attend.

The menu was based on Spanish flavors with a modern twist, and included things like savory churros with morel “hot chocolate” (pictured below, as well as my purse-sized digital camera could do) and apple-celery sorbet, both of which were unlike anything I’ve ever had and incredibly good. I was excited to hear that the baby turnip in the fideos (pictured above) came from the Whistling Train Farm, from whom we used to get a CSA share until we moved too far out of their delivery range.

 

He has a great run down of the inspiration behind each dish and links to recipes, so I urge you to check it out and be inspired yourself. I know that I’m going to try making the boyikos in the very near future (hopefully Sunday, to share with The Toasty Chef and Mr. T).

Not only was the food delicious, but the company was just as enjoyable, and we had fun meeting and talking to Michael and his wife, Dawn and Eric from The Wright Angle (don’t miss their resturant reviews, travel stories and beautiful photography–they’ve actually been to El Bulli), and everyone else at our end of the table. It was a real leap for me to invite myself along to a dinner where I didn’t know anyone, but I’m very, very glad I did.

Miracle Fruit 101

 
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A week and a half ago, Baker Bee and I threw our first flavor tripping party. It wasn’t our first experience with miracle fruit, but most of our guests were flavor tripping virgins. This was awesome, because in this case your first time is probably going to be the best, and if there’s anything more fun than flavor tripping yourself, it’s watching someone else’s eyes go big as they bite into a lemon wedge…and then seeing them immediately reach for another.

Miracle fruit is a little red berry from Africa, originally eaten by the local populace to make their food taste better, but now also a staple in the diets of urban foodies and inquisitive geeks elsewhere in the world. The berry itself doesn’t taste like much–or so I’ve heard, as I’ve never had a fresh one–but the results are, well, miraculous, thanks to a chemical in the berry called–get this–“miraculin”. When scientists start calling things miracles, you know you’re dealing with something truly special.

What the miraculin does is bind with your taste buds in such a way that sour foods taste sweet. Oh, they still taste sour, too, and you’ll feel your mouth ache from the acid after about a half hour of dashing back and forth to the fridge and pantry to find everything sour you own. But the sourer the food or drink is, the sweeter it becomes. Not only that, but the sweetness lets other flavors speak up that you’ve never noticed in the foods before. It’s pretty amazing, trippy, even–hence the they popularity of the term “flavor trip” for a miracle fruit tasting. Continue reading →

Don’t Cry Over Fallen Cupcakes

 
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Have you ever had a bad baking day? If you have, you’ll know that they can be as devastating as a bad hair day from hell. Most people don’t bake only for themselves. At least, I don’t. I’ve always been very aware of the people I bake for, and I firmly believe that the touchy-feely idea that people can taste the emotions you had while making the food is true. So when I have a bad baking day, it’s almost always when the product is going to someone–or many someones–I care about. On top of that, these people usually know I went to pastry school and was a pastry cook, and so should be capable of making a decent cake. All in all, bad baking days are a dogeared and food-splattered recipe for extreme embarrassment in the cookbook of my life.

This past Saturday, I was making the birthday cake for a very dear friend of mine’s birthday party. I wanted it to be spectacular, because the birthday girl is pretty darn spectacular herself. I ended up deciding to do cupcakes, and I set out to do two different flavors as soon as I woke up Saturday morning, a chocolate cupcake recipe from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri and a white chocolate cake recipe from Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow of Fran’s Chocolates. I’d had success with the devil’s food cake recipe in Malgieri’s book twice last fall, and one of my chefs at pastry school used to work for Fran Bigelow and helped with the production of the photos and drawings in the book (if I remember correctly, the hands in the drawings at the beginning of the book are hers), so I trusted both books to have good recipes. Continue reading →