Persimmon Pudding with Toffee Sauce

At this time of year persimmons are dangling on bare tree branches, like lanterns or brilliant pendant earrings. I've had the pleasure of eating two types of persimmons, the squatter, crispy type ("Fuyu") and the heart-shaped, soft-fleshed type ("Hachiya").

A Hachiya persimmon. My parents ripen them on the windowsill, bottoms up.

The sweet bounty of persimmons in winter sometimes poses a conundrum - what to do with all these orange beauties ripening into softness at the same time? Since only my dad and I eat the Hachiya persimmon (my mom ONLY eats crisp fruit, so no papayas, bananas, or Hachiyas for her), something had to be done about all our extra ripe persimmons. Hence this recipe, which I baked for our family Christmas Eve dinner. Persimmons really do not have a strong flavor (except for their tannins, and that is only when they're not fully ripe) so this recipe yields a very English plummy-pudding cake. With toffee sauce drizzled on top, it's a sweet, festive end to a holiday meal.

For the Pudding

2 Cups Persimmon Pulp

1 3/4 Cups Sugar

2 Egg

4 Tbs. Melted Butter

2 Cup Milk

2 Cup Flour

3 Tsp. Baking Soda

1 Tsp. Cinnamon

1 Tsp. Salt

1 Cup Golden Raisins
3/4 Cup Chopped Pitted Dates

1 Cup Nuts

Preheat oven to 325 degees. Grease a bundt pan.
Mix sugar, pulp, egg, melted butter and milk.
In separate bowl, combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.
Gradually add pulp mixture, mixing well.
Dust raisins, dates, and nuts with flour to keep them from sinking to bottom; add them to mixture.
Pour into bundt pan and bake at 325 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes.

For the Sauce

2 Cups Brown Sugar
1 Cup Heavy Cream
1/2 Cup Butter (1 stick)
1/4 Tsp. Salt

Combine ingredients in a saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring, until mixture is beginning to caramelize. Remove from heat and cool. Drizzle lavishly over pudding.

This would be lovely served with vanilla ice-cream!

Daring Baker's Challenge: Macarons and the Case of the Missing Feet!

I couldn't have been more excited about a Daring Baker's challenge - imagine having just come back from Paris and sampling the world's finest macarons, only to find out that you yourself are being challenged to produce the same pastry!

Alas, the macarons were not to be. I tried to follow all the advice out there: I aged the egg whites 24 hours, I tapped the baking sheets, I let the unbaked cookies dry out. But the end result was simply not a macaron. A fine almond cookie, sure, but there were no feet! If you scroll down to the other posts below on macarons, the feet are the ruffly edge on the bottom of the macaron cookie. At any rate, at least I tried (and will try again!) and got a good caramel sauce recipe out of the deal.

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

This batter looked promising: smooth, shiny. What could go wrong? HA!

Alas: these are just glorified almond cookies. Light and airy - but no feet! Arggghhhh.
Still, the caramel was delectable. Not a total loss.

For all things macaron, including recipes, I suggest going to Tartlette's blog. I used her Salty Caramel Sauce, which is the filling for her Pecan Pie Macaron. My shells were unflavored. I think I overfolded my batter. And I will have to experiment more with my oven, which uses gas mark numbers rather than actual temperatures. Live and learn!

Eating My Way through Paris: Macarons part 1

Since relocating to Heidelberg, Germany, I've been astounded by how easy it is to get to other European locales. Last weekend we headed to Paris - only 3 1/2 hours by train! As my mom said, "That's like driving to Tahoe!" (from the SF Bay Area, that is). One of my main incentives for going to Paris was sampling all the macarons I've been obsessing about for the last year or so. It seems that this meringue sandwich cookie has taken the foodie-world by storm. So here goes for our Paris macaron taste-off:

This is the display in the Lenôtre, in Bastille, 11th arrondissement.
We stopped there our first morning, for our first macaron tasting.

These were light and satisfyingly crunchy-chewy, with lovely fillings.

I was impressed by the chocolate ganache filling - very rich. The others we tried were pistachio, frambois (raspberry), and caramel, with sea salt. I think my favorite was the caramel (it usually is!), but one complaint is that the sea salt hits you first when you bite into the macaron, and it's a bit strong. The burnt-sugar taste of caramel comes almost at the end, which is too long to wait, in my mind. All in all, though, a great sweet treat - light but very satisfying.

Glass, Glas, Vidrio, Vitrum, Verre, ὕαλος, 玻璃

I adore glass, both its liquid qualities and its brittle ones. Glass looks like it can flow, like magma, slow and glowing and molasses-like, but it can also be crafted so thinly that it looks as light as air, almost invisible in its clearest forms. I remember as a child loving the glass icicle Christmas ornaments more than any of the others, and I want someday to decorate a tree only in clear lights and glass icicles. Imagine how such a tree would sound when touched!

When in a museum, I'm always drawn to displays of ancient glass. The opalescent sheen and the weathered textures of ancient glass enchant me, along with the thought that such a fragile item has survived hundreds of years.

Roman pitcher, 2nd-4th Century CE, Honolulu Academy of Art

Some of this love of glass is also tied to my love of food, oddly enough. I am fascinated by liquid glass - why? Why, because it looks edible! While it's being shaped, glass is glowingly molten and pliable - like taffy or caramel for the gods. My love of glass and my love of sweets feed into each other: I love glass, in part, because it looks scrumptious, and I love foods that look and behave like glass. I can't get enough of oozing caramel, brittle toffee, or burnt sugar.


But did you know that scientists are still puzzled by the molecular structure of glass? A New York Times article recently explored the competing theories of why glass is hard. Yep, you read that right. It seems that glass has the same kind of molecular structure as that of liquids, which is random and jumbled. It is not like other materials, such as water or silica, whose molecules form neat, crystalline patterns when solidified. Glass in its solid form inexplicably looks like a liquid. From the article:

Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.”

So, there you go. Glass is not only beautiful, it's a mystery, even though we've worked with it for thousands of years.

Glass octopus bowl, a recent gift I received.

Birthday Pause: Puffs & Perfumery

Yesterday I turned thirty - and, actually, feel very happy about it. I think it has something to do with being a perpetual student, since as one I feel as though I'm in a constant state of not-there-yet. I'm always under someone's supervision, always the student in a student-teacher interaction. So, turning thirty for me has signaled that I am actually an adult and could and should demand some respect.

But on to other heraldry of my adulthood! I am happy to announce that....I have finally attempted and succeeded in making pate a choux! (What did you expect, a pregnancy announcement?) After years of thinking I could not do this, I finally got out the piping bag, the non-stick baking mats, and mixed the panade. Here are my pretties. Aren't they oh-so-pretty?

These I filled with fresh strawberry cream, but I am actually preparing to make a croche em bouche for my & Molt's 30th birthday bash. Then they will filled with pecan pastry cream, dipped in caramelized sugar, and arranged into a wreath - with a spun sugar nest on top. See, I'm an adult. I can make croche em bouche, damnit!

I've also been obsessing about perfumes lately, probably borne from the old-fashioned but romantic notion that a woman should have a signature scent. Now Smell This is my absolute favorite fragrance blog - I could spend hours reading it, and do! So, for my birthday, Molt bought me the sample set from London perfumery Ormonde Jayne.

The set includes samples of the whole line. So far we've tried Osmanthus and Ormonde Man. I was dying of curiosity over Osmanthus, since I've been searching for the Chinese gui hua flower ever since our trip to Taiwan last winter. It's a flower that's dried and used in fragrant sweet tea and dessert soups, such as this one below (enjoyed in Shanghai), with sweet rice balls with rice mead and gui hua (the yellow specks are the dried flowers):

Here is my interpretation of Ormonde Jayne's Osmanthus:
Opening - grapefruit burst (not so much pomello), green herbs
Dry down - sweet honey and cotton
Base - a sweet, cherrylike pink floral, water, and honey
It doesn't remind me of gui hua at all, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately. I told my mom that if I smelled like gui hua I'd be a bowl of rice balls. She laughed and said, "Probably." So, OJ's Osmanthus to me is an elegant, well-dressed floral, very pretty, polished, and restrained. Not me. But! I will be trying Champaca soon - this is based on the magnolia flower, called bai lan hua in Chinese. They sell it hooked on wires in the streets of Taiwan (and throughout Asia) so drivers can hang it in their cars. It is a luscious fragrance. Ormonde Jayne mixes Champaca with the scent of basmati rice!! I can't wait to try it.

Some incredibly fragrant flowers I've sniffed (or eaten!) in China, Taiwan, and Thailand:

Gui Hua (Osmanthus). My aunt has a tree in her backyard.
When the flowers drop off the Chinese call it "golden rain."

Bai Lan Hua (Champaca). I was given a blossom at a restaraunt in Thailand - which I promptly put in my jeans pocket and forgot. Later my entire suitcase was redolent with the creamy white fragrance - it is that powerful, and beautiful.

Qi Li Xiang (Orange Jasmine) - translated, the Chinese means "Seven Miles Fragrant." We took a bike ride in the Taiwanese countryside and rode past a hedge of these flowers - it was amazing. I plucked a sprig, and it's still in the book I was reading at the time (Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man). Alas, it is fragrant no more.