Christmas Through Food- Part III: French Toast with Orange Compote

As I’ve mentioned time and again, I spent most of my free time tooling around on the internet looking for recipes.  There was a huge spike in this activity in mid December.  The idea of making decadent rich foods seemed appropriate and I was looking for any and all that would add to the holiday season.

While I was unemployed, for a very short two weeks, I developed some ungodly obsession with French Toast.  I couldn’t get enough of it, but once I started working again these morning treats vanished.  So when I was on the LA Times website, weeding through recipes requested from restaurants who were generous enough to supply them, I practically peed myself when I saw the most glorious French Toast recipe.

I remember talking to my mom on the phone a few days later (let’s be serious here, I told my whole family about this) and telling her I wanted to make this for breakfast one day while I was home.  It seemed like the perfect Christmas morning breakfast, except for the fact that my family strictly eats cold Italian antipasto on Christmas morning, so that idea was out.  Maybe Christmas Eve.  Regardless, I got everyone amped up for this motherload.

The recipe I chose was French Toast with orange compote, from the Arizone Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix.  This little number consisted of little marscarpone sandwiches that you dipped in the normal french toast egg batter and fried up, adding a freshly made orange compote.  I won’t judge you if you had to take a moment to wipe the drool from your mouth.  Because when I read this recipe, I practically jumped out of my chair.  Cheese in French Toast?!?!  This was the greatest day ever!

So when I returned to Jersey, the ingredients were purchased so I could make this mindblowing breakfast.  My parents were really encouraging this flare I’d developed for cooking.  Not to mention, this dish sounded incredibly excellent.  My downfall was hyping this up too much.  I told everyone I’d make it for breakfast on Christmas Eve.  What I didn’t take into account was the horrendous jet lag I would be developing for most of my stay.  So on the night before Christmas Eve, I fell asleep around 4am, resulting in waking around 2pm– well after everyone had eaten breakfast, and past an appropriate brunch hour.  This continued to happen for a few days, until one day I woke up hungover at an ungodly hour.  It was 10am, but after falling asleep around 4am again, this was awful.  I lounged around for an hour or two and got cookin.  This was really going to happen!

STEP 1- THE ORANGE COMPOTE

The end result.

I attached the recipe above, so please refer to that for exact measurements.

The first step was to get the compote going, as it would need to simmer for an extended amount of time to properly reduce.  I threw in the mandarine oranges, sugar, and ginger that I chopped up.  (I lOVE that this recipe used ginger, as I’m learning it’s my new favorite thing to add for a little extra tanginess.)  I reserved the mandarine orange juice, as the recipe so boldly told me to, having just enough that I would need.  Booyah.  I love it when things work out like that.  What I don’t love, is not having any orange juice because my father used it all up for mimosas.  Did I mention a blizzard rode through?  So there was no way for me to get my much needed 2 and 3/4 cups of OJ.  That is a lot!  How was I supposed to make an orange compote without any of the orange part?

I roared about how pissed I was that no one left any OJ for me and my dad just shrugged his shoulders.  “Just squeeze an orange,” was his response.  Cue body shake enraged chef at such a ridiculous concept.  When I told him how much I needed, he actually laughed.  Clearly he had no faith.  Having no other choice, I rolled up my sleeves and squeezed all the oranges we had.  Thank God for Christmas, because we had a ton from what we had bought ourselves and what others brought over.  I was able to get about 2 cups out of them.  It would have to do.  I dumped in the OJ, saving 1/2 cup for later use and let that mother simmer for about an hour.  The recipe said 40 minutes, but I let her ride.

STEP 2- FRENCH TOAST SANDWICHES

I grabbed my loaves of bread (just standard white bread, Wonder style) and grabbed a pint glass.  It was time to get circular on these mofos.  I patiently sat at our kitchen table, taking one slice at a time, and throwing down the glass to make the prettiest circle I could manage.  My sister sat across from me on her laptop pumping some jams.  It was getting serious in there.  I reserved the scraps for the birds, at my mother’s request.

I stopped after 24 circles, which would result in 12 sandwiches, and broke out the cheese.  I delicately spread a healthy dollop onto each pair, delightedly of course, and made up all the sandwiches.

Frying away. I didn't add any olive to my pan as I didn't really think it was necessary

I whisked together 6 eggs, cinnamon, a touch of sugar, and milk.  I lit a large skillet and started frying.  Like all french toast, I dipped a sandwich in for a bath and then threw it on the hot skillet.  Well I was a little more gentle than that because the marsarpone in the middle would cause the top half to slide around if I wasn’t careful.

Mmm... ready for a dip in the orange compote bath!

I was left with adorable little fried gems.  At that point I returned to the compost.  I took my remaining OJ and mixed in the cornstarch.  I added that mixture to the simmering compost to thicken it up a bit.  Then I let her cool down.

I called in the troops and let everyone create their own plates, buffet style.  I guided them through the intricate process of taking a fried sandwich and ladling the compost on top.

Gloriousness!

Of course by this point, I was barely hungry because so much of my energy had been used to create the dish, but I sat down with a little sandwich and savored it.  It was the kind of thing I imagined royalty would eat in the days of Barry Lyndon.  (Leave it to me to reference a movie to describe a period of time.  What a dork!)  So I felt even better about it as I drank my Dunkin Donuts coffee and ate in some sweatpants and my worn out Giants sweatshirt.  But this was exactly what I had hoped it would taste like.  You get a touch of richness from the cheese, but it’s not overwhelming.  The orange compote is a fresh, sweet contrast.  The flavors really blended together quite nicely, creating a filling and tasty breakfast.  It was a warming treat for such a cold day and really did taste like heaven.  I can’t even imagine going back to regular old French Toast.

Christmas Through Food- Pt I: Petits Fours

I’m well aware that I’m super late on a post like this.  To be honest, I had done so much cooking and baking at the end of December I was completely overwhelmed by the idea of blogging about it.  My plan was to save it all up and blog during the week and a half I was going to be in Jersey visiting the fam with nothing to do.  What ended up happening was that I realized I enjoy doing nothing.  So instead I cooked, ate, and decided to lay around instead of doing anything productive.  The result, is now my backtracking.

So I’m going to go all the way back to mid December, the beginning of my holiday cooking.

PETITS FOURS

This was the goal. Look at how perfect they are!

 

I’m not sure if I’ve already touched on this in the past.  If so, pipe down and lap up my good humored thoughts on the subject until I get to the new stuff.

I first encountered Petit Fours over a year ago at my old job.  They had accidentally come to our office in LA instead of the Denver branch.  We all greedily saw the perishable label on the package and called Denver to tell them whatever it was would probably be spoiled by forwarding along.  With success, we ripped open the package to find a tray of beautifully decorated bite- sized cakes.  I immediately fell in love.  While I’m more of a savory girl myself, when I do crave sweets I prefer cakes and tarts as opposed to plain old chocolate (I know, disgraceful).  As a chubby kid, I was the one buying the box of Zebra Cakes while all my friends were stocking up on candy.  So needless to say, these treats were just my style.

Around Thanksgiving was when I was starting to dream up what holiday treat I’d be baking this year.  Every year for the past 4 at least, I’d baked some sort of Christmas delicacy to shove down anyone’s throat who was around and bring home with me.  My sister takes care of the classics (and this year brought round delicious new cookies I’d never even think of).  She’s got the real skill for baking, making each cookie beautiful.  I’d like to think of myself more as an artist.  My treats don’t always look elegant, I’d say rather homemade, but I strive to make sure the flavors are on point.  So this year, I had my heart set on Petit Fours.

I had decided, as I do with most recipes, that I wanted to make everything from scratch and I wanted the real deal.  None of this shortcut bs.  I did extensive research on the genoise I’d have to make up to the fondant to top it all off.  I started thinking about the flavors I wanted to use.  It was all coming together.

I decided to do 2 rounds, so I could perfect whatever went wrong the first time around.  The flavors?  Chocolate cake, Raspberry jam, Amaretto Custard, and plain old fondant.

Wet and wild and ready for action.

I researched genoise.  This is a french sponge cake that’s supposed to be light and fluffy.  I decided to make a chocolate version.  This was my first time ever making sponge cake.  This was exciting for me because in order to properly execute this cake, you need to boil a pot of water and then place a bowl on top of that to mix your ingredients in.  We’re talking a double decker here.  It’s very precise, as you’ve got eggs cooking in there and don’t want them to actually cook.  The goal is to heat all the ingredients until it’s warm to your finger.  Then you remove the bowl from the heat and whip the crap out of them until you have a fluffy combination that’s tripled in size.  My issue, was that I needed to fold in the cocoa powder to this fluff.  Every time I thought I was good to go, I’d see a secret pocket burst and powder flow out.  This batter was laughing in my face.  So naturally, my first round came out dense and fudgy due to over-mixing.  I wrapped her up and stuck her in the fridge.  I had planned out the steps perfectly so as not to be overwhelmed with all the baking and construction in one night.

On day 2 I created the Amaretto simple syrup to brush over the cake.  Yum!  I also made an Amaretto custard for the middle layer.  There’s no secret to this recipe, as I discovered.  You make a regular custard and just add a few tablespoons of Amaretto to it.  Bam.

I also decided to construct and cut.  This is part one of my downfall.  I took out the sheet of cake and tried trimming the top off.  I think it was a personal issue at this point.  It was as if I was killing the spirit of my cake by cutting so much off.  The end result was very tall Petit Fours as I didn’t have the guts to cut them down small enough.

I cut my long piece of cake into two, for stacking purposes.  On the first layer a healthy amount of simply syrup, followed by jam, followed by the custard that was still room temperature.  Another mistake.  I learned that night that the custard should be cold and completely set.  I ended up with a bit of a mess on my hands, but was able to get it all together.

I'm still trying to stay uniform at this point.

Custard Rebellion.

Now the real pain in the tush.  The cutting.  I dropped the top layer of cake down and took a deep breath.  It was time for this baby to feel the wrath of my knife.  (I would like to note here, that in all the various recipes I read, they all made this part look so easy.  Just use a serrated knife, Bingo, perfect tiny squares.)  I started out making vertical cuts.  Ok, not so bad.  When I started taking each log one by one and cutting those down into squares is where things started to look bad.  The warm custard would ooze out, and I really saw how lopsided these little squares were.  I started giving some of them haircuts to even things out a bit.  It got to a point where I realized these just weren’t going to be the perfect morsels I dreamed up.  It was time to just make something that tasted awesome and looked a lot like something a five year- old would proudly serve to Mom.  Game on.

My daughter will be 5 in May. She did a great job on these.

After all my squares were cut and all different sizes, as I had thrown caution to the wind in any attempt to make them all look the same.  I took each one delicately and smoothed the edges, smearing custard and jam across the sides like glue.  I realized that I would be covering these with fondant, so maybe all wasn’t lost.  And as I’d been tasting as I was going (I am the ULTIMATE grazer when I make anything, which I guess is a good thing for a cook.), I knew they would at least taste good.  I threw them all in the fridge to await the next night.

This is the point where I would like to have a mini flip out session due to my own ignorance/ internet trickery.  As I previously stated, a lot of these elements were knew to me.  I was excited to try my hand at making something like fondant.  I learned there are at least two different kinds.  One, is the kind you see featured on all those cake shows.  You have to roll it out and you can cover or mold just about anything.  It’s kind of a cheat really because it’s maleable.  But, there is also a liquid version.  That’s what I was going for.  I read through some recipes that had a cheat for it, but like I said, I was going for a genuine recipe.  I liked the challenge.  Unfortunately, what I deemed ‘genuine’ turned out to be a freakin’ glaze.  I know, I know.  How could I not realize this?  When a recipe calls for 6 cups of powdered sugar, one should rethink what’s going on.  I just didn’t know any better.

Very obviously a glaze.

So I cooked up this glaze.  Yes, I was very proud of myself.  “Fondant.  Pshh,” I said to myself.  I didn’t understand what everyone made a big deal about.  This beast was supposed to be fickle and annoying, but I had a playful puppy on my hands.  Again, none of this tipped me off.  So I heated, and spooned the glaze over my treats.  This in itself was not an easy task.  I developed a two fork routine.  I’d spear the top, lean it over the pot while I spooned enough glaze to cover all sides, and then take a second fork to pry the little cake off the speared end to gently place it down on a tray.  Many of these attempts ended with expletives as the cake would roll onto it’s side, ruining the glaze.

Some of them came out slightly pretty. They wouldn't have been the last ones asked to dance in High School.

After finishing I looked at my work: A tray of all differently sized cakes that looked nothing like what I had wanted to create.  I popped one in my mouth.  I actually really enjoyed it, but it was not at all what I was trying to recreate.  So I sighed, ate another one and wrapped them up.

I brought some to work, and mailed out to packages of them.  The following week I rolled up my sleeves and got back to work.

This time my cake came out perfect.  It was light and fluffy.  I trimmed it respectively, glazed it and threw it in the fridge.  That same night I made the custard, so it would have a night to stay cool.  The next day I constructed my cakes.  With the cake being much fluffier, the cutting was a little easier.  I also decided to use my grandmother’s method of cutting cheesecake: dip your knife in a glass of water after each cut.  Booyah.  I was back on track.  The squares weren’t all even, but they were a lot closer.  I was also very picky about getting rid of the end slices and so on.  I became a Petit Four Nazi– only the perfect ones survived.  (Too much?)

This time around I said a big ef you to the glaze recipe and was still feeling too burnt from it to attempt another fondant.  I decided I was on a new path to making the most delicious treat I could think of.  The answer was Chocolate Amaretto Buttercream Frosting.  Heyoo!  I decided if I was making little tiny cakes, they were going to be exactly that.  None of this frenchy vagueness.  Pure American cake style.

I whipped this mother up and she was the perfect addition!  I decided to wait on icing these babies until I returned home to Jersey, so I packed everything up for my trip.

With my remains, I created little parfaits for myself and my roommates!  Yeah, I’m a dork, but wouldn’t you like a parfait?

So all in all, I attempted to master this decadent dessert and I don’t think I did that.  Instead, in my true fashion, I created some sort of Americanized hybrid that tasted pretty good.  By the time I got home for Christmas, I was so over the sweat and tears that I didn’t even bother to ice them.  I just served them with the icing on the side.  And of course I didn’t take any pictures of the second go around to boot.

This time, you won France but watch your back!  I’ve got a few ideas up my sleeve.

Stay tuned for more savory Christmas dishes!

Blizzards: Bringing families together and a new appreciation for Scotch

That's my Dad! And he's gigantic.

I’m bad at blogging when I’m not on a schedule.  When I get time off of work I become full of a sweet radiant bliss that doesn’t allow me to do any of my normal activities.  So now I’m behind on about 5 posts about decadent meals/ desserts I’ve created.  Watch out for those in the near future.  Hint– awesome seafood chowder to come!

I shipped out to NJ for my holiday break to spend some time with the fam.  My sad little LA body was worried about the cold winds it would have to endure.  I kept telling myself to ‘Buck Up!”  I used to live in Boston for Christ’s sake!  None of that mattered anymore though.  After 3 years of living in LA, I have been stripped of any tough exterior that can walk through temperatures below 40 degrees (and that’s being generous).

So I arrived and didn’t think it was all that bad.  I bundled up and went from car to establishment and back again, never spending too long outside.  I donned a hideous large puffy coat that I adore because it isn’t fashionable by any means and it almost hits my knees.  I only wear this thing when I’m home for the holidays.  It’s perfect for those weather conditions and is a friendly reminder that I don’t live in subzero weather anymore.

Christmas came and as always, that night ended with a gigantic high school reunion (spanning from decades) at the local bar.  This has become a tradition since all my friends have been 21, as a good friend’s birthday is on Christmas.  I actually walked home from the bar that night!  I braced myself, and even mentioned to my brother that I was going to have to get pretty loaded if we were going to walk home.  And we were, because our ride left.  After beer, shots, and merriment, we set off.  It wasn’t too terrible.  I was happy to get home, but wasn’t completely miserable.  I was getting the hang of this winter weather.  I was CRUSHING it!  And then…

BAM!  Blizzard mofo!

I’m not exaggerating here.  I often do that– like to dress up what I’m talking about to make it more exciting.  I actually mean a blizzard.  Look it up.  Union County, NJ gets 2.5 feet of snow– in one shot.  It snowed all day, relentlessly taunting me.  After the first foot I realized I wasn’t going anywhere, which was ok.  It was the day after Christmas and I could care less about going anywhere.  We had a ton of delicious leftovers and booze.  We were good to go.

I remembered past blizzards that have snowed me in.  There’s always some sort of bonding.

As a kid, you waited until daytime so you could somehow make your way over to a friend’s house to build snowmen and go sledding.  And sometimes even build igloos.  For real.  And then it was all about warm hot chocolate inside as you peeled wet clothes off your body. (It’s true.  In Jersey we ski in our jeans.  But I did wear snow pants as a kid.)

As I got older, it was more about who you were lucky enough to be snowed in with.  In college, my freshman year, we had a huge blizzard in Boston, resulting in a dorm-wide party.  Mostly I remember staying in with my roommate and having and epic evening with Captain Morgan (gross).   A few years later, a first date that gave us a long time to get to know each other.

In other words, as much as I may hate large quantities of snow, they always manage to bring people together.  So this one would be no different.  I was lucky enough to be with my whole family, which is a rarity to begin with.  We laid around and watched football and movies.  We were all old enough to not be bratty or annoyed by each other.  It was just peaceful.  We took turns dancing around in the flurries (I only lasted a few moments) and enjoyed the barricade the snow created.

And when the little ones and the older ones went up to bed.  My brother and I silently agreed it was time to class it up with some Scotch.

I talk about Scotch a lot.  I’m obviously a big fan, but for some reason the cold weather just aches for it.  There is nothing that seems more appropriate to me during a snowstorm, than a glass of smooth Scotch.  This is something I didn’t have an appreciation for as a college student, when I experienced my last big storm.  Luckily, my father had a good one.  I don’t remember the name, but I do remember I wasn’t supposed to drink it.  I did anyway (mostly because he doesn’t drink Scotch).  And it was perfect.

We both met in the basement with our various night caps.  It’s too good not to share the little midnight snacks we created.  I had my delicious glass of Scotch with a scrap of bread.  Boring!  But anything would have been in comparison to the combinations my brother magically throws together.  He chose to drink Makers on the rocks.  He paired that with a small bowl of Italian olives, a chunk of Ricotta Salata, a few slices of Provolone, and a wedge of Jarlsberg Swiss Cheese.  Awesome!  He shared of course, because I can’t just watch someone eat cheese.  And we discovered the swiss was an excellent compliment to the whiskeys.

And then we watched The Town.  But that doesn’t really fit into my theme here.  So I’ll just say that I liked it, but I’m biased because I spent a lot of time in Boston.  And I love Don Draper.

So as much as I will complain about being stuck in a blizzard, which ruined a lot my plans and gave me an annoying cold, it ended up being a nice way to have some close family time that I haven’t had in a long time.