Santa Hat Cupcakes in Demarle

Last Sunday's Potluck was amazing.   Our hostess made a huge pot of hamburger soup and homemade rolls as only she can make them. Others contributed salads and desserts in such a tempting array.

We took a dessert.  I wanted to take something to do with the season.  Looked around Pinterest for a few minutes and came up with this santa hat cupcake idea.  But because I like to use Demarle trays and molds you know I was going to put my own twist on it.

 

A requirement for our family is that dessert includes chocolate.  This recipe is for black bottom cupcakes which I blogged about last year.  Well upon further investigation I find I have not really blogged about this recipe.  This is hard to comprehend because it is our family's favorite dessert and I've made it countless times.

This time I used my new fancy dancy ISI (The brand matters) whipped cream dispenser.  But unless you plan on serving this dessert right away, don't do this.  By the time we served it at the potluck the whipping cream had melted away.  Next time I will use frosting to finish the hat.   The owner of the kitchen store where I had my birthday gift certificate to spend (this is what I got with it) said when dealing with compressed air, go with this brand of dispenser because others have the reputation of blowing up on you.  This was sound advice I'm sure because other advice has been good in the past.

So now you get the recipe which originally came to me about 20 years ago from a friend who got it from a friend when she was a minister in Alaska.  If you wish for more information on the Demarle trays contact me.

Happiness Pills aka Black Bottom Cupcakes

Cream Cheese Mixture

1 - 8 oz pkg cream cheese at room temp.

1 egg at room temp.

1/3 cup granulated sugar

1/3 tsp. sea salt

1 cup semi-sweet choc. chips

Cake

1 ½ cups all purpose flour, used Wheat Montana non-bromated)

1 cup granulated sugar

¼ cup powdered baking cocoa

½ tsp. sea salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup water

1/3 cup cooking oil

1 Tablespoon vinegar

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup semi-sweet choc. chips

Cream Cheese Mixture: 

Combine all ingredients except choc. chips and beat well.  Stir in choc. chips; set aside.  It might be good to refrigerate this so it gets a little stiffer.  I did not do this step so the cream cheese mixture spread out too much in the mold as you can see in the photo.  It’s too hard to mix together if you don’t have these items at room temperature to start with.

Cake mixture:

Combine dry ingredients.  Combine moist ingredients. Mix together until well combined.  Add chocolate chips.  

For the sake of knowing amounts, I’m going to give the instructions for a Demarle cupcake form such as bouquet, charlotte or muffin tray.

Place about a teaspoon of the cream cheese mixture in the bottom of each mold and then place about 1/8 cup batter on top of it.

Bake for 18 to 20 minutes at 350 degrees.  Cool 10 minutes or place in freezer for a few minutes before turning out of mold.  Cream cheese tends to stick more than other things, so a short freeze is really helpful.

If you choose a smaller mold, adjust your amounts the best you can and bake for shorter times.  Mini Charlotte is 10 minutes and small savarin is 12 minutes.  May need a little adjustment for your oven.  Mine bakes hot.

If you have a small amount of cake or cream cheese mixture left over, you can always put it in a mold by itself so it’s not wasted.

Chocolate Truffle Making Class at Alexander's

Lemon Truffles With Candied Lemon Peel.  

I actually helped make these.  The flavor is intensely lemony.

A few weeks ago I had the unique opportunity to be the first to attend a truffle making class at Alexander's Classic Chocolates.  I was the only student so it was the best one on one training possible; a positively excellent experience.  About a year ago when I first discovered this chocolate shop I began asking for a class, not knowing if it would happen, when it would happen or why it should happen.  The why part was mainly for the fun of it, but as it turned out it makes me into a more discriminating chocolate consumer plus MUCH more appreciative of the amazing amount of time and attention to detail that is spent on this art.  I called Alex recently once again to inquire about taking a class and he agreed to do it that very week.  This would be a good time to comment on the importance of importunity.  I spoke with him at least three times hoping he would agree to a class...maybe more.

It turned out to be a two day class though it was supposed to be just one.  I went back a few days later to see the rest of the process.

On day one we made raspberry truffles from scratch and got started on the lemon truffles too.  This included making the ganache from scratch with fresh fruit.  More on this later.  On day two we finished the lemon truffles.  I'm sorry to say I didn't take any photos that first day.  We made the raspberry truffles in the square trays.  There was part of the process I could not do because I don't have the strength in my fingers and wrists to hold the tray straight when turning it upside down at exactly the right time to pour the chocolate out of the tray to make the shell which will soon be filled with the ganache then sealed.

Lemon truffles just finished.

Alexander,  one of the owners  is strong in the area of chemistry and took two years of chocolate chemistry. Only a few people in existence have taken this much chocolate chemistry.  I never knew chemistry could be so interesting.  If ever I was going to relate to chemistry, chocolate would be the reason.  He has a very exclusive food chemistry program available to just a few individuals which he uses to make his truffles so precisely and of course from scratch.

Here are some of the tidbits I learned and found interesting.

Mother's should bring their children up to have discriminating taste in chocolate.

Anyone caught chewing gourmet chocolate will not be given seconds.

Vanilla and chocolate have almost the same chemical structure and are very complimentary to each other.  It was interesting to learn less sugar is required to sweeten chocolate when you bring vanilla into the equation.

Chemical structure of chocolate

Never boil chocolate you will ruin it.

There is not even one molecule of caffeine in chocolate.  There is theobromine and it gives a similar effect to caffeine except it lasts longer and has a more subtle effect.

I learned some things about tempering chocolate.  It is best to temper chocolate when making truffles so you get the hard crack when biting into the outside coating.

Here is Alex dipping a lemon truffle in tempered dark chocolate.  

I think this was 72% cocoa.

Chocolate has a mind of it's own (kind of like a child of about age 2, it takes a lot of attention and time) so you have to heat it up to a certain temperature I think it was 113 degrees  (should have taken notes).  Then let it cool to 88 degrees and then bring it up to 91 degrees.  If you don't get the beta crystals with this process, then you can start over.  That's good that you don't have to throw perfectly good chocolate away if at first you don't succeed.  You can seed it to help with this process.  This is like setting a good example for your children to follow.  There were many good lessons to be learned about child rearing when working with chocolate.

Round truffles filled with chocolate lemon ganache and sealed, just waiting to be dipped:

 Garnishes waiting for the lemon truffles:  The first is lemonade powder at the top, 

second is tiny slices of jelly bellies which we sliced with a razor blade and the last one is candied lemon peel made by a company in Italy.

Hardened chocolate from the drippings after dipping.  

This will be collected and tempered again for some other recipe.

Alex garnishing the dipped truffles on the right.  The truffles on the left are waiting for their coating.

The photos above are all from the second day I attended the class.  The first day we prepared the square shells for the raspberry truffles.  He has cocoa butter prints on sheets that you put in the bottom of the tray and then when you turn it over and take it out of the mold you have these perfectly printed truffles.  Here is an example though these are not the ones we did that day.

So now I want to tell you about the ganache.  When I arrived that first day there was a flat of the biggest, plumpest, most perfectly formed fresh raspberries I've ever set eyes on.  We washed those and put them in a large pot to cook down for 2 hours on a low heat.  After two hours it became syrup; smelling wonderful indeed. Then we made a chocolate ganache using that rare program I wrote about earlier in the post which is only available to a few people in the world.  The recipes are quite precise, measuring to the gram; and use only the best ingredients.  One ingredient of note was the raw honey used to sweeten the ganache.  Only the best will do of course and I'd like to let you in on the virtues of White Gold Raw Honey.  It is such a mild honey and gives such an amazing mild sweetness to these truffles.  It is a truly wonderful ingredient.  I want some for my birthday...it is that wonderful.  Imported from Northern Canada.   http://www.whitegoldhoney.com/

But I digress.  We made the ganache and then when the raspberry syrup was ready it was poured into the chocolate ganache and then left to cool to a very exacting temperature so when it was poured into the shells we had made they would not melt.  Once they reached the right temperature we sealed the ganache in and then all was left to cool.  We hurried the process along on just one tray of raspberry truffles so I could take some home.  It was too fast though and those would not be fit to sell because of the crack where the seal broke because the ganache was not cooled properly.  But that was just my tray and they certainly were wonderful tasting over the next few days.

While the raspberries were cooking down we started on the lemon syrup.  The first step was to wash and zest about 15 lemons.  Then once the zest was saved we juiced all the lemons and cooked it all down for two hours.  Oh man did it ever smell amazing in there.

So when Alex makes wine truffles which are truly wonderful, he makes the syrup out of two bottles of wine.  Other chocolate shops just put a couple tablespoons of wine in the ganache and I think this business of taking the fruit or wine and cooking it down at a low heat for a couple hours makes for some of the most amazing flavors ever.  Now I am beginning to understand why I am drawn to this chocolate shop.  It really is better than any I've experienced.

It was a fascinating time I had learning from this chocolate master, Alexander.

Bouzies Bakery Tour

It has been a busy month (you've never heard THAT before, have you?) and I really intended to get this post up long before now.  Even better I intended to learn to make this amazing ciabatta bread.  It's still on my list of things to do.

As I said in my last post, Tara of Bouzie's Bakery was friendly and fun.  After she and the little one gathered eggs, she invited us right in to see the bakery.  She was making a specialty cracker they do not sell to anyone except Luna for their wonderful cheese boards.  But we were able to see part of the process and then taste the results.

 This is what we saw first, several large trays of crackers waiting to be baked.

Here Tara is mixing four types of seeds to sprinkle on the crackers.

Next she spritzed the crackers with water.

Then she sprinkled the seed mixture over the crackers

 I can only remember two of the seeds she used.  Flax and sesame...but there were two more.

Then Tara took us into the other room where they have this huge steam injected oven.  She says this oven makes the difference between a mediocre bakery product and an extraordinary product. So I know that even if I do everything else right I'm not apt to have the oven so my bread is not going to be this good.  I will have to live with this fact and it's probably good because I would just eat all the more.

Here are the crackers that were finished.  It only took a few minutes.

There next to the oven were racks and racks of finished bread.  The rack on top was the fluffiest English muffins I've ever seen.  We bought a bag and ate them for breakfast the next day.  YUM!

Kind Lady Tara:

The story of Bouzie Bakery:  The owners spent some time in the small village of Bouzie France.  It is a cozy community where much bartering takes place.  They so enjoyed the experience and decided to create a bakery in Spokane to try and recapture the experience as much as possible.

That night at dinner we had ciabatta bread on the table:

with Cristie's delightful salad and pasta.

One of the tips she shared with us is when making up the Ciabatta dough it is more like a pancake batter consistency than a bread dough.  Then it is beat on high for 30 minutes to make the long gluten strands.

In this photo they were making scones.

Ummm...that mixer was over 4 feet tall.

Simple ingredients in this bakery include Fleur de Sel...

and extra virgin olive oil.... but most importantly, non-GMO flour and no synthetic sugars.

Luna's Restaurant, Spokane

A month or so ago I had the opportunity to visit my friend in Spokane for a couple days.  When a relative heard I was going there she suggested we have lunch at Luna's.  When that particular relative says go to this place or that place to eat I listen up.  She is a gourmet cook herself and knows about good food.  About Luna's Restaurant she said..."Gourmet food made from scratch and interesting decor."  Words I like to hear indeed.

So we did go and we were amazed. The outside appearance when you drive up is nothing special but I didn't let that bother me.  After all, I'd come here by recommendation. Once inside we enjoyed the atmosphere very much.

Here are a few photos I shot while waiting.

Not so busy on a Wednesday at 3:30 P.M. so it was good for taking a few photos.  The staff were relaxed and did a great job of answering our questions and waiting on us.  Nicely done.  I recommend going to nice places like this between meal times so you don't have the noisy din and rushed staff.

Patio seating is nice but it was a little too warm on this particular late afternoon.

Each table had a small potted herbal looking plant.  Loved this.

We already had a dessert plan so just took photos of the tempting made from scratch cookies.

Even the salt and pepper were well presented.

My daughter was a little uncertain about what she would eat at this place.  She likes simpler food than I do. She liked the fruit bowl.

My friend and I split a cup of soup.  Lemongrass, curry, vegetable.  OH MY!  I savored every bite.  Then we split a pizza from their wood fired Italian oven and was it ever good.  Forgot to take a photo of that.

Took this photo for the unique feet on the dessert display case.  White case with gold painted feet.  Like this.

We were amazed by the ciabatta bread and butter they brought to our table while waiting for the rest of the meal.  Unbelievable!  We ate that up and asked for more.  This was NOT going to be a dieting day.  She said they get the bread from the bakery behind them but this did not sink in until later...you will read all about it.

This gorgeous cupboard caught my attention because of my interest in painted furniture.  See my other blog for more details on that.  I inquired about this and was told the marble came from the Paulson Building in Spokane and the upper and lower cupboards were not meant to go together but were salvaged and stacked.

Moved in close to look at the details.  I think I might see some brighter blues peeking through.  Greek blue perhaps?  That might be interesting.

Can't tell if it is a light and shadow thing or if there is a brighter blue on the edge of these doors?

Just cute details everywhere you looked.  Liked how they displayed the bowls and used chalk boards.

Nicely done chalk board wall

Love the shade of green in the hydrangeas; also the aqua lamps.

Like the chandelier and the rough wood ceiling.

The waitress said they have a garden in back.  Rather than ask permission and be told no, we decided to ask forgiveness if we got in trouble which we did not.  What a neato parking lot on the way to the garden.

Close up of the parking lot.

Tara of Bouzie's Bakery saw us coming from the bakery window and whenever she sees a child she takes them to collect eggs.  She came right out and gave us a warm welcome and asked the child among us if she would like to help collect eggs. The photo below shows them on their way to do that WITH PURPOSE in their step.   The waitress had said the bakery was behind the restaurant but we hadn't put that all together until after Tara invited us in to tour the bakery.  This was a wonderful impromptu experience and we did not want to leave.

Stay tuned, there is a lot more, but I have to take a break and get the vacation rental ready.

30th Anniversary...Lunch at Brasserie Four: Cuisine Francaise

This blog is more about the wedding than food this time.  Scroll to near the end for the food part.

It was good to go through the wedding album and pick a few photos in honor of our wedding day 30 years ago.  Weren't we just the skinnies?

I was 97 lbs in these photos.  THAT was short lived!

I was really into vintage anything.  Not much has changed has it?

The dress was quite the story.  Everyone has their own idea of what the most important detail of the wedding is.  For me it was the vintage dress.  I was prepared to make a dress I could wear again and when I showed a drawing of the vintage style calf length dress...

... I had in mind to my husband to be, he said no. "Have a full length dress with a train like Princess Diana (she got married the year before). There is no need to wear the dress again."  WHAT!!!???  I thought I knew this conservative man after 6 years of courting. But that took me by surprise.  This was a departure from both of our family's tradition of being practical and appearing humble.

So with the assurance it was what he wanted, I went all out, choosing the most difficult antique pattern I could find from a company that has long since gone out of business called "Past Patterns."  This is the 1905 Muslin Gown.

The vintage patterns were so outdated it was difficult to find things I needed to make it and had to improvise. This pattern called for boning which I'd never hear of before. Thankfully I had been sewing for many years by this time and when I ran up against difficulties I had aunts, a sister and a mother and a talented neighbor who stepped in with help and suggestions.   One of the things that was improvised was that I really wanted this watermarked appearance in the fabic.  I was in love with watermark at that time of my life as were many people in the early eighties.  However, the pattern was for a muslin gown and the fabric I found and bought without knowing better was drapey polyester. (I learned a lot on this project).  The fabric and the pattern so did not go together.  When I was a few weeks from the wedding and ready to give up, my aunt Gwynne suggested taking it to a dry cleaners for pressing.  You see the tiny pin tucks over the hips sewn on the bias polyester fabric were a nightmare that was not going away.  Well that worked and then I was off and running again.  The next hurdle was how the dress hung straight down and the train didn't stand out like it was supposed to.  I was sent to a wedding shop by my parent's neighbor, Debbie, to buy a slip with a hoop.  Voila!  That worked too.  With encouragement and support from the right sources I was able to wear the dress.  However, not as finished as my highschool Home Ec teacher taught me...the hem is still unfinished to this day.  It's sewn up and all, just has a raw edge under there and it's got pine needles and stuff stuck in it from that day so long ago.

And here we are saying our vows in front of our relatives.

Then....and now:

My husband was going to be away for work on our actual anniversary day so we decided to celebrate on the one weekend in August that was available.  It was such a last minute decision that I just loaded up the kids and drove an hour down the road to meet up with my husband, just returning from a week of work 3 hours away and drop off the younger children to spend the weekend with their sister.

We had dinner at PF Changs which was good.  We had never been there before.  Since my husband was gone recently he wasn't in much of a mood to go anywhere so we just headed back home and relaxed all weekend.  It was hard not to tend to things that needed to be done but for the most part we managed.  We went out for one lunch and it was excellent.  I spent some time in the kitchen because we were home.  That's where I usually am you know.  It's why I'm not so skinny anymore.  The skinny began to change about one week into being married and I've struggled ever since.

Brasserie Four is owned by the daughter of the lady I signed up to sell Demarle under.  So this owner being related to her mother and also owning a French restaurant certainly does use Demarle for some of her presentations.

The menu is amazing and so is the food.

We ordered the last item on the menu:  Pizze La Paysanne and here is a photo:

We split that and also ordered a Ceasar Salad.  Love how they stack it.  Great presentation and of course delightfully tasty.

Tick Tock goes the clock.  Fast forward a week and now my husband is gone away for the week to work.  It's the day of our anniversary and my daughter is visiting for the day.  After running errands we come home and this was sitting on the front porch.  Love!

Back in those days we actually printed photos so I put one of our wedding photos out for the week.