BBP: 2007 is done

When we last examined the Bunny Baking Project, she had two last recipes to try.  The first was a Lemon Tart.  I've made a bunch of lemon tarts.  This one was delish, but did not stand out from the others and in fact, the crust was unnecessarily fussy when an ordinary pate brisee would do.  I give it two stars:  a do-over, but not a stand-out.

And that brings me to the Mother of All 2007 recipes:  The Black Forest Cake.  And here is what I learned:  If you cannot find really really good tart cherries, then don't bother.  I was only able to find mediocre cherries.  They would have been fine in a pie doctored up with sugar and cornstarch, but not so much when they stand alone (aside from a soak in kirsch).

Ugh.  I remember it looking better than that.  So here's how you do it.  Make a chocolate genoise and split in three layers.  Drain the cherries, reserving the juice, and boil the juice down with some sugar until syrupy, then add some kirsch.  Put the cherries back in and let them macerate for a while and while you wait, grate 1/2 pound of dark chocolate into chocolate shavings (it's both easier and more tedious than it sounds).  Make a slurry of cornstarch, sugar, and a bit of cream, and heat it until it thickens slightly, then set aside to cool.  Whip a whole honking bunch of cream with some sugar but before it's finished, add the cooled slurry (this stabilizes the whipped cream so it stays whipped for a couple of days without weeping) and finish whipping.  then assemble:  Brush cake with cherry syrup, spread layer with whipped cream, dot with a little less than half the cherries.  Brush the next layer of cake with syrup, put it on the cake wet side down, brush top with more syrup, then the cream and cherries, then syrup-brushed cake wet side down.  Frost the whole thing with the remaining whipped cream, making the finish as flat as possible.  Coat the sides of the cake with chocolate shavings, then decorate the top with chocolate shavings and the last of the cherries.

Yeah.  So that's a lot of steps, and it makes a lot of mess:

1.  That mess does not include the mess involved in the genoise, which I made several days earlier and froze.
2.  I did this while Mr. D was gone so I had to clean up the mess myself.

It was really tasty, but I rate it only two stars because so much depended on finding decent cherries and the recipe did not tell me how to compensate (I can see now what I should have done, but a really ace recipe would have offered suggestions) and because of the many many steps and big hassle.  Oh, and because the chocolate genoise was brown but not as chocolaty as it should have been.

So that's that.  2007 is done and now we start 2008:

Pictures like that make me think I ought to get out the pastry bag and start practicing my squiggly cookie decorating.

Here's the inside back cover:

 And here's the inside back cover edited for bullshit:

I don't need help with apple pastry or quiche; if I'm going to make a fruitcake I have an heirloom recipe to use; I don't need to be told that pancakes and waffles don't come from a box and I certainly don't need to be told how to make them; cranberries are for cranberry sauce and for muffins and nothing else; I won't make anything that requires a Bundt pan (although I have one); I don't see the point of trifle or a raspberry bombe; and the world only needs one brownie recipe and that ain't it.  Oh, and I've had the bread pudding at Commander's Palace, so there's no point in even trying bread pudding anywhere else.  I've tried several versions of madeleines and they all tasted good but looked like ass, so I'm willing to try something different.

I've tried the Lebkuchen.  Mr. D's mother is German, and she always has mass-produced Lebkuchen in a box that can sit indefinitely on a warehouse shelf.  They're pretty gross.  I thought I would try making real ones to see if they were any better, and because it's nice to give Mr. D ties to his family and heritage (even though his mother is one of those people who shares recipes, but gives them to you all fucked up on purpose).  They were pretty good.  But I didn't love them, and neither did Mr. D, so the experiment is over and need not be repeated.   One star.

The cheesecake bars were easy and good.  So good that Mr. D actually fishes them out of the freezer when he wants one.  Usually, when something goes in the freezer around here, Mr. D forgets that it ever existed.


So that leaves us with only four recipes to try, right?  Wrong.   2008 contains some awfully good recipes that didn't make the back page:  Flourless chocolate cake, cream scones,  and fig bars.

Do you know what's in flourless chocolate cake?  A pound of chocolate, 8 eggs, and sugar.  You bake it in  a springform pan in a water bath, which means you create an inevitably leaky mess that can be contained to some degree, but not entirely.  When it's "done," it's still liquid, and you can't eat it until the next day.  And it has a texture somewhere between mousse and fudge.  Meh.  Worth a try, I suppose, but I am not making that one again.

The scones, on the other hand, were good.  Better than the last batch I tried.  Two stars.  By the way, I did a variation with chopped crystallized ginger.  I had never thought of that, but I highly recommend it.

And the fig bars?  Wouldn't it be great to have homemade fig bars?   The problem is I simmered the filling about three times as long as I was supposed to and still haven't gotten to "syrup."  It's runny.  I'm going to have to improvise.  Stay tuned.