Molten Baked Alaska

WARNING: This is probably some of my worst writing ever. Its a cobbling of disparate recipes, over months, on 6 different computers.

Dale brought up a good point the other day as I proposed a cake for Tom's birthday. He said that everyone should know the favorite birthday cake of a significant other. (His tone of voice told me to take this seriously.) You can't just make something because you want to; it has to be the person's favorite. Since I haven't been asked what my favorite birthday cake is for years, I had to stop and consider this. True, Auntie H always made me a blueberry pie when I was a kid, but for adults?

So I gave Larry a call and had him determine what is Tom's favorite. It was chocolate, so for Tom's birthday, I decided on a variation of the ubiquitous molten chocolate cake, Baked Alaska, and Nutella.

(What I love about Baked Alaska as an architect is how the air bubble of the meringue act as an insulating layer against the heat of the over, keeping the ice cream from melting. Foam beer cup wraps at the foorball games do the same thing.)

Then I made a pact with Dale to clean the house of all my old copies of the New Yorker, Architectural Record, and the NY Times. This is setting a course for disaster. I mean come on: my ADD and addiction to magazines?!?!? Hours of distractions later, I came across this article from the NY Times for a layer cake with a heart of darkness, a heart of bittersweet chocolate darkness, an oozing fudgy center. Its like a layer cake elevated to nectar of the gods.

Following are the components for an amazing Baked Alaska.

Axo Chocolate Cake
Time: 40 minutes, plus 3 hours for cooling

8 ½ ounces (2 sticks plus 1 tablespoon) unsalted butter, more for greasing pan
7 ounces bittersweet chocolate (50 percent or higher cocoa), chopped
5 large eggs, separated
1 cup sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt

1. Place rack in top third of oven and heat to 400 degrees. (For best results, use a separate oven thermometer.) Butter a 9-inch springform pan and set aside. In a double boiler or microwave oven, melt together 8 ½ ounces butter and the chocolate. Stir to blend.
2. In a medium bowl, stir together egg yolks and sugar. Stir in flour. Add chocolate mixture and stir until smooth. Using an electric mixer, whisk egg whites and salt until stiff but not dry. Fold whites into chocolate mixture just until blended. Pour into cake pan.
3. Bake for 25 minutes. Remove cake from oven and allow to cool for 1 hour. Wrap with foil and refrigerate until cake is firm and cold, at least 2 hours. Two hours before serving, remove cake from refrigerator and bring to room temperature. Slice (center of cake will be fudgy) and serve, if desired, with whipped cream.


Ice Cream:
3 pints best-quality vanilla ice cream
1/4 cup nutella


Line 8" round cake pan with plastic wrap with enough to wrap over the top. Scoop ice cream into pan, smoothing into corners and flattening top. Pull the overhanging plastic over, and place in the freezer. Freeze overnight.


Meringue:
4 large egg whites, room temperature
1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

For Assembly/Meringue: Bring egg whites to room temperature in a medium, stainless or copper bowl. Stir together both sugars in a small bowl, pressing out as many lumps as possible. Cover and set aside.


Twenty to thirty minutes before serving, adjust oven rack to one-third up from bottom of oven, preheat the oven to 475 degrees F. About 10 minutes before you want to bake the dessert, remove the cake layer (NOT the ice cream layer) from the freezer. Remove the wrappings from the cake, and place the cold (but not frozen) cake layer right side up on the foil-lined baking sheet. Spread with a nice layer of nutella.

Sift the cream of tartar into the egg whites. Beat whites at low speed to incorporate cream of tartar, then increase speed to high and beat until very foamy and white. Begin adding combined sugars, about two tablespoons at a time, beating after each addition until incorporated. After last addition, beat until meringue stands in stiff peaks; this will be a thick meringue.

Remove top plastic from ice cream, and center over the cake. Remove the pan and plastic.
Like icing a cake, fold about half the meringue onto the ice cream. With a flat knife or offset spatula, work the meringue down the sides of the cake and ice cream, going right down to the foil on the baking sheet. Repeat with remaining meringue; the ice cream and cake should be entirely and thickly covered with the meringue. Immediately place the dessert in the hot oven for 3-5 minutes, or just until the meringue is lightly browned. Remove from oven. Serve immediately! Pass optional sauce for everyone to pour on if they wish.

If you are inclined to glitter the already gilded lily, try this chocolate sauce from Cooks Illustrated (Jan 2002).

Simple Chocolate Sauce.
3/4 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons light corn syrup
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into three pieces
table salt
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped fine

Bring heavy cream, corn syrup, butter, and salt to boil in small nonreactive saucepan over medium-high heat. Off heat, add chocolate while gently swirling saucepan. Cover pan and let stand until chocolate is melted, about 5 minutes. Uncover and whisk gently until combined, avoiding airbubbles. (Can be cooled to room temperature, placed in airtight container, and refrigerated for up to 3 weeks. To reheat, transfer sauce to heatproof bowl set over saucepan of simmering water. Alternatively, microwave at 50 percent power, stirring once or twice, 1 to 3 minutes.)
Makes 1 1/2 cups

Riding the Gravy Train: Sausage Gravy and Biscuits

Man, these Southerners are a lot of work. Just because they lost the war, they think they have the right to turn their noses up at all things and ways Northern: our iced tea, our hospitality, our peaches, our porches (OK, anyone who has moved here recently can give you examples of Seattle hospitality, aka the “Seattle Freeze”). Yet of particular issue is that of biscuits. We Yankees just can’t get the biscuits right, according to them. They are either too light and crumbly or too dense.

Well after making biscuits for Dale, I have figured out the problem: Southerners. You see, Southerners have two different kinds of biscuits in mind. The first is light and crumbly and is perfect with jam, honey or other preserves and lots of black coffee. The second is more firm, dense, and stands up to the onslaught of gravy with sausage bits. Prepared biscuit mixes don’t pass and most recipes don’t either. Biscuit mixture is more like a batter than a dough, so recipes that lacked enough liquid were pretty quickly passed over. Not surprisingly, the first recipe that passed Dale’s muster and received the highest accolade “These are just like my Mom’s!” came from Cooks: Mile High Biscuits. The interior was fluffy while the top was crisp; they rose high, but retained a tender crumb. My aunt’s freezer jam—which I hide from Dale—was delicious on them, and the entire batch was gone before the second pot of coffee brewed.

Interestingly enough, the original recipe adapted by the CI Bostonians was Floridian Shirley Corriher’s Touch-of-Grace Biscuits. After the triumph of her Lemon Meringue Pie, I couldn’t wait to try these. The recipe was extremely different from Cooks, but I nevertheless expected the same fluffy, tender biscuit. Wrong. In fact, they were so different I thought I might have done something wrong, until Dale explained that no, these were perfect gravy biscuits, and were just like his good grandmother’s. These were dense and not as flavorful as I used lard (even though it called for shortening, not butter. Even lovingly spread with butter and fresh strawberry jam we couldn’t finish them. (But the squirrel we tossed a chunk sure loved it as he devoured a chunk that proportionally for us would be size of a beach ball.)


The secret to both of these biscuits is a very wet dough, dropped into flour for ease of handling, then placed in a baking dish. The dollops of floured dough, as you gently pass from one hand to another feel like large powdered yolks, which threaten to spill into gooey globs at any second.

This Labor Day though, for all of his hard work on our cocktail party the day before, I made Dale Biscuits with Sausage Gravy. Of course, I used Corrihers Touch of Grace biscuits, but used butter instead (out of lard). They were out of this world. They were delicious as batter, with jam, with sausage gravy; they were tasty hot, cold, and even one day old. The crumb was firm, yet airy; the flavor was embracing, but let the preserves and the sausage shine. And the verdict from Dale? “These are better than my Mom’s and even she would agree.” For the hell of it, I included the Cook’s recipe but I say: One nation, one biscuit.

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Touch of Grace Biscuits Adapted from Shirley Corriher


2 cups self-rising, low-protein flour (aka Southern flour such as White Lily, Martha White or Red Band
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
Baking -------
4 tablespoons shortening or lard or butter
2/3 cup cream
1 cup buttermilk (approximate)
1 cup all-purpose all-purpose flour, for shaping
2 tablespoons butter, melted

Note: I used 1 ½ cups All-purpose flour with ½ cup cake flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder with 1/8 tsp baking soda.

1. Heat oven to 425 F and arrange one shelf slightly below the center of the oven. Spray an 8- or 9-inch cake pan with nonstick cooking spray.

2. In a large mixing bowl, stir together the dry goods (minus the shaping flour). Work the shortening or lard in with your fingertips until there are no large lumps. Gently stir in the cream, then the buttermilk. (It may take less than 1 cup of buttermilk, or if you are using a higher protein flour, it may take more.) The dough should not be soupy, but should be wet and resemble cottage cheese.

3. Spread the all-purpose flour on a rimmed baking sheet. With an ice cream scoop or spoon, place 12 even mounds of dough in the flour. Sprinkle flour gently over each mound. Flour your hands, then gently pick up a mound, coat it with flour and gently shape into a round, shake off excess flour, and place it in the prepared cake pan, with 9 along the perimeter, and three in the center. Continue shaping biscuits the same way, placing each biscuit up tight against its neighbor in the pan, until the dough is used. Brush with melted butter.

4. Place pan in the oven and bake until lightly browned, about 20 to 30 minutes. Let biscuits rest two minutes. Invert into a towel or napkin-lined basket, turn right side up and break apart. Let rest a few more minutes to let the steam escape and serve.

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Seattle is famous for its seafood and coffee but it is also getting national raves for its charcuterie. Whether it’s a pound of kielbasa for the grill or a sausage sandwich from Uli’s Famous Sausages or a ¼ pound of lamb prosciutto from Salumi, these small producers of forcemeat are part of a small but growing national trend to embrace real meat cured or processed in time-honored, traditional ways.

Sausage Gravy Adapted from Uli’s Famous Sausages

1/2 pound of sausage, preferably spicier versions such as linguica, chorizo, or andouille
1/4 cup all purpose flour
2 cups of milk
1/2-teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Remove casings and chop sausage. Cook sausage in medium saucepan over medium to high heat until browned, stirring to crumble. Drain off all fat except about 2 tablespoon. Stir in flour. Cook stirring constantly until thick and bubbly. If there is no or little fat, just keep stirring to cook the flour until thick. Gradually whisk in milk, salt and pepper. Cook stirring constantly until thickened and bubbly. About 5 minutes. Makes 4 servings.

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Mile High Biscuits Adapted from Cooks Illustrated

Dough
1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour (7 1/2 ounces)
1/2 cup whole wheat flour ( 2 1/2 ounces)
1 tablespoon double-acting baking powder
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon table salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons unsalted butter (cold), cut into 1/4-inch cubes
1 ½ cups buttermilk cold, preferably low-fat

To Form and Finish Biscuits
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (5 ounces), distributed in rimmed baking sheet
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 500 degrees. Spray 9-inch round cake pan with nonstick cooking spray; set aside. Generously spray inside and outside of 1/4 cup dry measure with nonstick cooking spray.
2. For the dough: In food processor, pulse flours, baking powder, sugar, salt, and baking soda to combine, about six 1-second pulses. Scatter butter cubes evenly over dry ingredients; pulse until mixture resembles pebbly, coarse cornmeal, eight to ten 1-second pulses. Transfer mixture to medium bowl. Add buttermilk to dry ingredients and stir with rubber spatula until just incorporated (dough will be very wet and slightly lumpy).
3. To form and bake biscuits: Using 1/4 cup dry measure and working quickly, scoop level amount of dough; drop dough from measuring cup into flour on baking sheet (if dough sticks to cup, use small spoon to pull it free). Repeat with remaining dough, forming 12 evenly sized mounds. Dust tops of each piece of dough with flour from baking sheet. With floured hands, gently pick up piece of dough and coat with flour; gently shape dough into rough ball, shake off excess flour, and place in prepared cake pan. Repeat with remaining dough, arranging 9 rounds around perimeter of cake pan and 3 in center. Brush rounds with hot melted butter, taking care not to flatten them. Bake 5 minutes, then reduce oven temperature to 450 degrees; continue to bake until biscuits are deep golden brown, about 15 minutes longer. Cool in pan 2 minutes, then invert biscuits from pan onto clean kitchen towel; turn biscuits right-side up and break apart. Cool 5 minutes longer and serve.