The Café au Lait Tart, for breakfast for dessert

Well, here's one for recursion: it's dessert for breakfast for dessert! :) This idea has been floating around in my head for quite a while now, but I hadn't had a chance to properly realize it until a friend requested this week to have "breakfast for dessert," since she found herself too busy to ever properly have breakfast for breakfast. I'm never one to let friends go hungry, and so, at last, the café au lait tart was born.

My inspiration behind this tart was to make it a beautiful homage to the first meal of the day, pulling together the flavors and textures that we'd normally associate with breakfast into dessert form (minus the scrambled eggs and bacon--that's so overdone). The crust has a hint of nutty sweetness from a tinge of oat flour, and then there are layers of milk jam, whole-fruit wild blueberry jam, and espresso dark chocolate ganache, all topped with golden oatmeal praline and flaked seasalt. (You can see my diagram of the dessert in the planning stages here.) The end result is at once rich and bitter and crunchy and creamy and sweet and salty--pretty much one of the most sophisticated ways to start your day, all compressed into a single bite.

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...Now, if all days started this way!

[My apologies on the short post, but hopefully the recipe makes up for it. I find myself far too lacking in words these days, having used up my quota for work purposes.]



Read on for recipe....

Kitchen Prep and a Simple Summer Menu

It's not often that the actual counters of my kitchen make a public appearance. The light in my kitchen is particularly horrid, either with direct sunlight bursting full blast through a small window or no light at all (and I don't have a budget that can afford flash strobes for an artificial light set-up), and the counters of my kitchen are usually covered with a layer of caked-on chocolate or dirty dishes waiting to be wiped up in the chaos that pervades my life. But, thanks to some extreme coincidence and some miraculous cleaning from family and friends after July's wedding cake adventure, there happened to be a day when I was prepping for a small dinner party that (1) my counters were (relatively) clean and (mostly) chocolate-free, and (2) clouds drifted in front of the sun outside, letting diffuse light brighten up a corner of the kitchen without its usual uncontrollable intensity. So for once, that day, I got to cook with my camera beside me and capture the process rather than the end result, which is quite refreshing since usually, it's the opposite for me.

For this dinner, I didn't have any elaborate plans: it was a casual hangout on a Saturday night for a couple of friends who live a bit further away and who aren't in the area very often. (Then, a few more friends joined at the last minute--but the more, the merrier! :)) Basically, the menu was formed from whatever I managed to find inspiring at the market that morning:

a Summer Saturday Dinner

crostini
kalamata olive tapenade or tomato conserve
with toasted sweet baguette

nasturtium and granny's bonnet salad
with shaved radishes, mixed greens, and whole grain mustard and honey balsamic vinaigrette

red and gold beets
marinated in apricot-orange jam vinaigrette
with goat cheese and honey

blackened padrón peppers
with lemon zest and smoked Maldon salt

seafood paella
with mussels, shrimp, and spicy chicken sausage

Greek yogurt
with orange blossom strawberries, brown sugar shortbread crumble, and Tcho chocolate

drinks
Pine Ridge rosé
lemon and fresh mint fizz

I've been somewhat obsessed with beets lately, and the marinated beets and goat cheese that I made that night was a dish inspired by a recent visit to State Bird Provisions--an amazing up-and-coming restaurant in SF that serves small plates as you chat with the chefs working in the tiny kitchen. The tender beets are marinated in a sweet and tangy combination of apricot-orange jam (leftover from making this dessert) and a dash of vinegar and served with creamy goat cheese topped with dabs of mild honey.... so simple and divine. The olive tapenade that I made for the crostini appetizers was from David Tanis's book, with a quick squeeze of lemon juice thrown in for a wee bit more acidity than his original recipe calls for (but that I think makes the recipe even better!). The tapenade matures for a few hours in the fridge and is even better the second day, satisfyingly salty when I slathered it on top of leftover paella for lunch.

For greens, we had a colorful floral salad, all spicy with crunches of shaved radishes and whole grain mustard vinaigrette, and the spice theme continued through the blackened padrón peppers (lightly salted with some lemon smoked Maldon) and the spicy and saffron-y seafood paella, boasting a kick of smoky pimentón and tomato. For drinks, I broke into a Pine Ridge rosé that's been sitting in the back of my cupboard for a while since I thought that the dry pink would go well with the spice and seafood, but the real hit of the night as far as drinks went was the homemade lemon and fresh mint fizz. Inspired by my mint plants (which I've miraculously kept alive for over a year now), I mashed together mint leaves and lemon zest, threw them in sugar and water with whole lemons for a simple syrup, and added sparkling water to the syrup as needed for some awesome, brightly-flavored, home-grown soda.

Dessert was a completely unfussy affair, more of a plateful of the necessary tastes and textures to make up a subtle sweet ending to a simple summertime meal than a big bang at the end: fresh strawberries from the market lightly flavored with sugar and orange blossom, some buttery sweet and toothy crumble (made with hard red winter wheat for some oomph), thick and creamy and tart Greek yogurt, and a square of dark Tcho chocolate to round it off. Sometimes, easy is best. :)

Rhubarb tarts with orange-honey fromage blanc

It's been insanely busy here in the studio working non-stop on a big upcoming project that I promise I'll divulge more about soooooooon, so personal desserts that I've been whipping up just for me have taken a turn for the ultra-simple and fast. But of course that doesn't mean they aren't still finger-lickingly good!

I've been waiting so, so patiently for rhubarb to finally hit the markets in my area, so when I at long last saw them at the grocer a few days ago, I pounced. (My apologies to the poor innocent bystanders that I must have trampled in my race to the rhubarb!) Given the mad success of rhubarb in pie form last season, I really wanted to make a rhubarb tart of some sort this year and settled on something super simple and yet surprisingly good: rhubarb puff pastry tarts with orange honey fromage blanc. I love how in the oven, the rhubarb stalks create this bubbling tart filling all on their own, melting into the puff pastry below. There isn't anything else in the tart itself except a dash of vanilla bean and some turbinado and brown sugars to add a bit of rustic sweetness. I served these with dollops of orange and honey-scented fromage blanc on top and a few more drizzles of honey--the tart sourness in the fromage blanc is a really fun alternative to plain old whipped cream, and the orange and honey softens the kick from the cheese. I love simple desserts like this that demonstrate how mixing just a few really good ingredients can make something absolutely divine.

Speaking of news, in all of the Italy excitement, I forgot to say that I'll be at BlogHer Food again this year (in Seattle! Yay!) talking (again) about food photography with Anita Chu of Dessert First. I hope I'll be seeing at least some of you there!


Read on for recipe....

Get Well Soon Cakes

Pinch me, because I cannot believe it's October already!  *rubs eyes*  Outside, we're getting our first serious rain of the season, which I'm loving, and I'm already drinking large amounts of hot tea indoors.

Actually, this weather is a little difficult to believe because last week, we had our first real summer temperatures all summer, hitting 90+ degrees F in San Francisco proper for a few days on end--which is quite the rare happenstance!  Unluckily for me, however, my body decided that it was also the week to give myself a cold and a fever, so there I was, running around between meetings and work, in hot, hot weather, made all that much hotter from burning up from the inside.  (and to make matters even worse, it didn't help that I was wearing a sweater with no option to go home and change for the entire day either! ><)

At least now, the weather has decided to go back to the normal grey San Francisco status quo that I know and love, and I'm nearly 100% recovered from the cold.  Thank goodness.  But, I'm still obsessed with hot tea--and especially for colds, with chamomile tea, a drizzle of sweet honey, and a thin sliver of lemon--to nurse me slowly back to health.  Oh, that, and I've been chugging orange juice like there's no other liquid on earth for as much vitamin C as my body can handle (plus some).  Whatever works, I say!

Thinking about what we usually drink and eat when we're sick got me to thinking about whether or not I could pack the same complimentary flavors into cake form, since cake makes everything better, too.  :-P  (yes, I know I must be slightly delusional here, but let's just blame it on the fever, okay?)  I decided to go with a simple honey and meyer lemon pound cake, coated with a thin, subtle, and ever-so-slightly crunchy chamomile sugar glaze.  It's a cake that's moist and dense and lemony! but not too sweet, even with light flavor of honey wrapped inside. And, the mini bundt molds that I decided to use were so cute that I immediately started feeling better upon taking these cakes out of the oven.  :)  It's the small things!

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Anyways, welcome to October, all!  If it's truly going to be a long fall with rainy days and hot tea (and beautifully diffused light from the clouds), keep this recipe on hand--it's perfect for the occasion.

Oh, and go get your flu shots now!

Edit: My good friend reminds me after reading this post that these honey cakes are actually well-timed for Rosh Hashanah, too, when it's customary to eat honey cakes and the like. I guess so many people had been talking to me about making and eating honey cakes this week that it sort of just sunk into my subconscious!


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Fig, Mascarpone, and Pistachio Tart

Given that nearly every stall at the farmers' market this past weekend was brimming with figs, I'd say that it's officially fig season here.  Swoon!  The arrival of figs marks one of my favorite food seasons--late summer and early autumn.  I swear that this cross-over time has some of the best produce ever: melons, tomatoes, berries, stone fruit, peppers, apples, pears, winter squashes.  Basically, any foodie's dream.

Since I missed fig season last year due to my finger surgery, I've been *itching* for figs to finally come back this season so that I could make this tart, which I've been lusting after since last August: figs, mascarpone+brown sugar filling, and pistachio crust.  Three of the best things packed into one dessert!--sweet and soft figs atop a creamy bed of rich and fluffy mascarpone cheese, sweetened and darkened by just a little brown sugar, lemon zest, and vanilla extract, with a faintly nutty and very buttery pistachio sweet pastry crust.  Oh, and topped with a light glaze of raspberry-apricot jam, like a little touch of sugary sparkle. :-)

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The arrival of figs to the markets also marks the beginning of the academic year.  Sigh!  Usually I'm quite happy with everything starting back up, getting back into the grind of things, but this year, summer was just too, too short.  (That's what you get bouncing back and forth between a school on quarter system, which ends for summer break in mid-June, and a school on semester system, which starts for the fall in late August.)  Then, I felt even more cheated out of my final days of summer when, on Monday, one of my professors pointed out (while eating a slice of this tart, coincidentally) my error in thinking that school actually started a week later than it actually does (read: it starts now)!  Ack!  Talk about a rude awakening.

So, I suppose it's fitting to be posting this tart recipe, which I'd planned to post for next week, a week early (by demand of fellow Instagrammers).  Welcome to (early) autumn, folks!

P.S.  If you think I'm going to acquiesce so easily over ending summer this early, think again.  I've still got summer plans, yo.  Stay tuned.  :-)


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Honey Thyme Roasted Plums and Thyme-flecked Sable Breton

Oh, sigh!  It felt so good to be back to a normal(-er) routine this weekend.  After taking care of work deadlines on Saturday, I gave myself Sunday off to just take it easy and relax.  And by "take it easy and relax," I meant "get back in the kitchen and behind the camera and make a mess in the kitchen and studio without bothering to clean up at all."  Also known as "baking and photographing with reckless abandon."  And yes, it felt very good.  So, so good.

Of course a day of baking and photographing must first be preceded by a trip to the farmers' market, where I wandered slowly from stall to stall, stopping whenever people handed me samples (it's better than Costco, I swear!), snacking on fresh seafood ceviche (yes, one of the local farmers' markets here has fresh ceviche--be jealous), and, lo-and-behold, running into fellow food photographers/bloggers (yes, the SF Bay Area is so crawling with foodies that you literally can't walk out of your house without tripping over food bloggers).  I was on the lookout for apricots, but it seems as if during my work-imposed hermitude from the food world, apricots had gone out of season.  Sad.  But! I did stumble across plenty of beautiful plums that would nicely substitute in my intended plans.

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One of my favorite stands for getting fruit is run by this lovely old grandmother figure, who is so awesome that she's the reason I buy fruit there in the first place.  (The same woman who sold me these persimmons.)  She takes such great and wonderful pride in her crops that she usually insists on picking your fruit for you so as to insure that you have the best selection possible for whatever use you specify.  Today, though, she was busy offering samples to a few other shoppers, so I ended up picking my own plums.  Upon presenting them to her for weighing, she said to me, "You have a good taste--you picked perfect plums!"  Ah! I'm taking that as a huge compliment.

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Anyways, this is the recipe that I had in mind originally for apricots, but I have to say, I think that it came out even better with the multi-colored varieties of plums that I brought home from the market.  And by "even better," I mean, that these honey thyme roasted plums are most likely one of the most delicious things that I've made in a long time.  Seriously.  When the plums came out of the oven bubbling intensely in their own juices, and then with the warm honey drizzled on them, all soft and sweet and slightly earthy from the thyme leaves... it was divine.  Sigh.

To go with the plums, I finally got to break out a recipe that I've been meaning to try for ages, modifying it with a little bit of herb infusion: thyme-flecked sable breton.  It's not often that I bake with salted butter, but this shortbread was so well worth it: buttery, crumbly, herb-y, with just a light sprinkling of coarse sugar on top.  Its crispiness makes it a perfect companion to the soft plums, and it also makes a very nice vessel with which to soak up the plum juices left on your plate at the end. :-)

Anyways, I'd call this a very successful day off.  I'm also very glad that I have a few more plums and some more sable breton dough squirreled away so that I can relive the weekend just a bit sometime during the week.

Welcome to Monday!


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Blood orange honey-glazed five spice tart with almond cream

There are few fruits that I am happier to see come into season than blood oranges. (Meyer lemons and maybe some of the rarer berries also top this list.)  There's just something about blood oranges that is so exciting, cutting into the fruit to discover a deep, dark, rich, red gradient inside.  And, in my opinion, they just taste better than regular oranges, like they're packed with even more orange-y flavor.

Usually, I'm too impatient with blood oranges to bother doing anything but eat them just as they are or, at most, muddle them into a cocktail to achieve a gorgeously colored drink.  But finally I was able to hold off long enough to actually make dessert with them--yay, self-restraint!  I'd been wanting to try this tart concept ever since my friend (of caramel brandy hard sauce fame) mentioned to me she had made a tart with oranges and Chinese five spice powder, and I thought it would be a perfect dessert for Chinese New Years: blood orange, honey-glazed tart with a Chinese five spice crust and soft-whipped almond cream. (--oranges, nuts, and the color red all being good-luck symbols for the new year celebration.)  I really loved how the tart came out, with the soft, candied oranges glazed in sweet orange-honey against the hint of spiciness in the tart crust itself.  And the soft-whipped almond cream adds the perfect touch of creaminess to balance out the intense orange and spice underneath.

Happy Lunar New Year!  and, as the Vulcans say, "Live Long and Prosper."  :-)

(p.s. five brownie points to whoever can post the Vulcan reply in the comments without looking it up!)


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Gorgonzola, Pear, and Balsamic Honey Galette, and Q&A Part 2

When the holidays roll around, I totally get sugar overloaded.  Between the cookie swaps and the baked goods-laden office holiday parties and the highly addictive ginger fudge that dear friends bring for you from Scotland--all of which are delicious, mind you--, it gets to be just too much sweet, even for a sugar-addict like me.  So here's my solution: disguise the cheese course as something between dessert and dinner: a gorgonzola, pear, and balsamic-honey galette with toasted walnuts and a thyme-flecked crust.  = layers of juicy sliced pears accented by crunchy and nutty toasted walnuts sitting on a bed of pungent melted gorgonzola cheese, all wrapped up in a flaky crust with sweet balsamic honey glaze.  It's sweet and savory rolled into one and made extra perfect by a glass of red wine and just maybe a fireplace, if you have one (here's a virtual one, if you don't).

Now to finally return to part two of answering your questions before we all get far too wrapped up in the holidays and completely forget about it!  (Looking for part one?)  Okay, ready?  here goes...

Q: If you could only have one spice in your kitchen cabinet, what would it be?

Oh, this is a super tough one.  My first instinct would be nutmeg.

Q: You have tons of great recipes (thanks!), but do you have fails, too?  How much experimenting do you have to do before the recipe comes out right?

Oh yes, I have plenty of baking and cooking fails, plenty of stuff that goes straight from oven to the trash.  When I was learning to make macarons, for example, my roommate would gawk at how many trays of perfectly edible but chewycrackedsunkenfootless macarons were tossed.  (Turns out, part of those macaron failures were caused by the fact that I had just memorized the recipe wrong, but still.  ><)  How much experimenting I have to do really depends on how much I'm fiddling with an existing recipe or whether I'm developing a new recipe from scratch.  One valuable lesson I've learned though is that following my instincts usually saves me from recipe failure--it's really the times when I deviate from what my inner voice is telling me that things start to go seriously wrong.

Q: What is your favorite dessert to make?

I can't decide!  Really!  Can I cheat and say that my favorite dessert to make is the one I'm making at that point in time?

Q:  Do you have any embarrassing baking stories to share?

I do!  So many!  Perhaps the most infamous of my embarrassing baking stories happened the night before my senior English thesis was due in my college years.  My professor had invited all of us in the seminar to her house for dinner the night the thesis was due so that we could turn in our work and then enjoy a good meal together.  For some reason or other, I was elected to bring the dessert, for which I planned to make a chocolate Viennese layer cake.

But, I am and have always been a huge procrastinator.  (And perhaps I was worse as an undergrad, though that's seriously debatable.)  And so there I was, the night before my thesis was due with a thesis to write and a cake to bake--oh, and I didn't start until well past 10pm because I'd also had rehearsal, et cetera, earlier that evening.  At the same time, I wanted to make some lemon lavender pound cakes as thank yous to my professor and some other people in the class who'd helped me out on a different project.  So long story short, I'm there, baking and writing my thesis simultaneously.  I finish the lemon lavender pound cakes without a hitch, but by this time, it's about midnight already.  I then get started on the chocolate layer cake.  The first problem: I'd left one of my cake tins at my parents' house so I could only bake one layer at a time.  The first layer goes in and comes out perfectly.  The second layer goes in, and while it's baking, I get back to work on writing my thesis.  Until...

Oh crap!  I didn't set the timer on the oven!  !#$)*&!  I was a far less experienced baker back in those days, and our apartment oven didn't have a window, so I (stupidly) kept opening the oven door to check on the cake--which of course caused the cake to fall.  *That* went directly into the trash.  By this time, it's about 2am and I still have half of my thesis to write and no dessert to bring.  And I decide to start over, but with cupcakes instead of a layer cake.

Now comes the second problem: my cupcake tins at the time were hand-me-downs from, like, the 80s from my mom, so they were pretty horrific looking, with random black stuff caked all over them.  Not all of the cupcake molds were filled by the recipe I had so after a few minutes in the oven, the oven started smoking fantastically... which of course set off the fire alarms! ... which of course woke up my extremely angry roommates ... and of course it's well past 3am at this point ... and of course I still have a thesis to write.

Yeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhh.  In the end, the cupcakes were finished as was my thesis.  The dinner party at my professor's was lovely, and I returned home to an exploding and disastrous mess in the kitchen to clean up.  Moral of this story, kids?  Don't try to write your thesis and bake 2 cakes in the same night.

Q: Do you listen to music when you cook?  What is your musical playlist for when you bake?

Do I listen to music!  Perhaps this is best illustrated by a crappy cellphone photo my friend took of me one day while I was baking...

Yes, that's me, and yes, I dance and sing ridiculously when I cook!  The musical accompaniment to the photo above was this song, but really, I listen to anything and everything when I'm in the kitchen.  My playlist lately has been Christmas music (of course), Girltalk's All Day mix, random pop songs, and a recording of California All-State Wind Band 2003 (it was a particularly good year).  My roommate and I also went through a time period when we memorized the entire Avenue Q soundtrack in the kitchen.

Q: Which one of your PotW is your favorite?

Ooooo, hmm.... I'd have to say these meyer lemon ricotta pancakes with lemon curd and warmed blueberries.  Mainly because I'm addicted to meyer lemon curd.

Q: Which do you think is best: rice, pasta, bread, potatoes?

Rice. When I was young, they called me "rice tub."  No joke.

Q: If I gave you $10,000 to go on a holiday (and you could only spend it on a holiday), where would you go?

At this point, I'd say anywhere but here!  I'll take anywhere nature-y and away from too much civilization where I could walk around with my camera all day and try to capture the beauty of the world on film a little SD card.  Antarctica!  The Maldives!  the deserts of Egypt!  The Canadian Rockies (a personal favorite)!  the American Southwest (another personal favorite)!  Costa Rica!  oh, *sigh*  Why must you torture me with thoughts of a holiday?!

Q: I know on your 'about page' you said you don't know what you want to be in the future, but have you gotten any closer to the answer?  What do you want to be when you grow up?

If there's any lesson that I've really taken to heart and had to learn in 2010, it's that the best laid plans of mice and men always go awry.  I've always been a planner, and when things finally blew up in my face this year, I'm trying out a new philosophy: do now, plan later.  So now, I'm working on being the best damned linguist-cum-food-photographer-on-the-side I can be, and we'll see how that works out.  And, as a mid-life crisis, you know, maybe I'll open my own dessert studio.

Q: "Want to know what 'random forests' really are?" <- Yes! I want to know!

Okay, for you crazies out there, see this quick start guide to random forests here.  In short: it's a statistical method.

Q: Can you give more info on the Bay Area Food Bloggers get-together?

If you're in the Bay Area, make sure you're part of the Bay Area Food Bloggers Google group!  We always have get-togethers in the works.

Thank you all for your wonderful questions!  I hope you have as much fun reading the answers as I had answering them. :-)  I know I haven't answered your food photography-related questions, but I'm working on that as a special pet project over Christmas break, I promise....

Now, onto cheese and pear and flaky nom-niness!


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