Passionfruit & Red Bean New Year's Cake

Life has been extraordinarily hectic as of late. I feel like (actually, I know) I spend more time on airplanes, in the car, or in the office these days than at home or in the kitchen or behind the camera. But I'm busy with things I love, so I don't mind that most of the time, I feel like I've been treading water nonstop in an attempt to keep from drowning in the deep end of the pool. As long as my nose stays above the water, I'm good. And it helps that I like the water. (I'm a water Zodiac sign, after all. :))

Then, there are these rare, glistening moments of calm in between. Extraordinarily rare, but they're like such a gulp of fresh air when they happen, as if someone has temporarily thrown me a flotation ring to hang onto. Like this one rainy Sunday a few weeks ago, when I was at a friend's house for lunch. You know what happens when you get three friends together who have a love a desserts? Impromptu dessert bar. For lunch. Cause that's just how we roll.

I brought a passionfruit and adzuki red bean Chinese New Year's Cake (gluten-free, pictured above, recipe below), and some poached, vanilla-scented, late season quince that were cooked to just a touch of pink. My friend, Rob (of dessert tour fame), showed up with a bagful of goodies from Tartine Bakery: banana creme pie, lemon-poppyseed almond cake (my personal favorite), chocolate hazelnut tart, and meringues. And my friend who was hosting the lunch busted out these beautifully wrapped gold-bar nuggets of hazelnut chocolates that she was recently sent from Switzerland (because, you know, it pays to have foodie friends in foreign places). Yes, I know, it's excessive to have a dessert bar so extravagant for a lunch that consisted of only four people total, but hey, you know what they say: work hard, play eat desserts harder!

Recipe for the passionfruit & red bean cake follows. It's my modern spin on my mom's old family recipe for baked New Year's Cake that is one of my favorite things she makes. It's satisfyingly mochi-chewy, and the pop of passionfruit brightens the whole cake like bursting, exotic streak of sunshine. (Oh goodness, excuse the cliches, I don't get much sleep these days!)

Read on for recipe....

Passionfruit and Espresso Tosca Cake

I've always maintained that the best desserts I make are ones that are designed with a specific person in mind. There's something about crafting the perfect personal dessert, targeted and fine-tuned to one person's unique palate... it's a challenge in how well I know someone, how well I've figured out their tastes and likes and dislikes and favorites (that sometimes they don't even know they had), and when I get it right, it's better than any general, all-purpose dessert that I make, no matter how high the bar is to begin with. In a sense, this is my ultimate definition of the practice of baking with love.

(This is also why I realized a long time ago that I couldn't ever do cooking contests. Cooking for myself is just never as rewarding--and never tastes as good!--as cooking for someone else.)

This cake was for a friend of mine who has this unique talent in making sense of the world in the most lucid manner, no matter how convoluted the situation. Her advice has helped me through many major scrapes in the past few years, and after nearly eight years of knowing her, I *finally* got her to reveal her birthday this year, so I had quite a few birthdays and years to make up for! This surprise cake had to be nothing short of perfection.

One of my favorite things about how this passionfruit and espresso Tosca cake turned out is that the cake boasts this quiet and understated drama. It's a natural layer cake without all of the boisterous pomp and circumstance of a traditional, tall cake-and-frosting-and-cake-and-frosting layer cake: the nutty and slightly crunchy topping of the toasted almonds melts into the salty-sweet, espresso-tinged caramel, which soaks into the top of the underlying, fluffy but moist genoise cake base, which itself bursts with the tart, tropical boldness of passionfruit. It might seem like a lot going on at once, but the beauty of the cake is the simplicity with which all of these complex flavors find a balance together in the continuous layers of the dessert. Somehow, they just all make sense together here, which I thought was particularly befitting of my friend.

Her response to the cake:

"Best. birthday. cake. ever."

Mission accomplished.

(Special shout-out to Emma of Poires au Chocolat for posting about Tosca cakes.)



Read on for recipe...

Strawberry Passionfruit Tart

This weekend was packed with so many birthdays and trying to squeeze in developing, baking, and eating two birthday desserts between birthday dinners and work and friends visiting from afar and gearing up for the imminent sated launch! -- Clearly everyone and their mothers are born in May, so if you're a May baby: Happy Birthday!

Anyways, though I didn't manage to get very many photos of this dessert, I have to say that this strawberry passionfruit tart is one of my favorite developments recently. Richard, the spoiled bf who knows to request tarts and not cupcakes for his birthdays, is a mad-lover of strawberries, so for years now, I've tried my hand at various ways to incorporate strawberries into his birthday desserts: strawberry cheesecake ice cream, strawberry rosemary tarts, actual strawberry cheesecake, strawberry cream puffs. But then I realized that he really wants just one thing: the strawberries--cut the whole 'dessert' crap. So this year, I attempted to make the most unadulterated strawberry dessert I could, with straight-up strawberries (and just strawberries!) filling a meyer lemon-scented crust and brushed with tart passionfruit jelly, since passionfruit is one of Richard's other fruit obsessions. And success! basically, a dessert vehicle for delivering strawberries to the mouth. :)

For this tart, make sure to look for small, ultra-sweet strawberries. Since the strawberries are the main focus of this dessert, it's paramount that they are delicious specimens. The bigger ones this time of year don't pack nearly as much flavor. Small strawberries are also easier to fit into the tart shell, and if they're small enough, you can (if, like me, you're short on time) skip the step of hulling the inner white of the strawberries out.

Don't forget to enter for a chance to win a copy of sated magazine when it comes out, if you haven't already! Pre-orders should be starting sometime in the next week or so, so stay tuned!

Read on for recipe....

Passionfruit Tapioca and Lemon Cream Tarts

Happy Valentine's Day! Or otherwise known as, Happy stuff-your-face-with-desserts day! Now, I realize that I'm a little bit late to the Valentine's Day party, but this being a journal and all, I wanted to share what the dessert I'm actually having for Valentine's Day rather than making something weeks ahead of time that I wouldn't actually make again. ... and, I'm just running behind, so please forgive me! :)

It seems that, whenever I think about Valentine's Day desserts, I always come back to passionfruit. It's not your typically romantic fruit, like red strawberries dipped in chocolate--and frankly, it looks like dinosaur eggs, with its bumpy skin and bizarre, seedy insides. But, I think it's the name that gets to me, with passion, and I like that it's a little bit tart and sweet, like love.

This year for Valentine's Day, I decided to mix passionfruit with another thing that my bf and I are obsessed with: tapioca. I've always joked that you can't date me unless you like tapioca (with tea, that is), and one of the first things that happened years ago in our relationship was that Richard learned to like tapioca milk tea, just to hang with me. That's the sign of a keeper! Then, a few days ago, he showed up with a bag of lemons from his backyard (<3), which I also wanted to incorporate into the dessert.

Hence, passionfruit tapioca and lemon cream tarts! with passionfruit curd filling, which is super luscious and studded with small rounds of soft tapioca pearls, and mascarpone whipped cream, which is flavored with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and zest for an overall brightness to the dessert. It's one of those desserts that make you feel like you're eating pure rays sunshine, even if the weather outside and stormy and cold (as it finally is here in the Bay, after a winter of no rain!).

Even though it's a bit late, here's wishing you all a Valentine's Day filled with sugar and candy and delicious desserts (forget love and romance, all we need is sugar anyways)!


Read on for recipe....

Passionate Whoopie Pies, or Musings on Dinosaur Eggs

Sunday was Easter, so I thought that today, we should talk about eggs.

Or, rather, I thought that we should talk about things that remind us of eggs.  Like, passion fruit.  Which is what I thought about this Easter.

I mean, come on--do you blame me?  Passion fruits (when they're not completely shriveled up) totally look reminiscent of eggs.  In fact, in my family, we always joke that they're like alien dinosaur eggs because of how weird they look when you cut them open.

So, of course it was natural for me to be thinking about weird looking dinosaur eggs during Easter (yes, that's just how my messed-up brain works--Kids: this is your brain on graduate school. Take note.).

Anyways, I also associate a feeling of down home simplicity and nostalgia with Easter, and so I thought nothing would be more fitting for our Easter celebration than combining dinosaur/alien eggs with homey goodness in the form of passion fruit whoopie pies!

I have been meaning to make whoopie pies for quite a while now.  It falls into that family of frosting-sandwiched-in-between-baked-goodness that I love so much, along with the also-nostalgic sandwich cookie or the high-class, snobby French macaron.  Whoopie pies are basically what would happen if you took a cupcake and converted into a sandwich form, which, in my humble opinion, is a genius move.

For my whoopie pie cakes, I used an adaptation of the recipe published a while ago in the New York Times. One concern I had when embarking on making whoopie pies were that the cakes would be super dry, which is how some of the proprietary ones that I've had are like.  And there's really nothing I can't stand more than dry cake.  Ugh.  But, my worries were for naught, because these cakes turned out beautifully moist and dense.  They were sooooo, sooooo good.  Like, I-almost-skipped-the-frosting good.  To kick up the chocolate quotient even more, I used black cocoa powder in addition to regular cocoa powder, which made the batter awesomely dark.  The cakes turned out super chocolate-y and ever so subtly sweet, which were perfect for the sweet, fruity frosting that I had planned.

For the frosting, I adapted a vanilla frosting recipe found here with vanilla bean and folded in passion fruit curd.  The result was a tantalizing flavor combination of citrus-y, tangy, and sweet passion fruit frosting, with  dark and moist chocolate.  Um... yes!  To make the passion fruit curd, I used a syrupy passion fruit nectar that you can find bottled in Asian supermarkets so that the passion fruit flavor would really come out robustly through the chocolate cake, though fresh passion fruit juice should also work as well.

These "passionate" whoopie pies went over really well at Easter.  I credit their success to the combination of moist chocolate cake that isn't too sweet and the surprising punch of passion fruit frosting in the center.  And, all in convenient sandwich form, too!  I made some little, two-bite size whoopie pies (or one bite, depending on how big your mouth is ;-P) that my mom took with her to her office.  Apparently, people lamented to her about only having one bite-size whoopie pie per person, and, honestly, I feel for them--I can't just eat one either!

Anyhow, I hope you all had a wonderful Easter weekend!  This week's going to be a super busy one for me: I'm running a workshop this coming weekend with many of the leading researchers in my field, which promises to be at once excellent fun but also crazy work leading up to it!  (Wish me luck surviving!)  But, I have some really, really exciting things in the works for the blog for next week.  Like, black cocoa.  Stay tuned for more about that in a few posts or so!

In the meantime, let's hear a "Whoopee!" for whoopie pies.  (and crazy, dinosaur-egg-looking passion fruits!)  :-D


Read on for recipe...

Valentine's Chocolate Overload: Passionfruit-coconut dark chocolates and Raspberry mocha dark chocolates

Here we go again-- I did it for Christmas and couldn't escape it for Valentine's Day: Chocolate Overload.

Sooooo many chocolates.  My head spun.  Despite my best efforts at true, surgical cleanliness, there were wayward and unruly drops of chocolate everywhere, on every pair of jeans (and I have a lot of those), on the top ceiling of my freezer, on my chin.  A lot. of. chocolate.

This time around, I made four flavors again.  Because they were my hands-down favorite from Christmas, I made the saffron-honey dark chocolates again, which were just as much of a hit this time as the last time around.  Pictured above are some classic spicy dark chocolates, with a healthy kick of cayenne pepper to spice things up.  Then, there were these:

Passionfruit Coconut Dark Chocolates

with Meyer lemon curd filling

Probably due to the incredibly rainy weather and dreary days leading up to Valentine's Day this year, I was in a quite a tropical mood, which translated into these passionfruit-coconut-lemon dark chocolates.  The ganache in these are infused with this ultra-concentrated passionfruit syrup that is available at Asian markets (like Ranch 99), spiked with rum, and then studded with unsweetened dried coconut for texture.  For a little extra something-something, I also filled the chocolates with a dab of meyer lemon curd, whose tartness played off the passionfruit flavor quite well.

Then, finally, we have the raspberry mocha dark chocolates, which were the runaway favorites for the overly caffeinated academic crowd I served some of these chocolates to:

Instead of raspberry jam, these dark chocolates were packed with a freshly cooked down raspberry reduction that added so much intensity to their flavor.  Then, coupled with the strong mocha dark chocolate ganache..... mmmm mm!

Anyways, despite all of my grumbling about the amount of chocolate work I've been doing lately, I have been relishing this chance to experiment with all of these flavor combinations.  I've got a few upcoming orders for chocolates, so I'm looking forward to trying some new ideas, too, and, thinking about working with chocolate transfer sheets.  Go, chocolate-ty fun!

Read on for recipes for passionfruit-coconut-lemon dark chocolates and raspberry mocha dark chocolates