Ginger White Chocolate Strawberry Trifles, and (not) paying attention in class

I space out in class.  There! I said it.  It's actually quite a problem, because when I get spacey, I start thinking about things that I happen to have lying about the refrigerator and the kitchen, like leftover white chocolate creme anglaise or beautiful chunks of crystallized ginger or egg yolks.

And then, I start thinking, "Oh, what a shame it would be if all these things went to waste!"  And then--here's where it gets dangerous, I start thinking about what I could do with all of these ingredients.  At this point, I'm sure my professors are utterly and completely fed up with me because I really should be paying attention to the diachronic origins of morphological ergativity in Indo-Aryan languages and dialects (which actually is interesting, I promise).  Anyways, here's what I came up with:

Ginger, white chocolate, and strawberry trifles.  Oh boy!  I sure to wish all of my daydreams turned out so well, with layers of ginger genoise cake, white chocolate creme anglaise whipped cream, and fresh strawberries.

The genoise cake recipe that I used here is an all egg-yolk genoise, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible.  It's one of my favorite genoise recipes because, with all of the egg yolks, it's much more moist than your average whole egg variety--and, it's a great, yummy way to use up leftover egg yolks.  To adapt Beranbaum's recipe to a ginger genoise, I added ground ginger to the batter and also huge, rough chunks of crystallized ginger.  When it came out, the cake was magnificently studded with all of this sweet and spicy crystallized ginger and then I brushed it with some homemade ginger syrup that I had sitting in the fridge (that stuff also makes great homemade ginger ale).

To use up my white chocolate creme anglaise, I folded it into whipped cream.  It was actually quite a discovery when I found out that the white chocolate creme anglaise sets up nicely in the fridge, to almost the consistency of a light pudding!  With the creme anglaise folded in, the resulting cream is thick and luscious, packing just the right amount of sweetness and an incredible vanilla taste.

Combining the cake and whipped cream with fresh strawberries and more crystallized ginger made for the perfect antedote to mid-winter blues.  These were so good that I (accidentally!) inhaled two of them myself, despite the fact that I kept trying to save them for others to try.  Oops...

So, let's see... what is the moral of this story?  Daydreaming in class won't get you anywhere in terms of grades, but it will result in something utterly delicious to eat.  (Wait, is this really going to help me graduate?)


Read on for the recipe....

Pi Day is Coming, or, a round-up of 3.1415926535...

Are you ready for Pi Day???

Well, I was.  I was going to be SUPER ready.  I was going to celebrate Pi Day in EPIC fashion, with not one, not two, but three pies.  All baked in one night.  Yeah, this is yet another lesson of Stephanie-doesn't-know-how-to-gauge-how-much-she-can-really-do.

But, I think it would have all really worked out.  Until I decided to try two pies that I've never made.  Including these cute little cupcake pies with the numbers of pi cut out on top!  I mean, they would be super cute, wouldn't they?  But here's the hitch and a confession: I've never made a covered pie before.  EVER.  In all of my years of pie baking, I have always managed somehow to avoid making a covered pie.  'Til now.  So, how would I know that the insides would boil out through the numbers if I covered the pies with foil too early on to avoid burning the crust?  Yes, lesson learned.

The other pie that I wanted to try turned out looking beautiful.  Here they are browning up nicely in the oven:

Aren't they gorgeous?  Well, they would have been a huge success had I not been trying out a new (not lemon) curd recipe at the same time, which, as I found out thirty minutes after taking these beauties out of the oven, didn't keep set when it reached 350 degrees F.  Blurg.

Okay, so there you have it.  Bad Pie Karma: 2, Stephanie: 1.  At least one of my pies did come out nicely, and I'll post about that one sometime soon.  Not to say that the mush from these failed pies didn't taste AWESOME, but it's going to take a few more tries of tweaking these recipes to get them completely right.  When they do turn out, though, I think they'll be really, really yummy.  :-)

So, since I don't have little cupcake pi pies to present to you for the celebration of Pi Day, here's a quick round up of a few of my favorite pies and tarts that I've posted about thus far.

First, we have these mini key-lime heart-lettes that I made for a wedding last summer.  They were one of the first things to disappear on the dessert table!

Next, there's this orange-almond-pomegranate chocolate tart that I posted about a few weeks ago.  This was truly a great invention, borne of random ingredients that I happened to have lying about my kitchen table.  The pomegranate seeds were especially delicious as little bursts of juicy flavor next to the bitterness of the dark chocolate.  Mmm...mm!

Lastly, this drunken pear frangipane tart is probably one of my favorite recipes from this past year.  Frangipane pear tarts are already really good, but if you poach the pears in red wine beforehand...  Yes, you know what I'm talkin' about.  :-P  It was so good that I even made it for Thanksgiving dessert, along with the holiday staples of apple pie and pumpkin pie.

Anyways, this is a fair warning that my pie and tart spree as of late is not over yet!  I have a few exciting tarts up my sleeve, and I'm definitely going to revisit and perfect these two pie recipes.  But, until then, Happy Pi Day!