Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Bread, Parrano cheese, a variety of good olives, and a damned fine Trappist ale. All eaten while listening to good musing and rereading Doug Hofstadter’s explanation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which I have to say is remarkably well-written.

Said Trappist ale is also rather strong, which just makes this all the better. This has been a very relaxing evening.

Experimental cake attempt today. This is a roulade, so it’s going to be 24h of refrigeration before I know how it turned out, but I suspect that the production version is somewhat better.

Grr. The problem with this cake is having to wait to find out what happened. But one bite tomorrow should tell me what I need to know to make the next version really damned good.

Test #1. Partial success. The idea of maple ice cream has been vindicated strongly, as has the overall functionality of the ice-cream making machine. (Cuisinart, btw, and quite recommended based on this limited test)

The recipe in question, derived from reading through a lot of other recipes and trying to merge them, is a complete failure. For reference, the basic idea was to make a creme anglaise – boil the milk, cream and flavor mixture, whisk it in to eggs, hold it at 170F for a few moments, strain and chill – and then freeze it. The resulting flavor is hard to describe, and best not thought about too closely, especially this close to lunch.

Test #2 will use a lighter recipe, perhaps one omitting the eggs altogether. If anyone has a favored category of ice cream recipes that they think may be worth using in future tests, please let me know.

I am now the owner of an ice cream maker.

I also now have a list of experiments planned. Maple, several flowers (esp. Jasmine), fresh spearmint and peppermint (to be served together, sitting in chocolate shells), port wine, smoked salmon (to be served sitting inside half an avocado, together with very thin toasted slices of baguette), cucumber sorbet (to be served in the middle of a bowl of gazpacho), sundry fruits (maybe apple sorbet floating in some real apple cider? i.e. the good very dry Bretagne variety, not the artificially flavored shite they’ve been selling in the supermarkets lately…), nuts and spices (Hazelnut, nutmeg, clove & allspice, and so on) and so on…

This will be fun.

Those of you in the area may be unexpectedly dragooned into acting as guinea pigs for various of these, at various times in the near future.

Also, on a completely different note: the band ‘Paris Combo’ is excellent. French jazz with lots of Spanish and Gypsy influences. Highly recommended to anyone who likes any of those categories.

When I ask my mother for a recipe, she always responds “What, you want to make a foo? Are you crazy? Do you know how much work that is? Here, let me give you the recipe for a bar, it’s much simpler.” Then after a great deal of coaxing I convince her to give me the foo recipe anyway, and it never fails to be substantially easier than I had been led to believe.

Well, this rolada was no exception. Having just made the second (production) version, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually not a very hard cake to make at all, it just got an unnecessarily bad reputation. In fact it’s kinda fun to make, and fairly straightforward.

And very good. :9

Rolada 2.0, now with certain of the bugs fixed, is presently beginning its two-day refrigeration. Woohoo!

Be more forceful when mixing melted chocolate into the beaten yolks. Similarly don’t be afraid to fold the yolks into the whites more thoroughly. Roll the souffle so it comes out short and fat, not long and thin, since it’s easier that way, and the expansion joints in the cream do a hell of a lot more good.

And damn, it’s a good thing I decided to try a practice cake before the one for Thanksgiving.

To those of you at Buffy night this week: Yes, the experimental cake will be there. I think it turned out tasting reasonably well, but since it’s not going to be tasteable for another day or two, it’s kinda hard to tell. It will probably be very ugly, however.