big dirt garden

Coming Soon… I’m thinking Passion Fruit shells with Coconut Caramel Filling.

Yes, I’m still in France. Well, in my kitchen at least. In keeping with the French theme, macarons surfaced to the top of the recipe pile. I’m not referring to the sweet, shredded coconut kind, although those macaroons are very good. No, these French treats are pillowy almond sandwich cookies that typically house a gooey center of fruit or chocolate filling. I’m not sure where I first tasted a macaron, but I am sure it wasn’t in France.

Now the reason I’ve never tried to make these is that the sandwich cookie part is very delicate. Look at them wrong and they might disintegrate. And the meringue part didn’t seem too cooperative either. But since I recently conquered making homemade marshmallow, I figured I could handle this.

I found a few recipes that were simple enough. A recipe for Passion Fruit Macarons came out on top. Bright orange and tantalizing, I was trying to recreate a memory of a milk chocolate and passion fruit macaron I ate at Pierre Herme in Paris. Over a year after eating an entire box of macarons in one sitting, the passion fruit one still stands out. ‘An entire box?’ you ask. Mais oui! They were going to disintegrate. Haven’t you been reading?

I headed to the store and immediately hit a stumbling block. I could not find the passion fruit puree. “It’s out of stock.”, I was told. My remaining puree choices were raspberry and prickly pear. I went with prickly pear. I’ll make Texas macarons! I headed home and continued undaunted.

Combining the cookie ingredients was easy enough. Even making the sugar syrup wasn’t too bad. Just a word of warning though, meringue is super sticky. You could patch drywall with this stuff. It whipped up and folded into the almond base just fine. But I got it all over the place. No, the trouble started when I baked the cookies. Halfway in the cookies started cracking like the soil in a 40-year Texas drought.

Even though the recipe called for a 400° oven, clearly that was too hot. But it was too late. I managed to salvage two “good” halves thinking, ‘well, they all taste fine and I’ll have two good ones to photograph’.

But when I attempted assembly I realized I had forgotten a very crucial ingredient in the filling, the heavy cream. The thickener. The glue to the drywall so to speak. So yes, that sealed the fate of my macaron massacre. Or macaron meltdown.

In case you are wondering, macarons should look like perfect sandwich pillows, should be eaten under the Eiffel Tower while the lights twinkle and the sun sets. Not over your kitchen sink as the filling oozes out.

It seems to be France week here at the Big Dirt Garden. Earlier this week we had some big melons with their own festival and now a boozy cake made with wine from its own AOC. Mix those two together and you’d probably make any Frenchman your best friend.

Back in 1999, I brought this Beaumes de Venise cake to a party. It wasn’t well received. No one was exclaiming ‘OMG, this is the best cake ever!’. This could be for two reasons. First, the term OMG didn’t exist yet. Second, by cake standards, this isn’t a very sweet cake. Thus, they were probably caught off guard or too nice to tell me they thought it sucked. I should have worked on my sales pitch. That or I needed to find some friends with more refined palates.

This recipe reminds me of most olive oil cake recipes, which I love, but the results are often disappointing. Frequently I end up with just an oil-sodden flat cake. Yes, olive oil cake should taste like olive oil, except it should be light and citrusy. This recipe delivers both. Assisted by some lemon and orange zests and a cup of sweet Muscat wine, this is olive oil cake, but better.

I didn’t make any modifications to the recipe and it works beautifully as is. Some Bon Appetit readers suggested adding half of the grapes ~15 minutes into the cooking time. I haven’t tried that but could keep the grapes afloat versus having them sink to the bottom.

This time I served it with a grape syrup that I remembered seeing last year in Food and Wine. Funny thing that I am realizing as I type, this recipe is almost exactly like the one above except it doesn’t require the Muscat. So hey, make either one! Food and Wine’s recipe called for using Sangiovese grape juice to make the syrup. However, most people I know don’t have their own winery. So tough shit, you can’t make the syrup.

But seriously, it’s just reduced grape juice. Super easy and brings out all the wonderful grapeyness (not a word, I know). Be careful and don’t let the grape syrup almost bubble over towards the end of the reduction time or you’ll end up with grape paste. Ask me how I know this.

The August issue of Bon Appetit showed a very sexy picture of a beautiful melon soup. I rarely make soup but this one caught my eye, if only so I could practice my photography with the great colors in the dish. But more importantly because even though we were teased last week with some cooler temperaturs, it’s still 100 degrees outside.

The recipe called for a specific type of melon, a Cavaillon or a Charentais. The former is apparently quite a big deal in the world of melons, has its own festival, and must be certified by an official Cavaillon consortium to be sold in France. That must be some melon.

Regrettably, I am not in France so I planned on getting a regular ‘ol cantaloupe or honeydew. I’ve had some bad luck buying melons in the past. They are typically flavorless and never have that sweet, musky taste I hope for. However, with a stroke of luck, the store had some special orange-fleshed honeydews that smelled fantastic and perfumed my car on the drive home.

Most cold soups are usually pureed raw. This one is a bit different and instructs you to cook the melon for a bit to give you a nice combination of a raw and cooked taste. I had to improvise with the recipe as it called for some white soy sauce which I don’t have. I dug around and found some white miso and substituted a little of that for the white soy and it tasted great.

I’ve sort of become the default cook for family gatherings. I like to cook, I generally have more time than others to cook, and it gives me an excuse to be in the kitchen. Which, for an introvert, is perfect for avoiding some of the inevitable small talk.

‘How’s the weather? How’s the job? How’s your pet iguana? Were you and Iggy selected to appear on the new show My Pet Haz Mad Skillz? etc…’ You know, the surface level conversations you have when you see someone once a year. I’ve never been the sort to eagerly regurgitate the happenings of the last year to say, my long-lost third cousin, who I know is just as bored with my “stories” and I am with theirs. This is going of on a very weird personal tangent so time to focus.

One year, my mom’s boyfriend decided he would cook Christmas dinner. Yes, this made me sort of twitchy, but did allow for some more engaging conversations because I wasn’t cooking!

Crème brulée was the featured dessert. Now, crème brulée is my mom’s absolute favorite dessert. She loves it and will rhapsodize about the various crème brulées that have been presented before her. So when her boyfriend announced that it would be the feature, I was looking forward to it. I assumed that with a crème brulée fanatic in the house, he knew what he was doing.

Well let’s just say it was not crème brulée. Not even close. It was closer to flan. Because it was flan. From a box. I typically have an aversion to most foods in the gelatin category. It’s a texture thing. Just jiggly and downright off-putting. It was a poor sad crème brulée impostor.

So when I run across recipes for flan or its closest boring cousin, panna cotta, I simply keep moving. I tend to lump the aforementioned desserts into two categories: flan and panna cotta in the jiggly category; crème brulée and pots de crème in the smooth and luscious category.

Last week when was flipping through the new issue of Bon Appetit, I saw a beautiful picture of a Pink Peppercorn Panna Cotta and my heart sank. Or it jiggled. Or whatever. But, here’s where I tried to get creative. I really wanted to play with some pink peppercorns. I decided to make a pots de crème with those sexy, hot pink orbs.

Pink peppercorns have a musky floral and yes, peppery smell. So rather than using sugar to sweeten my version of the pots de crème, I wanted to use honey, as honey is also very floral. I also wanted the peppercorns to be the star and any other base flavor seemed like it would steal the show.

Turns out the two paired well together. When served with the macerated cherries originally called for in the panna cotta recipe, it tasted great, only jiggly when I took it out of the oven. Actually the first time I took them out of the oven they were far from being done and I feared disaster. But by cooking them a litte longer and patiently waiting for the right amount of jiggle, they turned out wonderful.

Pink Peppercorn Pots de Crème
2 cups heavy cream
1 T. peppercorns crushed
6 egg yolks
1/2 c. honey

Macerated Cherries
6 oz. cherries, pitted and halved
1 T. sugar
one large pinch freshly ground black pepper

Heat oven to 300 degrees. Pour cream into small saucepan. Heat cream until steam rises. Turn off heat, add the crushed peppercorns. Cover pan and let steep for 10 to 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk together egg yolks and honey in a large bowl. When the cream is ready, stir in about 1/4 of the cream into the egg yolk and honey mixture to temper. Slowly add in the rest of the cream to combine. Strain the final mixture into a pitcher. I scraped out some of the peppercorn flecks to add them back into the mixture. Or I could have used a strainer with a little larger holes.

Pour mixture into 6-6 ounce ramekins and place ramekins in a baking dish; fill dish with water to reach halfway up the side of the ramekins. Cover with foil. Bake 45-50 minutes, or until center is barely set or jiggly (e.g. flan-like). The pots de crème will set up as they cool, becoming more solid and smooth.

Remove from oven and chill for a few hours to set. Serve with macerated cherries. About 20 minutes before serving, remove the pots de crème from the refrigerator. Combine the ingredients for the cherries in a separate bowl and let the mixture sit while the pots lose a bit of their chill. Serve with some of the cherries spooned on top.