Shortcake aux Fraises

It's not quite summer yet here in California, but strawberries are starting to show up everywhere. Although, it's true that you can find fresh berries all year around in CA, but they taste best in Summer.

I had a box full of over-ripened strawberries in the fridge. I have sooo many ideas of cakes and desserts when it comes to strawberries, strawberry tart, strawberry mousse cake, strawberry cheesecake, strawberry shortcake, you name it. They even look fabulous as garnish. They definitely contribute to the "wow" factor of a cake. Its vibrant red color, the fragrance, the shape, just make anything stands up among others.

I wasn't actually planning to make this cake. I just didn't want to waste the beautiful strawberries. I'm sure they'd go bad if I let them sitting in the fridge for a day or two longer. I had to use it up by using whatever I had in the fridge the other day. Since I didn't want to make something that requires multiple layers of filling, I decided to make this shortcake aux fraises, or what we would normally know as strawberry shortcake. Not the regular American shortcake, which uses shortcake as a base.

Nothing fancy, it's just two layers of vanilla chiffon cake, chantily cream flavored with Cointreau (orange liqueur), fresh strawberries, and clear neutral glaze on the top surface. I decided to decorate it like the traditional fraisier (French strawberry cake with Kirsch creme mousseline filling) decoration because I didn't have enough cream to cover the whole cake. Besides, I love this decoration. It's simple, elegant, and doesn't require much effort.


I also made chocolate leaves for the first time using fresh mint leaves. It turned out that it wasn't too difficult to do.

I get to taste the cake a couple of hours ago with my nephew. The chiffon cake was soft, with a light orange taste in the background, combined with the fresh taste of sweet strawberries. My nephew ate two slices by himself, and he doesn't normally like to eat. It doesn't have the complexity flavor of many other multilayer cakes, but yet tastes so simple and refreshing. I really can't wait for summer to come. I'm so looking forward going to farmers' market just to buy a couple boxes full of sugar-sweet strawberries. Seriously, I've never thought before that strawberries and even raspberries could be so sweet. All this time, I thought they're supposed to be tart and sour, but oh boy, what have I missed all these years. I would think twice, well maybe ten times before decided to buy berries from grocery store.

This is also my entry for the "Strawberry Seduction" event hosted by Mike. You can find the complete information about the event here.

Vanilla Chiffon Cake

100 g cake flour
20 g cornstarch
pinch of salt
50 g sugar
75 g oil
100 g milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
4 eggs, separated
1/8 tsp. cream of tartar
50 g sugar

• Line the base of two 9-in round pans with parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
• Sift together cake flour, cornstarch, and salt. Set aside.
• In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks and the sugar until well blended.
• Add the oil, milk, and vanilla extract. Mix well.
• Mix in the flour mixture.
• In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy, add the cream of tartar. Keep whisking until the bubbles are smaller. Add the second half of the sugar gradually and keep whisking until it reaches soft-peak stage.
• Fold the egg white mixture into the yolk mixture in addition carefully so that you won’t deflate the air.
• Pour the batter into the prepared pans . Tap each pan gently against the countertop to remove the excess air bubbles.
• Bake for approximately 30 minutes. Let cool.

Filling:
500 g heavy whipping cream, cold
4 Tbs. sugar
3 Tbs. Cointreau (or other orange-flavored liqueur)

Fresh sweet strawberries for filling and decoration
clear neutral glaze (optional)

• Whip all of the ingredients until it reaches medium-stiff peak, but not dry.
  

To Assemble:

• Prepare an 8.75 in round cake ring (or use smaller size) and cut the chiffon cakes to the size of the cake ring. Use cake ring only if you want to make it like the decoration in the picture. Otherwise, don't bother
• Spread a layer of orange-flavored creme chantily and scatter the sliced strawberries on top.
  
• Top with another layer of chiffon cake.
  
• Cover the whole cake with the leftover cream if you prefer. Or if you want to decorate it like what I did, spread a thin layer of the filling on top of the cake.
• Decorate all you want.

Easter Cookies

Easter is tomorrow. I don't normally make something for every occasion, but I always get excited when special holiday or occasion is coming. That mean's that there's an excuse to make dessert or cake :). But, most of the time, although I have planned the cake I want to make, the decorations, and everything, it always ended up not baking anything. I don't know why or how, but when the day is getting closer, I'm always loaded with a lot of activities.



For Easter this year, I've been planning to make decorated easter cookies and an easter cake decorated with basketweave, bunny, easter eggs, grass, flower,..... In my mind, it looks so Easter-y. So today, I made some time to make this easter cookies with my nephew. The cookie part was fine, but when it comes to decorating it, I barely have the patience to finish all of them. I ended up decorated 80% of the cookies and threw away the leftover icing. You need to be a verrryyy patience person to be able to decorate a cookie perfectly. Me?? no, I'm not that kind of a person. As you can see in the picture, they look like cookies made by children. It's so far away from neat. I like the pastel color though.
Anyways, I don't think I will be decorating cookies like this for quite some time now

For the cake, I don't think I would have time to do it by tomorrow. My biggest concern is who would finish up the cake? I really think my friends are getting tired of all the cakes I've delivered to their door. It's only yesterday that I gave them chocolate tiramisu cake. Although, it's gone now, but still, three cakes in a week??? who wouldn't be sick of that?
I might still make it though, since I have the chocolate easter eggs and the bunny for decoration, but not today or tomorrow. We'll see

Chocolate Tiramisu Cake

Still in the tiramisu mood, one of my friends asked me if I could make a chocolate tiramisu cake for her husband upcoming birthday. Hmm...interesing. I made chocolate tiramisu cake once, trying out a recipe about two years ago. But I've never actually made it based on the recipe that I've been using.

Since I have leftover cream that's almost expired, I thought this is the perfect opportunity to experiment :)
So, this cake consists of two layers of chocolate sponge cakes, soaked heavily with espresso-rum mixture so that it would have the same texture as soaked lady fingers. The filling is the same as the classic tiramisu, mascarpone cream filling. I just added melted bittersweet chocolate and more rum and coffee in the filling so that the flavor would be more pronounced, since chocolate is a strong flavor.

I wanted to decorate it as simple as possible, but still looks elegant, so I piped chantilly cream on the top to look like a daisy, then dust it with cocoa powder. The side is decorated with just melted chocolate that I shaped like the picture. I'm quite satisfied with the look though.

I asked my QA friends (who get to taste almost every cake I make and give me some feedback) to taste it (although it ends up that they're not only tasting it, but finishing the whole cake!!! and I only got to taste about one spoonful of the cake). The whole cake disappeared in about one night. What I found in the fridge the following day, was just an empty box sitting nicely in their fridge.
The cake was great. It tasted like a very good chocolate mousse cake. You can definitely taste the rum and there's a pretty strong espresso after taste. So, the three main flavors are definitely there, but I might reduce the amount of chocolate in the filling so that it doesn't overpower the other flavors. I can barely taste the mascarpone cheese, which is predictable considering that mascarpone cheese is so subtle and chocolate is so strong.

Honestly, I don't think that reducing the amount of chocolate would make the mascarpone tastes stronger. Whatever modification I make, this is the best flavor I can get. Tiramisu is not tiramisu anymore if you add chocolate to it. It will completely change the taste.

I like the flavor of the cake. I mean, what else could you ask for? chocolate, rum, and coffee are definitely a match made in heaven. So, considering that I'm not a big fan of chocolate and I like this cake, I think this deserves to go into my permanent recipe file.

Here's is the individual version of it

Tiramisu

I posted about tiramisu cake before, but I just realized that I've never posted the classic tiramisu. I made this dessert so often a long time ago, but only a few of them for at least the last year or so. In fact, this is the first dessert that I attempted to experiment with and finally having a recipe of my own.


It's been so long that I forgot how easy it is to make this dessert. You don't even need an oven to make this. The longest part is to let the assembled dessert rest in the fridge for a good couple of hours before serving to give enough time for the flavor to marry and the espresso to soaked deeply into the ladyfingers.

Usually, I would make it in a pyrex type container. It's quick and easy. But since I'm crazy about neatness and perfection lately (read: the last couple of years), I made it using a cake ring this time. It takes a lot longer and a lot more hassle, but it's worth it.

I want the sides to be perfectly straight and neat, but I guess I wasn't doing a great job doing it, judging from the picture above. I froze the tiramisu for a couple of hours before cutting the four sides with hot knife. I think I need to freeze it a little longer so that it's completely frozen (at least the outer edge) before trimming the sides. But, I'm pretty satisfied with the result.

I have just enough leftover mascarpone filling for one individual version. Instead of using lady fingers, I used some joconde that I kept in the freezer so that it would lined up straight with the filling. I also soaked the joconde heavily with the espresso-rum mixture so that it would have the soaked lady finger texture and the strong espresso flavor.

Durian Puffs

Another durian goodie. Made some mini durian puffs for a potluck party last weekend. This is my second attempt of making it. I made it once before using durian flesh and fresh cream, but I wasn't completely satisfied. So, I made another attempt and make a recipe for durian pastry cream or durian custard or durian vla.

Here's a closer look of the inside.

I was very happy with the result. The durian taste was so strong. I'm glad that the durian I bought was very sweet and tasty. It is the key to a great durian dessert compared to a good one.

Durian Cream Cake

Durian, The King of Fruits.
Some people would say "Yummmm", and others would say "Yucckkk" everytime this fruit is mentioned.

Me? I fall into the first category. I absolutely loveee durian. Despite some people who say that it smells like baby's dirty diaper, or some other stuff, I think it smells G-R-E-A-T!!

So, here it is, Durian Cream Cake. I made this once before, but it didn't turn out that great. The chiffon cake I used was not good and the durian wasn't really that sweet and aromatic. On the other hand, the durian I bought this time was really sweet, I almost cancelled my plan making this cake and just want to eat the custardy flesh by itself :)

Although I wasn't 100% satisfied with the chiffon cake this time (different recipe), my friends said that it was really really good. They even said that the sponge cake was good before I said anything about it. More importantly, the durian cream!. It was like almost eating a plain durian (maybe I'm exaggerating a little). I only ate a small spoonfull of the cake though. My friend eved had third in one sitting. Well, he's a big guy :)

Other than this cake, I made another Durian dessert. I don't know what it's called in English. The texture is a cross between a pudding, a custard, and something else. I personally would like it even better if it's somewhat denser, so that I can bite into it, but tastewise, it's soo duriany (if this word even exists)

I got the recipe for this blog here http://keikhouse.blogspot.com/2008/02/resep-kue-duren.html
it's in Indonesian language though

Cream Puff Tower

I made cream puffs at least a million times before. Ok, I lied, maybe hundreds or more like 50 times? But usually, I just made them into plain rounds. Lately, I wanted to try making swan cream puffs. So, I piped the neck and the body separately.

It turned out that the necks were way too big. I mean it looked like swollen necks or diseased necks. So I threw it away. I can only save one neck that I think is "okay". Even that is a little burned :)