Blue cheese iceberg, strawberry poundcake, Weld

The man above owns the house and I said, "Come here and see what this lens does to this room." 

I was on the floor kneeling using the chair seat at the end for platform, the lens is a few inches from the plate. He answered, 

"If I get down there I won't be able to get back up."

"I'll help you." 

So the two of us were on the floor using the same chair for a table sharing the camera viewfinder.

That's what I made.

This is the chef who helped. He is no longer a chef but retains his mad cheffery skills. He cubed an avocado, limed it up, and sprinkled black pepper all over. 

And then we put on our accents and amused ourselves, in cartoon French-English, 

"It iz a mountain. And dis iz le detritus. And this is the snow upon the mountain. And dis is l'avalanche."

And indeed, the salads looked like little landscapes. The guests repeated they had not seen the likes of it before, they are so encouraging. Most are already familiar with the simple blue cheese dressing iceberg at Emilenes that I learned from for this, but they remarked they found the combination of detritus excellently unfathomable. 

But that comes from various salsa frescas minus the onion and garlic and chiles and harsh things, just the nice things that children would like then pair that with blue cheese. That's the odd part. And not mix them. They must do that.  The watermelon touches the blue cheese by accident on the plate and delivers a surprise. They go! And so do the grapes. They're in control, the mixing unforced.

The pecans are burned on purpose, but only slightly, I kneeled there patiently watching to assure it, so that they give up their nut-meatiness and dissolve in the mouth leaving a faint charred pecan flavor, and the croutons are large toasted cubes with irregular rough surfaces, made of my own sourdough bread.

Who does that? 

The chef pictured above asked what type of sourdough I used and I told him my own, I baked it this morning, his jaw dropped and he said he wouldn't attempt sourdough. I told him the culture was collected out on the balcony and he looked at me as if I were quite mad. 

But all of that is common. I guess they didn't do such things in his hotel and his catering.

Pineapple upside down cake

A cast iron pan is prepared with delicious goop of butter and brown sugar with holiday spices and fresh pineapple with all of its pineapple wetness. And obscenely red cherries preserved in a syrup, not a natural product by any means and signaling the cake product is not authentic foodstuff.

Cake is

not authentic foodstuff.

A delicious cake batter is prepared ad lib ad hoc impromptus, extempo raneously.

I don't know how I do it I just do. 

Here's how. Read the ingredients of boxed cake batter. Then read the instructions. Get the idea. Thereafter you're on your own.

Here's the idea. Egg whisked with sugar. Vegetable oil. Vanilla. Almond extract, just a few drops it's killer. Sifted flour folded in. Avoid developing gluten. Baking powder. Salt. Enough milk to loosen the mixture to pourable sludge. 

Or put another way, milk first with liquid ingredients gauged by the amount needed. Then enough flour to thicken at least a cup and 1/4. All adjustments this way or that with liquid or with flour will affect the balance of everything else. You might need more baking powder or corn sweetener or salt or possibly even another egg. 

I did adjust with milk to loosen without adjusting anything else and there's enough wiggle room the cake turned out to be moist and delicious. 

I'm trying to tell you how awesome I am that these things can be whipped out so nonchalantly, so casually, so facile and with daringly cavalier confidence.

Kabong. 

It's flour and sugar, topped with sugar and butter. 

It's not real food.

It's what one whips out to eat in order to punish one's body and to erase the memory of awful gobi aloo that tastes like vinegar, and I mean awful. 

And to get rid of a pineapple on its way out, and preserved cherries in a jar with a fifteen thousand year half-life. I'm glad both those things are finally gone.

Win.

Chocolate cake

This is an experiment and it worked and it failed. 

I was going for génoise without being fussy about it and that's the part didn't exactly work. 

White chocolate cake

From Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking, Harumi Kurihara. Oddly, I read the reviews on Amazon after I bought the book. That was stupid. Turns out the book is very well reviewed. Lots of reviews, all five stars, and that's unusual.

Harumi's idea for this cake appealed to me because of its simplicity. Egg, flour, white chocolate, scant sugar. That's all. I thought, "Hmm, how very Japanese, no leavener beyond the egg. ." Strange, no oil, very little sugar. No salt.

That's just wrong.

Result: (whispers) Not very good. (/whisper) Any boxed cake would be better, and I mean any boxed cake. And that's a shame. This cake is too dense, too heavy, too dry. It's hopeless. I doused the cake with half a cup of Grand Marnier and half a cup of simple suger (which ah made mahself -- 1/2 cup sugar + 1/2 cup water, brought to boil) After all that the cake was still too dense and too dry. No sense of white chocolate. It's awful.

I'll say this, though, the raw batter tasted very good.

I forgot to dust with powdered sugar for a final touch, which Hurami does for her lovely book so her picture is prettier than mine. Her recipe is for 8x8 pan, I used 9x9 so I doubled the recipe but I did not increase the baking time. That is not the reason the cake is so dense. Also I used 1/2 AP flour and 1//2 cake flour. Her recipe calls for 100% AP so by all lights and logic mine should have been more tender, but it's not tender. Not by a long shot. Huuuuck-ptewie. It's gross.

If I were to attempt this again, and there's no reason I should, I would back off the egg, include more vegetable oil and add baking powder, and I'd use 100% low-protein cake flour. Taa daaa. That right there would fix it. I'd also might whip the egg white separately from the yolk then fold the components together and bake it less than 20 minutes. I'd also use more white chocolate, or consider a white chocolate ganache layer. Let's face it, Japanese are not known for their wheat flour products, nor for their chocolate, so I'll cut Harumi some slack here and leave it at that.

Harumi's recipe:

1/4 cup good-quality white chocolate

1 cup AP flour

3 eggs

1/4 cup granulated sugar

~~~~~~~

3/4 cup heavy whipping cream

2 tablespoons ganulated sugar

blueberries, mint leaves, powdered sugar to dust.

Bake 20 minutes at 350℉ / 177℃

* Preheat oven.

* Sift flour into a bowl mix in cold grated chocolate

* Separate bowl, beat eggs and sugar. Whisk until it stands in peaks. Stir in 1/2 flour white chocolate mixture.

* Add remaining flour lightly mix.

* Transfer mixture to baking pan. Tap pan on work surface to break bubbles. Bake

* Remove from oven. Put on rack. Cool. Wrap in plastic to keep from drying out.

* Whip cream and sugar. Spread. Place berries and mint.

OK, here's what's wrong with this.

1) Eggs with their yolks will not whip to stiff peaks. Fugitaboudit. They will whip up, but not to stiff peaks. Six jumbo eggs is more than any quiche would even call for. (Except Vincent Price's quiche. Price's quiche calls for eight egg yolks, or possibly twelve, I forget. At any rate, it's an unusual lot and probably bad for you besides, itself a culinary horror.)

2) It's no use covering it with plastic to prevent it from drying out. It's already exceedingly dry. So dry in fact that an entire cup of extra liquid did not moisten a double batch. Blah.

My recipe that failed and would have got me promptly expelled from Le Cordon Bleu along with my knives. POW! "Sortez. Et ne revenez pas." Get out! And don't come back."

Derisively, "American. Pfffft. "

* Half cup grated white chocolate

* 1 cup sifted AP flour

* 1 cup sifted low-protein cake flour

* 6 jumbo eggs

* 1/2 cup fine granulated sugar

* 1/8 cup vegetable oil

~~~~~~

topping as above.

Cake bakers can tell by looking, this is dreadfully woefully insufficient and now I do too. I think I'll toss the rest of this and chalk it up to experience. I'm glad a party wasn't involved. I look at it this way; I paid a lot more dearly for education in college. After that, everything is bargain.