Pink Profiteroles

I'm one of those girls, I love pink. And some glitter sometimes. I won't say no to a rhinestone or two. Tiny things? I get a little enthused. Sprinkles…sign me up. Ruffles, polka dots, ribbons and bows? I swoon.

In honor of that lovey-dovey Hallmark holiday happening later this week that is full of hearts and sparkles, I made something pink and tiny and covered with sprinkles, just for me. Because who needs a Valentine when you’re a baker.

Profiteroles with pink Chantilly cream and dark chocolate ganache. Ooh la la! (Or as one of my chef instructors in culinary school would put it, “Cream puffs with whipped cream and chocolate sauce…four dollars. Profiteroles with pink Chantilly cream and dark chocolate ganache…eight dollars”)

Pâté à Choux is the dough that you use to make such delicacies with fancy names like eclairs, gougeres or croquembouche. Here it is used to make these dainty cream puffs. Pâté à Choux is a different sort of baking recipe, you cook the ingredients on the stove and there is dumping and cooling and lots of stirring and maybe piping, it’s got a lot going on. But don't let that be intimidating; the ingredients are totally everyday, it is pretty simple and quick to put together and the results are impressive and fun.

In culinary school they tried to get us to make a “team name” for our class. No one could agree on one so we never ended up with a name, but my fave suggestion was “choux fetish”. Get it? Ha ha!

I piped the pâté à choux into small mounds, baked them into golden little orbs, split them open and swirled into them pink whipped cream. I made my own natural food coloring because that’s what you do when you're a hippie who’s also into glitter nail polish. How do I make natural food coloring? From beets, that’s how! What?

I took three small beets, removed the greens and scrubbed them thoroughly, diced them into large chunks and covered them with water by about two inches in a small saucepan. I put it on low heat and let the beets cook for a good hour-hour and a half until the beets were very soft and there was just a few tablespoons of very pigmented water at the bottom of the pan. You can eat the boiled beets at this point if you’re down with that (the greens too!) and use the liquid as red food dye. Don't worry about the flavor, I've had it in frostings and whipped creams and I haven't yet been able to detect any beety-ness. The hue is a little on the purple side and it is not as intense as commercial food coloring, but in certain applications where a little extra liquid won’t affect the end result of your recipe, it is a beautiful natural substitute. 

I made the Chantilly cream with some powdered sugar and vanilla. Did you know Chantilly and whipped cream are the same darn thing? Well, there you go! I whipped up a pint of very chilled cream in a cold, clean bowl until it was softly thicker and then added the vanilla and about ½ cup powdered sugar in stages until it was sweet and firm. I then added the coloring a teaspoon at a time until I go the color I wanted, I used about 1 tablespoon beet juice concentrate to color the cream a light pink. 

You could stop there, filling your cream puffs with the Chantilly cream and call it a lovely day, but why would you quit here when chocolate exists? I made a simple ganache of equal parts (8 oz each) dark chocolate chips and scalded heavy cream to drizzle over the puffs. Just warm the cream over medium heat until it is steamy and a few bubbles rise around the edges, pour it over your chopped chocolate or chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl and let it sit for about 5 minutes, then stir. The chocolate should be melted and the mixture will come together into a glossy, dark sauce. That is ganache and it belongs on everything.

I finished the cream puffs with sprinkles, because sprinkles. When my sister and I were kids my dad put those colored sugar crystal sprinkles on our morning yogurt and we would stir them in to tint our yogurt all sorts of unnatural, awesome colors. I love my Dad and I love sprinkles. Happy Valentines Day!

Pâté à Choux

From Smitten Kitchen

Makes about 18 two-inch puffs

            1 cup water

            ½ tsp salt

            1 Tbs sugar

            6 Tbs butter – cut into small chunks

            1 cup all purpose flour

            4 eggs – room temperature

1.     Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Have a cookie sheet ready with parchment paper.

2.     Bring the water, salt, sugar and butter just to a boil in a saucepan. Remove the pot from the heat and dump in all of the flour at once and start stirring with a wooden spoon. I put the pan back on the still warm (but off) burner and stir until the dough comes together in a smooth ball that looks dry on the surface and just starts to leave a thin film on the sides and bottom of the pan as you stir.

3.     Remove the pan from the stove and transfer the dough to a mixing bowl; let the dough cool about 5 minutes. Beat in the eggs, one at time, mixing thoroughly. The dough should be smooth and shiny after you’ve added all the eggs.

4.     Fill a piping bag fitted with a large straight tip or reusable plastic bag with the corner cut off, with the dough. Pipe out small mounds, about 1 ½ to 2 inches, leaving lots of space around them to allow for them to puff up. You can also use two spoons or a cookie scoop to portion the dough. Use a finger dipped in water to smooth out any little tips sticking up.

5.     Bake for about 25-30 minutes until puffy and deep golden brown. They should have puffed up considerably and be light and hollow. I pricked mine as soon as they came out of the oven with the end of a thermometer to allow steam to escape.

6.     Baked cream puffs don’t hold very well, but you can recrip them in the oven if you decide to store them (in an airtight container, before filling them).

7.     To finish these cream puffs, I made the whipped cream and ganache as described above. I filled a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip with the pink whipped cream and after carefully cutting the tops off the cream puffs, I stuffed them with pretty whipped cream and then put the little lids back on top, drizzled each with about a tablespoon of ganache and sprinkled them with those little ball sprinkles that love to scatter all around your kitchen. And then I ate one. Or, all of them. They don’t hold well, so just go for it.

What's In a Name?

My intentions for this recipe and post was to explain my blog title, sel adore. But it ain’t working. I’m over it. Totally. Over. It. In the months, even years, I’ve had the dream of creating a food blog, coming up with a title has been such an obstacle. It doesn’t really feel like you can do anything without a name. I asked friends and family, made lists, crossed them off again, ruminated over it until finally I wanted to just get on with it, so I settled on what I thought was my most decent idea.  I knew from the inception that the name “sel adore” wasn’t quite right; almost a placeholder for what would eventually be something amazing (still hoping!) and it’s time has come quicker than I thought.

Well, why did I go with it? Before I had the opportunity to attend culinary school, I went to university for about a million years, switching between majors and schools and even states. The general track I was on throughout my indecisive undergrad years was an English studies one, which as everyone knows is one of the most useful, marketable degrees. I ended up with a diploma that says, “creative non-fiction writing” on it, even though I’m still not totally sure what that means. I wasn’t a very good student and I sorta skated along, writing mostly about big, important, life stuff like emotions and feelings and drama (cue worlds tiniest violin).

But where does “sel adore” come from? Creative non-fiction writing majors spend a lot of time workshopping (aka: sitting in a circle, pretending you read everyone else’s work while nice-judging each other), and well, the memory is old and was never really that clear to begin with, but during one of these workshops someone brought up the concept of “cellar door,” saying it was considered by scholars to be the most beautiful phonetic phrase in the English language. The phrase and it’s meaning stuck with me and came to mind when I was brainstorming a blog title, I looked up where the concept was from and I found out I might have attributed more to it than it really deserves (Shakespeare didn’t actually use it, huh), but whatever. I took it and ran with it, cellar door to sel adore. “Salt love” is it’s translation from French (I’m sure you figured that out) and that spoke to me as a baker and a cook, because salt is essential in everything.

Why isn't sel adore right? Well, I don't speak French and I haven't spent much time there (and to be honest, it ain't my fave country or cuisine). It isn't catchy or memorable and it doesn't make sense grammatically (in English at least, is it correct in French? I wouldn't know!). I spoke with an entrepreneur and she recommended a change to something simple and straightforward, something that actually says me and what I want this blog to represent. I have a lot of figuring out to do.

So. I baked a cake in which to say all of this, it’s got salted caramel to speak to the sel and chocolate to reflect the adore and it was really, really good (if I do say so myself, which I really can because I ate half of it). You should still make this cake even though I need a new blog title; I promise they really have nothing to do with each other.

The cake/filling and frosting recipes are from my first muse, little Ms. Martha Stewart. Gah, did I love her. And for my first dedicated recipe just to my blog, I wanted to honor her as my original inspiration. She challenged me, (sometimes unjustly, do you think she leaves instructions out?) and her magazine and the photos in it defined beauty and esthetics for my small life as a kid. I used her recipe pretty verbatim, adjusting the cake only for my altitude here in Colorado. I baked her three layer cake recipe in two (tall) 6 inch pans and one 8 inch with a little batter left over that I may or may not have heavily sampled. I cut the larger layer into a 6 inch circle (using my cake pan as a template) to create three 6 inch layers that I split in half before constructing the cake. This dessert is super over-the-top, so don't do anything silly like skimp on the homemade caramel…really layer it in there, you will not regret it. 

Do you have any ideas for my blog title? Can you help me out? Let me know if you come up with something, I'm certainly listening! This whole thing is a new adventure and I'm thrilled to even be doing it, the title and everything else will fall into place. But first, there is a salted caramel chocolate cake you should be making!

Martha has the recipe for the cake, caramel and frosting right...here. Thanks, girlfriend.

If you want to read more about the concept of "cellar door" check out this article.

Spread the Compound Butter Love!

One of the easiest, most impressive ways to up your flavor-game is to incorporate seasoned butters into your cooking repertoire.  Seriously one of the simplest, quickest most impressive things I learned at culinary school, compound butters add a level of sophistication and skill to many dishes. From melting over a grilled rib-eye steak to smearing on a slice of hot baked bread, enhanced butters are deceptively simple compared to the amount of flavor and flair they add to a dish.

I remember reviewing the recipe for the classic “Maître d'Hôtel Butter” before class during the foundations portion of the culinary program and thinking to myself, “is this even a recipe?”. Mixing a little parsley and lemon into softened butter seemed too easy to be worth covering in culinary school, but in our lecture that day my chef instructor opened my eyes to the innumerable variations and ideas on how we might use compound butter to elevate our cooking.  From that lecture on, it was expected that any butter on the table during meals at school were to be flavored to enhance the day’s menu. It was challenging at times, some were more popular than others (the anchovy/caper butter was…interesting) but we quickly came to appreciate all the ways you could add flavor and richness with compound butters.

Super simple to make and even easier to store and serve, compound butter is an easy, fast and impressive technique to elevate your cooking.  After mixing your ingredients into softened butter, just shape into a log, wrap well and store in the freezer. Anytime you want to add that something extra to a dish, just slice off an inch or two from your compound butter log and you have an instant boost of flavor. Furthermore, for an incredibly quick appetizer, an array of compound butters and hot bread make an interesting, delicious snack.

The three variations of compound butter that I’ve included are just the tip of the tasty iceberg of things you can mix into butter. The most classic compound butter is the Maître d'Hôtel Butter, it is simply softened butter mixed with a bit of lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt and fresh ground black pepper. It is excellent on top of a grilled piece of meat, from steak to salmon and it also wonderful for melting over steamed vegetables. Merlot and shallot butter is a perfect match for lamb or beef as well as sautéed mushrooms. Lastly, the smoked paprika and cilantro butter would be excellent on sweet corn on the cob, grilled fish or cornbread.

There is no end to the variations on compound butter; in class we added everything from black olives and toasted walnuts for a savory spread to cinnamon and vanilla for smothering fresh brioche bread. Compound butters were a way to experiment with flavor combinations, different herbs and spices and to expand our palates and knowledge of ingredients. At home, you can experiment the same way, probably with many of the ingredients you already have. For each of the recipes shown, just combine herbs, spices and flavorings with the softened butter, shape into a log on parchment or plastic wrap and refrigerate or freeze until use.

Maître d'Hôtel Butter or Parsley and Lemon Compound Butter

           

            ½ lb softened butter

            3 Tbs chopped fresh parsley

            1 ½ Tbs lemon juice

1 tsp lemon zest

            2 tsp kosher salt

            fresh black pepper to taste

Merlot and Shallot Butter

            ½ lb softened butter

            1 cup merlot wine reduced over low heat to 2 tablespoons

            1 small shallot – minced fine

            1 Tbs fresh rosemary – minced fine

            2 tsp kosher salt

            fresh black pepper to taste

Smoked Paprika and Cilantro Butter

           

            ½ lb softened butter

            1 Tbs smoked paprika

            2 Tbs chopped fresh cilantro

            few dashes of hot sauce

            2 tsp kosher salt

            fresh black pepper to taste