[Sca-cooks] Favorite dessert?
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Fri Apr 4 04:28:40 PDT 2008
On Apr 4, 2008, at 12:49 AM, chawkswrth at aol.com wrote:
> There are times, Adamantius, when I think you are a man after my own
> heart.
Only sometimes???
> That is the way I bake, and when I had a catering business, that was
> the way I baked.
> You want *GOOD*, you come to me. You want cheap, go elsewhere.
Unfortunately, if you want to do that for a living, you have to find a
clientele willing to pay a somewhat larger percentage of their income
for food (which much of the US is not; why pay even $20 for a cake
when Duncan-Hines is -- what -- I have no idea what Duncan-Hines
costs, but how much could it possibly be, rising grain costs
notwithstanding) but who _also_ (and here's the catch) actually
appreciate the value of good food, and not simply its cost/price. Not
many people are/do. You could probably set up shop in someplace like
Brooklyn, maybe Long Island City, Queens, and do fairly well. But yes,
you probably have to sell something like this as "comfort food":
plain, high-quality food at slightly premium prices.
Incidentally, what started all this was my lady wife's attempt to buy
a decent, ordinary layer cake in Manhattan, and what she found was
some kind of allegedly white chocolate thing that was six inches
across, and I believe cost $38, and of all the things it was, the one
thing it obviously was not, was _good_. I think people have lost all
sense of the concept that when you want a good cake, it's the cake,
not the frosting/icing (I grew up with icing, not frosting), nor the
fillings (filling? What's that? Oh, you mean the thin layer of jam or
icing in between, right?) that has to shine. You can't cover bad cake,
or a ridiculously small cake, with eighteen pounds of spackel and have
as your end result a good cake. I knew when we cut into this white
chocolate extravaganza that we were in for trouble: it was three thin
layers, with about 3/4 inch of some kind of gooey pastry cream in
between the two bottom layers, and a lot of very thick, structurally
supportive red stuff alleging to be jam, under the top layer. I
further noted trouble when the bottom layer was larger than the
others, so it could be built up with relative ease with "frosting" to
a specific size and shape. Oh, and then there was white chocolate
ganache on top (more or less), and some kind of floral decoration that
I honestly couldn't tell between gum paste and marzipan, and stuff
that looked at first like shredded coconut, but turned out to be
[grated???] suspect white chocolate.
Of the flavor of good cake, there was virtually none; it was as if the
cake was there as an excuse for all the lovely frosting and
decoration. Now, if they had wanted to use some other grandma
aesthetic than my own -- say, a genoise sponge moistened with brandy
and a little apricot glaze or some other jam, then a thin layer of
buttercream, I would not toss that out of the sack, as the saying
goes. I suppose this is a good illustration of the difference between
"fancy" and "tarted up".
The eight-inch version of the white-chocolate whatever was $20 more.
> I have never seen the sense in using junk and expecting cuisine.
> It is kind of like using cut glass to make jewelry and trying to
> pass them off as diamonds.
"They're only putting in a nickel,
And they want a dollar song...
Da da da, da da da, da da da da..."
Yeah. I'm feeling kinda old these days.
> There is one dessert that I would like to make for my 102 year old
> Grandfather, if I can find the secret. Egg Custard pie is one of his
> favorites. I can do cream pies and banana pudding, but that is one
> that escapes my skills. It comes out too bland and lumpy. It misses
> that vanillaly creaminess that you find in others' custards....
> Help?
I'm sorry, I don't really speak American fluently, I'm from New
York ;-). It's why I never really knew what "frosting" was until I was
an adult... Is Egg Custard pie filled with something like vanilla
pastry cream? I'm guessing it is, since you mention cream pies and
banana pudding. So do you bake a pie shell blind and fill it with a
cooked, stirred egg custard that has been somewhat stabilized with
something like flour, when both are somewhat cooled, the way you might
make, say, a chocolate cream pie?
Perhaps you have a recipe you could post, with comments on where,
along the way, you think things are going wrong? Usually when I hear
"bland and lumpy" in connection with stirred custards or pastry cream,
it comes down to overcooking, seasoning to taste while hot something
intended to be eaten cold, and improper cooling and storage. Or maybe
simply something silly like not sifting flour, or using a spoon
instead of a whip at the wrong time. Those would be my first guesses.
Adamantius
"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's
bellies."
-- Rabbi Israel Salanter
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list