Fare for the family table
So….guess who's birthday cake this was?
HA….those of you who guessed Muppet, give yourself a gold star!
Yes indeed, to celebrate our young chocoholic's 14th birthday (where does the time go?), and in keeping with our habit of crafting fairly non-traditional birthday cakes around here (remember this one, and this one?), we decided to get all fancy this year and make this insanely good "Palet d'Or" for the Divine Miss M.
No you're not seeing double, this cake is a re-post from the Oui, Chef archives and I'm awfully excited to be sharing it with you again.
Why?
Because this cake has just been chosen as a semi-finalist in a great new recipe contest sponsored by MobileSkillet, the mobile app development company that specializes in helping clients create cooking apps for the iPhone and iPad, and the people behind the super popular "TruffleHead" cooking app. The ultimate winner of this contest will be awarded a MobileSkillet app and services with which to launch their own mobile cooking app!
The MobileSkillet app framework is awesome, and I would be so excited to build a Oui, Chef cooking app on their platform. Of course, before I can do that I need to win this competition, and that is where you, my devoted readers, can really help me. You see, the semi-final round of the competition will in part be decided on Pinterest, with the Top 10 most popular recipes advancing to the final round, where a panel of professional judges will cook and test each recipe before declaring the ultimate winner.
So….I have a favor to ask of you. If all of you Pinterest users could click on this link , go to the contest's Pinterest Board, search for my Blueberry Streusel Cake recipe and vote for it, I would be so grateful! Not a Pinterest user yet? If you'd like to join, you can send me an email (at the contact me link above) stating so, and I can send you an invitation to join the Pinterest community.
How does voting work once on Pinterest? Each voter is allowed to "Re-Pin" and "Like" just one recipe, and only one time. As much as I would appreciate your stuffing the ballot box for me, voting more than once for my dish will disqualify me, so please do follow the rules. If you can click once to "Re-Pin" the recipe to your own Pinterest board and once to "Like" the recipe, then that will count as a complete vote for the recipe.
In order to get LOTS of you to go and vote for my cake, I've decided to craft a little product giveaway as a bribe incentive. In order to qualify for the prize, please go and vote for the recipe, then come back here and leave me a note in the comment section of this post letting me know you've done the deed. As votes will be counted through November 12th, I'll do a random drawing on November 13th from all of your eligible comments and I'll send the winner this terrific 3 piece Wusthof "Santoku" knife set.
Obviously, you could leave a comment here without actually going to vote for my recipe, but know that if you do and are chosen as the winner, these knives will arrive with all sorts of bad Juju attached, and believe me when I tell you that the last thing you want in your kitchen is a sharp knife with bad Juju!
As for the cake, I can honestly say that it totally rocks and is completely worthy of your vote. For those of you that missed it the first time around, click on this link to get the back story on this baby. If you don't really care about how and why it came to be and just want to get busy making one for yourself, I've reprinted the recipe below.
I hope you love the cake, and thanks so much for your Pinterest Vote, you all are the best!
Cheers – Steve
I'm a big fan of what in France they like to call "Weekend" cakes, simple sweet loaves that are perfect to wrap and take into the country for a weekend picnic. One of my favorite such loaves is a glazed lemon cake by Pierre Hermé that I made countless times while living in France. It was a huge hit with the kids, so I was always under the gun to make sure that there was at least one on the counter and one in our tiny freezer as a back-up.
Last year for my birthday, Boris bought me a gorgeous little cookbook by Lori Longbotham entitled Luscious Berry Desserts . I've flipped through it frequently, but until now had not pulled the trigger on a recipe. When sitting down to plan out Boris' welcome home dinner the other day (he'd been rocking a month long National Outdoor Leadership School "NOLS" course), I pulled his gift from the shelf and decided to make him the recipe that made the cover of the book, this delicious hazelnut berry cake. We liked it so much that we made it the following weekend for my father-in-law George's 80th birthday cake!
Last week was a big one around here as far as sweets go. First came the latest version of my wife's now perfected Peanut Butter Pie to celebrate Grid bringing his college sweetheart home to meet the family, then Muppet decided to pull out all the stops when putting in her order for the cake that would mark the awesomeness of her turning THIRTEEN! That's right, the youngest of our clan is now a teenager……God help us.
Can his and hers walkers, and pallets of Depends undergarments be the next big purchases for the wife and I?
Don't count on it!
You gotta love birthdays around here. They may not be very good for our waistlines, but they sure are tasty! Our lovely young Peyton just turned 15, and as is our custom when one of us tacks on another year, we (oui) kitchen slaves craft a meal and cake of choice for the lucky celebrant. For her birthday meal Peyton chose an Asian theme with a Ming Tsai crab maki roll, and a Wagamama chicken gyoza, and for dessert, this insanely good chocolate cheesecake.
I know this cake is a touch out of season but fact is we've been drowning in blueberries lately, so much so that I felt compelled to create this little beauty as a means to help work through our overstock.
You see, Muppet's been on a bit of a blueberry bender as of late, begging for them at every turn. Shocked by the fact that one of our kids was (no-kidding) ASKING for fresh fruit, and not wanting to blow a food-hero opportunity while actually buying something healthy for them, my wife and I each purchased mondo boxes of the lovelies last week. As fate would have it, the day after we presented our young berry fiend with her fruit-booty she had upper braces slapped on her teeth and promptly lost her taste for just about everything….well, except maybe for chocolate. Poor child.
A few weeks back I had the good fortune to attend the Boston book launching party for the The Food52 Cookbook . My friend Emily (fiveandspice for all you Food52ers) and her husband hosted a pot-luck gathering where each guest made a dish from the book to bring, it was great fun and a delicious afternoon. As you might imagine from a gathering of such food fanatics, we brought way more food than we needed for the gang assembled. In fact, as the afternoon wore on I started to get a little concerned that we had not properly paced ourselves and would be unable to have a go at the beautiful desserts decorating the sideboard in their dining room.
A lesser group would have called it a day I’m sure, what with the sheer volume of savory tarts, salads, dips, breads, and charcuterie that we all consumed. Many would have slipped into a food coma and curled up in the corner for a little snooze, but not this stalwart group. No, the siren’s song of cakes and cookies took care of that, and as we emptied the last bottle of wine, our hostess took her leave and retired to the kitchen to gather things for dessert.
A page is turned, a chapter ended.
Ever since I was a student at LCB and learned to make a Bûche Pistache, a delicious chocolate-pistachio log shaped cake, it has been Arthas’ choice of birthday cake. I still clearly remember my initial shock when a few months after he had tasted the one I made and brought home from class, he asked that I make another for his birthday.
This is the first recipe that Muppet and I have baked from the cookbook I bought her for her birthday this year. The book is the first from one of our favorite local pastry chefs, the delightful Joanne Chang. Joanne's book is named after her bakery, "Flour", and is a beautifully produced collection of many of the confections that have made her famous, and her bakeries Boston institutions.
I've had the good fortune to have met Joanne at a couple of Share Our Strength events (she is a huge supporter of the organization) and found her to be very warm and charming. She was kind enough to inscribe the book for Muppet, so cooking from it was an extra special treat for our young baker.
