Wedding Catering with St. Cloud

Today I got to help St. Cloud with catering a wedding in Queen Anne.  It was mainly passed appetizers.  It was super fun!

Here is what was on the menu....

Curried Brie Pecan Cracker with Mascarpone & Grilled Apple

Rustic Galettes with Tomatoes, Fresh Mozzarella & Basil

Vietnamese Style Avocado Spring Roll slice on Crispy Wonton with Wasabi Mayo

Garlic and Lemon Shrimp Skewers with Roasted Red Pepper Aioli

-Sorry didn't get a pic of this, but if you look at the below, Brad is holding a plate of it.  :)

Hoppin John Masala Cakes with Giner Mayo

Tequila Marinated Hanger Steak Slice on Ficelle with Chile-Cilantro Molida Sauce

Phyllo Cups with Mexican Recado Chicken, Chipotle Custard, and Avocado Crema

Stuffed Mushrooms with Spinach, Fontina, Bacon, and Pinenuts (before they went into the oven)

Grilled Shitake Mushroom, Snow Pea, Red Pepper, Skewers with Soy Glaze

They did chocolate cupcakes rather than a traditional wedding cake.  It was a fun atmosphere so fit right in.

It is always a pleasure to work with St. Cloud.  It's not like working at all but seeing some of my favorite people.

Here is the kitchen staff.  John Platt the owner, me, and Hamed.

This is Shannon who is the bartendar.  He is also owns a gardening co.

The servers...one of the funniest people I know...Brad

Hamed again, and Sally

Rhubarb Apple Bread

Drearily Sundays in Seattle are the perfect days to do some baking.  Last Sunday, I spent the day baking one of my favorite things...the apple bread.  I received some rhubarb from my friend Chia-Hui.  She grows them in her garden so I decided to add them to the apples.  During the holidays, I make this bread with cranberries so I thought the rhubarb would work nicely.
This recipe is from the Pasta & co. cookbook.  It's their Santori Apple Cake recipe.  I vary it up by using pears, cranberries, and other fruits.  I like this recipe because it's so moist and a bit gooey because of the oil and lot of fruit in the recipe. The recipe doesn't quite follow my dry/wet combining because it uses the flour last as a coating.  Enjoy!


Dry
3 cups of Sugar
1 Tbs Baking Soda
1 1/2 Tsp Ground cinnamon
1 1/4 Tsp Salt
Wet
3 Eggs
3/4 cup of Oil
1 1/2 Tsp Vanilla
Other
3 cups of diced Rhubarb
3 cups of peeled and sliced Apples
1 1/2 cups of chopped Walnuts
3 cups of all purpose flour


Heat oven to 325.  Combine the dry, then the wet, then mix in the dry and wet ingredients together.  Add the fruit and nuts to the bowl and stir until everything is nicely coated with the wet mixture.  Add flour 1 cup at a time until "just" combined.  Spoon into a prepared pan of your choice.  Bake for 1 hour and 20 min or until toothpick comes out clean.


Below are step by step pictures...

Lovely Dinner

My sweet friend cooked dinner this past week.  It was a pan fried Tuna, sauteed Potatoes, Asparagus and Zucchini, and a salad of shredded Broccoli, Carrots, Tomato, Kiwi, some kind if dried Fruit, with Almonds slivers.  It was a lovely, lovely dinner.  I found a new way to cook one of my favorite foods, the potato.  He boiled them first, then pan fried in butter and oil, then salt and pepper.  I don't know why I always do one or the other.  Boiling made the potatoes very moist and that fall apart texture like freshly mashed potatoes.  Bon appetite!

Bastille in Ballard

Tonight I met up with my friend Michele whom I've not seen in a long time.  She is a big time foodie as well and we both live in Ballard.  I finally made my way to the hot French restaurant Bastille.

Wow!  Great food!  So so dessert...

Michele had...

Steak Frites Au Poivre:  Roasted flat iron steak with pepper jus and marrow butter. 

Coffee Creme Bulee

I had ....

Arugula Et Betterraves Roities:  Beet and arugula salad with pistachios, chevre croûte & red wine vinaigrette.  

Artisan Pasta Gratin:  Comete & sauce veloute "mac & cheese".  

Bananas Foster:  Chocolate tart, banana pastry cream & rum caramel.

Chocolate Chip Cookie

My favorite kind of Chocolate Chip Cookie involves at least 2 different kinds of chocolate, hazelnuts, and salt.  
I'm a huge Nutella fan so I love anything that combines chocolate and hazelnut.  This was my inspiration for my cookie.  My version has big chunks of milk and semisweet chocolate, crushed hazelnuts, and topping it with some salt (preferably Fleur de sel or Kosher salt).  For chocolate, I love Guittard's chocolates.  It's so creamy, smooth, and bakes well.  A lot of the confectioner's use this chocolate as base to create their own flavors and creations.  I know Oh Chocolates uses this brand.
I also love "thick" meaty cookies, not the thin crispy one.  Thin crispy ones have their place but not for this cookie.  There is so much goodness to this cookies that you need a nice amount of dough and crusty like base for the cookie.  
I've tried various recipes from the one on the back of the yellow bag of Toll house Chocolate Chips to Thomas Keller's recipe in Ad Hoc (which is a good one), to Debbie Fields, and some more I can't think of.  I really like the recipe on the back of the Guittard bag.  I've modified the Guittard and Thomas Keller's recipe and came up with this.  Give it a try and let me know what you think!


Dry Ingredients
21/2 cups of All Purpose Flour

1 teaspoon of Baking Soda
1 teaspoon of Kosher Salt, more for topping after baking
Wet Ingredients
1/2 cup of Butter (room temperature)
3/4 cups of Sugar
3/4 cups of Brown Sugar (packed)
2 Eggs (room temperature)
1 teaspoon of Vanilla
Other Ingredients
1 cup of Milk Chocolate Chips or Milk Chocolate Bar (cut into pieces)
1 cup of Dark Chocolate Chips or Dark Chcolate Bar (cut into pieces)
1 cup of raw whole Hazelnuts
-Preheat oven to 350
-Measure and mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside.
-Measure and mix the butter and sugars until very light and fluff, preferably in a stand mixer or hand mixer.  Add eggs and vanilla and blend/mix again.

-Add dry mixture into the wet mixture until well combined, again with stand or hand mixer.
-Add other ingredients, one at a time to the mixture and hand mix until combined.  (I like to use the stand mixer because it smashes the raw hazelnuts a bit.)
-Spoon a little bigger than a golf size of the mixture onto a sheet pan lined with parchment paper.  Put into the freezer until cold, about 5 min.

-Bake 13 minutes and golden brown.

-Sprinkle Kosher Salt right after it comes out of the oven.

Molly Moon

Ginger Ice Cream, Strawberry Rhubarb Sorbet, Vegan Coffee Coconut Milk

Memorial Weekend of Baking

What a great 3 day weekend it was!  I did a lot of baking!  It was about Chocolate Cherry Cake, Blueberry Almond Scones, Zucchini Bread, and Peach Chocolate Chip Cookies.


Friday night, had girlfriends over for some Margaritas and Mexican food.  Even made corn tortillas from scratch, but this entry is about baking so more on that on a another entry.  I did bake a Chocolate Cherry Bundt Cake for dessert and also made Chocolate Dipped Cherries.  People are always dipping strawberries but I think the cherries actually make a great fruit to dip and decorate with. It is also very delish!  The cake was pretty good but I'm not as fond of the recipe, I think it needs a bit more chocolate so I'll tweak the recipe and post.

Saturday, I didn't really bake at all. It was my little bro's birthday and I had planned on baking his birthday cake but the day got the best of me and I didn't have enough time.  We did celebrated it with a theme of BBQ and Bowling.  I bought a Whole Food cake.  I know what kind of baker am I?  It was a good cake though!

Sunday, I made some Blueberry Almond Scone for my friend Samad because he really like almonds.  The texture of the scone came out great but I think it needed a little bit more almonds and almond extract.  I didn't add it to my baking that day but included that in the recipe below.  This recipe is a modified recipe from the Grand Central Baking Book.  I think the dry ratio from this book is really superb but I tweaked the wet ratio and used WW flour.  I used to make scones everyday when I worked at Both Ways Cafe a few years back.

Blueberry Almond Scone
Dry Ingredients & Cold Butter
2.5 cups of Whole Wheat Flour
1/4 cups of Sugar
1 tablespoon of Baking Powder
1 teaspoon of Salt
1/2 cups of cold Unsalted Butter cut in dice size pieces
Wet Ingredients
1 cup of Buttermilk
1 Egg
1 teaspoon of Almond Extract
Other Ingredients
1.5 cups of Blueberries (I like to use frozen berries for scones because it doesn't burst and bleed during the forming stages.)
1 cups of Almonds (I used sliced but you can use chopped or slivered.)
Turbinado Sugar for sprinkling before baking


-Preheat oven to 350 degrees
-Measure and mix all the dry ingredients, then add cold butter and mix on low until a crumbly mixture.  If you don't have stand mixer, you can use a pastry cutter or use your hands to blend the butter into the dry mixture until crumbly.  Using a wooden spoon or your hands, add the blueberries and almonds, then toss until the crumbly ingredients are mixed with the fruit and nuts. I like to use hands to again, the berries aren't crushed.   It will be a dampish dry mixture.
-Measure and mix the buttermilk, egg, and almond extract.  
-Slowly start pouring a small amount of wet mixture into the dry mixture and just toss and mix with your hands until all the wet mixture is all into the dry mixture.   I say toss because you are trying to balance the wet mixture into the dry mixture evenly.
-Pour the mixture into a lightly floured surface. Using a scraper or your hands, gather the mixture to form a mound about 2 inches think and oval in shape.  Lightly press the sides toward the center until you have a somewhat firmed dough.  Cut into triangles and put on a sheet pan lined with parchment.  
-Brush the scones with a egg wash or some leftover buttermilk.  Sprinkle some turbinado sugar and a little salt (the sweet salty combo is great).
-Bake for about 30 minutes until nicely golden brown.  


Sunday, I also made the Zucchini Bread for my mom.  She has been asking for some for a while now.  This recipe is from the Tartine Bakery cookbook.  This was the first time I used this recipe thus didn't change much. I only substituted olive oil instead of the vegetable oil they listed.  I also doubled the recipe and didn't sprinkle with sugar.

Dry Ingredients
1 3/4 + 2 tablespoons of All Purpose Flour
1/2 teaspoon of Baking Soda
1/2 teaspoon of Baking Powder
1 teaspoon of Cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of Salt
Wet Ingredients
 2 Eggs
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons of Olive Oil
3/4 cup of Sugar
1/2 cup of Orange Marmalade
Other
2 1/2 cups of Zucchini grated
1 cup of Walnut chopped and lightly toasted
Sugar for topping
-Preheat oven to 350
-Measure and mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside.  Now, a lot of recipes call for shifting the dry ingredients, especially for cakes, but I usually just dump it all in a bowl an use a wire wisk to mix it up and fluff it up.  Works for me and much easier.

-Measure and mix all the wet ingredients in a separate larger bowl.

Add zucchini and walnuts to the wet mixture.


-Add the dry mixture into the wet mixture until combined.  Don't over mix or bread will toughen.
-Put into a butter and floured pan or some sprayed pan.
-Bake for about 1 hour until clean tooth pick comes out.

Monday, I made some Peach Almond Chocolate Chip Cookies for my friend Heather who is moving to NYC.  I kept promising her cookies but our timing was never right so tried a new recipe for her.   I see a lot of dried fruit in oatmeal cookies but not combined with chocolate chips.  I love a little fruit with all my desserts. I think it offset the heavy sugar and butter, even if dried fruit.  I like the idea of peaches and cream, so I used dried peaches and white chocolate but also wanted the taste of dark chocolate.  This recipe might seem a bit too much and I should had some restraint but I wanted to put some kind of nuts into so I used almond but now I think about, I think it might be even better with pecans. 

Dry Ingredients
2 1/2 cups of Whole Wheat Flour (For "meaty" cookies, I use wheat flour than all purpose, I just thinks it adds a nice heartiness to the cookie.)
1 teaspoon of Baking Soda
1 teaspoon of Salt, more for topping after baking
1 teaspoon of Cinnamon
Wet Ingredients
1/2 cup of Butter (room temperature)
3/4 cups of Sugar
3/4 cups of Brown Sugar (packed)
2 Eggs (room temperature)
1 teaspoon of Vanilla
Other Ingredients
1 cup of dried Peaches chopped
1 cup of White Chocolate Chips
1 cup of Dark Chocolate Chips
1 cup of nuts (Almond or Pecans)
-Preheat oven to 350
-Measure and mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside.

-Measure and mix the butter and sugars until very light and fluff, preferably in a stand mixer or hand mixer.  Add eggs and vanilla and blend/mix again.

-Add dry mixture into the wet mixture until well combined, again with stand or hand mixer.
-Add other ingredients, one at a time to the mixture and hand mix until combined. 

-Spoon a little bigger than a golf size of the mixture onto a sheet pan lined with parchment paper.  Put into the freezer until cold, about 5 min.

-Bake 13 minutes and golden brown.

This is a long entry and it was a long weekend. Hope you enjoyed the entry as much as I did.  A happy weekend in that I got to do so much of what I love to do.  Now I've got to balance with some more running this week to off set all the eating I did!