He Cooks, She Cooks

I wish I could call it my secret ingredient, but I’ve never been able to keep my own secrets. I put ground cardamom in most things I bake. Pumpkin chocolate chip cake, oatmeal cookies, carrot cake, granola…

Then I found a recipe where the cardamom would be far from hidden.

I saw something called chocolate con leche y naraja y nata al cardamomo in a book about chocolate in a Buenos Aires bookstore. I didn’t buy the book, nor could I full understand the Spanish, but I got the gist of the drink and decided to improvise my own at home.

Orange and chocolate isn’t typically a combination I love, but in this drink with cardamom and cream, it’s very welcome. I’ve made this a few times already for dessert. If there’s anything more comforting than hot chocolate, it’s this version.

(Which was difficult to photograph, by the way. Here I let the cocoa cool first so it wouldn’t melt the whipped cream, but then the cream didn’t all stay at the top of the drink, and some got covered in chocolate. A whipped cream dispenser would have helped, but it’s not a gadget I would ever actually need.)

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Chocolate and dulce de leche. I don’t even have to say much more to convince anyone this is a great idea, but I’ll get a little more specific: Three layers of dark chocolate cake loaded with thick Argentine dulce de leche that permeates what had been an extra springy cake, then covered, as everything should be, with creamy bittersweet chocolate ganache.

You shouldn’t need any other reason to make this, but I came up with this decadent idea because today is my friend Kat’s birthday. If you read He Cooks She Cooks fairly regularly, you know her name comes up often. While I was in Missouri, I cooked dinner with or for her nearly every night this summer and many times during the school year.

Now we’re a hemisphere apart, but I wanted to make something to celebrate her birthday.

No, she can’t eat any of this and that’s sad, but I hope she appreciates the thought. I’m not much of a baker because I’m no good at following recipes and I don’t have much patience. This is the first three layer cake I’ve ever made — my family makes a lot of bundt and sheet cakes because we’d rather get to eating cake than wait around for multiple tiers to cool so they can be properly frosted. But for this cake, I cooked each layer individually (I have a small oven and only one cake pan), waited for them to cool, and tried my best to be neat with the ganache.

Since you can’t taste the cake, Kat, I hope the effort means something to you. And trust me, the cake is as amazing as you are imagining it right now. Happy birthday!

See also: Dulce de Leche Ice Cream

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I used to have a pile of more than a dozen cookbooks near my bed. Most were library books, some were Michael’s, one was chef Mike Odette‘s. When the semester ended it was time to return them all. I was left with two books of my own:

“Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone” and “Brownies” …how appropriate.

“Alone” is a compilation of personal essays on solitary cooking and eating. I love creative non-fiction, and this book was filled with touching stories, witty writing and very different perspectives on how people deal with food when they’re by themselves. (I’ll write more about the book in another post, but I recommend it highly.)

Brownies is a recipe book Michael got me. I imagine that with him gone, I’ll be wanting to make that comfort food a lot more often.

Here’s a brownie recipe I made while he was still in town — cherry almond brownies. And check out more of what we’re reading here.

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Michael and I cooked some impressive dinners for his parents and Kat’s parents, but we had to up the ante a bit for my family this winter. I’ve been cooking magazine meals with my parents for as long as I can remember. (I got my first subscription to Gourmet before I lost my first baby tooth. Not kidding.) So we decided to make a North African feast with lots of lamb, chicken and couscous.

I’ll say two words about this chicken: spice butter. Ok, I want to give you more words: Butter, cumin, coriander, paprika, cayenne and cinnamon. Rubbed all over. Now, I’m not normally a glutton for chicken skin, but spice butter. I ate everything but the bones.

And the dates and apricots in chicken jus? I didn’t even think I liked dates. (I tried one from the box the next day, and they’re nothing without being roasted in spice-buttered chicken jus. Just sayin.)

The stew was also great, even though we totally rushed the process. The Darwell family has too high of metabolism for slow food. Luckily the stew didn’t suffer. The broth was full of flavor and just barely spicy, even with a whole habanero. Though, I have to give credit to the Los Angeles grocery store and the country of Australia for the lamb, which managed to be fork-tender even though we lumped off probably an hour of cooking time.

We served the dishes with piles of couscous and a side of refreshing carrot and fennel slaw. For dessert, I kept the spice theme going by making dark chocolate tart with gingerbread crust a la Smitten Kitchen.

Play some Algerian music from Cheb Mami, Rachid Taha or Khaled. Samira Said from Morocco is good too. If you can recommend any Tunisian artists, let me know.

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What? You forgot about pumpkin after Thanksgiving?

I love pumpkin. Mostly, I love all the spices that are associated with it: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice… Tonight after a Moroccan-inspired dinner, a spiced cake with dark chocolate chips was just what we needed. And who says pumpkin isn’t February food?

This recipe is a variation of the New York Times’ chocolate-pumpkin layer cake. We needed dessert fast, so layers weren’t an option and neither was making frosting. I basically cut the recipe in half, skipped the nuts, added my own touches (cardamom and orange zest) and 30 minutes later, we were enjoying spicy, pumpkinny, dark chocolatey goodness. This is really dense and moist, and that’s what makes it good.

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I recently attended a Slow Food Katy Trail event at the Wine Cellar and Bistro, Saturday Feb. 7, at 7pm.   Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate served and explained his creations, while Sarah Cyr, owner and sommelier poured paired wine selections. First impressions: holy crap, Craig and Sarah are super nice.  They are a married couple, who co-own a classy restaurant, and who are clearly qualified to be an executive chef and sommelier, respectively.

Craig

Executive Chef Craig Cyr plates a chocolate tart he prepared with Patric Chocolate.

I’m immediately let into the kitchen, though smaller than I would have guessed; it’s simple, efficient and clean.

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