Pi Pie -- Chocolate Meringue Pie

It's here! It's really here! One of the nerdiest holidays ever -- pi day! Naturally pi day is observed every March 14 (3.14) and the celebration of pi kicks off at 1:59 (3.14159...). How does one celebrate pi day? Well, there are many ways.
(1) You could wear a dorky math t-shirt (I'm not even going to tell you how many I have. Suffice it to say, it's more than 1).
(2) You could do some trigonometry-- what is the length of a 24 degree arc of a circle with a radius of 5?*
(3) You could eat some pie! Pizza pie, dessert pie, even quiche! Whatever kind of pie you can find!

To celebrate pi day I decided to make a pie I've been craving for a while -- a chocolate meringue pie. A rich smooth chocolate pie, topped with a light fluffy and not too sweet meringue. This is truly a hit or miss pie -- I've had amazing chocolate meringue pies, and I've had terribly tragic chocolate meringue pies.

Given this chanciness I've had my eyes out for a good chocolate meringue pie recipe for a while, unfortunately none of them looked chocolatey enough for me. How can you call yourself a chocolate pie if all the chocolate in the recipe is 2 T of cocoa powder? Disgraceful.

And then I found this recipe from pie maven. Pie maven really gets pie. And when pie maven makes a chocolate pie, pie maven makes a chocolate pie. None of this smidgeon of cocoa powder nonsense. No. Four whole ounces of honest to goodness chocolate. A chocolate meringue recipe worthy of pi day.

I made some minor adjustments to the recipe entirely based on what I had on hand, and what I ended up with is beautiful. And the bits I tasted when I first licked the spoon (and then um... licked the pan too) have me convinced that it'll be delicious when I bisect its diameter tomorrow and serve it up to fellow pi enthusiasts.

So, happy pi day to all! Let me know how you celebrate! 

*2pi/3, if you're curious

Chocolate Meringue Pie

Pie Crust:
1 1/4 c graham cracker crumbs
6 T melted butter
3 T sugar

Filling:
4 egg yolks (reserve the whites for the meringue)
1/2 c sugar
2 T cornstarch
2 c milk
4 oz coarsely chopped chocolate (I used half bittersweet and half semisweet)

Meringue:
4 egg whites (set aside at room temperature for 10 or 15 minutes, while you make the pie)
1/2 t cream of tartar 
8 T sugar

Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Mix together the graham cracker crumbs and sugar. Add the butter and mix well until combined.

Press the mixture into a 9" pie plate, mushing it in against the sides of the plate.

Bake for 8 minutes until it's golden brown, then remove from the oven and set aside. Then reduce the oven temperature down to 350.

Make the filling. First, mix together the cornstarch and the sugar.

Then beat the egg yolks in a saucepan. Sift in the sugar / cornstarch mixture (to prevent lumps) and mix well.

While stirring, add the milk in a constant stream. Give it another stir or two to make sure it's all well incorporated.

Heat over medium heat until the custard has thickened. It took about 5 - 7 minutes, and if you have any doubt that it's thickened keep going. It'll become obviously thicker when it's ready.

Add in the chocolate and stir well, continuing to heat until the chocolate is melted, the custard is thick, and bubbles just start to break the surface.

Pour into the pie crust.

Next, make the meringue. This is easy. Don't panic! There are a few things you need to know about meringue, and if you pay close attention to them you will always get a nice meringue.

(1) Eggs at room tempreature
(2) Cream of tartar is amazing
(3) Use a clean, dry, stainless steel bowl. Whatever you do, don't use plastic.
(4) If fats or oils get into your meringue it'll never rise so be very careful no yolk gets in your egg whites.

Keeping those things in mind, here's what you do.

Beat your eggs and cream of tartar until medium peaks form. Medium peaks mean that the meringue will hold its shape, but the tips generally fold back on themselves. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture. Here's a picture of my mixer instead:

Add in the sugar and continue beating until the sugar is dissolved and stiff peaks form. You know the sugar is dissolved when you rub a little meringue between your fingers and it doesn't feel grainy, and you know you have stiff peaks when the peaks stand up. It'll also be nice and glossy and shiny.

Use a spatula to spread the meringue over top your custard pie. Be sure to seal the pie (cover all the way to the edges, making sure the custard is covered) to prevent your pie from getting funky.

Bake at 350 for 15 - 20 minutes, or until your meringue has a nice golden color to it. Check it towards the end to make sure it doesn't burn.

It's best served a few hours after baking at room temperature, but if you make it in advance refrigerate it and then let it stand a room temperature a little bit until you're ready to serve! Enjoy!

Croissants: A little bit of flaky heaven

Croissants. Flaky and crispy on the outside, soft and buttery and delicious on the inside. Fabulous, delicious, and only available in bakeries, where the croissant fairy makes them appear, because my god no one could actually make pastry like that on their own, right?

Wrong.

And you know what? It's surprisingly easy. I know many of you are rolling your eyes at me disbelievingly (is that a word?), but seriously. Not hard. The secret to making delicious croissants boils down to one thing: butter.

Dear god, the butter. It's really indecent. Basically, all you do is take 3 sticks of butter. I'll stop and let you process that for a minute.

You take 3 sticks of butter and beat it into a butter square. An 8" X 8" square of butter... more time to process the wonder of a giant butter square...

Then you fold the butter square into your croissant dough, roll it, fold it, roll it, fold it, roll it, until you have layers of dough alternating with butter. That's how you get the flake.

Dough alternating with butter. Heaven.

The most high-tech cooking tool you need is a good rolling pin. And I have a great one -- my friend Gwen brought back the biggest, heaviest, most amazing rolling pin from Peru for me. I'm not sure how she did it because it is seriously 2 feet tall and weighs like 10 pounds, and it must have taken up a huge portion of her suitcase. But I certainly appreciate the effort (and wish she weren't back in Peru so she could enjoy the croissants too!).

It takes forever to make the croissants, but most of the time is time for the dough and the butter to chill in the fridge. The actual amount of time you spent hands on is pretty minimal, so don't be intimidated. You can do it.

Croissants

Ingredients:

3 tablespoons + 3 sticks of cold butter
1 3/4 c whole milk
4 t yeast
4 1/2 c flour
1/4 c sugar
2 t + a pinch of salt
1 egg
1 t cold water

First, melt the 3 T butter over low heat. Once it's melted, remove from the heat and add in the milk. Check the temperature here, it should be around 85 degrees (between 80 and 90). If it's too cool, heat it up a bit, if it's too warm, let it cool some.

Whisk in the yeast, and once combined move to the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a dough hook attachment (if you don't have a dough hook, no fear, just use your hands!).

Add the flour, sugar, and 2 t of salt. Knead on low speed until a cohesive dough forms. This took about 3 or 4 minutes.

Then increase the speed to medium-low (2 on the kitchenaid) and knead for 1 minute.

Remove from the mixer, cover with plastic wrap, and let the dough rest for half an hour at room temperature.

In the meantime, line a baking sheet with parchment paper (or wax paper if you don't have parchment paper). Shape the dough into a vague 10" X 7" rectangle and wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours.

While the dough is in the refrigerator, make an 8" X 8" parchment paper square -- cut a 24" length of parchment paper and fold it in half length-wise to make a 12" rectangle. Then fold over the 3 open sides to make an 8" square with enclosed sides. Really crease the sides well, because you're going to stick butter in there and beat the hell out of it, and you don't want it to ooze.

Now, take your 3 sticks of butter, put them near each other and just start whacking them with your rolling pin. Beat it and beat it some more for about a minute. Basically, you want it to make your 3 sticks of butter into one butter blob.

Use an offset spatula, a cake server, whatever you've got, to scrape the butter up off the counter and put it into the parchment paper envelope. Turn the envelope over so the folds are underneath, and roll roll roll until the butter fills the entire envelope and you have an 8" X 8" butter square.

Refrigerate at least 45 minutes.

Pull the dough from the fridge into the freezer for half an hour. Then you're going to do something fancy called "laminating" the dough. This doesn't involve putting plastic coating around the dough, but rather, involves squishing butter between dough layers.

Get the dough from the freezer and turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Roll it into a 17" X 8" rectangle with the long side parallel to the edge of the counter. Place the butter square on the middle of your dough rectangle, and fold the sides of the dough over the butter so they meet in the middle.

Press the seam together with your fingers, and press the edges of the dough sealed with your rolling pin.

Roll out the dough lengthwise into a 24" X 8" rectangle, then fold the dough into thirds to an 8" square.

Turn the dough 90" counterclockwise, and roll out lengthwise again to a 24" X 8" rectangle. Fold into thirds again to make another 8" square.

Place the dough on the baking sheet, wrap with plastic, and pop back in the freezer for half an hour.

Do it all again -- place your dough on a lightly floured surface, roll it out lengthwise to a 24" X 8" rectangle, fold into thirds and place back on the sheet. Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours (or overnight).

Again, pop the dough in the freezer for half an hour before removing it and placing it on a lightly floured counter and rolling it into an 18" X 16" rectangle (with the long side parallel to the edge of the counter.

Fold the top half of the dough over the bottom half to make a double layer of dough.

Get out your measuring tape, and measure 3 inch segments along the bottom, marking each segment with a small slice with a knife (you should have 5 cuts). For some reason I didn't take pictures of this. Oops.

Along the top, measure in 1 1/2 inches, then 3 inches from that, again making slits in the dough at each segment (you should have 6 cuts).

Use a knife to cut from the top left-most mark down to the first bottom mark. Keep going, cutting from mark to mark, until you have 12 triangles and 5 diamonds. Unfold the diamonds and cut into 10 triangles.

Now shape your croissants! Cut a small (1.5" slit) in the top (widest part) of your croissant. Tug on each of these points and the bottom skinny point. Then starting with the top, roll the top part down toward the point, stretching the bottom point out and tucking it underneath.

Curve them into a crescent and repeat with the remaining triangles.

Place your crescents on a parchment-lined baking sheet (at least 2.5" apart), wrap with plastic wrap, and let stand until nearly doubled, 2 1/2 - 3 hours. At this point you can also refrigerate up to 18 hours or freeze.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Whisk egg, 2 t cold water, and a pinch of salt together, and brush on top of the croissants.

Place the croissants in the oven, and reduce the temperature down to 400. Bake for 10-11 minutes and then rotate and switch location of the baking sheets. Bake until golden brown, 5-8 minutes more. Watch them carefully, ovens differ!

Enjoy!

"Super Bowl" Cookie Dough Dip

Last week I gave a talk in our department about some of my recent research on choking under pressure. I usually include a few examples to make sense of this phenomena, and there are some examples that make complete sense to the academic in me -- flubbing a big exam. Yes. I get that. But every other example in the literature is about sports.
Sports.
Ugh.
(Just to show you how completely sports challenged I am, I asked my brother in law at Christmas what one does with batting gloves (a brilliant christmas gift from my uncle) -- "does one wear them when one throws the bat?" I asked. No. Apparently you don't throw a bat.)
Anyway, as I was prepping this talk, one of my friends mentioned that there had just been an example in a football game in which one team lost their chance at the super bowl because one of their players fumbled. Don't ask me what a fumble is. Falling down? Punching someone (they do a lot of that in football, right?)? Doing pirouettes? Hell if I know.
It was at this point in my life that I learned that I say super bowl as if it has virtual quotes around it. "Super bowl".
Sigh.
Anyway, I am going to a "super bowl" party tomorrow. So I googled "super bowl desserts" and found this cookie dough dip. I was totally sold! Cookie dough is great! And apparently dipping foods in other foods is a staple of "super bowl" parties the world over. That is, I was on board until I got to all the bit about the chickpeas. Who puts chickpeas in a dessert? That's just wrong.
SO, I figured out how to make it totally unhealthy. Cream cheese. And butter. And, because I had reeses' cups sitting around, I threw those in too. And I put it in a jar because everything is better in a jar!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Dip

Ingredients: 

8 oz cream cheese

1/2 c softened butter

1 c powdered sugar

2 T brown sugar

2 t vanilla

2 - 4 reeses' cups 

1 c chocolate chips 

1 c peanut butter chips 

First cream the cream cheese and butter. 

Then add the powdered sugar and mix some more. 

And the brown sugar and vanilla. Mix well. 

I only had 2 reeses' cups, but I think it would be even better with more! Throw them in the mixer and mix mix mix! 

Add in the chocolate chips and peanut butter chips and mix. 

And you're done! Seriously. That's it. Serve with graham crackers for dipping. Delicious!

The Evolution of Wedding Cake

Anyone who says evolution is 'just a theory' clearly hasn't ever been in my kitchen. Or, you know, spent any time with a chimpanzee. After wedding cake attempt #1 I knew I was on the right track, but I didn't think I was quite there yet. SO I decided to make a new cake -- a chocolate cake modeled after Smitten Kitchen's double chocolate layer cake. I liked the sound of her raspberry glaze (at the bottom of that page), and, while I was there, Smitten Kitchen's swiss buttercream seemed like a great idea too. And then I planned to pit the two cakes against each other in an ultimate battle. A cake tasting in which only the most delicious of cake parts would survive to create the next generation of ultimate wedding cake.

This was, in theory, a genius idea. But I only had a couple of hours before my friends were coming for cake tasting in which to actually enact it. So I had to make the cake quickly. Very quickly. No problem though. I can bake a cake with my eyes closed, right?

Um. Then this happened.

Oops. Fortunately I had enough cake remaining in the cake pans that I could piece together a passable cake for the tasting.

Frosting is an amazing concealer of disaster.

So we ate cake. We ate cake and we skyped in Dennis, the bride. And we picked the elements we liked -- the Smitten Kitchen chocolate cake was moist and deeply chocolatey whereas the first cake was dryer and crumbly. The flavor of the raspberry glaze was better, but the fluffy texture of the mousse was preferred. And the frostings were both out. The first buttercream wasn't very delicious (it basically tasted of powdered sugar) but it was easy to work with, and the second Swiss buttercream was good, but not terribly conducive to decorations.

SO, I present to you the ultimate cake -- the smitten kitchen chocolate cake, the glaze, slightly modified and folded into whipped cream to create a mousse, and cream cheese frosting. Both delicious and easy to work with.

The following week, when this cake was presented for tasting it was the clear winner. In fact, I mailed bride Dennis samples (in jars!) of each cake and she agreed -- cake #3 is the winner.

So here it is -- only the best cake elements survived to create THE cake.

This recipe can also be used to just make a layer cake if, say, you want to make a birthday cake or a just-because-there-should-be-cake cake.

The Ultimate Wedding Cake

Chocolate Cake:
3 oz semisweet chocolate
1 1/2 c hot coffee
3 c sugar
2 1/2 c flour
1 1/2 c unsweetened cocoa powder
2 t baking soda
3/4 t baking powder
1 1/4 t salt
3 large eggs
3/4 c vegetable oil
1 1/2 c buttermilk
3/4 t vanilla

Raspberry Mousse:
20 oz frozen raspberries
1/2 c sugar
2 T cornstarch
1 pint of whipping cream, whipped 

Cream Cheese Frosting (enough for 3 layers plus decorating):
3 - 8 oz cream cheese, softened
3 sticks butter, softened
9 c confectioner's sugar, sifted
1 T vanilla

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and grease pans.

Chop the chocolate in a food processor. Then add the chocolate to the coffee, stirring occasionally until the chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth.

Sift together the dry ingredients -- sugar, flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

In the bowl of a standing mixer beat together eggs until they are thickened and lemony colored. Add oil, buttermilk, vanilla and coffee/chocolate mixture.

Add dry ingredients and beat on medium speed until just combined. Not too much!

Divide the batter between the pans and bake until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. About 45 minutes for a 6" pan up to about an hour for the 10" pan.

Cool the layers for 10 minutes on a wire rack, then invert onto cooling racks.

For the mousse, puree the raspberries in a food processor (or blender if your food processor still has chocolate in it).

Push the puree through a strainer with the back of a spoon or your hands. It's gross, but way more efficient. This will remove the seeds so you have a smooth mousse. Sorry there are no pictures, my hands were covered in raspberries!

Combine the puree, sugar and cornstarch in a small pot and heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture boils. It should thicken up quickly upon boiling. Let it thicken up a bit and then let it cool.

Once your raspberry mixture has cooled fold it into the whipped cream to make a delicious raspberry cream.

Make the cream cheese frosting. Put the cream cheese and butter in the bowl of a standing mixture and beat until light and fluffy. Add the sugar and vanilla. Beat on low to combine.

Now go see my instructions on the other wedding cake page about cake assembly. I'm too lazy to write it twice :) But I'll include a million pictures below so you can see what the process looked like.

Step 1: Torte your cakes (fancy for 'cut them in half') and add your mousse to the middle.

Step 2: Put the other half of your cake back on top.

Step 3: Repeat with all your layers

Step 4: Use an offset spatula or a butter knife to remove the excess mousse.

Step 5: Plop on a little cream cheese frosting.

Step 6: Make a crumb coat -- spread the frosting and don't worry about the looks quite yet.

Step 7: Freeze your cakes for a little bit to set the crumb coat, then remove and cover in another layer or two of frosting.

Step 7 Continued.

Step 8: Stack your cakes! Don't worry that they aren't pretty. They will be later.

Step 9: Work on your frosting. Add more where you need it, remove excess where it's too much.

Step 10: Start decorating!

Step 10 Continued.

Step 10 Some more!

I added a ribbon around the edges. It made things easy and looked pretty.