st paddy's day

though none of us are irish, 24 and 44 joined forces on friday night for a st patrick's day dinner party, i guess you could call it. mirms made colcannon, corned beef, and soda bread, and carrien and i brought beef stew and cupcakes. cupcakes, you say? ok, so they're not particularly irish, but when you consider the stout and bailey's that went into them, there's a less tenuous cultural connection there. they were kind of like those hostess cupcakes - the chocolate ones with white "stuff" inside (i don't like to speculate as to what that white paste actually is) - but, unlike hostess cupcakes, were actually good. i found a chocolate stout cake recipe on epicurious and then dug out a hunk from the middle of each cupcake, and filled them with whipped cream. whipped cream with bailey's in it, and gelatin to stabilize it, that is. the cupcakes were then frosted with a chocolate ganache, to which, because i deemed it slightly too bitter (it was bittersweet chocolate with a couple of ounces of unsweetened chocolate), i added a little bit of bailey's.

the cake turned out quite nicely, for a cake with only cocoa in it for the chocolate component. it was a little less sweet than i would have liked, but it was pretty good. in general, i prefer chocolate cakes with both cocoa and chocolate in them, so in that sense this was a bit of disappointment. i can always taste when a chocolate cake is made with oil, because the crumb is really moist, or when it's made with cocoa - it just lacks a little bit of the richness that chocolate would give it. it's also quite possible that it's due to the kind of cocoa i used. usually i would use valrhona, but i was almost out so most of the cocoa was hershey's. any cocoa that's not dark brown is suspect, in my book, and hershey's is a nice, light reddish brown. hmph.

i find that whipped cream, when it's stabilized with gelatin, does really well as a filling. it kind of departs from the whipped cream we know and love because of what the gelatin does to it; it's not quite whipped cream, yet it's not quite custard either. it has the flavor of whipped cream, but it's somewhere between whipped cream and custard with respect to consistency. entirely pleasing to eat, because it feels like you're squishing the air out of it when you eat it.

the ganache was quite good - a pound of chocolate and two cups of cream. we were in a hurry, so of course it seemed like it took forever to thicken. in reality, it was about forty-five minutes before i threw in the towel and stuck it in the fridge to set a little bit. these cupcakes proved that i still have much to learn in the realm of ganache-making, because the first cupcake's ganache was too runny, and the last cupcake's ganache was too solid. the cupcakes, assembled on a cookie sheet, reminded me of the time i made flan for the house. i had caramelized the sugar and was pouring it into the ramekins, and each ramekin had a darker shade of sugar syrup than the one before it. i think i must just be too slow. ah well, they tasted good, anyway. there was no time to do the ganache well, so we went for "artistically messy" instead. we garnished them with white and green nonpareils that carrien and lauren picked out of a package of vegan nonpareils that i had bought at harvest.

there was so much extra cake that we almost didn't know what to do with it. oh, of course, we planned to eat it (don't know why i just got a vision of izma-the-cat: "i'm not going to drop it! i'm going to drrrrrink it!"). it was just a matter of how we were going to eat it. as we had both extra ganache and extra whipped cream, i made a trifle out of part of one extra cake (we had 24 cupcakes and 2 loaf pans' worth of cake). hmm. still one and a half loaf pans left. so i made some layer-cake-with-ganache-in-a-bowl for lauren to take with her. hmmm. still one loaf pan left. and that's where we are now. we're trifle-less, having finished it yesterday, but we still have one cake left.

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yesterday carrien and i made lasagna, following a desire triggered by far-too-sexy images of lasagna on the homepage of epicurious (damn you, epicurious!). as we are wont to do, we made a hybrid of various recipes: lasagna with eggplant, a meat sauce with cinnamon in it (from a recipe for lamb lasagna), and a white sauce (minus the feta cheese). it was quite good, although i think i prefer it without the eggplant. we broiled the eggplant before putting it in, but it still didn't absorb as much liquid as i like it to, so accordingly it wasn't as soft (translation: mushy) as i like it to be. however, it was still excellent. i think i would also not brown the meat before adding it to the sauce. it might provide better browned-meat flavor, but i would take softer meat over the flavor boost. also, seeing the threads of meat (the threads created by grinding the meat) is just gross. perhaps if we had added some milk to the meat while cooking it? guess i won't know 'til the next time we make lasagna. anyway, the addition of the white sauce is nice - kind of a replacement for the cheese - but i think it makes the whole thing a bit rich. it does have a nicer texture than ricotta cheese, though...

review: winter restaurant week (33 rest. + lounge)

carrien and i love food, but we're also poor students. accordingly, we wanted to partake in the newly christened winter restaurant week (i guess business is slow), without breaking the bank. we settled upon lunch ($20.06 as opposed to $30.06) - which, when you consider that it's a three-course lunch, seems pretty luxurious anyway.

we spent a long time not making a reservation - i think most people do dinner, anyway. personally, i feel better spending my dollars (earned from hours of scanning slides and modeling with foam core) on dinner, which is the stereotypically large meal of the day. i mean, who has meat and potatoes for breakfast or lunch (ignore those crazy brits)?

when we finally picked a day, we thought we should go ahead and make a reservation. carrien had looked at the menus and the first restaurant on the list - 33 restaurant and lounge - had three of her favorite foods on it : lobster, salmon, and pork loin. they had ample space, so we made a reservation for three. at first, i had thought that since i was skipping out on celina's and my new weekly lunch date, i'd see if she was free, but i thought it would overlap with her class (it did). so we tried keith, who had class. the third try yielded george.

it's a good thing that boston has tourist maps scattered around the city, because i neglected to print out a map while i was on campus. oops. we were definitely going in the wrong direction when we found the map.

33 is off the beaten path (for those of us who live in cambridge, at least). the interior of the restaurant is pretty typical of places that are trying really hard to be hip. the pulsing/color-changing lighted panels on the bar are a poor imitation of the color-changing, light-changing dealio at alinea in chicago (the sound component of which eventually had to be panned because of the way the sound echoed off the lacquered wood tables). we probably looked like the scum of the restaurant week crowd with our backpacks. ah, students. anyway, all of us started with the chestnut lobster bisque, which was quite good. it had croutons in it, as i remember...for a second course, george and i had the pork loin, which came with thinly sliced (panfried?) potatoes, and carrien got the salmon with couscous. it's a little odd, i admit, to have a three-course lunch. admittedly weird. but do it we did. the pork loin was rather tougher than i would have preferred, and if it weren't restaurant week i likely would have attempted to send it back (for the first time ever). however, its sauce and accompaniment were great, so that definitely made up for the toughness. despite the toughness, the pork developed a great crust.

and then dessert - warm chocolate cake with tonka bean ice cream. i first had tonka bean in a dessert at alinea, and it tastes a little bit like vanilla, but also has hints of...how would i describe it...malt? it's kind of interesting - in fact, i am so tired of vanilla that i have resorted to omitting it in any cooking that i do. i would recommend it, even though it may fall under the category of "trendy-because-it's-weird" food ingredients. the warm chocolate cake was great, too - all fudgy in the middle. it was really a glorified brownie. you could tell it was based on a recipe for homemade brownies - it had a lighter brown color than regular brownies at the supermarket. the chocolate, i was happy to discover, was not scharffenberger - at least i think it wasn't - because i hate scharffenberger chocolate. i like my chocolate to taste like chocolate, not flowers.

all in all, it was a great way to spend an afternoon. chocolate is always an appropriate way to end a meal.