Emily’s Birthday: Chocolate Almond Brown Butter Lime Tea Cake

Last Friday, my friend Emily turned 22.  Emily is my poet friend.  Literally.  She likes to spend evenings with a glass of wine, writing poems.  We met because we were both interested in The Pop Culture of Early Modern Europe, one of my favorite class topics at Hopkins.  I like witchcraft and charivari and carnivals and all those fun things.  Also my favorite childhood story was called Cat’s Carnival.  Go figure.

This is how Jethro would act at a carnival.

A friendship developed once I accepted her lunch invitation (it took awhile).  She visited me for a weekend when I was abroad in Paris.  We watched Heathers while drinking wine in my apartment.  We even took a second class together.  One about John Locke.  And afterwards we would get burgers.

This semester we have no classes in common, but we seem to be seeing each other more than ever (which is a great thing, Emily’s the best).  And so, of course I had to make her the best birthday cake I could.  Her only stipulation was that it have chocolate in it.  Easily done, since I have a bit of Scharffen Berger chocolate that’s been burning a whole in my pantry.

Like most normal people (excluding my mother and my roommate, Sluggy) I like chocolate.  I’m not obsessed with it and I tend not to use it too often in cooking.  When I do, I want it to be the best chocolate possible.  Also, I want it to be the centerpiece of the dish, not just thrown in there for extra flavor.

This is how Slug ate while I made cake. She shunned my chocolate.

This Chocolate Tea Cake with lime and almonds and browned butter comes from The Sweet Life cookbook, from which I’ve taken multiple recipes on this site.  The cake was perfect.  A little under baked, but that is my impatience, nothing to do with the recipe.

Here it is! I couldn’t capture any images of the cake with its rum sauce at the party, but this is the form it traveled in.

When I first looked at the recipe, I thought to myself, well that’s just too much for one cake.  But I was also intrigued.  Because how could a cake balance all of those flavors?  I trust Kate Zuckerman and her recipes.  Not a single one has ever let me down.  So I made it.  And I was happy.  Very happy.  The lime shines through brilliantly, highlighting the already acidic quality of chocolate.  The browned butter adds a nutty quality that helps to melange the chocolate and almond flavor.  Most of all the cake is wondrously chocolaty.

Lime, sugars, and egg whites. Delish.

Jethro, sadly, could not enjoy the cake.  His food choices are limited to organic cat food for outdoor cats (all other things upset his delicate tummy), so he may not have been too upset.  He’s content now that I am home for a few days, even if he does think 4 AM is the perfect time for feeding.  And chasing mice loudly.

Jethro says, “I am perfect, even if I drool.”

Chocolate Almond Brown Butter Lime Tea Cake

Adapted from The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelle

225 grams (8 ounces, 16 T) grams butter

85 grams (3 ounces) grams high quality bittersweet chocolate

140 grams (5 ounces) almond flour or blanched almonds

120 grams (1 cup minus 2 T) flour

9 egg whites

355 grams (2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons) powdered sugar

Zest of 2 limes

2 tablespoons honey

50 grams (1/2 cup) cocoa powder, Dutch process or natural

1/2 T salt

Preheat the oven to 375˚ F.  Butter or oil a 9 or 10 inch cake pan (or make mini muffins, about 45-50)

In a small frying pan or a medium saucepan brown the butter over medium high heat.  The butter will begin to form a foam on top.  Turn the heat down to medium.  The foam will start to have flecks of brown in it.  The liquid underneath the foam will transform from yellow to clear golden, and the butter will emit a rich, nutty, caramelized scent.  Once the butter is at this point, remove from the heat and set aside.

In a glass bowl set over simmering water or in a double boiler (make sure the bottom of the bowl does not touch the water), melt the chocolate, stirring frequently.  Remove from the heat, but allow the water to keep simmering.

If using whole almonds, in a food processor grind the almonds and 1 tablespoon of flour until they become a fine powder.

In a large bowl over the simmering water, whisk together the egg whites, powdered sugar, lime zest, and honey until the egg whites are warm to the touch and all of the sugar has dissolved.

Slowly whisk in the remaining flour, ground almonds, cocoa powder, and salt into the egg whites.  Smooth the mixture out, as it will become thick and clumpy, with a few turns of your whisk.

This next part is very important.  You must emulsify the brown butter, that is add it very slowly to the egg white mixture so that it all becomes incorporated.  Add in about a quarter cup at a time of the brown butter, making sure it is COMPLETELY incorporated before adding in another quarter cup.  Once all of the butter is incorporated, add in the chocolate.

At this point, you can refrigerate the batter for up to 4 days.

Pour and scrape (and taste) the batter into the prepared pan or pans (if using mini muffin tins, I suggest using a spoon or a piping bag to get the batter in the tins).  Bake the cake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, rotating at least once for even baking.  If making mini muffins, only bake for 15 minutes, but still rotate.

Serve this cake on its own and warm or with some sort of caramel sauce.  I used rum caramel sauce.  Zuckerman also recommends blood orange caramel sauce.  If you’d like either of the recipes, let me know!

The cakes will keep for about one week, if they last that long.

Key Limes in Baltimore? Key Lime Pie.

Currently, I have two finals to write and a French essay I should do.  Its my last finals week ever and all I want to do is bake.  Also I want to watch all of Hemlock Grove, the new Netflix series by Eli Roth of Hostel fame.  I’m now 5 episodes in, completely confused, alternately terrified and amused.  The acting is quite bad, the writing is terrible (example: “I don’t have a recall” Don’t you mean recollection Eli Roth??), and its a horror series, not my favorite type.

Maybe I watch it because there’s a Skarsgard in the show.  The youngest Skarsgaard.  Bill Skarsgaard.  His brother plays evil Erik in True Blood.  His father (Stellen Skarsgard) is just a famous actor for a lot of roles.  The youngest Skarsgard looks like a heroin addict (but a beautiful one) and plays someone slightly evil and completely sex obsessed, although it seems he really just likes blood?  I’m not sure.  But he’s very pretty.

Chowhound Burger Truck, Baltimore MD

There are a few reasons I get a burger at the Chowhound Burger Truck from Kooper’s Tavern every Tuesday.

1. The burgers are always really good and hefty and I like hefty lunches.  Especially after yoga, which is my solitary Tuesday activity besides sometimes going to The Baltimore Free Farm for my class on radicalism in Latin America (makes total sense if you know my professor)
2. They also taste quite good.  I wouldn’t say they are perfect, but for $8 I get my fix of meat of the week.  Sure, they could be neater, they could be cooked a little less, they could be juicier, but they are still damn tasty burgers for a decent price.
3. The guy who works the front of the truck always remembers my name and we might flirt just the tiniest bit even though I never have enough cash for a tip which makes me feel terrible because I did work on a food truck at one point and tips are golden.  But so is flirting.  It brightens up the day.

So every Tuesday I get my burger, I go home to my tiny little dark apartment and chow down, preferably while watching my favorite terrible television show, Once Upon a Time.  Its a perfect ritual.

The one pictured here is an Elvis Got the Blues Burger.  Blue cheese, bacon, tomato, lettuce, onion.  Lots of beef, lots of heft, and maybe I feel just a bit manlier after I eat it.

The Kooper’s Tavern Chowhound Burger Truck comes to the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus in Baltimore, MD from 11-3 every Tuesday.  Follow their twitter to find out where else they go!

I’m almost back home for the summer, which means no more burger truck, but plenty of Jethro.  I’m excited.  And definitely more blog posts, since I won’t have hundreds of pages to read and plenty to write every week for school.

Guinness Gingerbread Cupcakes with Lime Frosting

This week is the last week of classes.  Its a mad rush to get everything finished in the one week where every teacher assigns something to be due.  We’ve got tests, papers, presentations, what have you.  But as a senior, you know what?  Its okay.  And by its okay, I mean I’ve watched a lot of netflix recently and am none to bothered about all of my papers and tests.  Sorry parents.

This weekend, therefore, I did little in the way of work.  And Friday I made cupcakes.

The Liebster Award

So here’s the deal.  There’s this award.  No one ever wins the award, but in a sense everyone wins the award.  What it really does, though, is promote new bloggers, those with less than 200 followers, and allows them to get recognition.  It strengthens the food blogging community.  The award goes out to various new bloggers from other new bloggers creating little knots of bloggers so we all get to read each others posts a bit more.

Its The Liebster Award.

When I first started blogging, a measly 4 months or so ago now, I kept seeing this award pop up on blogs I’d begun following.  And I was kinda sad that I didn’t get one, since it seemed everyone else did.  But hey that’s living in our voyeuristic society for ya.

As I continued blogging, I became less concerned that I wasn’t immediately receiving tons of awards and praise, and more concerned with what I was putting forth into this world.  I started sharing what I was writing with my facebook friends (this for some reason terrified me, as if everyone would judge me when I made a typo), and even would talk about it at parties, as a proud mama to a lil baby blog.

I like having this blog because I like to cook, I like to tell stories, and I like to put the two together.  Plus I feel as if I am slowly becoming a part of a community of bloggers, people who love food and spend as much time thinking about it as I do.  I’m finding my niche, as some would say.

Cat in pillow niche.

I also like to share photos of Jethro because he’s just so darned cute and sweet and I want the world to know about this awesome cat.

How The Liebster Award works: someone nominates you (in my case the lovely abrooke65 over at What’s Cooking who shares some pretty awesome recipes, especially middle eastern inspired ones that always make me hungry, check her out, you won’t be disappointed) and then you must post 11 facts about yourself, answer the 11 questions that the tagger has set forth for you, choose 11 questions of your own to ask whomever you choose to nominate, and then nominate 5 bloggers with less than 200 followers.

11 Facts About Me:

1. I’m a history major but I’ve never held an internship, instead preferring to sell gourmet hot dogs and tacos for a living.
2. I have a summer house in The Thousand Islands where I first learned how to make pie and bread.
3. When I was 4 years old, I wanted to be a lawyer just like my father and would draw pictures of myself in a suit with a briefcase.  This changed as I grew older.
4. Spanish food is my favorite type of food.  I hate eating full meals, tapas are better.
5. I’m allergic to milkweed, or at least I think I am.
6. My sisters are both 7 inches taller than me.
7. I was a tennis champion in high school (division 2, but it counts).
8. Wine over beer, gin and tonics over everything else.
9. I tend to work best in the early morning but I also like to stay up late and need at least 8 hours of sleep a night.  So basically, I nap a lot.
10. I want to live in a different country for a long period of my life.
11. My favorite movie is Heathers.

11 Questions to Answer

1. What is your favorite cuisine? Spanish
2. How do you solve a tough problem? I’m not sure.  I tend to figure out what I want to happen and then because I want it to happen, I will work really hard at it.
3. One thing about yourself of which you are proud? I’m basically a cat whisperer.
4. Most triumphant moment in the kitchen? Pineapple rosemary sorbet for Christmas dinner a few years ago.
5. One word which you hate to use? Yummy.
6. Name one location that you want to visit? Everywhere.  But right now I really want to go to South America.  Or Thailand.  Or Laos.  Although I’ve wanted to go to Morocco and Israel for awhile as well.
7. Who is at your dream dinner party?  All of my best friends, my cat, and Alan Cumming to keep us entertained.
8. Your favorite hobby or avocation? Besides baking?  Either tennis or reading or working.  Yeah I like to work.  Not schoolwork though.
9. What’s your dream job? Cookbook writer or editor or someone who gives food tours.  Something where I don’t have to work a 9-5 nor do I have to sit down, well ever, and I get to eat.  A lot.
10. City life or country life?  Both.  I like farms but I also like to be surrounded by people.
11. On a Saturday night stay in or go out?  Out.  And then come back in to watch a movie with a bottle of wine.

Answer well, or Siegfried will bite your toes.  He does look hungry.

My 11 questions for the nominees:

1. Who do you admire most in the food world?
2. What was the first food item you ever made?
3. What is your favorite city in the world?
4. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
5. What can you not live without?
6. What’s your favorite movie?
7. What food do you hate?
8. What do you feel guilty about?
9. What was your worst moment in the kitchen?
10. Who is the one person you want to meet?
11. What do you look for in others?

And my nominees!  Some of whom have definitely been nominated before, so no harsh feelings if you don’t respond to everything.

The Furious Pear Pie- who definitely has a thing for tea.  Which is wonderful.  Plus she shares great stories and recipes and really makes you feel as if you know her.  She has her own writing style as well, something that is hard to come by.

Maple and Saffron- I adore this blog of a Canadian and an Italian who love food and travel.  Also they do travel tours, which I personally find fascinating.

Olive Oil Diaries- This blog by a quite young blogger is adorable.  She’s clever and always has interesting middle eastern recipes to share.  Plus she loves olive oil.  Always a great thing.

The Baked Road- This high schooler can bake.  She likes to play with different ingredients and clearly has a grasp on what odd flavors can work together.

A Taste of Wintergreen- I love the lovely food that Lindy creates over at her blog.  When I first started this blog, my roommate and I would pour over her recipes and salivate.  We’ve made a few as well, and they’ve all turned out quite nicely.  Also Lindy’s from Canada, and I love Canada.

Happy Baking Everyone!

Kitty reflects on baking and mice.

The Hummus Games

I love hummus.  I think its one of those perfect foods that I can just eat and eat and eat because its so versatile and simple and tasty and filled with things that are all good for me (or so I tell myself).

Normally when I make hummus, I use David Lebovitz’ recipe.  I like that its a bit chunky and has a lot of vibrant colors and flavors in it.  But seeing as its spring time, a time for change and renewal, I decided to make a new hummus.

Classic Desserts: Chocolate Chip Cookies

The first food I ever really made on my own was a batch of chocolate chip cookies.  I was in my early teens, armed with the back of a bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips, and definitely used the gas stove to heat the butter so it was warm enough to cream.  No adults helped me and I may even have been alone in the house.  I ate a lot of creamed butter and sugar before I realized it was a necessary component of the chemical makeup of cookie dough.

They were still quite good cookies and everyone ate them. Because chocolate chip cookies straight from the oven will warm the cockles of anyone’s heart.