It’s a Chocolate Kinda Day

If you are a chocolate lover you must have this recipe and keep it with you always. It’s fast, easy and uses ingredients you have on hand. If you make it thick you can spread it on cakes as icing. Make it thinner and sandwich cookies together with it, dip truffles in it, and thinner yet, dip strawberries, marshmallows, angel food cake in it. It is dark, rich and delicious. You can actually convince yourself that it is good for you! So what is the secret? Chocolate Ganache! This is that wonderful nectar you can make at midnight or have after a good cry!

Chocolate Ganache

Ingredients

1 cup heavy whipping cream (More or less cream determines the final thickness. Experiment!)

2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips or finely chopped semi-sweet chocolate

Method

1. In a 1 quart microwave bowl, heat cream almost to a simmer. DO NOT BOIL. Remove from heat.

2. Pour over chocolate and gently whisk to melt.

3. As the ganache cools it will thicken. You can use it warm to drizzle over cakes or cream puffs, or blend it until it cools, to ice cupcakes and cookies

4. Makes three cups dark chocolate ganache – enough to decorate a cake, ice 24 cupcakes, or ice lots and lots of cookies.

German Fruit Cake (Obstkuchen)

We called the light and airy fruit shortcake my mother-in-law made us all summer German Fruit Cake because she didn’t know what to call it in English. In fact, the first time she wrote down the recipe for me it was in German and she had her family send a German measuring cup and torte pan to me from her home in Stuttgart.

I would hope and pray there was a fruit cake every time we went to her house. I had never tasted anything so fresh and light. There is no fat in the cake other than the egg yolks. So if you care about fat content you’ll love this. Just stay away from whipped cream which somehow always makes it onto my slices! Although the “separate the egg” thing makes this seem difficult to make, it really isn’t. It’s showy and really delicious without overpowering sweetness and fat. You can use any berries, sliced fruit, or a combination of both.

I have always shot food and still life images using strobes and am trying to use the wonderful sunlight that streams into my studio instead. Finding the right situations and positioning the food for the light is a learning process. I had to do way too much post processing on this image to soften the light and get detail in the shadows. Serious contrast situation! I am much more pleased with the quality of light on the Caprese Sandwich image.

German Fruit Cake

3 eggs separated

3 tbs water

2/3 c sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2/3 c flour

2/3 c corn starch

2 tsp baking powder

Fresh strawberries washed and cut lengthwise in half. Or you can use any berries or sliced fruit or a mixture of several kinds of fruits and berries.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a fluted torte pan. Cream together egg yolks, water, and  two thirds of sugar. Add vanilla. Beat egg whites with the rest of the sugar till soft peaks form. Sift all dry ingredients and fold into egg yolk mixture. Gently fold egg whites into the mixture. Pour batter into the torte pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

Let the cake cool and rest for 15 minutes and turn onto a plate to cool completely. Arrange fruit onto the cake shell and cover with glaze.

Glaze

1 c water (or fruit juice)

2 tbs sugar

4 tsp cornstarch

Pinch of cream of tartar

Mix 1 tbs water, sugar, cornstarch and cream of tartar in a small bowl to make a paste. Put the rest of the water into a small pan and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and stir in paste. Return to heat and bring to boil. Remove from heat and let rest 1 minute then spoon over fruit.  You can add a bit of food coloring to make the glaze more colorful. Top with fresh whipped cream if you dare!

Caprese Sandwich

If you tried the Moroccan Bread recipe then you probably had the same thought I did. “What am I going to do with all this bread?” I froze a couple of loaves but they were in the way in the freezer. Then I decided that the density of this bread would hold up well in an egg/milk french toast mix. I adore french toast! Or…what about a grilled sandwich? Or Both? I love the taste of Caprese salad. There is nothing better on a hot summer day with fresh Maryland tomatoes right off the vine. Yum! Here’s what I did.

Caprese Sandwich with Grilled Garlic Bread

4 center slices from a loaf of Moroccan Bread (any dense bread will do)

1 large tomato sliced into 4 pieces

4 slices of fresh mozzarella cheese

small bunch of fresh basil

1/4 cup good olive oil

1 tbs balsamic vinegar

1 tsp fresh minced garlic

Slice the Moroccan bread into 1/4 inch slices. Pour the olive oil into a small bowl and with a pastry brush, lightly brush one side of each slice with oil. Place on a hot, medium high griddle. Add the garlic to the remaining oil and brush the other side of each slice with the garlic oil. There should still be some oil and garlic in the bowl when you are done.

Once the first side is toasted, turn the bread over and toast the garlic side. Put the slices onto plates with the hot garlic side up. Put the mozzarella on two slices, then layer on the sliced tomatoes and leaves of fresh basil. Add the balsamic vinegar to the olive oil and garlic mixture and stir together. Drizzle the garlic/oil/vinegar dressing over the basil and top with the other bread slices.

The hot bread warms the mozzarella and softens it even more. The crispy toasted bread sops up the dressing and that taste and the sweet tomatoes and fresh basil…mmmmmm to die for! I added a little fresh ground salt and pepper.

That was lunch. The bread worked so well that I tried it in french toast. Amazing! You probably have your favorite french toast recipe but I’ll share mine anyway. It’s pretty simple. Just put 1 egg, 1/2 cup milk, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp cinnamon in a low sided bowl and whisk. The cinnamon is very stubborn and doesn’t play well with others but not to worry. It all works out. My son, who is a chef, adds a tablespoon of sugar but I don’t see a need. You choose.

Now take those 1/4 inch slices of bread and soak them in the mixture. I turn them a couple of times. The density of this bread will sop up lots of egg/milk mixture which makes for very creamy french toast. Once the bread is drenched, lay the slices on a well greased griddle at medium high heat and cook until each side is toasted brown.

I love my french toast with butter and powdered sugar but maple syrup is delicious as well. Or fresh berries, or fruit sauce…

Moroccan Squash and Chickpea Stew

As promised a Moroccan Chickpea stew. Photographing stew can be difficult without a little thought. The veggies and sauce get mushed together. You want it to look appetizing. A plate full of unrecognizable mush is not. Fortunately for me the colors and textures in this wonderful stew were beautiful and delicious. After much research reading lots of recipes, I chose this one from Aida Mollenkamp, Food Network. It wasn’t overpowering with lots of spices like many I found. The flavor is a lightly spiced and complex mixture of sweet squash and cinnamon blended with pungent cumin and salty olives. Very nice!

I also made the stew stuffed inside roasted butternut squash. I cut the squash in half length wise and scooped out the seed and stringy center bits. Then brushed the cut sides with olive oil and sprinkled them with fresh ground salt and pepper. They were roasted at 400 degrees for about half an hour. They were removed from the pan and filled with the stew mixture. It was a pretty presentation.

Once the food was on the set, I did have to rearrange bits and clean up some pieces. I misted everything as I shot to keep it looking fresh but this dish and it’s presentation was very easy to photograph. The colors were bright and clear and the texture was very rich. It made my job easy! Here’s the recipe if you’d like to try this yourself.

Moroccan Bread (Khubz Maghrebi)

If you love the smell of yeast bread baking and the first hot bite fresh out of the oven but hate the long arduous process then this is the bread for you!!!  It whips up in the mixer and requires no kneading. Pretty amazing. And the flavor is nice and gives you all those sensory necessities you want from a fresh baked yeast dough. The only downside is the crust isn’t crunchy. It’s a softer crumb with no real crust but that’s a small price to pay for the final experience.

Cupcakes

I’m working on photographs of cupcakes. I did a cupcake marathon about two weeks ago and made and iced about 75 beauty cupcakes and shot them. I was on a short time frame and had only a week to plan, bake, decorate, prop, and create sets for the cupcake images. I know that it sounds like a long time but I shoot for stock as my second job. I have a real job as a computer illustrator so I have to donate 40+ hours to the day job.

It took two full days to bake 150 cupcakes and choose the best 75 and then ice them. I baked both chocolate and vanilla and chose different papers for them to add variety. When I’m working on a project like this I do a lot of research to see how they were shot by other photographers and pick some inspiration images that I put in my notebook as a shot list. I was really pleased with some of the images.