The Kentucky Derby is two days away. The big locals race, The Oaks, is tomorrow. Which means Louisville is vibrating at a very high frequency this week. Posting may be difficult before Monday, but we’ll see. Understand that my intentions are good. The juleps have a way of distracting me from my responsibilities.
READ ONAll this talk of spit and sloppy drunkenness really is making for a macho week — as advertised. But why does one actually need to make a spit to make a spit cake? Because a normal meat-roasting spit is inadequate to the job. You can’t simply skewer a piece of dough on a stick, hold it over a fire and expect it to bake into anything. It would be too massive and the outside of the dough would burn before the interior baked.
The trick to a spit cake is to expose only thin strips of dough to the flame so that it has a realistic chance of baking all the way through. Sure, you could wrap a tiny amount of dough around a stick, but how much fun would that be? A fat log-like spit allows you to create a cake of a size that’s worth eating. It isn’t difficult to make one. I’ll show you how.
READ ONHow do I know there are so many Hungarians in Transylvania? I read the statistics on Wikipedia of course. However I once had occasion to personally witness the strength and depth of the ties between Hungarians and Transylvanians, back in my college days in 1986. Then I was passing a pleasant year at university in […]
READ ONOriginally chimney cake was known as Kürt?skalács, but I have to be honest here and say that I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce that word. I’m told that it literally means “chimney cake” in Hungarian, and that’s good enough for me.
So chimney cake is Hungarian, then? Yes, but not exactly. It hails from Transylvania, which once made up the eastern portion of Hungary, but ever since 1945 has made up western portion of Romania. Which I suppose makes it technically Romanian, but then hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Hungarian-speaking people still live in Transylvania. For them not much has changed other than the location of the border. Which I guess really makes it Hungarian. I dunno, it’s a tough call.
READ ONA chimney cake is an odd thing in that it’s an enriched yeast bread that’s wound onto a thick wooden spit, then roasted over a charcoal fire. The hardest part of this recipe is constructing the implement you need. More on that as the week progresses.
For the dough:
8.5 ounces (1 3/4 cups) flour
2 1/4 teaspoons (1 packet) instant yeast
1 ounce (2 tablespoons) sugar
1/8 teaspoons salt
2 egg yolks, room-temperature
1.5 ounces (3 tablespoons) melted butter
4 ounces (1/2 cup) milk, room temperature
I usually spend my weekends chasing children and plotting the next baking exploit. This last one was a bit different. We had a break in the weather so I spent most of my free time working out in the yard, chopping holes for fence posts out of the extremely woody ground along the south edge of our lot. It was extremely hard work but it felt great — the perfect antidote to a week spent obsessing over a fussy pastry. I sorely need something to make me feel more…how can I say this…man-like.
However I’m not sure I’m fully recovered. Which is why this week I’m going to take on a baking project that takes tools: a circular saw, vise and a power drill with nice, fat 3/4″ flat bit. Oh yes. Just writing that is helping the masculinity flow back. Much better…definitely much better…
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Napoleons seem tough, but it’s only the topping that can be tricky. If the marbled sugar is what’s stopping you from attempting these, console yourself that a simple dusting of powdered sugar is more than acceptable. In fact it’s it the standard in many quarters. The zebra-striped crown is something we Americans have come to expect on top of our mille feuilles. The truth is that homemade Napoleons are terrific either way.
READ ONReaders Sandra asks if all butter is still made in the way I described a couple of posts below. In fact, no. These days the starting point for most commercial butter isn’t cream, it’s leftover whey from the cheese making process. Whey still has milk fat left in it that didn’t coalesce into cheese curds, and whereas the amount of fat in liquid whey would have been far too little for creameries of old to reclaim efficiently, today centrifuges spin it out in minutes. Sure, it’s an “industrial” process, but it keeps all that milk fat from going to waste, and that seems like a good thing to me.
READ ONChocolate poured fondant is most commonly used for decorating Napoleons and petits fours. It’s a snap to make, but pictures always help. So here goes. Just melt some poured fondant in a small pan:
A mention of buttermilk always generates a lot of interest and questions. Instead of trying to answer each question individually, I’ll refer all interested parties to the tutorial on buttermilk right here. Enjoy!
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