Category: Pastry

Is chocolate really the love drug?

Despite the insistences of (mostly female) chocoholics, all clinical evidence points to no, Reader Connie. I’ve done my best to debunk the purported effects of chocolate’s trace components here, here, here, here and here. Of course all that’s done is earn me a reputation for being no fun. There are hundreds, thousands of pop journalism pieces out there that imply the contrary of course, though if you read carefully they’re always peppered with escape-hatch words like “may”, “could” and “might.”

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Our story begins in Detroit

Huh? A Gilded Age tale of gypsies, royalty, heartbreak and chocolate starts in…Michigan?

Well yes. Sort of. That’s where one Clara Ward was born in 1873. She was the daughter of a Midwestern captain of industry, a man known as the “King of the Lakes,” Eber Brock Ward. His personal fortune was valued at some $6 million ($133 million in today’s dollars) and when he died he left young Clara fully half of it.

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Rigó Jancsi Recipe

Chocolate on chocolate on chocolate. What else would one expect from a cake named for a swarthy gypsy violinist, the man who stole the wife of a Belgian prince and scandalized Parisian society for years? Ladies — to your fainting couches! This tale of passion, love and loss may be too much for your sensibilities to bear.

For the spongecake:

2.5 ounces (1/2 cup) all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
4 ounces (1 stick) butter
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped fine
10 eggs, room temperature and separated
4.5 ounces (about 2/3 cup) sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt

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Cake of Infamy

Reader Charm suggests that while we’re in Hungary (or thereabouts), we head over to Budapest to sample a cake inspired by a scandalous love affair — the ultra-rich and decadent Rigó Jancsi. Well, we haven’t done chocolate in a while, so…why not?

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Making Chimney Cake

Kinda sweet, kinda smoky, sorta crunchy, sorta nutty…chimney cake has a lot going for it beyond the entertainment value — which is considerable. It would make a great surprise ending to a grill party, as a dying fire is the perfect amount of heat for this unique sweet. Here’s how it’s done. Start the dough by combining your dry ingredients in one bowl…

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It was all a communist plot.

The Romanian secret police were a running joke in East European intelligence circles. Not because they were any less ruthless than their peers in other Soviet-bloc nations, but because they were hopelessly obvious, given to following people around in knee-length Boris Badinov coats. They were objects of scorn to the Russians. Or at least that’s what a KGB trainee I later met told me. But then who was he to talk? In Russia in the summer of 1986 you could pick out the spooks in tourist hotels by their tell-tale powder blue Nike jumpsuits. But that’s another story.

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Who needs vampires?

So by now you may be thinking: this guy’s been to Transylvania so he must have a story to tell about eating real chimney cake. Nope. I never saw one while I was there. In fact I hardly saw any food at all. Life was tough for Romanians in 1986. Even tourists like me had […]

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Pre-Derby Post Problems

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.

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Spit-Making 101

All 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.

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The Ties that Bind

How 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 […]

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