Here’s another buttercream alternative that’s extremely easy. It’s standard ganache, a 50-50 combination of chocolate and heavy cream by weight — only whipped! You start by making the ganache, any quantity you wish, you can use either standard or white chocolate.
READ ONWho knew there were so many people in the world who don’t like buttercream? Following Monday’s post on Heritage frosting I’ve received a deluge of emails asking for alternatives to buttercream. Of course I never deny my readers anything (ehem). Hang on while I whip something up.
READ ONGood question, reader Luther! It’s commonly said that flour granules “pop” in a hot, wet environment, releasing their starches and creating thickening. But that’s not quite right. Think of a flour granule as a tightly-bound bundle of reeds and branches (amylose and amylopectin [starch] molecules), a broken-off chunk of wheat berry endosperm. Immerse that granule […]
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Did I forget to mention it’s also called “mock buttercream”? This is something that a handful of readers have asked me about lately. It was little Jo’s turn to submit a cake for the cake wheel at last Friday’s fish fry, so it seemed like a good time to make it.
READ ONReader Jay writes:
When you were talking about macarons, you said that old egg whites are better. Does the rule hold true for floating islands?
It does. Older eggs are better when it comes to making any sort of foam. Why? Simply because older eggs have runnier whites, and when egg whites are runny it’s easier to put the hurt on the proteins they contain. Think of it like this: a whip cuts through a bowl of water with much more force than it does through a bowl of, say, honey. The result is that older whites are not only easier to whip, they whip up higher.
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My daughters, my neighbors’ daughter, my neighbors and my wife were all stunned at how good this dessert was. On the face of it, it just doesn’t sound all that interesting. Meringue poached in milk? Oh, yippee. You really have to try this to understand how remarkable it is. With your caramel sauce and crème anglaise at-the-ready, start making your islands. Pour the milk into a saucepan and set it on to simmer.
READ ONI’ve heard you can’t make a decent egg white foam in them.
…writes reader Owen. That’s another well-worn myth in the world of foams: that it’s impossible to whip up a good foam in a plastic bowl, or using plastic implements. The logic is that because plastics are so similar chemically to fats and soaps, they tend to hang on to trace amounts of them, foiling future attempts at foamery. There’s some truth in this. Plastic, fat and soap all share certain structural similarities. It’s also true that they tend to want to hang on to one another when they’re in close proximity, as anyone who’s ever tried to wash out a plastic salad bowl coated with oil can attest (it takes lots of soap and scrubbing, and even then you probably can’t get rid of it all). But unless the bowl in question is actually greasy to the touch, those minute amounts of fat won’t adversely affect the foam.
READ ONThis week, for reasons that are surely clear, I found myself wondering when the whisk was invented. For a clue to that I started checking into the history of egg foams generally. I found that while people have been eating eggs forever, and binding ingredients with them for at least 2,500 years, egg foams haven’t […]
READ ONReader Clay writes:
I’ve whipped whole eggs to a pretty impressive volume, which is why I’ve always been skeptical of the claim that fat ruins foams.
True enough, Clay. However while whole eggs will make foams, they’ll never rise as high or last as long as all-white foams. Under the right conditions egg whites can be whipped up to about 8 times their original volume. With whole eggs you’re doing well if you can do 3 times, and even then the foam will only hold up for a few minutes on its own. However a whole egg foam will last long enough to be of some use in a thing like a flourless cake, where you want to lighten the consistency just enough to prevent it from baking up into a chocolate brick. Though I suppose even a brick can be good if it’s made of chocolate, yes?.
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