Alpha Bakers -- The Polish Princess

The Polish Princess. Sounds like a cruise ship, doesn't it? Or a jewelry display. 

But no, it is a cake. Under its fancy veneer, it is actually quite a humble and homebody cake. Just because a girl wears two layers of buttercream doesn't mean she's stuck-up. Also, doesn't she have a right to some honest pride when she's a righteous sponge soaked in a tea and rum syrup, topped with two smooth and creamy and eggy layers of pastry cream buttercream, one filled with cocoa and walnuts, the other with raisins and chocolate? 

The Polish Princess, or the Ambassador as it is apparently known in Poland, is a bakery cake--the kind you ogle in the pastry case that often doesn't punch its weight in taste outside the cage. This lady, however, holds up, especially at room temperature, where all the layers soften into a creamy blend.

 

The creation of the Princess happened over a few days, in slow stages. First, the sponge was baked and syrup-ed. The syrup, in Polish fashion, was meant to be a strong tea steeped spiked with vodka. Having no vodka, I used rum, which was delicious if not culturally appropriate. According to the recipe headnote, the cake was developed after the fall of the USSR, when new quality ingredients came to Poland, so perhaps it's just an appropriate cultural cross-pollination.

Then came the buttercream--one recipe divided at the end for flavorings. It starts with a goopy pastry cream, into which a LOT of butter is blended. I mean a LOT--about three sticks worth. Because I was making the recipe in stages, I had some trouble with the buttercream--it broke badly and became a cottage cheese looking wet mess. I waited for everything to come to a warm room temperature, added a few more tablespoons of butter, and came out at last with a creamy fluff. 

The Princess had a warm reception at work, as I made sure she was served at a cool room temperature, the spongy buttercream was a great success. One of our young shelvers (who have just been temporarily almost laid off due to budget constraints--call your city councilors!) told me it was a brand new cake experience for him--he had never eaten anything like it. 

The last few weeks have been stressful. Some of the stress is personal, a result of something very wonderful that I have the privilege to do, that is none the less...stressful. Also, a few mountains have been falling and a few cities have been burning, and that's not without its impact too, however far away it may be. Many of my friends seem to be finding themselves in a slightly ragged place as we straggle into spring. The reasons vary, from the personal to the professional, from life to love to happiness to sadness, but regardless, most of us need a heavy dose of cake and flowers and soup. 

Last Sunday I had a few dear ones over and made this soup--quick and simple and rich, a basic potato soup raised up with prosciutto and saffron and garlicky ground almonds, from my new cookbook, Food52 Genius Recipes. More from this cookbook soon. I'm going through my cookbook back catalogue and trying not to buy many more, but this one was a printed version of about half the recipes I have already bookmarked and printed out, and it seemed prudent to pick up the bound version.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: The Bostini

My family was never much for fast food, but there was a period when, at the beginning of a long car trip, we'd swing by Dunkin' Donuts. Although my palate usually swings toward the unadorned end of the cake spectrum, at Dunkin' Donuts I would often find myself seduced by the oozing, glazed Boston Cream Pie. The squish of the pastry cream and the cloying crust of the chocolate mingle in my mind with the vaguely ill feeling of too much doughnut on early morning car trip.                    

The RHC version of the Boston Cream Pie is a bit more elegant, though with some of the same cloying overtones when the whole thing is eaten too quickly.




It consists of a vanilla pastry cream, topped with a chiffon cupcake (it was supposed to be orange, but I had a lemon in the house, and you get the picture), and drizzled with a warm chocolate sauce.

On the whole, I played it pretty straight, but when it came to the chocolate sauce (a half and half mix of chocolate and butter), I went in a different direction. I had no chocolate (though I did have plenty of butter), so I made a lighter chocolate syrup, a recipe from Alice Medrich via Matthew Amster-Burton at Culinate. Actually, I doubled the recipe, so I'd have some left for egg creams.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Pudding Ice Cream Tart Sandwiches

This week's assignment for Tuesdays with Dorie was a Chocolate Cream Tart in a chocolate tart shell. Sounded very good, and in fact a version of this once caused Mandy Patinkin to possibly break Pesach, but it was getting warm, pie is hard to keep in the refrigerator, and I wanted something a little different. So I kept the components and did a little inversion. I made the custard, a fairly standard chocolate pastry cream/pudding, with cornstarch, and chilled it. Then I made the tart dough but instead of filling a tart shell with it, I cut it into little cookies. It was very easy to work with.The 'cookies' were good, slightly more crumbly than your average (unsurprising, in that they were really a tart crust). I then froze the chocolate pudding in the ice cream maker.
The result was impressive, rich and perfect textured--the cornstarch in the pudding, which is also a component in classic gelato, helped it keep a smooth texture in the freezer, unlike a lot of my other ice cream, which freezes pretty hard. (A side note: I no longer use corn starch, I tend to use tapioca starch. Probably just as processed, but at least a variety in the crop). I scooped the pudding ice cream into a tray, and when it had hardened up a bit, cut out little circles of it with my biscuit cutter, and made sandwiches.
And people have been begging for them ever since. I did leave out the whipped cream, but I wouldn't doubt that these would be, well, enhanced, by a bit. If I'd been really clever, I would have slipped some in just before I stopped churning and gotten a swirl. But the texture was so good, I don't know that I would have liked to risk it.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Banana Cream Pie

I'm behind, I'm bewildered, I'm bothered and busy. I barely made banana cream pie. But I love banana cream pie. Only crazy people and custard-phobes don't love banana cream pie. And, I suppose, a few people who unaccountably abhor bananas. But for me, banana cream pie is just great. Cream. Banana. Custard. Pie. This particular pie, which I'd made once before for the great pie extravaganza of 2008, is exceptional in every way, from the cinnamon pastry cream to the sour cream whipped cream. Cream cream cream. Of course, since we're trying pretty hard to eat like normal people and less like pastry chefs, who needs all that cream in the house? And when I'm trying to write five papers in one month and Matt's trying to be in a play, even the time to properly make and admire the banana cream pie is lacking. And it's Pesach. Still, it was banana cream pie.
So I made it. That lumpy thing above is the crust, with some buckwheat subbed in for some of the flour--buckwheat and bananas are a very good thing. I made it in a tart pan because I don't have any adorable little six inch springforms or pie plates. This is something I'm thinking about investing in, though, because seriously, what is the sense of making a nine inch pie for a family of two? Also, I was out of tin foil, so the prebaking was a little haphazard. (Are you getting a sense of what kind of week this was yet?)

I also managed to undercook the pastry cream and not care enough to take the two minutes to fix it, so the bottom layer was runny. After that, I lost patience and fixed the rest by cooking it a little longer, then dumped it on. I like this best a few hours after assembly, so the banana has time to permeate the pastry cream fully. It was a mess, but tasted wonderful.
Some time soon, banana cream pie, I promise to make you with proper attention and love, because you're a wonderful dessert. As it is, I might be scaling back on TWD this month, which is a lot of cakes and cream pies. Next week I may just make the Amaretti for the Chocolate Amaretti Torte. We'll see. As I said, it's going to be a busy month, but I'm still here. When Pesach is over, we'll see what we can do about the next step in the gingerbread project (hint, no one has shared any recipes yet...), and about more thoughtful blogging as CSA season and our rooftop garden get started up.
Meanwhile, there's sponge cake and matzo toffee crunch somewhere around here. Excuse me.