Assam Mandarine Cheesecake with Caramel Sauce for the DBs

Apparently, April is cheesecake month for the DBs since last year we made cheesecake lollipops. The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.
As soon as this went up, I decided I was going to make a saffron and honey cheesecake because I wanted to make something that reminded me of Persian food and growing up in an Iranian household, but by the time I was up against the deadline we were out of saffron (something which rarely but evidently does happen and, with a little one around, getting to the store isn't what it used to be) so I turned to other flavors from my childhood.
Iranians consume several things without moderation, one of them being tea and another citrus fruit. The caramel sauce, while seeming odd, actually came out of the fact that at the end of Iranian meals, one will often be presented with tea and little pieces of caramel to finish the meal. In this instance, the caramel is simply sugar cooked to hard-stage caramel. One is meant to put the piece of caramel in his/her mouth (usually holding it between the teeth) and drink the tea which melts the caramel as it washes over it. Since hard caramel is a little hard to incorporate in a cake of any kind, I chose to go with a caramel sauce instead.
Major Variation: There was only one 200g (7 oz.) container of cream cheese left at the market so I used one container of light cream cheese and a container of mascarpone cheese to balance the fat content and ensure that the cheesecake wouldn't be too thin. It turned out just fine.
The flavor was very subtle so I might try using more tea bags next time and/or letting them steep longer in the cream. The slight mandarine flavor was lovely.

Unfortunately, now that the picture of the whole cheesecake is posted (you should see the time acrobatics involved just to get these pictures up), I'm not sure I have time to do a picture of a slice with the caramel sauce, but I will try. The caramel sauce is in a rather unphotogenic container at the moment so I won't bother taking a picture of that just to have a picture of it.

I'll definitely make the saffron-honey cheesecake, just not right now. Recipe with my variations below. Big thanks to Jenny for choosing something I could somehow manage with my mini-me.

Mes excuses aux lecteurs Français qui ne lisent pas l'Anglais couramment mais j'ai tout juste le temps de publier des billets en une seule langue. Si vous avez des questions sur la recette, n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message.

Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake (original recipe - my variations in blue):

Crust:
2 cups / 180 g graham cracker crumbs
1 stick / 4 oz / 115g butter, melted
2 tbsp. / 24 g sugar (Omitted)
1 tsp. vanilla extract (Omitted)

Cheesecake:
3 sticks of cream cheese, 8 oz each (total of 24 oz or 680g) room temperature
1 cup / 210 g sugar (I used about 190g instead)
3 large eggs
1 cup / 8 oz / 250ml heavy cream
4 good quality Assam Tea bags to infuse the cream
3 tbsp. Mandarine juice
Zest of 1 Mandarine
1 tbsp. lemon juice (Omitted)
1 tbsp. vanilla extract (or the innards of a vanilla bean) (Omitted)
1 tbsp liqueur, optional, but choose what will work well with your cheesecake (Omitted)

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4 = 180C = Moderate heat). Begin to boil a large pot of water for the water bath.

2. Mix together the crust ingredients and press into your preferred pan. You can press the crust just into the bottom, or up the sides of the pan too - baker's choice. Set crust aside.

3. Combine cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or in a large bowl if using a hand-mixer) and cream together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Make sure to scrape down the bowl in between each egg. Add heavy cream, vanilla, lemon juice, and alcohol and blend until smooth and creamy.

4. Pour batter into prepared crust and tap the pan on the counter a few times to bring all air bubbles to the surface. Place pan into a larger pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. If cheesecake pan is not airtight, cover bottom securely with foil before adding water.

5. Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until it is almost done - this can be hard to judge, but you're looking for the cake to hold together, but still have a lot of jiggle to it in the center. You don't want it to be completely firm at this stage. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let rest in the cooling oven for one hour. This lets the cake finish cooking and cool down gently enough so that it won't crack on the top. After one hour, remove cheesecake from oven and lift carefully out of water bath. Let it finish cooling on the counter, and then cover and put in the fridge to chill. Once fully chilled, it is ready to serve.

Pan note: The creator of this recipe used to use a springform pan, but no matter how well she wrapped the thing in tin foil, water would always seep in and make the crust soggy. Now she uses one of those 1-use foil "casserole" shaped pans from the grocery store. They're 8 or 9 inches wide and really deep, and best of all, water-tight. When it comes time to serve, just cut the foil away.

Prep notes: While the actual making of this cheesecake is a minimal time commitment, it does need to bake for almost an hour, cool in the oven for an hour, and chill overnight before it is served. Please plan accordingly!

DB Challenge October - Bostini Cream Pie

I'm sick with a nasty bout of the flu so this is going to be very short and only in English. The October Daring Bakers' Challenge was hosted by the lovely Mary of Alpineberry, who threw down the gauntlet with something I had never heard of before, a Bostini Cream Pie (you can find the recipe on Mary's blog). Basically, it's a montage of custard cream, orange-flavored chiffon cake (I used blood oranges) and chocolate sauce. Since I knew I was going to be busy planning out this little cake for most of the month and as there were a number of other things in my life that needed my immediate attention, I made the Bostini Cream Pie the very first weekend of the month and then forgot about it. The whole process was pretty straightforward for once as I've made custard cream before (although admittedly never one that required 10 eggs), but if I were to make it again, I would probably change the flavor of the cake to something other than orange, which I found to be mostly overpowered by the other two flavors, and alter the recipe for the chocolate sauce, which felt too thick. Nevertheless, it was quite delicious (as you can see from the picture below, it was very popular with everyone who tried it) and I'd like to thank Mary of Alpineberry for introducing me to a dessert I'd never heard of before. You can see other Daring Bakers' tasty treats by clicking through the Daring Baker Blogroll. Bring on November!

Langues de Chat - Cat's Tongues

Let's start with something simple...

When I was little, in cafés and restaurants langues de chat were usually served with ice cream, but I haven't seen them served anywhere in many years. I hadn’t made langues de chats in a really long time and had a couple of egg whites left over from another dessert, so I decided to try something a little different and give them some unusual flavors.

Given my habit of stockpiling ingredients, it was more a question of which flavors I was going to pick rather than what I might actually have available in the kitchen. One of the flavors had to be pistachio using pistachio paste from G. Detou (because I have to get through the jar somehow…).
Flavor #2 was settled on as being blood orange, because just orange isn't interesting enough…(plus I had a carton of blood orange juice in the fridge as I often do and wanted to find out if I could successfully transfer that fruit's marvelous tangy bite to a butter cookie).
Flavor #3 came directly from the Persian grocery store in the form of a bottle of pomegranate paste. Pomegranate paste is used in all sorts of dishes in Iran so the serious Persian cook is never without it (note: I haven't actually used it in any Persian dishes yet but that's only because I haven't been focusing on learning those particular dishes, all in good time).

As for the recipe, I used a recipe from a very famous and highly appreciated book called Les Gâteaux de Mamie which calls for a slightly different version from the standard tant pour tant (equal measure) way of making it. Most recipes you'll find call for an equal amount of sugar, flour and butter to so many egg whites. Mamie's recipe calls for a bit more flour than butter and sugar. If you browse through the myriad versions available on the web, you'll find that most recipes use close to equal measures and the amount of egg whites probably varies according to what size egg one is using. It's easier to remember the equal measure one but, in particular for the blood orange version, it helped to have a little bit more flour in the batter.

The results were interesting, though perhaps not entirely reproducible since I added flavoring “to taste” basically. The blood orange ones required a great deal more flavoring through the juice and some orange flower water, which made the batter much more liquid than the other flavors and the cookies thinner and flatter. The pomegranate ones acquired a pleasant acidic peak right after the initial sugar taste, but turned out a much darker color than I would have thought. They almost look like they’re made with cocoa.

I made four separate batches so that I could add the flavoring at the right step of the recipe.

The Recipe - Variations on a Cat's Tongues

3 tbsp + 1tsp salted butter at room temperature (you can use unsalted butter instead)
3 tbsp + 1tsp icing sugar
¼ cup flour
1 egg white
½ tsp vanilla essence (optional if you are making the basic kind)

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.
Beat the sugar and butter together until creamy.
(If you are adding vanilla, add it now).
#1 Pistachio variation: Add 1 tbsp pistachio paste.
#2 Blood Orange variation: Add 1 tbsp blood orange juice & 1 tbsp orange flower water or to taste and what your batter will accept (I did it to taste).
#3 Pomegranate variation: Add 1 tbsp pomegranate paste.
Beat the egg white until stiff.
Add the egg white to the sugar/butter mix.
Add the flour.
Make even pinkie-length dollops of batter (with a spoon or a pastry bag with a small tip i.e. 1/5-1/3 inch) on a non-stick baking sheet or parchment paper lining a baking sheet. Cook for 6-7 minutes until just the edges are brown. The center should remain pale.

(note: my oven is very unreliable so I actually have to cook them for longer than this, but this is the amount of time a reliable oven should take).
Let cool on a wire rack if available.

En Français (je doute avoir le courage suffisant pour traduire tous les billets à venir).

Quand j'étais petite, on servait des langues de chat avec la glace dans les cafés et restaurants, mais ça fait longtemps que je n'en ai pas vu. Je n'en avais pas fait depuis des années et puis récemment je me suis retrouvée avec des blancs d'oeufs dont je ne savais pas bien quoi faire en sachant que je n'avais pas envie de faire de la mousse avec, donc j'ai ressorti une recette de langues de chat du livre Les Gâteaux de Mamie, et je me suis lancée dans une aventure gustative en leur donnant des saveurs un peu hors du commun.

Comme j'ai la mauvaise habitude d'accumuler les ingrédients en quantités, j'avais l'embarras plutôt que la pénurie du choix. Premièrement, il fallait qu'un des goûts soit la pistache parce qu'il faut bien que je trouve un moyen d'utiliser les 450g de pâte de pistache que j'ai de G. Detou. Deuxièmement, j'ai choisi l'orange sanguine parce que c'était plus intéressant que l'orange simple... (et puis j'ai toujours une brique de jus d'orange sanguine dans le frigo et je voulais voir si je pouvais adapter ce merveilleux goût acidulé à un gâteau au beurre). La troisième variété est venue tout droit du magasin iranien par le biais d'une bouteille de pâte de grenade. La pâte de grenade est utilisée dans pleins de plats iraniens et fait donc partie des ingrédients de cuisine de tout cuisinier iranien qui se respecte (note: je ne l'ai encore jamais utilisé dans une recette iranienne mais c'est surtout parce que je n'ai pas encore essayé de recette qui l'utilise, chaque chose en son temps).

Pour la recette, celle de Mamie contenant un peu plus de farine que la version traditionelle avec le tant pour tant m'arrangeait parce que, en particulier pour les biscuits à l'orange sanguine, l'ajout de jus et d'eau de fleur d'oranger a rendu la pâte un peu plus liquide et de ce fait, les biscuits un peu plus minces.

Les résultats étaient intéressants, quoique probablement pas complètement reproductibles puisque je les ai surtout fait au goût. J'ai ajouté beaucoup de jus d'orange sanguine ce qui a rendu la pâte beaucoup plus liquide et ces langues-là bien plus minces que les autres. Les langues à la pâte de grenade se sont dotées d'une pointe acidulée très agréable juste après la note sucrée du biscuit, mais sont aussi ressorties du four avec une couleur bien plus foncée que je ne l'aurais imaginé. Elles ont l'air d'être au chocolat.

J'ai divisé la pâte en quatre pour pouvoir ajouter les goûts à la bonne étape de la recette.

La Recette - Variations sur Langues de Chat

50g beurre salé tempéré
50g sucre glace
60g farine
1 blanc d'oeuf
½ càc de vanille liquide (facultatif)

Préchauffez le four à 180°C.
Battre le beurre et le sucre jusqu’à l’obtention d’un mélange crémeux.
(Si vous mettez de la vanille, ajoutez-la maintenant).
#1 Variation Pistache: Ajoutez 1 cuil. à soupe de pâte de pistache.
#2 Variation Orange Sanguine: Ajoutez 1 cuil. à soupe de jus d’orange sanguine & 1 cuil. à soupe d’eau de fleur d’oranger ou au goût et ce que vôtre mélange accordera (je l’ai fait au goût).
#3 Variation Grenade: Ajoutez une cuil. à soupe de pâte de grenade.
Montez le blanc en neige.
Ajoutez le blanc au mélange beurre/sucre.
Puis ajoutez la farine.
Avec une petite cuillère ou une poche à douille (embout de 5-8mm), dressez des petits tas réguliers de la longueur d'un petit doigt sur une plaque anti-adhésive ou sur du papier sulfurisé.
Enfournez pendant 6-7 minutes jusqu’à ce que les bords soient dorés mais le centre reste pâle.

(note: mon four étant moins que fiable, je dois les faire cuire plus longtemps, mais ceci est le temps que ça devrait mettre avec un four fiable).
Laissez refroidir sur une grille si possible.