I Make Truffles for the First Time, and They Are Ugly

Truffle? 

This significant Beetle Branch Out began because the Dining Section of the New York Times last week was devoted to ice cream, and as I glanced disparagingly through it muttering things like "stupid ice cream" and "it's so cold" and "why would you devote an entire thing to ice cream" and "ugh, really . . . banana, pistachio, jalapeno pepper WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE" I happened upon THIS. Namely, Chocolate Ganache. 

Now, it wasn't so much attractive because I wanted to make a cake and frost it with ganache, and definitely not so much that I wanted to have ice cream and pour ganache over the top. 

For the record. In my slightly psychotic and definitely minority opinion, ice cream is too sweet, too sticky, and too cold. Even before it was relegated to the "Beetle Bad List" I wasn't a huge fan. It made my teeth hurt, my hands always got all gluey and gross and there was NEVER a place to wash them on the boardwalk or beach or whatever, those tiny little shreddy paper napkins they gave you were completely useless, and shortly after finishing my cone or my cup I became too cold to continue "enjoying my harbourside stroll" or whatever I was supposed to be doing at the time. There was a brief period when I was little when I did legitimately love it and every summer consumed my weight in chocolate soft serve at Dairy Queen, but soon enough my inherent jerk took over and I became the obnoxious, sweatshirt wearing, killjoy I am today. 

Anyway. Where was I. Oh yes. Ice cream. Ganache. TRUFFLES. 

I started reading the article thinking that I would mentally file it for future cake-icing purposes, but then I happened upon the magical phrase ""chill it, then roll it into balls and dust with cocoa powder to make truffles." And I realised that I absolutely HAD to try. 

I'm ashamed to say that I've made it this long without making truffles. Because. Do you have any idea how easy they are? 

THEY'RE REALLY EASY.  

And I have to say, on a day that was 90 degrees with what felt like 100% humidity, NOT standing in front of a hot oven was kind of amazing. Bonus was that working with chilled balls of chocolate awesomeness meant that making them actually cooled me off.

Lesson of the Day: if you are hot and don't want to cook but want something delicious, make ganache truffles!

So. The basic ganache recipe is bittersweet chocolate and heavy cream, which is then brought to the desired temperature and corresponding consistency. The New York Times one that I've linked to above added sugar, vanilla extract, espresso, and a pinch of coarse salt. I balked at adding the sugar, initially, because if there's one thing that bittersweet chocolate absolutely DOESN'T need, it's sugar, that's kind of the point of it, it's perfect and delicious and legitimately the best chocolate in the universe as it is, and then I started looking at the recipe and realised that perhaps I should do a bit of outside research.

Lo and behold, I found more ganache truffle and bittersweet truffle recipes that kept the ingredients to bare three: Bittersweet chocolate, heavy cream, vanilla extract. I went with that.

INGREDIENTS

• 14 oz bittersweet chocolate
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

I melted the chocolate in the microwave because honestly it's a better way to do it, and ACTUAL CHEFS say that, you don't burn it, it's consistent heat, and it's a hell of a lot easier. I brought the cream to slightly warmer than room temperature (also in the microwave) before I stirred it into the chocolate so that it wouldn't make chocolate clumps.* Then added the vanilla last and gave it a few spins with a big spoon until it was a glorious, shiny, delicious smelling mass.

*it took me FAR too long to realise that this was my problem and how easy of a fix it actually was. DUH.

Then I popped it in the fridge for a few hours, did a few household chores, went for a run, etc, and came back to it before dinner. 

The tricky part, I knew, would be making the balls themselves. Whenever you go into Maison du Chocolate or Vosges or similar, you are greeted by these absolutely perfectly symmetrical truffles that I swear were made by little chocolate elves because no actual human could possibly be that talented. I do NOT own a melon baller* and working with only teaspoons and tablespoons I knew that they were going to be . . . well . . . 

*I didn't at the time. Thanks to amazon.com, I do now. 

But working with two teaspoons and a large bowl of cocoa powder, I sort of manhandled them into sort resemble spherical objects that sort of looked like truffles. Or at least some of them did. If you squinted. And I told you what they were first. 

But you know what? I've decided that if everyone in Brooklyn and Seattle can have "hand crafted artisinal truffles" then I jolly well can too. So. These have PERSONALITY. These weren't made by an enslaved chocolate elf. These were made by a BEETLE and each one has it's own little story behind it and THAT'S why some look like golf balls and some look like smashed chestnuts and some look like fossilized dinosaur eggs and some even look like those things that the giant mantises were guarding under Tokyo in the latest Godzilla movie. 

THEY'RE INDIVIDUAL. THAT'S WHAT I'M SAYING. 

I would like to think I got better as I went along and gained confidence, but sadly, I think it was actually the reverse. The ones that actually DID look like fossilized triceratops babies were the last five I made. 

BUT, dear reader, they are quite simple, they require only a microwave and some spoons (and if you have a melon baller, so much the better) and if they turn out better than mine I bet they would be quite pretty too. 

Remember that dumb line about love meaning never to have to say you're sorry?

Well.

"Love means that your parents, your husbands, wives, children, your Lovely Librarians . . . Love means that they still have to like you even if the truffles you give them are ugly. Even AFTER you say you're sorry."

In Which We Are Monarchists (and lots of photos of Strawberries)

THE VERY SHORT LIST OF THINGS THAT MAKE ME GO "RAH, AMERICA" OR AT LEAST FEEL A SMALL SPARK OF PATRIOTISM

1. The movie National Treasure starring Nicholas Cage and Diane Kruger

2. The movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets 
starring Nicholas Cage and Diane Kruger

3. Paintings by Albert Bierstadt or various of the Hudson River School

4. The music of Aaron Copeland

5. Acadia National Park

6. Eating lobster

You've probably guessed by this point, dear reader, that the 4th of July is not really a day upon which I or my sainted mother dress up in our best red white and blue and run around with sparklers* singing God Bless America. We don't do bald eagles. We don't do tailgating. We don't do hamburgers and steaks on the grill, Nascar, stars and stripes forever, baseball and crackerjack, ice cream sundaes, and we DEFINITELY don't do beaches and suntan lotion and coolers full of beer and potato chips. (If there is a hell, its a crowded beach on a 95 degree day with only one public bathroom, a book you thought you would like but you hate by page 3, and tuna fish sandwiches that contain celery.) 

We're just . . . we're just PILLS, you guys. 

*I would run around with sparklers, actually, any day of the week, but I'm a pyromaniac and have been forbidden from having, holding, or running around with sparklers or flame in general for the rest of time. 

Anyway. I decided that this year I would express our relative antipathy towards all things AH-MUHR-ICA (and our greater than average predilection for all things British) through culinary means. I could channel a bit of political frustration, try a few recipes, and Mum would get to sample the results. 

Hence. 

A MONARCHICAL WEEKEND THAT JUST HAPPENED TO FALL ON THE FOURTH OF JULY AND WAS FILLED WITH THE MOST BRITISH FOOD I COULD THINK OF

Victoria Sponge

Sausages and Mash

Carrot Slaw with Mustard and Dill Dressing

Eton Mess

Strawberries and Cream

All of this, it should be noted, was eaten in the (newly renovated! gorgeous! clean and organised!) library with a framed photo of Her Majesty in pride of place. The one nod to America we did make was by watching Jaws which: a) is a truly awesome movie, b) that scene when the dead fisherman comes out the bottom of the boat into Richard Dreyfus' face STILL scares the crap out of me, c) you can't do a proper Massachusetts accent unless you grew up here, Hollywood needs to figure that out already and stop making actors try because it's just painful, d) Mum totally forgot that Robert Shaw gets eaten which is kind of huge overarching plot point and so that was fun when I was all "yeah but remember when he's halfway in Jaws' mouth?" and Mum is all "wait he dies?" and I'm all "WHAT DO YOU MEAN WAIT HE DIES OF COURSE HE DIES HE'S ROBERT SHAW IN JAWS YOU KNEW HE WAS GOING TO DIE FROM THE BEGINNING" and she was all "well I forgot."

VICTORIA SPONGE

The recipe for this came, OF COURSE, from Nigella. 1. After the birthday cake drama of last week, I've sort of been sleeping with Nigella's books under my pillow. 2. If I'm going to bother having an All Britain Baking Weekend, I'm damn well going to use British cooks and British cookbooks. It would be silly to do otherwise. 

The traditional Victoria Sponge is, duh, sponge cake, with jam and whipped cream between the layers, and dusted with powdered sugar. If you are a Wikipedia junkie like me, here is the entry and it's requisite esoteric facts. Nigella's recipe is blissfully easy, a one-mixmaster beauty, and it's possible to make the batter, throw it in the oven, run upstairs and take your third shower of the day because it's 80 MILLION DEGREES OUTSIDE and be back downstairs in time for it to be golden and done in the pans. 

Luckily, the cats don't care that when you pull the cake out of the oven
the only items of clothing on your body are oven mitts.

Now. A note on the filling. Under "normal Victoria Sponge" circumstances, I would have OF COURSE used whipped cream. (I consider "normal Victoria Sponge" circumstances to be a large garden and/or tea party where there are at least 8 people in attendance, and nobody has any stupid dietary restrictions like "I'll just have a sliver oh no that's too much" or "Just give me the top half of that slice, the bit without the whipped cream." Under these circumstances it would be totally acceptable to used whipped cream because the majority of the cake would be eaten in a short period of time, and therefore the whipped cream would not do what whipped cream does best, unattended, in hot weather: dissolve into cream-laced-water and turn your cake into a sodden mess.) However, this cake was going to the library, and that meant that it had to be able to sit in the break room, outside the fridge, for a good few hours, without dying. SO. 

What looks like whipped cream but is not whipped cream and will hold up like a CHAMPION? Why, Boiled Frosting of course! Now, there may be a few out there who have just fainted out of sheer horror. I'll give you a moment to collect yourselves . . . But under the circumstances it seemed like the best possible option. I needed something fluffy, sweet, and light. Something that would PAIR with the jam and cake rather than OVERWHELM them (like a buttercream for example). Something that would be able to hold up an entire 9-inch-diameter sponge cake for longer than 10 minutes. Granted, the sweetness was a source of concern for a while; it's a lot sweeter than whipped cream, even sweetened whipped cream, and I ended up holding back a bit on the sugar, and using jam that had only fruit juice in it, hoping that it would all balance out in the end.

So. Victoria Sponge! Super easy, super fun, super pretty, SUPER BRITISH.

ps OF COURSE the jam was Strawberry. I mean. Do you have to ask?


And now some pictures of potatoes:

SAUSAGES AND MASH

Sausages and mash was the first thing that came to mind when I was figuring out what to make. But I decided to go all Heston Blumenthal and do DECONSTRUCTED Sausages and Mash. No, not to the extent that I filled freeze-dried potato skins with pork-infused air or anything, but to the extent that what I made was not a mound of mashed potatoes with a mound of sausages on top. What I made was Oven-Roasted Potatoes with lots of rosemary, olive oil, and sea salt, Grilled Onions, and Grilled Veggie Sausage.The result was less stodgy, much more fragrant, and allowed me to break in my brand-spanking new Grill Pan.

The Carrot Slaw, incidentally, was going to be something completely different. It was going to be a Watercress and Sugar Snap Pea Salad with Lemon Olive Oil dressing, but when it came time to make it, Mum was all "what about those carrots you made a few days ago those were delicious" and I was all "what you mean that desperate five minute empty fridge salad I made for you when I realised all we had in the crisper was half a bag of julienned carrots and a lot of mustard?" and she was all "yeah I loved that" and I was all " . . . well . . . ok then."

And now for Pudding . . . 

Here's another Wikipedia entry for you: ETON MESS.

The making of this was rendered entirely possible and entirely delicious by the farmstand up the road which, as of this weekend, has THE BEST WILD STRAWBERRIES ON THE EAST COAST. I'm not kidding.

Eton Mess is Meringue, Whipped Cream, and (traditionally) Strawberries.

I'm beginning to understand why it's lasted as long as it has.

Meringues, incidentally, SUPER EASY AND SUPER FUN TO MAKE.

I will be doing a lot of them this summer. They are so light and fluffy and really require minimal work. You can even watch the World Cup at the same time as you are beating the egg whites. 

 Plus it's SO MUCH FUN to make little poofy cloud mounds on a baking sheet.

I was worried that I'd burnt them initially. They went brown a lot faster than I was expecting, and I had a small panic attack that I'd burnt them and (again) wasted a ton of eggs. 

However, I am incredibly happy to report that they were NOT burnt, and indeed remained gooey and marshmallowy on the inside, which is exactly what a good meringue is supposed to be. 

So I didn't have to sleep in the barn. Which was nice. 

The assembly might be the best part, actually. It's literally one, two, three, and done. I'm SO going to use this for dinner parties later this month, and just have a trey of meringues and a bowl of whipped cream and a bowl of strawberries and let everyone do it themselves. It's so much fun that way. 

A Monday-morning conversation between me and the woman who runs the farmstand up the road: 

Woman: Oh, hi, it's you again!

Me: Hi, yeah, I came for more strawberries.

Woman: You got a pint on Saturday, right? 

Me: Yeah. 

Woman:  . . . 

And thus begins, dear reader, what I am henceforth calling "The Summer of Wild Strawberries" or "The Summer Where Beetle Dies (Happily) of Strawberries." 

There are worse ways to go.