Boeuf à la Mode with Pumpkin Gorgonzola Flans

Boeuf à la Mode is the French version of roast beef . . . a way to make a less expensive cut of meat elevated. This version is from Around My French Table.

The beef was placed in our dutch oven overnight with wine, carrots, celery, and fresh herbs wrapped in a bundle. I had to send children out in the dark with a flashlight in the rain to collect the herbs – I would have done this, but they got so extremely excited about this adventure that I didn’t have the heart to say no. The beef is turned now and then the next day. About three hours before dinnertime, the beef is removed and browned in a skillet while the wine sauce is strained and reduced by half. More seasonings are added, and to the pan where the beef browned is added a half-cup of the wine sauce, four anchovies (!) and a little tomato paste, until the anchovies melt. I was enthralled by the addition of the anchovies for umami. What would it taste like? A tiny bit of cognac was added for depth, as well. Then the whole thing was put back in the dutch oven, and into the oven.

While I did take pictures of the beef, I did not notice that the batteries were almost dead, and every last picture was so blurry as to be unrecognizable. Still, you’ve seen roast beef, right? It was very good. Perfectly melty fork-tender, and if you listened to your tastebuds, they picked up all sorts of complicated notes. I was thinking about our recent “Meals in Minutes” roast beef, and I decided I was glad to have both recipes for obviously different times and purposes. I do have one note-to-self here: this dish longed for some little red potatoes added when the whole shebang gets put in the oven. There is plenty of time for them to cook, and while we definitely ate the sauce, potatoes would’ve been just the thing. Or colorful fingerling potatoes if they were available.

Also from this book, we made Pumpkin Gorgonzola Flans because it is October and cold!!! This was a quick-to-put-together little concoction of pumpkin fluffed in the food processor with seasonings, ladled into ramekins with gorgonzola and theoretically walnuts (we roasted up some pecans because that’s what Clara is safe for), and cooked in a water bath (with, oddly enough, a paper towel):




As I mentioned, my batteries were about to die, but here is a fuzzy pic of a finished flan:

Don’t you wish I’d photoshop my pictures like other food bloggers? I should totally get rid of the pumpkin splotches on the ramekin!

Both Sophia and Clara helped me to get this dinner to the table, bless them. Sophia even found the energy somewhere to help the little girls do a “Sugar Saturday”. We had found some actual Key Limes at our local Asian food store, so we picked up gluten-free graham crackers as well and the girls made Key Lime Pie:

They’d never made pie before, and we all found their first attempt at a pie delicious. It was based on the recipe found in The Essential Baker, just altered to be gluten free.




  

Araminta’s Solo Triple Berry Cupcakes

When making up the grocery list this week, Araminta pointed out that if we continue cooking consecutively through Cupcakes: Luscious bakeshop favorites from your home kitchen , we will be making berry cupcakes in, say, November. Hmmm. Re-plan; she’s right about that! So I picked up lovely fresh berries, but then got slammed with a tidal wave of errands on Saturday, not particularly negotiable, and Lucinda’s allergies flared horribly. The cupcakes we’d chosen were complicated, too, since they were filled, and used cream cheese frosting, which we’d not done before.

No problem for Araminta! Bravely prepping as I head out the door:




And I arrived home to find a beautiful batch of cupcakes:




The vanilla cupcakes were everything a cupcake should be: moist and flavorful, just perfect. They had a raspberry filling, and the cream cheese frosting was delicious as well. I have to apologize for my blurry shot again, but had to show you a cut-open cupcake:



Congratulations to Araminta on a really professional cupcake! 



 

Chocolate Cupcakes

The one we’d all been waiting for! Chocolate cupcakes with three different recommended buttercream frostings to choose from. This was the third recipe in line for our cookthrough of Cupcakes: Luscious bakeshop favorites from your home kitchen , and the girls chose to make the buttercream coffee-flavored.

By now, we’ve gotten the buttercream technique nailed, and again the results were super silky and really fabulous. Clara discovered the bit that made the difference: even though we have a very nice hand mixer with a good balloon whisk attachment (and we tried it with both the balloon and the regular whisk attachments), this really needs to be done in the stand mixer.

The paragraph that described the cupcakes in the recipe book said, “ . . . their soft, moist texture [is] from a simple hand-mixing method”. Well, we used the simple hand mixing method, but these puppies were dry and much more like a brownie than a cupcake. The batter didn’t even halfway fill the 12 cupcake cups. Kind of a disappointment, although they all disappeared quickly as usual!
Once again we have Araminta’s distinctive style:




I tried decorating a couple this week, grating a bit of bitter chocolate on top:



And Lucinda hit hers with a tsunami of girliness as usual:

Yellow Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Our second cupcake making Saturday with filled with problems and interruptions! We were strangely out of eggs – strangely because our ducks keep us well-supplied in general, but we’d been having a lot of morning scrambles, and huevos rancheros was on the menu last week. So a run to the grocery first thing in the morning for cocoa powder, another run later for eggs, that sort of thing. It was so disjointed I forgot to take pics!

I will report, though, that the frosting (same recipe as last week with the addition of chocolate) worked very well this week. The thing about doing buttercream in this way – sugar and egg whites in a double boiler before whipping – is that the end result does seem very light and silky. Not necessarily better than a thicker buttercream, but good to have in the arsenal when light and silky would be a better option. The cupcake itself, again, was a pretty stock yellow cake. Good, but not exceptional.

Araminta and Lucinda, when left undirected for decorating, have their own styles.

Araminta’s cupcakes:




And Lucinda’s somewhat ebullient style:

First Cupcake Saturday

Araminta and Lucinda were ready bright and early to have our first cupcake lesson, but sadly, it hadn’t occurred to me to get the butter out the night before. Ah well. It was softened pretty quickly and we began our classic cookthrough of Cupcakes: Luscious bakeshop favorites from your home kitchen with the very first cupcake – vanilla with vanilla buttercream frosting.

Araminta mixing the dry ingredients. The girls need to wear nitrile gloves to handle this wheat and dairy, and Lucinda isn’t able to be near the flour until it’s incorporated into the moist ingredients.

Lucinda mans the mixer

The cupcakes turned out a wee dry, but had a good flavor. I took two bites to check :-). The consensus was for girlie decorations on the piped-on frosting.

The only thing that didn’t work for us in this recipe was the method for making buttercream. We consulted our in-house expert, Clara, who looked over the recipe and said that she’d tried that method twice and didn’t have success herself at it. Sugar and egg whites are heated to pasteurize the raw egg, then this mixture is beaten until stiff peaks form. After over a half hour of beating, we finally gave up at the soft peak stage and felt grateful we’d achieved that! We’ll give the recipe one more try next Saturday, then if we have similar results, we’ll move to other methods of doing buttercream. 

All in all, a good solid vanilla cupcake. It was tasty but fairly utilitarian.