A weekend of food

This has been an extra long weekend for me with a whopping four days off in a row. I hardly knew what to do with myself with all that extra time on my hands, so I transferred it into valuable cooking time. Did it ever pay off. I can hardly remember all of the ground we covered this weekend. It has been a really busy weekend bursting with delicious food and, suffice it to say, I REALLY need to hit the gym tomorrow morning.

Thursday didn't include any cooking, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the culinary treat we indulged in. Our Valentine's day gift to each other was an evening at home free of cooking. I really love to cook, but I didn't want to spend the precious couple of hours after work slaving away in the kitchen. All too often P and I do just that and barely have time to acknowledge each other while yawning around our forks at nine o'clock. Neither did we want to spend the evening at an expensive restaurant filled with cliche romance. Instead, we ordered the special Valentine's meal for two from The Red Apron. It was a scrumptious four course meal, highlights being the pumpkin bisque with toasted pepitas and mascarpone cream; papardalle with mushrooms; and (my personal favourite) passion fruit panna cotta.

Friday saw me trekking through Ottawa in search of ingredients to fuel our weekend of food-frenzy, with a hunger-inducing walk from Billings Bridge to Centretown I was certainly ready to eat.

Friday evening we had a couple of P's friends over for dinner and served up a nice cheese platter to start, then some comforting veal sausages with balsamic-onion gravy, brown butter mashed potatoes, lemon-garlic beans and roasted beets. I tried another recipe from Flour for dessert and it was a real hit. It was a pretty simple one, Nutmeg-Spiced Cake with a Rum Buttercream. With memories of the rum-soaked cakes from school, I was a little reticent to add the full amount of rum to the buttercream. After tasting it, I think the full amount in the recipe is probably best. To give a little bit more of a rummy flavour, P and I flambeyed some pineapple chunks in rum and served it on top of the cake. It worked really well with the rest of the cake's flavours.

Saturday was a pretty busy morning of cupcake madness. My uncle had ordered a few dozen cupcakes for an event that afternoon and I hadn't had time to start anything the day before. Everything was going very well. The maple-pecan cupcakes looked pretty sleek and the chocolate with salted caramel cupcakes almost made themselves. I ran into real difficulty with my strawberry shortcakes, though. With my uncle coming in less than half an hour to pick them up, I ran into several issues. I squirted way too much pink colouring into the icing, which became an almost neon nightmare. With no time to whip up another batch of icing and decorate them, I carried on. The icing was a little too thick for the rose piping I intended to do and there wasn't enought to do pretty rosettes on top. So I had to settle with smoothing the icing on freehand and adding a little strawberry to the top. We'll just say these ones were Valentines' day electrified.

Despite the chaos, the taste was bang on for all the cupcakes. Maple-pecan with chunks of pecans inside a white cake laced with cinnamon spice, topped with a creamy maple buttercream and a candied pecan. The chocolate cupcakes were filled with a salty caramel and topped with a chocolate italian buttercream and red sprinkles. The strawberry shortcake cupcakes (not pictured) were made with a tender white cake filled with stewed strawberries, topped with (neon) pink italian buttercream and strawberry.

I'm still not even halfway through the weekend... but I'll skip through a little bit. Saturday morning we cooked up breakfast burritos with spicy eggs, avocados and cheddar, and the evening was accompanied by a sausage, bean and cheddar risotto. Sunday brought with it oatmeal buttermilk pancakes and slow-cooked pulled chicken tacos. Those tacos were a real winner. I'm still drooling over them.

I also had to tackle a few more recipes from Flour and got through a whopping three in two days. We are practically wading through desserts in this house right now.

The first was the Lemon Poppyseed Pound Cake. I had made it a couple of years ago and wasn't quite convinced, but on the second attempt I can understand the appeal. It's a very rich and dense cake with a strong nutty flavour from the poppyseeds. The lemons in it add just the right amount of brightness to it.

Next up was the Good Morning Muffins, which I thoroughly enjoyed. They're jam packed with nutritious ingredients that you forget you're eating a pastry. Filled with zucchini, raisins, pecans, bran, apples and coconut, it's pretty much a full breakfast.

Last one and a real nightmare of a task was the Milky Way Tart. The picture in the cookbook looks absolutely divine, and miles away from the monstrosity I created in my kitchen today. I prepared myself well in advance for this one because you really need to set aside an entire day to factor in the wait times. The chocolate has to be combined with the mousse and then chilled for 8 hours. You have to chill the caramel for 4 hours before using it. Not to mention the wait times for pastry dough, it was a nightmare of logisitcs and planning. But I followed all of those directions to the letter. Pastry chefs would shake their heads in disbelief at my hack-job attempt with that tart.

Now you may recall that I had some difficulty with the pastry dough for the Chocolate Truffle Tart from last week. I figured that it was caused by my freestyling attempt to add hazelnut powder to the dough. After today's pastry catastrophe, I'm shifting the blame to the recipe for this. I made the pastry exactly as directed and waited all the appropriate times. When it came time to roll the dough out, the blasted thing cracked everywhere. The second I tried to lift it into the tart pan, the whole thing just fell apart. I ended up making the most motley patched tart shell - I don't know how many pieces the dough became before I welded it back together in the pan, but it really wasn't pretty.

The patch-work would ultimately be my downfall, as I tried to remove the tart from the pan pieces just started to fall away. And this tart requires stability in the tart shell, above all else because when I added the layer of caramel to the bottom, half of it leaked out of the little holes onto the plate. The chocolate mousse didn't set properly and we basically just slopped the whole onto our plates with a spoon. It was a messy mound of chocolate mousse, caramel and pastry, but it sure was tasty! The coffee flavour in the mousse really helps to balance the sweetness of the milk chocolate. And, despite all of my cursing, the sweet dough was really crisp and delicious. I think I'll need to practise this one a few more times; I certainly wouldn't mind eating the results. But I highly recommend using a different recipe for the pate sucree. I'll definitely be using the one from my school binder for the next attempt.