Il Forno

Mole Poblano... from scratch.

I love spending hours cooking in my kitchen, and so nothing could be more self-fulfilling than taking the best part of the day to cook one of those long time-consuming dishes nobody seems to prepare anymore. For once, instead of a tried and tested Italian classic, I decided to give Mole Poblano, one of Mexico's most notorious dishes a try. About a year ago I had my first taste of mole. It was great, but not enough I wanted to try and make it from scratch myself.

As it often is, laziness got in the way and so I procrastinated until the theme of the new eGullet cook-off was announced. If you haven't yet give those cook-offs a look; IMO a great idea to get a group of people to cook a dish virtually together. (Past themes included classics like Pizza, Fried Chicken and Gumbo.) Guess what the new theme was? Mole clearly! Time to use those tips for mexican chilies sources and get working. Remembering Petra's source tip I was the proud owner of a few bags of Mulatos, Anchos and Pasilla chilies in matter of days (from bottom left corner, clockwise).

Zotter's Chocolate

I always thought that 34 flavours were plenty. Well, clearly that's not the case for everyone. Some people think 50 and more is better. The someone I'm referring to is Austrian chocolate maker Sepp Zotter. I ran across some of his chocolate bars in a local wine shop and became instantly intrigued. The first thing that caught my eye was the packaging. Almost all the front of the package is taken up by pleasantly designed pictures created specifically for each of the chocolate tastes by the Austrian artist Andreas H. Gratze. These little works of art are so nice they almost make me feel like collecting all 50+ of them. What I found even more interesting was the different taste combinations Zotter offers. Some chocolates are a gourmet version of classics, like the milk chocolate cream. Quite a few use the many delicious Austrian spirits distilled from fermented fruit juices. But even more intriguing are the ones offering adventurous taste pairings. Combinations like dark chocolate and pulverised shitake mushroom or Fontina (an Italian cheese) seem quite over the top but the title IMO goes to the chocolate with coffee marinated plums and caramelised bacon (speck). I considered for a while one of these three but decided to go for a less "extreme" pick: I carried home a marzipan and Kirshbrand bar, a pumpkinseed and egg flip one and one with cranberry and thyme.

Pierre Herme's Nutella Tart.

Some cookbooks should come with a warning sticker. I'm not talking about health warnings here though I could see a point sometimes. Something on the lines of "The subject of this cookbook is classified as chemical weapon according to the latest UN report. Probable side effects after ingestion: loss of taste, intense oral pain, excessive sweating, hyperventilation and next-day rectal inflammation." would go very well with The Habanero Cookbook. That's not what I mean though. The warning I have in mind should be somewhat along the lines of "The recipes contained in this book are dangerously delicious and addictive. After trying them your taste will be spoilt forever and you'll become a demanding eater." That's what should have been pasted on the cover of Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme. I've only made two of the recipes in the book and I'm totally hooked: will any other chocolate sweet ever taste the same after this?

40 years of Nutella and a hazelnut spread tasting.

I only recently found out that Nutella turned 40 this year. I've been eating this delicious cream since I was a kid, so I can't deny I was a bit touched by the news. I always thought Nutella-craze to be a rather Italian phenomenon but I discovered I was wrong: take this eGullet thread as an example. I was even more surprised from Pierre Herme's positive comments on Nutella in his Chocolate Desserts. I knew Nutella was nice but after reading these comments I can even eat it with gourmet confidence. So what better occasion than this to look back and Nutella's history, its cult-product status and a little hazelnut spread tasting?

IMBB cake walk: Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte

It took me a little time to decide which recipe to pick up for this edition of "Is my Blog Burning?" hosted by Renee. I was divided whether to take something I had tried before at least once, to avoid possible embarrassing failures, or try a completely new recipe, to make things a bit more interesting. I decided to go for both in a certain sense. I chose a cake I know well, cause it's one of my favourites, but had never baked myself before: Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte better known as Black forest cake. There are loads of versions for this classical cake: the old-fashioned original German one, different modern versions, some with a French touch, some with an American touch... I've even seen a deconstructed one. In this case I stay true to the original German one. Maybe it's a question of being used to it, after all I've been eating this cake at least once a year for more or less the last 30, but I think it still has an edge on the modern versions. I usually got this cake from my parents for my birthday and what started as an almost-necessity, we were living in Germany back then, became a tradition. Finally, after all these years I'd give it a go myself.

Covered in chocolate from head to toe: coffee beans

I have to thank the friend that gave me the little box above as a birthday present. Almost any nut, fruit and cereal, even if great on their own, improve when covered in chocolate... if you like chocolate that is, but I still have to meet someone who doesn't. But chocolate and coffee are a case apart: they seem made for each other. Coffee-flavoured chocolate "beans" (actually bean shaped pieces of chocolate) were always one of my favourites chocolate but I never had real coffee beans (Arabica beans here) covered in chocolate: even better! These ones are sold as "Quick Kick", a rather silly name, in the shops of the Hussel chain. They are marketed under the product line "K's soul food kitchen", which includes different sweets, candies and chocolates which should presumably be good for your mood and/or health. Honestly, when something is so yummy I really don't care if it's good for me or not :-)!

Candied orange peels or how to turn garbage into sweets

Raise your hand if you usually just throw your orange peels away. Who doesn't? It's not like you could eat them. Or is it? When I prepared Sicilian orange and fennel salad I used some nice Spanish untreated oranges. Throwing away the peels seemed a waste. I could have dried them but I still have a big jar of this stuff which I seldom use. And then, as in every classic cartoon, the little light bulb turned on. Candied orange peel! That's what I would do.

A children's favourite for grown-ups: marble cake... enriched

Sometimes I just want to let my memories guide my baking inspiration. For that reason I felt a compelling urge to bake a marble cake. Marble cake is a children classic, at least, judging from my experience, in many European countries. It comes in many different forms and variations but the main division is between home -made, or better mom-made, and commercial version (this version is strangely loved by students :-)). I can't really remember marble cake being baked in our home, except maybe a few times as me and my brother Marcello begun experimenting with baking. Our mom and dad usually went for something a bit more structured when it came to baking sweets, probably marble cake was just too simple. Still I couldn't remove this cake from my memories even if I wanted: loads and loads of birthday party marble cakes are responsible for that. I found a nice "grown up" version of the cake in the Italian version (published by Bibliotheca culinaria) of this French book from Marabout. I just had to try it.

What to do with those fridge rests? Hazelnut-chocolate balls!

As I mentioned In my previous post on Daniela's birthday cake I ended up having more dough than I needed (laying in the freezer) and had all that chocolate intended to make the failed chocolate cigars. They were just taking up space and would have landed into the "what that stuff there?" category very soon. So Sunday evening, while I was busy with a major stock making action (coming soon), I decided to use both to make some chocolate coated biscuits. I just divided the dough (look at the original post for the recipe) into 1 cm wide balls (1/2 in) and baked them for 20 minutes at a moderate 160C(320F), to avoid them loosing shape too much. Once done I let them cool and meanwhile melted the chocolate which I then used to coat them. Apart maybe missing a bit of sugar, they tasted great. I'm actually considering inserting them in next year's Christmas baking list.

Birthday cake... chocolate mousse pie.

At Daniela's request I baked a chocolate pie for her birthday: a chocolate mousse pie adapted from Patricia Lousada's Chocolate. I had done the pie a few years ago for the first birthday we spent together and decided to slightly modify it to make it "darker", which worked great, and tried to make chocolate cigars for the decoration, which did not work at all. This pie has a very intense chocolate flavour, enriched by alcoholic notes. It is fluffiest when just out of the oven, soon afterwards the filling tends to "sit" a bit. We waited a bit and let the pie cool slightly. I find it tastes better: the filling becomes more compact, almost truffle like :-9.

A fine toothpick job: Torta Caprese

This is the final post about our New Year's eve dinner then back to baking.

To properly finish our Italian inspired New Year's Eve dinner I decided to bake one of my favourite cakes, torta caprese or chocolate almond cake from Capri. Capri is, gastronomically speaking, the home of some wonderful lemons: so what better than a strongly lemon flavoured custard to go with the cake? I tried some decoration on the custard, as you can see from the pic above, which was, as you'll see, easier than thought.

Intermezzo

A short post on chocolate while I finish working on a few new baking posts. Now, since I live in Germany's culinary backwaters (willingly and quite happily, to be honest) I'm happy when I get the chance to travel to Berlin and do some food shopping (as well as some sightseeing). Last time, a few weeks ago, I was there for work for about a week and having some free time in the afternoon I finally managed to visit Kadewe and their famous food hall on the 6th floor. I left with a quite full bag containing, between others, a little box of assorted Valrhona chocolate squares. OK maybe for some of you it's no problem getting hold on these chocolates but I left happy as a kid, and looking forward at finally tasting these famous chocolates.

Hoax chocolate chip cookies

Sometimes urban myths can be delicious. I've tried baking one with great results yesterday. The urban myth I'm referring to is the one about the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe. In case you don't know the story, a few years ago an (hoax) e-mail started circulating claiming someone had been charged (more or less unknowingly) 250 dollars for this recipe and decide, as a sort of revenge, to send it through the web. As a result Neiman Marcus was bombarded by e-mails, they denied (and still do) the story. Still to stop the rumours they published their recipe openly on their own web page. Another version of the story claims that the chocolate chip cookie recipe was developed after the whole e-mail hoax case exploded.