Silicone: Bad for Boobs, Good for Cakes

On Sunday, in addition to seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean: Sexy Fishmen with Bonus Piratical Chow Yummy-Fat" (what? that’s not what it’s called?) with my culinary friend E., I went to an Actual Social Gathering.

My newish neighbors in the next building had a barbecue and invited everyone. Not a lot of people showed (my apartment complex consists of three buildings with nine units each, spread out across several acres of woodland, and populated, at least it seems, by introverts who all have different schedules), but I was glad I went because it gave me a reason to experiment.

I broke out the three silicone molds that I’d splashed out for at Chef Rubber while I was in Vegas. Chef Rubber serves all the Vegas chefs as well as thousands more through online sales, and I would highly recommend them if you’re a home baker looking to get a bit more fancy-pantsed. They’re a little expensive, but their stuff works, and isn’t it better to buy a $16 mold that works than a $5 one from Bed Bath and Bupkis that turns out lousy product until you finally give up and sell it at a garage sale for 50 cents?

I speak from experience here. When I read about chef after chef raving about silicone (or silicon... whatever... the flexible wiggly stuff that comes in pretty colors), I tried a few different molds from places like Bed Bath and Bupkis. They were horrible. Cakes got burnt on the outside but were still raw in the middle. They were impossible to clean. Everything stuck to them. I decided chefs were getting some kind of kickback by recommending these monstrosities to naive home bakers.

Then, when I got into the bakeshops at school and especially on externship, where my main chef was Fleximold-obsessed, I noticed there was an incredible difference in professional v. home grade silicone. Cakes, financiers, muffins, cheesecakes, mousses, ice creams, panna cotta, cookies... you name it, we fleximolded it, all with stunningly perfect results every time.

That’s actually what inspired my first trip to Chef Rubber. The black fleximold, full sheet tray molds of the highest grade, which we use in the bakeshops, are $70 and up, and, quite frankly, impractical for the home baker, as few have an oven big enough to fit them. But the second grade silicone, which is still leap years better than the Bed Bath and Bupkis variety, is just $16 for 10-18 shapes on a sheet and you can fit two sheets on most home oven-sized trays.

So, that’s my pro-silicone pitch. If you’ve tried the home grade silicone baking stuff and came away angry and frustrated, get thee to Chef Rubber, spend $20 and get happy again.

Thinking about my extern chef’s Fleximold-obsession reminded me also of his fetish for repurposing random things, like turning packaging material into cheesecake molds or pieces of cardboard into stencils to cut supports for chocolate showpieces. It’s something I notice most pastry chefs do, as well as make furtive late-night runs to Home Depot to stock up on exotic hardware and PVC pipes. (Most of our jocund stencils at school are sheets of decorative radiator covers, and der Erlkonig keeps a traffic cone handy for helping students learn to make croque en bouche.)

So, with that in mind, I’d like to urge you to get bronchitis. Or, if you’re not ready to commit to a couple weeks of coughing, go for a milder infection, anything that requires getting a prescription for cough medicine. Then, take your Rx to your nearest Target and they will give you the med in a bottle with a neat little top that fits perfectly with the supercool little plastic syringe they also give you.

How cool is this little fella? It has teaspoons and tablespoons and mLs marked on its side, it’s super easy to clean and it is perfect for, say, squirting just the right amount of booze-laced simple syrup onto a mini-savarin.

I love my little plastic syringe so much that I’m thinking of getting bronchitis again just so I can bring home another one.

Anyway, I whipped up (not literally... mustn’t aerate the egg whites!) the financier recipe I stole from the fancy-pantsiesed of the fancy-pantsed restaurants I rotated through while on externship. It was the one restaurant where the chef made a big deal about not letting me take any photographs or even see any of his recipes (at all the other outlets, the pastry chefs were usually very encouraging, or at least obliging, of me snapping pix and copying recipes). He used to call down from his office every day and ask the sous chef if I had a camera with me. Please. I really wanted him to accuse me directly of stealing his stuff so that I could say "Actually, I don’t want your recipes. I have better ones," but he never confronted me.

As an aside, he was French.

Of course, given his attitude, I had to steal a recipe. I took a couple surreptitious photos, too, including the one I posted of Boy Wonder plating, but I particularly liked the financier recipe because it was easier than the one I learned at school.

When I make it though, I add salt. You have to. Just a pinch, but if you don’t, it tastes like nothing but the albumin of egg whites. The salt brings out the almond and the sugar. The French chef never added salt to any of his stuff, which is why I wasn’t particularly tempted to steal more recipes.

Anyway, after baking off a few dozen each of the three different shapes on Saturday night, on Sunday morning I soaked the mini savarin shapes in straight Frangelico (yum) and the mini-flan shapes in a syrup of equal parts concentrated mulberry juice, vodka and simple syrup. This was my first time using the mini-flan shapes for something other than panna cotta, and I didn’t expect the batter to rise quite so much during baking. I sliced off a couple tops to make a neat shape, then decided I liked the upended, untrimmed shape better.

It’s rustic.

(Another aside, and kind of an in-joke in the kitchens and bakeshops I’ve experienced so far: whenever something doesn’t turn out quite perfect, just call it rustic and suddenly your uneven dice or crooked apple slices are authentic.)

Right before walking over the soiree, I dusted the banquette-shaped chocolate financiers with cocoa powder and the mulberry-vodka soaked doozies with just a little confectioners sugar. I finished the savarin with just a star-shaped dot of freshly whipped cream and a raspberry. Then I took this photo (sorry about the bad lighting):

Nothing fancy and remarkably easy. They won rave reviews. I particularly liked the texture of the Frangelico-raspberry one, as the soft, ripe fruit and whipped cream melted on the tongue and the booze-soaked financier seemed surprisingly light (the mulberry ones felt heavy, maybe because they were so big, and the chocolate ones tasted dry to me, though they were the crowd favorites. What can I say, they were chocolate).

When I was cautioning parents about which ones had alcohol in them so that I wouldn’t be responsible for intoxicating the assorted toddlers and grade schoolers running about, one of my neighbors said "does everything you bake have booze in it or what?"

What part of pastry pirate don’t you understand?

While I’m on the topic of pirates, without revealing anything, I will say I was surprised by the new "Pirates" movie... while I saw several of the plot "twists" a mile off, I was thrown for a loop by a few others, and was particularly surprised by how dark the movie was, especially for something heavily marketed toward kids. I avoided reading any reviews before I went, so maybe everyone knows this, but I thought the ending in particular was pretty ballsy, especially coming from Disney, which after all bills itself as "The Happiest Place on Earth." The extended Depp-in-the-Actor’s-Studio bit in the middle was also, dare I say, shockingly avant-garde for the Mouse Kingdom.

I thought the movie was too long (jeez, it took Frodo and Sam less time to find Mordor and throw the damn ring back into the fires of Mount Doom) and, in typical Bruckheimer fashion, way too many things blew up or exploded or went bang. But I was also a bit emotional at certain points (probably not the ones you’d imagine... I was quite fond of that Kraken).

This was also another good Keira Knightley turn. I like that she’s almost always believable, strong and smart in her movies (I never thought I’d say this after the 1995 BBC series, but she’s my favorite onscreen Elizabeth Bennett... rent the "Pride and Prejudice" with her if you haven’t seen it). And yes, she’s beautiful, but in a more natural way than, say, Hannah Montana or the other bleach blond wenches I see on the cover of a lot of preteen mags.

Oh, and regarding the other performances in "Pirates," I just have to say that with or without tentacles, barnacles and unfortunate facial hair, Stellan Skarsgard, Bill Nighy and Chow Yun-Fat can join the crew of my ship any time.

I’ll supply the rum.