Someone's in the Kitchen with Pirate

Mud season is upon us at Bullwinkle Ranch. Instead of being at or near full capacity, the hotel has had one or two rooms -- or none -- booked the last couple weeks, aside from a few small conferences. It's deathly quiet, and the Fancy-Pantsed restaurant, as well as the coffee shop, is closed till the middle of the month.



While I've had to take a few three- and four-day weekends (unpaid) so Chef can keep his labor costs down, when I have been at work, I've been prepping a huge county-wide black-tie event later this month (dessert buffet with nine items for 400 people done entirely by yours truly!).



I've also been working on the new menu. Chef wants to completely revise the desserts at Fancy-Pants, and has pretty much given me free reign. Yesterday, I plated a couple ideas for him (we were the only two in the kitchen most of the day):







This is the one I'm happiest with: Chocolate-Hazelnut Molten Cake with cinnamon ice cream, hazelnut cookie and cappuccino ganache. I think visually it's the most complete, the flavors are good and it's got nice textural variety. One thing I like about my molten cake, stolen with some adaptations from one I made in Vegas, is that it's not raw in the center. It's liquid, yes, but that's because when I pipe in the batter, I insert a ganache disc that's hard at room temperature but perfectly gooey right out of the oven.



From a service perspective (something Chef is rightly concerned about), it takes seven minutes from the time the ticket comes in to plate up. The trickiest part is scooping the ice cream so it's on the plate but not melting when the cake comes out of the oven.







I'm still tinkering with this recipe. It's a Lavender Cheesecake with lemon reduction and strawberries macerated with St. Germaine, an elderflower liqueur that both Chef and the Food and Beverage manager are crazy for. Personally, I find it too sweet (which is saying something!) but hey, I know who signs my paychecks, so I'm trying to find uses for it. The problems with this dish as I see it are the viscosity of the lemon reduction (I'm trying to avoid using gelatin, but I need to add it to this to make it less runny), the berries (next time I'm quartering them, or even leaving them whole, and standing them up to avoid the "pile of slop" look) and the intensity of the lavender flavor of the cheesecake. I was worried it would be too strong, so I backed off the lavender when making it, but it turned out to be barely discernible.



All that said, look at that quenelle!! I was practicing my quenelles when Chef came over and asked what I was doing. I told him my dirty secret: I suck at quenelles. He said he did too, then proceeded to take my spoon and whipped cream and try his hand. And you know, it wasn't perfect. It wasn't as pretty as mine... though this is about the 2oth one I did.



I will say that watching a leftie quenelle (Chef is also sinister) helped me visualize the right motion and mine improved after his impromptu demo.



Quick tip to the quenelle-challenged... Anyone can quenelle with two spoons, or quenelle something stiff like a forced meat (possibly the least appetizing food category name I know). But if you want to quenelle one-handed something soft like whipped cream, put your spoon in hot water and semi-freeze the whipped cream. Don't freeze it really, just get it as cold as possible. As you quenelle, drop each one onto a Silpat-lined sheet pan or parchment-lined plate or cake pan. If you screw up, just scrape it off with a spatula and start again. Then put them in the freezer. Again, don't actually freeze them, but let them chill just long enough that they get a bit stiff. Then using two offset spatulas, transfer them onto the cheesecake or plate or wherever they're going and voila, you'll look like you can quenelle perfectly everytime.



That's what I do.



And finally, here's Carrot Cake with cream cheese frosting, apple-cumin butter, ginger ice cream and pineapple chip. Chef didn't like the plating... he wants it on a square plate because the cake itself is round, which I understand. But other than that, he liked it. In an earlier version, I had the apple cumin butter inside the cake, but a few test subjects freaked at having cumin in a dessert, so I decided to move it onto the plate. Chef disagreed, saying he liked the apple-cumin butter, but I talked him out of it, reminding him that he and I loved, loved, loved the fennel ice cream I made... and no one else would go near it, so the two of us wound up eating it. A dessert that doesn't sell because it frightens customers isn't much of a dessert, you know?

He liked the other two as well, and another one that I didn't get a photo of because I'm still working on certain aspects... it's a doozy, though. Chef said it would be a "rock star" on the menu, but you'll just have to wait to hear what it is. Two words: whisky sabayon. And that's just the start of it.