You may have noticed that I recently joined the FoodBuzz Featured Publishers program.  One thing I get out of it is a chance for a little extra exposure, but since joining, I’ve heard about various opportunities to write special posts for various causes.  These “Top 9 Takeovers” are events where Foodbuzz asks all their Featured Publishers to post on a theme.  Then, for one day only, all the Top 9 posts reflect the theme.  This time around, it’s banana splits!

Electrolux and Kelly Ripa are partnering with Foodbuzz to raise money for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund (OCRF).  According to the OCRF, ovarian cancer is the 5th leading cause of cancer death among women in the US.  Because symptoms are rarely matched with ovarian cancer, most women (81%) aren’t diagnosed before the cancer has spread.  The OCRF’s mission is to fund research to better detect and ultimately find a cure for ovarian cancer.  When ovarian cancer is detected and treated early, the five-year survival rate is greater than 92%.

Just for writing this post, they’ll donate another $50 to the Fund.  If you want to help out, visit Kelly Confidential and build your own banana split.  For each one you do (up to one per day), they’ll donate another $1 to the OCRF.

I’m not always a dessert guy, but this opportunity piqued my interest.  I wanted to create a banana split that was a little different from what you’d get at your corner ice cream shop.  I thought about the tropics, and I thought about Elvis.  I thought about bananas foster and pad thai.  It’s not traditional, but it was tasty.

I started with the defining element: a split banana.  Some small scoops of vanilla ice cream went on top, then I drizzled the whole thing with a brown butter caramel sauce, made super simply by browning some butter, adding in brown sugar, then a little cream to smooth it out.  The wackiest element is the dry peanut butter.  I made this fluffy powder by combining some creamy, natural peanut butter with tapioca maltodextrin (TMD is available on Amazon).  It’s pretty cool stuff, when you put the ultra-light peanut butter powder in your mouth it instantly dissolves into that sticky, peanut buttery taste and texture.  Then, feeling a little inspiration from pad thai, I grated some lime zest over the whole thing.  The color is great, but the citrus flavor also brightens up and enlivens the dish.

I only had two bananas, so I made one for me and one for my wife.  I think if I did it all again I’d add even more lime zest… or maybe squeeze some lime juice over the top.

Some facts and statistics taken from the OCRF page.  I have not and will not receive any monetary payment from FoodBuzz as a direct result of this post, but I do have a chance to be featured in the Top 9 on Monday, July 19th.

My wife made baklava the other day to bring in to a potluck at her office.  I’ve had so many soggy, over-sweetened, stale pieces of baklava that I wasn’t so sure of it at first.  One bite later I was a convert.  It was light, flaky, and had just enough sweetness.  The triple-threat combination of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts really elevated it.  Go get some phyllo dough and make this (she used Alton Brown’s recipe).

First, to update from previous posts. The chef’s knife that I won has been working out fantastically.  The edge is sharp, and the weight of the knife has been a welcome addition to all my cutting.  It certainly came in handy over the gustatory celebration known as Thanksgiving.

I had a great seasonal recipe published on a local site, featuring more delicious sweet potatoes.  I’ll leave it as a tease now, but I’ll be posting a copy (with links to the original post) very soon.  This is one to bookmark and share with your friends for the holidays and any time you find great sweet potatoes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, chocolate has been taking over my life.  First it was getting involved with Dan Schreiber.  At some point I started noticing a small, artisan, bean-to-bar chocolate maker out of Somerville, MA–Taza Chocolate.  They’re on Twitter (@tazachocolate), and apparently if you’re in the area, they offer tours of their facility and have a Chococycle that they pedal to local markets and events.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of great chocolate makers out there.  One way that Taza distinguishes themselves is by putting their values in the forefront of what they do.  Their chocolate is not merely fair trade, but Direct Trade.  They work directly with the people who grow their vital raw material–theobroma cacao.  Not only do they pay them more generously than fair trade standards require, but they work with them to ensure they are using organic, sustainable growing practices.  So far, all their chocolate (other than a recent limited release) has used chocolate from a single coop in the Dominican Republic.  In addition to holding their suppliers to high standards, they work for sustainability and eco-friendliness in their own operations, reusing, recycling, and composting wherever possible.  They even work with a local organization to help keep their community green.

Their process is very manual, using vintage machinery that they put a lot of love into.  At the end of the line, the chocolate is wrapped by hand.  Their bars are sealed with a label that has a number corresponding to the batch of chocolate your bar is from.  On Taza’s website, you can put in this number and see all the details of where everything in the bar came from, when it was made, even the signature of the cacao grower the beans came from.  Click the image on the right of one of the bars I had to see all the details for batch #218.

When you unwrap one of these bars, you’re greeted by a shiny bar of dark chocolate.  Each section snaps loudly as you make your way through the bar.  The chocolate has texture, character, owing to the hand-hewn stone grinders they use at Taza.  Pressing it to the roof of your mouth, it slowly melts and the flavors of this 80% dark chocolate unfold with delicious notes of fermented flavors, a surprising brightness (acidity?) and unexpected tropical fruit flavors, like banana.  Before having real artisan-made chocolate, I never experienced chocolate like this.

Their other primary product is Mexican Chocolate, sold in adorable disks pressed with the company name and hand-wrapped in pairs.  They are all 55% cacao, since they are intended for making drinking chocolate, though they are tasty on their own.  For these decadent disks, they offer several flavors on top of their cacao puro, including classic flavors like vanilla, cinnamon, and guajillo chile.  They also offer, for the slightly more adventurous, a yerba maté infused chocolate.  If you’ve enjoyed the bitter South American beverage before, it’s a really neat combination.

Now, I mentioned drinking chocolate, not hot chocolate.  The recommended recipe is one disk to 6-8 ounces of milk, or water if you want to be traditional.  This elixir is intense.  If you love chocolate, this will change your life.  If you snack on the dark stuff every once in a while, and you think it might be too much, share it with a friend.

One of the typical ways that people all over the world enjoy this decadent beverage–from cafes and street carts in Spain and Mexico, to chocolate mexicano advocates like Rick Bayless in his Chicago restaurant, Xoco–is with churros.  I remember having churros in my high school cafeteria, but if you’ve never had them they are essentially fluted tubes of fried dough.  They are often dusted with sugar, maybe cinnamon, and if you’re going over the top, like Bayless does, rolled with finely ground cacao nibs.  Warm churros, with their crunchy exterior and (usually) softer, interior, are delicious on their own, but this classic combination is a winner.  The way the fluted edges hold just enough chocolate to soften them ever-so-slightly is a testament to why this is a lasting match.

As long as you’re not afraid of piping dough into hot frying oil, churros are easy to make.  Most recipes I’ve found make a dough that is too hard to pipe out of anything I have–most churros are extruded from large metal churreros, not plastic piping bags that most of us have access to.  The traditional dough is similar to pâte à choux (you know, the stuff eclairs & cream puffs are made from) without eggs  or butter.  Boil oil, sugar, and water, then turn off the heat, dump in flour and stir, stir, stir.  Bayless’ recipe is available from StarChefs.com (and probably elsewhere).  Since it was way too thick to pipe with my jury-rigged zip-top-bag-with-the-corner-cut (I do screw on a star tip), I added a couple eggs, which softened up the dough enough to allow for precise piping.  Pipe it into hot oil (watch out for splashing), and cook until lightly browned.  Watch the oil temperature though.  If it’s too high, the insides won’t cook enough, and I’ve heard that if it’s too low, they will explode as the outsides will set before the moisture inside has a chance to escape.

If you’re having visions of drinking delicious hot stone-ground chocolate, explore Taza’s online store or ask around at local stores.  In the C-U area, I found some of the Mexican chocolate disks at Art Mart in Urbana.  I’ll be hosting a give-away of some Mexican chocolate disks (and maybe an additional surprise), but it won’t end until after the New Year (expect details in the next week), so if you want some before the holidays, go ahead and order some.

Disclosure: Taza sent me some free samples of their products (see below), with no request or expectation of a review, positive or negative.  I have since bought my own chocolate from them, beyond what they sent, which is why I have some to give away. I like the chocolate and believe in their mission and their quality, which is why I’m spreading the love.

I was always skeptical of sweet potato pie.  I’m not sure why.  I’d say it was the idea of vegetables in my dessert, but I got over that for the delicious Indian dessert made with carrots cooked down in milk, gajar ka halva*.  I had it at a few different restaurants, still just trying a bite of my wife’s pie selection, since I didn’t want to commit to a whole slice.  I liked it.  It usually had a blend of spices similar to pumpkin pie, and a texture, well, a lot like pumpkin pie.  Some were bland, some were dry, and most had horrible crusts.

Pie crust is hard to get perfect all the time.  I’ve made some really good ones and some less-than-stellar examples of crust, but if nothing else they all tasted good.  The crust that went into this pie was a simple 3-2-1 ratio (as codified by Michael Ruhlman in his book, appropriately titled Ratio) of flour to butter to water.  I won’t go into the gory details of pie crust particulars as there are plenty of other people who can do it very well, like local food lover Anna Barnes in her Smile Politely piece Perfecting Pumpkin Pie.  Ruhlman also gives a lot of great tips in Ratio, and if you love to cook, I highly recommend this book.

The pie crust was initially made for Halloween night, as my wife and I dressed up as Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd from the 2007 Tim Burton musical film.  If you haven’t seen the movies or seen the stage musical, Mrs. Lovett is known for making little meat pies (possibly the worst pies in London) out of Mr. Todd’s unfortunate customers.  Not being a demon barber myself, I made cute little apple pies perfect for two people (or one glutton).  I didn’t remember to take pictures of those pies, but they were cute and delicious (probably the best pies in CU).  If nothing else, we won the costume contest at the party we went to, thanks to my wife’s expert costume-making skills.

I froze the rest of the pie dough, until one day I found myself in possession of two largish sweet potatoes that I had gotten from the farmers’ market.  For whatever reason, sweet potato pie sprung into my mind and I scoured the web for recipes.  I rarely give about.com much attention, but this time it seemed like the best recipe I could find was there, titled Mississippi Sweet Potato Pie.  I sliced the sweet potatoes and boiled them until soft, then (mostly) followed the recipe.  I reduced the sugar, increased the cinnamon, and added a little bit of some of my favorite fall spices like ginger and cloves.  I mixed it up with my immersion blender and got my crusts ready.

The recipe says two pies, but I didn’t believe it.  I think I was just in denial because I could only find one pie pan.  I made one pie and had some of the filling left over.  It wasn’t quite enough for a whole deep pie, but it was enough for a tart!  Thankfully, there was more than enough pie dough to go around, and so it went.  The pie turned out delicious and creamy.  It was moist and sweet, but lots of flavors coming through from the spices.  We’re still working on the last of the pie (which was unanimously loved by all in the house), and the tart will be sold tomorrow at our daughter’s school in their fine arts bake sale.  Since I mentioned it earlier, there’s already at least one person interested.  Here’s a sneak preview of what the buyer can expect.

* I know you might have been thinking pumpkin pie, but pumpkin’s actually a fruit!  I’m sure I didn’t know that as a child, but hey, it was covered in whipped cream.

One of my favorite pastries is the croissant.  They can be found at any coffee shop and pretty much any bakery.  I love the buttery, flaky layers that wrap around and around, but many croissants end up disappointing me.  They are either stale, not done in the middle, or not done enough on the outside.  I like the browned exterior bits the best, tasting almost like a crunchy version of a really richly browned pie crust.

I’ve only made croissants a few times, since it’s a lot of preparation.  The process itself isn’t difficult, just time-consuming.  As I learned this time, it really shouldn’t be rushed.  The recipe I follow is the small-batch version from the Professional Pastry Chef cookbook.  I highly recommend this book as a tome of great knowledge on just about any dessert from meringue to pastry cream, truffles to napoleons.

This batch of croissants didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked, but the basic idea is there, and despite their appearance they are delicious.  These are definitely not the best croissants I’ve made, but they meet what I like in a croissant.  They have a buttery and crispy flaky crust on the outside with just enough soft center to give a contrast.

First you knead butter with a little flour and lemon juice to soften it and give it a chance to stand up to the heat before melting out all over the place.

Next, make a pretty typical yeast dough.  It’s a softer dough than that for bread, and not kneaded as much so it stays much more tender.

Then you roll the dough out a bit bigger than the butter and place the butter on top with the corners of the butter square aligned with the sides of the dough square.  Note how my butter and dough are nowhere near square.

Enclose the butter in dough by bringing up the dough corners and pinching.  This is the first important part.  I always feel like if I don’t close it up right here that all the butter will run out at the slightest increase in temperature.  I think this is one of my first screw-ups, since I left some air pockets in there that ended up forming defects in the finished product.

Now roll it out into a “rectangle”.

Then you do a series of “turns” where you fold it like a brochure.  One third folds in from the left, then one third folds in from the right.  Bring it all together and turn it 90 degrees.  You’ll then roll it out and “turn” it a couple more times.

We’ve now created a laminated (layered) dough.  You start with 3 layers (dough, butter, dough), but in making the turns you create many.  After the first, you have 9.  After the second, 27, then 81, then 243, then 729.  The butter separates the layers of dough and the water within the butter creates steam which puffs it up.  This is how puff pastry gets its puff.

Once we’ve made the dough, it needs to rest in the fridge, but needs to be wrapped tightly, because if the dough dries out, things will crack and break and our butter will escape.

Once it’s rested, you’ll let it come up in temperature a bit, then roll it out, cut strips, then triangles for croissants or rectangles for pain au chocolat.  Roll them up, brush with a beaten egg, bake in a hot oven and try to wait until they’re cool to enjoy any time of day.

My problem was in rushing the process.  There are supposed to be more waiting periods of chilling and/or resting the dough.  I think it would have helped my croissants get bigger.  I also cut them too small, but that just means it’s easier to have more than one!