Sunday, June 3, 2012

After a day spent working on the computer(between doing work for Jordan and looking a recipes-such a surprise to find me doing that, lol), we had dinner at the home of someone Jordan works with. Elizabeth works for the State of Nevada in Carson City and is in charge of emergency planning. She is also originally from a small two in Mexico. So dinner was authentic Mexican food. She served some sort of bean dip and a green salsa with corn chips. For dinner, we had Enchiladas Plaza, a dish apparently original to her home town area in Mexico. She asked me to help her put the meal together as some of it was "a la minute"-at the last minute.

Elizabeth had made home made corn tortillas, which she toasted on a flat hot plate on the stove. She then dipped the corn tortillas in home made red sauce, then fried them. You take them out of the oil, put a spoonful or so of a queso cheese and onion mix, then fold them over. These are served with cooked pork on the side as well as boiled potatoes and carrots that are topped with more queso cheese and yogurt (which takes the place of sour cream). Very tasty! It was a pleasure helping out! I had made Cinnamon Apple Empanadas earlier in the day and brought them with us as a gift. We had some of those for dessert. Everyone enjoys a little sweet at the end of a meal.

Today I tried the banana ice cream I have been reading about. The only ingredient in the "ice cream" is bananas. I kid you not! It's like magic! You slice two bananas into coins, place them in the freezer (for me, that was overnight) until they are frozen solid. Take them out of the freezer and let them sit 5-10 minutes, then put them in a food processor and whooze them around. The texture comes out exactly like ice cream! It's low calorie, dairy free, gluten free, sugar free-can't get much healthier. (Other than not eat at all.) I got the recipe from www.thekitchn.com. There are all sorts of "mix-ins" you can do to change the flavor-Nutella, peanut butter and honey, and strawberries were just some of the options they mention. The "secret" is in freezing the bananas, it changes their structure.





Afterwards, I started making my Dacquoise. The recipe is from Le Cote Basque, a now closed famous restaurant in NYC. A Daquoise is a French layered dessert much like a layer cake but the layers are made with meringue instead of cake. In this recipe, the meringue is flavored with ground almonds and ground hazelnuts, then baked for four hours at 250 degrees.



They look like giant cookies, don't they, lol? Next you make chocolate ganache using 1 cup of heavy cream, 3 oz of milk chocolate and 5 oz of bittersweet chocolate. While the meringue layers and the ganach cool, make the Coffee Buttercream frosting. That consists of simple syrup boiled until it reaches 250 degrees (so it "cooks" the egg whites in the frosting), meringue. unsalted butter and coffee extract. While it is a very time consuming recipe, the taste is worth it!

Next you spread one meringue layer with the ganache, and two with buttercream.



Then stack the three layers-



and finally (almost finally, anyway) frost it all with the coffee buttercream frosting. It needs sliced almonds to complete it, but I will add those later.

The Dacquoise must be refrigerated no less than five hours before serving, but cuts better if you freeze it first, then cut it and let the pieces come to room temperature before eating. A cake fit for a king! (It's a birthday cake, so I guess that qualifies, lol!)



But now it's bedtime. I start a new job in tomorrow and have to be at work at 7am. Nighty-night!