dorm gourmets

Gluten Free Spiced Blueberry Clafoutis

It’s good to be home. I’ve been baking and making like mad, and I’m sure Ellie has too. I’ve returned to my kitchen, my dog, my mom—and this time for longer than one chaotic thanksgiving week. I feel more like myself, and more prepared for the challenges of next semester. And eating this certainly helped—it’s delicious. It’s much more custardy than I expected, and it’s delicious. I added the spices and cooked it very differently than the original recipe, and it tasted much richer and more complex. 

My dog went in for surgery yesterday. I won’t say this helped, but it certainly didn’t hurt. She came through just fine, but we still haven’t been able to see her. She’ll come home tomorrow. I can’t wait.

Blueberry Filling

2 cups frozen wild blueberries (the small tart ones)

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

 1/4 teaspoon ginger

1/8 teaspoon cloves

3 tablespoons honey

Warm the honey, drizzle over the blueberries and toss. Add the cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and toss once more; let them marinate for a bit. Stir to combine every few minutes while you’re preparing the other ingredients. Preheat the oven to 350°.

Custard

1 1/4 cup soy milk
1/3 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
40 grams sweet rice flour
30 grams millet flour

Throw the soy milk, brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, almond extract, salt, and sweet rice flour and millet flour into a blender and puree until the batter resembles crepe batter.

Pour a thin layer of batter onto the bottom of deep-dish pie pan. Put it in the oven and let it bake until the center is firm, and does not jiggle when you shake the pie pan—about nine minutes in my oven. 

Spoon in the honeyed fruit, evenly, over the bottom layer. Pour in the remaining batter.

Bake at 350° until the top is golden brown and set, about 45 minutes to an hour depending on your oven. Let cool, and enjoy with friends and lattes. Or chai, if coffee isn’t your thing.

If you have any suggestions for recipes you’d like us to try, let us know! You can tweet Kristina or submit a recipe, or put it in the ask box! 

Coconut Meringue Sandwiches with Chocolate Ganache

This week has been a challenge for everyone involved. Nothing has been going right, the world has been collapsing, and many tears have been involved. Finals are coming up, and we’re having a rough time all across the campus with balancing everything—friends, finals, projects, group work, and the madness that goes along with a first semester of college winding down.

It stands to reason that in times of stress and heartache we turn to what we know, and what Ellie and I both know is that kitchens are places of joy and togetherness. Right meow we’re gathered around a table with the two of us and three friends (all with our laptops out) sharing stories and memories across our technology. We’re sharing baby pictures, pictures of our parents when they were younger, and stories about the holidays. Christmas is three weeks from today, but it doesn’t feel like it.

So we bake. Tonight we’re making coconut meringue sandwiches with a chocolate ganache, and maybe making crème brulee with the leftover egg yolks. It’s a dorm room kitchen, but we’ve made it ours and we’ve imbued it with our own special something. There are Christmas lights and we’re alternating between the Spice Girls, Mumford & Sons, and Bing Crosby on various laptops.

Everything’s going to be okay. Homework will get done, finals will be passed, and just shy of three weeks from now we’ll all be home with our families celebrating the holidays. We’ll all make it home safely, and we’ll all be relieved to be away from college for a little while. But until then, here’s a recipe to tide us over.

These coconut meringue sandwiches were a delight. Crunchy, nutty, and chocolatey all at once. The bittersweet chocolate offset the sweetness of the meringue, and the crunch of the meringue combined with the ganache was a brilliant textural mix.

Coconut Meringue

3 egg whites

¾ cup of powdered sugar

1 tsp of coconut extract

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees.

Mix the egg whites and the powdered sugar in a double boiler at a low temperature. If you’re like us and don’t read recipes, you can beat the egg whites into stiff peaks and then add the powdered sugar. It worked out pretty well in the end, but I think it would definitely be easier to beat the egg whites + sugar into stiff peaks if the sugar had been dissolved in the egg whites beforehand.

Once the egg whites and sugar mixture has reached stiff peaks, add the coconut extract. I think we added a little bit more than 1 tsp, so feel free to make them as coconutty as you like—the extract we used wasn’t particularly strong, but just added a nice hint to the meringues. You can also flavour the meringues with other extracts, but make sure that if you use peppermint you don’t use one with peppermint oil in it –it’ll make the meringue deflate in the saddest possible way.

Pipe the meringue mixture onto a cookie sheet, preferably lined with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. Bake the meringues for 1 hour and 40 minutes, until they are crisp but not brown.  Let them cool on a wire rack.

Ganache

¾ cup half & half (stolen from the dining hall in a travel mug)

6 or 7 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped finely

Bring the half & half to a simmer in a small double boiler at medium heat, then pour over the finely chopped chocolate and let it sit for a few minutes. Stir until smooth, then continue to stir until cooled. We had to throw ours in the freezer for a bit until it cooled enough to pipe because we are horribly impatient people, but then it seized in the pastry bag… it’s a fine line.

To assemble the sandwiches, fill a small pastry bag with the ganache and then pipe it onto one meringue. Top with another meringue, and let it sit for a moment before snacking on it. The meringues will keep for several days in an airtight container in the fridge.

If you have any requests for our next few recipes, put them in the submissions or inquiries, or tweet them to Kristina! 

Gluten Free Chocolate Hazelnut Espresso Torte

 

We made this for Kristina’s birthday, and it was delicious. We got the recipe over from Girl Cooks World and oh my god is it just a celebratory happy taste bud dance waiting to happen. The flavours are wonderful, and if you leave the cake overnight the espresso really permeates the whole thing and turns it into more of a torte. It is technically a layer cake, but it was impossible to tell the next day – the mocha glaze and the cake were completely combined in a delicious, dense mouthhole experience. Bonus: it’s naturally gluten free, and incredibly delicious! 

This cake was a little bit of a nightmare to make in the dorm kitchen. We had purchased ingredients (which was also a nightmare—taking a crowded bus with eggs in hand is nervewracking to say the least!) but the real problem was the egg whites. If you’ve ever tried to whip egg whites in a 12 ounce blender, you will know exactly what we mean. If you haven’t tried to whip egg whites in a 12 ounce blender, you’ve lived a good life. 

Cake: 
* 3/4 cup hazelnuts, plus extra for garnish
* 1 1/3 cups bittersweet chocolate chips
* 8 Tablespoons butter
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 6 egg whites
* pinch of salt
* butter, for greasing pan
* rice flour, for flouring pan

Mocha Filling:
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1/4 cup espresso
* 2/3 cup chocolate chips
* 6 Tablespoons butter
* 6 egg yolks

If you can buy freshly roasted hazelnuts, awesome. If not, roast your own! Put the hazelnuts on a cookie tray and throw them in the oven at 325 degrees for about 8-9 minutes, then let them cool. Let them cool. Once cool, blend 3/4 of a cup of the hazelnuts into flour. We ended up with a coarser flour than we expected, but it turned out really well in the end. Do try and remove any large chunks though – the torte itself is so smooth that you don’t want to combine weird textural elements.

 

Boost the temperature to 375 degrees. We forgot to do this, and ended up very confused because the cake took longer than it was supposed to in the oven.

Melt 1 1/3 cups of chocolate in a double boiler until shiny and delectable-looking. Using a mixer, whip the butter and sugar together. Unfortunately we misread the directions, and did not end up with light, fluffy, sugary butter. You should probably try and end up with light, fluffy, sugary butter. Add that to the chocolate and hazelnut flour, then stir thoroughly.

Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until very stiff. Please, for the love of god, don’t try to whip egg whites in a blender. Just do it the hard way and spend some time getting to know your whisk. Your arms may hurt, but it’s definitely worth it. Once the egg whites are ready, add a quarter of them to the chocolate mixture and mix well. Gently fold the remaining egg whites into the mixture.

Prepare the pan! Butter it thoroughly, and then flour generously with the rice flour. Pour in your chocolate mixture in, and then bake for 20 minutes.  If you missed raising the temperature to 375, bake it for about 25-27 minutes. When an inserted toothpick comes out clean, you’re done.

If you’re short on time, you can make the mocha glaze while the cake bakes. However, you won’t need the glaze until after the cake has cooled a little bit, so if you have extra time you can just read a book while the cake bakes.

Combine the sugar and espresso over medium heat. Cook for 3-4 minutes, until syrupy. Let it cool a bit, and then mix in 3/4 cup of chocolate chips and 6 tablespoons of butter. Stir until smooth and delicious-looking, then add egg yolks in one at a time until fully combined. Keep stirring the mixture – it will get thicker.

We were in too much of a hurry to let the cake cool all the way before assembling it, and that was a big mistake. To assemble the cake while still hot, we did four smaller cakes. We cut everything in the pan into eight pieces of equal sizes, and then covered four of them with the mocha glaze. Top the covered pieces with the matching uncovered piece of cake, add another layer of glaze, and top with some leftover hazelnuts!

The pictures will get better from here on out – it just took playing around with some camera settings to get things figured out. Next week we’ll post the writeup for the Fall Spice cheesecake!