When I was in pastry school, I became entranced with the financiers we made there. Never before had I tasted anything made with buerre noisette, and I had fallen in love. Their crispy outsides. Their soft, almondy center. If I wasn't careful, I'd find myself eating way too many of them when they were set out in the student cafe.

I've figured it's about time I made a gluten-free version, which should be pretty easy since there isn't much gluten in them to begin with. I have a small silicone mold that I bought a while back, and I thought it would be perfect for these financiers. It has square molds, and I thought that would perhaps be pretty, compared to the usual long rectangle shape of financiers.

First time around, I filled the molds almost all the way to the top, and after baking them twice as long as directed, they were still raw in the bottom. I had to throw my entire first batch in the trash. Boo! :( So, I've learned a couple of things while making them, and I've included these tips in the recipes below.

Financiers

Ingredients

• 100 grams TPT (50 grams almond flour, 50 grams sugar, mixed well)
• 170 grams powdered sugar, sifted
• 50 grams all-purpose gluten-free flour*, sifted
• 130 grams egg whites (about 4.5 large eggs' worth)
• 175 grams buerre noisette (brown butter)

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Melt the butter on the stove on low heat. Boil until the butter begins to separate, and the solids sink to the bottom and turn brown. Remove quickly from heat and pour through a sieve or cheesecloth into another container to cool. Let cool to at least 40 degrees C (85 degrees F). It is important to keep a close eye on this because it can begin to burn very quickly. Pouring it through a sieve will remove all of the solids that you don't want in your buerre noisette.
3. Whisk together all of the dry ingredients until they are well incorporated. Then put the dry mixture in your kitchenaid with the paddle attachment.
4. Gently whisk the egg whites a little, and then add them to the dry mixture in the kitchenaid. Turn on low-medium speed and mix well.
5. With the mixer on low speed, slowly pour the cooled brown butter into the kitchenaid and allow it to mix until the butter is well incorporated.
6. Brush the molds with a little bit of leftover brown butter or spray with cooking spray. If using a silicone mold, place it on a flat baking sheet before filling it. If you do not have silicone molds, you can also use mini tart molds or mini muffin tins.
7. Pour into a piping bag with a medium-sized round tip and pipe into the molds. If the molds are deep, like mine, be sure not to pour more than 1/8-inch or so of batter into each mold. When filled, tap the mold against the counter to settle the contents evenly.
8. Bake for 4-5 minutes, then remove from oven and place an almond slice (or berry, if you like) on each. Then put it back in the oven for another 4-5 minutes. The baking time will vary depending on how much batter is in your molds, and their material. I believe my mold is a bit thicker than the ones we used at school, so I actually had to bake mine for about 20 minutes total. Just continue watching them, and add a couple of minutes at a time, until they are nicely browned on the top. Then remove them from the oven to cool on a rack.

*My all-purpose flour mixture consists of 3 parts brown rice flour, 3 parts white rice flour, 2 parts potato starch, 1 part tapioca starch, and 1/2 tsp of xanthan gum per cup of flour.

Here's the part where I ate a couple, because they're just so hard to resist. The powdered sugar in the recipe gives them a distinct crispy, chewy edge that is so familiar In a lot of French baking.

While they're cooling, you can prepare the cream!

Vanilla Whipped Cream Frosting

Ingredients

• 2 ounces cream cheese, softened
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

Preparation

1. To make sure your cream cheese is softened enough, feel free to put it in the kitchenaid with a paddle for a minute or two.
2. Switch to the whisk attachment and add the sugar and vanilla. Mix until smooth and creamy. You'll probably need to scrape the sides with a rubber spatula a few times during the process.
3. Once it is well mixed, set the mixer to low and slowly pour in the heavy whipping cream.
4. Continue whipping (you may want to up the speed a little) until it is well mixed and the cream forms stiff peaks. Again, you'll probably want to scrape the sides a few times during the process.
5. When ready, prepare in a piping bag with your desired tip. Pipe onto each financier and garnish with an almond slice.

Here's the part where I rushed to take photos of them so I could hurry up and eat them! The soft, smooth texture of the cream really sets off the chewiness of the financiers, and the flavors complement each other in such a delicious way. Enjoy!

As much as I love pastry, it just can't pay my bills yet, so by day I work in GIS doing nerdy geo-stuff for a small training and consulting company. This week, all of my co-workers were able to get together (which is a rare occurrence, because we are all off at different sites and in different cities). They have got to be one of the most awesome groups of people I've ever had the privilege to work with. So, to celebrate the occasion, I baked them goodies!

I decided on miniature brownie cupcakes because they're cute, bite-size, and fun to decorate. Also, I love making these brownies because they are so gooey and delicious and you can't even tell that they're gluten-free! I dipped them in some of my trusty dark chocolate ganache and topped them off with some vanilla buttercream and rainbow nonpareils.

So much fun and so tasty!

Some of you may know what a big fan of colors I am. In fact, I even have the additive and subtractive color spectrums tattooed on my backs on my wrists. So it should come as no surprise that I was inspired to create a CMYK cake!

My plan was something like this:

But, as usual, my plan didn't come to fruition as fabulously as I hoped. However, it did turn out better than I expected, after a few setbacks.

The cake is entirely gluten-free and has SO MANY components that it actually took me three days to complete. And I had to re-bake the lemon cake because I didn't put enough baking powder in the first batch. Darnit! My process went something like this:

DAY 1

• raspberry curd
• lemon curd
• blueberry puree

DAY 2

• lemon cake
• raspberry cake
• blueberry cake
• chocolate cake
• chocolate ganache frosting (yes, the black is chocolate!)

DAY 3

• re-bake lemon cake
• blueberry Italian meringue
• assemble and frost cake

By the end of it, I have to admit that I was rather exhausted, which would explain the not-perfectly-evenly-cut cake layers (resulting in the angled top) and the not-perfectly-smoothed frosting job. In the end, it looks cool, but it could have used a lot more filling in between the layers to make it taste better. Darn.

I borrowed this lovely recipe for the pie crust and changed it up to suit me. Well, by "changing it up" I mean that I substituted in my gluten-free flour. I also decided to do the first part of the process in my food processor since I don't have a pastry cutter, then did the second part as specified in the recipe. The dough turned out great!

I then borrowed this recipe for the pie filling. It looked so yummy before it was even baked!

As the pie was busy baking, I noticed that it looked gorgeous and the crust smelled SO GOOD - like puff pastry!

But after a while, I thought I smelled something burning. Indeed, the pie has burst somehow, and spilled all over the place! It has oozed out sweet red goo all over the tray I set it on and and overflowed down into the bottom of the oven, which was now busy bubbling like molten lava.

Yes, folks, my oven actually caught on fire. Luckily, my boyfriend knows how to use a fire extinguisher, and I happen to have one under the sink in my kitchen, so he quickly came to the rescue. Gosh, what a mess!

I inspected the pie to see what caused the damage. All I can guess is that I didn't seal the crust well enough on this spot. Boo.

Luckily, the pie wasn't a total failure. It didn't get to cook is as long as specified, so it was still a bit runny inside. However, my boyfriend says it's delicious (I haven't even gotten to taste it yet).

My newest endeavor is taking recipes from World of Warcraft and attempting to recreate them in my own kitchen. If you missed my first experiment, go see how my [Delicious Chocolate Cake] turned out. This time around I'll be doing another cake, but with more sinister ingredients: the [Gooey Spider Cake].

Recipe Assessment

Things to note about this recipe:
- It only has one ingredient: gooey spider legs
- Its result looks more like a pie than a cake

Mise en Place

With only one ingredient, this should have been pretty easy to prep. I'll tell you what, folks. I must have killed two dozen spiders (which takes a while for a holy paladin who doesn't do much damage) before I got enough [Gooey Spider Leg] drops to complete this recipe. Luckily, the last one I killed yielded exactly two [Gooey Spider Leg]s.

You'd think that it'd be easy enough to get what I needed after only one spider, since they have eight legs and everything. I guess sometimes they're just not gooey enough. Or something.

On to the Baking

That wasn't so bad! And now, just to bake the cake.

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical of this recipe, having only one ingredient, but I figured Blizzard wouldn't let me down so I decided to forge on with the baking.

Final Result

Tada! Wow, that was way easier than I thought it would be. This WoW baking is pretty cool!

(If you'd like to learn about an alternate way to make this pie, er I mean, cake... check out this blog.)

In order to bridge the gap between World of Warcraft and my kitchen, I've decided to embark on a new endeavor to make WoW food in real life. That is to say that I will be taking in-game recipes and attempting to recreate them in my own kitchen.

There will, of course, be a certain amount of improvisation on my part, in order to make some of these (unrealistic) recipes work; however, I do intend to stick as closely to the game recipes as possible. As time goes on, I also intend to branch out into recipes from other video games, but in the beginning it will be purely WoW items. If there's one you'd like to suggest, please send me a PM.

Blizzard's Delicious Chocolate Cake

I figured that a good place to start would be with a popular item from Burning Crusade days - the Delicious Chocolate Cake. (Since I am a pastry chef, I intend to stick to the baked goods, but we'll see where things go in the future.)

Recipe Assessment

Things to note about this recipe:

• Simple Flour, not cake flour - this means the cake will be light and fluffy.
• Ice Cold Milk - this means the cake will be rich, especially in ratio to the flour
• Mild Spices - perhaps this could be the chocolate? I'm not sure what to use for this.
• Small Egg - high ratio of eggs-to-flour. This cake will be rich and thick after all.
• Flask of Port - quite a large amount of alcohol, although this could be tasty.
• Mageroyal - this could be lumped into the spices, or add an accent to the chocolate.
• There is no chocolate listed in the ingredients. Interesting.
• There is no sugar listed in the ingredients. Also interesting.
• There are berries in the picture (below) but not in the recipe. Heh.

Image Assessment

The first thing that I noticed is the icon doesn't look anything like a chocolate cake. It looks like white cake with some sort of berry filling and green goo on top. I could decorate it to look like that, but let's see what the item looks like in-game.

So in-game, the actual item looks (or is presumed to look) more like a chocolate cake with some berries on top. I'll shoot for this model because it seems more fitting for the name anyhow.

Kelley's Delicious Chocolate Cake

Now that I'd seen what the original recipe and cake look like, it was time for me to recreate this in my own kitchen. I decided to do this in the style used by Mythbusters. I'd make one cake using the exact recipe from the game (substituting spices/mageroyal as I see fit). Then I'd make another cake using the recipe but expanding it to make it an actual delicious chocolate cake.

Translated WoW Recipe

• 8x Simple Flour = 2 cups flour (assuming 1 part = 1/4 cup)
• 4x Ice Cold Milk = 1 cup milk (assuming 1 part = 2 tbsp)
• 4x Mild Spices = 4 tbsp cocoa (assuming spices = chocolate)
• 8x Small Egg = 4 extra-large eggs (cause who can find small eggs?)
• Flask of Port = 1/2 cup port wine
• 3x Mageroyal =1 tsp lavender (it's a flower, at least!)

I decided to go for the normal (non-French) mixing style and just mix the wet ingredients and then add the dry ingredients. The batter turned out looking pretty good.

I was a bit leery, however, that the recipe called for four eggs, but no leavening of any sort. Would the cake rise?

That's right, folks. The cake came out very flat and very dense.

So dense, in fact, that I decided to use it as a makiwara.

It barely rose, meaning the final cake was about 1.5 inches in thickness. It had barely any flavor (thanks to there being no sugar in the recipe, Blizzard).

So. Almost total fail. Next it was time to try this with some revisions, because by now it was clear that I needed a real delicious chocolate cake.

Kelley's Revised Recipe

• 8x Simple Flour = 1.75 cups flour
• 4x Ice Cold Milk = 1 cup milk
• 4x Mild Spices = .75 cup cocoa, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp baking soda
• 8x Small Egg = 2 extra-large eggs + .5 cup vegetable oil
• Flask of Port = 1/2 cup port wine + 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3x Mageroyal =1 tsp lavender (it's a flower, at least!)
• MISSING SUGAR = 2 cups sugar

As you can see, I altered the recipe to include some leavening, some sugar, and a slight alteration of wet-to-dry ratio. I also replaced some of the flour with more cocoa. The batter turned out nice and dark, and had a bit more volume than the first recipe.

The cakes rose beautifully, and I had no trouble at all removing them from the rings.

I baked two cakes and cut them both in half in order to stack them. I used three for stacking and the other for tasting. The cake was chocolatey and moist, but the port was a bit... odd. I knew I would need a very tasty frosting in order to even out the flavors. And I was glad that the images showed berries on the cake, too.

The Delicious Chocolate Cake

I decided to use a chocolate fudge frosting to fill between the layers and on the top. I also used sliced strawberries in between the layers, and halved strawberries to garnish the top of the cake.

So, the cake looked pretty, and actually rather WoW-ish. But... would it taste good? I sliced a piece and gave it a taste. The fudge frosting and strawberries were actually pretty perfect for balancing out the flavors. Yay~!

Final Thoughts

Blizzard was on the right track with this recipe, but in actuality, it didn't turn out so well. Hint: if you're going to use the word delicious in the name of your cake, you had better put some sugar in it. I'd also recommend leaving the port wine out, and replacing it with something more tasty, like coffee or maybe even some Kahlúa -- and less of it.

Oh, and by the way -- yes, it's completely gluten-free.

I figured the best way to do this would be to make some decorated sugar cookies in the shape of goats. I decided to go with my trusty (and fricking fabulous, thank-you-very-much) gluten-free shortbread recipe and substitute goat butter instead of regular butter. (As always, click the images to see them bigger.)

The goat butter turned out to be a lot more like shortening than I was expecting. It was white and very greasy, but it assimilated into the dough better than normal butter did. The dough had the proper consistency, though, and was a dream to roll and cut, so no problems there - yay!

They seemed to brown a bit quicker than with my normal recipe, so I baked them a bit less time than usual. They also spread a bit more than I was expecting, but they didn't lose too much of their goaty shape, so it's okay.

Next day I set about decorating them! I decided on white goats and black goats, each with a little red heart (you know, for the Valentine part of this whole project). I used my entire jar of black powder coloring and my royal icing STILL wasn't black, so I had to make a quick run to the store to get some (real) gel coloring - thank goodness they hadn't closed yet!

And, since I am devious, and goats are often associated with the devil, I decided to make a red devil-goat cookie, complete with a BLACK HEART. Isn't he cute?

As for the taste? They're awesome. The cookies are softer than my normal shortbread recipe, but still sturdy enough that they don't fall apart in your hands (which is especially important in gluten-free baking). The royal icing keeps them together well, and the flavors work great together. Interestingly, the goat butter seems to have made these cookies taste a lot milkier than the normal cow-butter recipe.

My two initial ideas were these (click to view them bigger):

The results? Well, I didn't realize just HOW small they had to be, so my idea for the Mayan Chocolate cakes had to be scaled down a bit more than I wanted. I omitted the chantilly cream in the center.My joconde biscuit turned out lighter in color than I intended, so I had to change from a chocolate mousse on top to a bavarian cream so that the colors matched better. Also, the pecans in the ganache were way too big, so they screwed up the uniformity of my display. Argh. I also wanted to make blue chocolate decorations for the tops, but I couldn't get the color I wanted, so I went with dark chocolate instead. My instructor chastised me for using blue, because the French say that the color on the outside needs to indicate the flavor on the inside. Bah! I still think the colors turned out gorgeous.

The other dessert turned out pretty much as I had planned. I decided against the brittle, however, because I didn't want it to get soggy and melt into the custards while they sat in the fridge between Tuesday and Thursday night. I also didn't get to put a cherry jelly inside the chocolate straws - it just wasn't feasible since they're so delicate. These were absolutely delicious, but the lime flavor kind of overpowered the coconut. Boo.

Well, it was a lazy Sunday afternoon so I decided to make some pumpkin muffins. This was my first time making a gluten-free muffin recipe from scratch and they turned out amazingly well. I dressed them up with a little rosette of cream cheese frosting and some decorative cupcake liners.

I've added them to the Autumn line-up of goodies in my Etsy shop - yep, I'm back open for business. Check out the pumpkin muffins in my shop. Cheers!

The Wedding Cake

As I'm sure you already know, my wedding cake was the mermaid cake I wrote about not too long ago. Since they were foam forms, we were able to keep them for the past few weeks until the final.

The Pastillage Showpiece

I have already written about this too, but only had some crappy cell phone pictures to show you. Now I was able to take some better ones with my real camera!

The Sugar Showpiece

The sugar showpiece was to be an underwater scene made entirely of sugar. The base, water, seaweed, and coral were made of poured sugar (boil it to horrendous temperatures and pour into various things for different effects). The pumice was made of rock sugar (boil sugar and add a spoonful of royal icing at a certain temperature to make it all foamy). The fish and jellyfish were made of isomalt, which was blown and pulled for various effects. Unfortunately, most of my jellyfish's tentacles broke off. :(

The Chocolate Box

The chocolate box was made completely out of chocolate, which we tempered the hard way - on a marble slab. :P The decorations on top were piped onto plastic and very carefully glued on with chocolate (and the help of some awesome chef's grade canned air stuff to freeze the chocolate solid very quickly).

The Mousse Cake - Night and Fire

For the mousse cake, we had a few different ones to choose from. I chose this one because, well, I like it! The bottom is a pistachio genoise, the middle is a chocolate hazelnut mousse, and the top is a raspberry mousse. It's topped of with a thin layer of raspberry glaze, wrapped in some more tempered chocolate, and decorated with some of my leftover chocolate decorations (from the box) and strawberries (because we were all out of raspberries - boo!).

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with the way things turned out, although everything could have been a lot better. :P